Feminists condemn Senate health bill compromise

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently has succeeded in cobbling together a filibuster-proof health insurance bill that can pass the Senate before Christmas. In the process, he has made a bill of questionable benefit even worse, according to John Nichols at thenation.com. Among the changes weakening the bill were concessions to right-wing Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To get Nelson's vote, Reid had to agree to restrict the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created exchanges.

"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," Nelson said of the anti-choice language. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."

The question now is whether supporters of abortion rights can -- or should -- back a bill that not only disrespects but disregards a woman's right to choose.

While President Obama made a bizarre statement Saturday about how he was "pleased that recently added amendments have made this landmark bill even stronger," the co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus signaled deep disappointment with the Senate compromise.

The compromise has also angered mainstream feminist organizations that have supported the health insurance reform bill up until now. Groups opposing the compromise include the National Partnership for Women and Families, EMILY's List, and NARAL. The National Organization for Women has gone so far as to oppose passage of the health insurance bill if the anti-choice amendment remains.

Over at RH Reality Check, blogger Rebecca Sive is also calling for defeat of the health insurance bill in its current form:

If the bottom line in all this is that we won't be getting healthcare reform, but we might be getting healthcare finance reform, is it too much to ask that the Democratic women members of the House and Senate insist on eliminating any kind of two-tiered system for paying for abortions-one for the rich and one for the poor. Is it too much to ask that they say to do otherwise isn't reform of any kind; it's the same bad business as usual, and we won't have it?

I can understand someone who believes abortion is wrong and must be prohibited under all circumstances; hence, my respect for Senator Nelson. What I don't understand is women who are complicit in the use of government power to deny their poorer sisters access to the healthcare they, the richer sisters, get. This looks like what we used to call in the 70s "identifying with the oppressor." It's still a very bad idea.

So, here's this week's talking point for the Democratic women Senators:

Have the courage of your convictions: Stand-up, and say what Ben Nelson said: "There isn't any real way to move away from your principle on abortion, and we won't."

Update: Thanks to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for linking to this explanation by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on how the latest anti-choice compromise is supposed to work:

The basic compromise is that states can impose the Stupak rules on their own exchanges, but the rules will not be imposed by the federal legislation. I've been assured that at least one plan in each state will cover abortion, but I'm still trying to get clarification on how that works (my hazy understanding is that at least one of national non-profit plans, and probably more, will include abortion coverage, and they'll be offered in all states).

US lesbian soldier seeks asylum in Canada

Womens eNews reports that after suffering through months of anti-lesbian verbal and physical abuse, Private Bethany Smith received the anonymous death threat that convinced her to leave her post at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in 2007, and head for Canada in the hopes of receiving asylum there.

"It said that they were going to break into the supply room and get the keys to my room and beat me to death in my bed," Smith said, adding that the letter came only a couple months after she learned the Army was deploying her to Afghanistan. "It was at that point that I knew I was more afraid of the people who were supposed to be on my side than people we were supposed to be fighting overseas."

More than 12,000 service members have lost their jobs because of the U.S. military's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy. A disproportionate number of those discharges are women, according to 2008 statistics gathered by the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network from the government under the Freedom of Information Act.

After two years in Canada, Smith is still fighting to receive asylum. In November, Canadian Federal Court Justice Yves de Montigny ruled that the country's refugee board should reconsider Smith's case, which it had earlier denied.

The entire article is short and well worth reading.

I couldn't bring myself to sign this

I recently received an email from NARAL Pro-Choice America: asking me to sign a petition to moderate Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine. The petition reads as follows:

We, the undersigned, ask you to vote for the health-reform bill and stand firm against attempts to block women's access to insurance coverage for abortion.

Health reform is too important to be held up by the anti-choice politics of Sen. Nelson. You have shown courage, leadership, and independence by voting against anti-choice amendments in the Senate Finance Committee and voting to move the bill forward. We ask you to stand with us again. We're counting on you, Sen. Snowe. Thank you.

And you know, I almost signed the darned thing. But then I remembered that the health care reform that I would be urging her to back has no public option, no Medicare buy-in for people 55-64, no meaningful method to control the unconscionable waste and price-gouging of our for-profit medical system. And I just couldn't bring myself to support that. Am I wrong? What do you think? If you would like to sign the NARAL petition, you can do so here.

Not the climate change I was hoping for

Reclaiming Medusa on Facebook for linking to this post at thenation.com by Naomi Klein. As I write this, the Unites Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has been teetering on the brink of failure. In order to get the conference moving again, the Obama administration -- in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- is pushing to seriously weaken the Kyoto Protocol in return for the financial assistance poor countries desperately need to cope with the effects of climate change that they've already suffered.

This offer is being spun very differently in the mainstream media -- for instance, see this version of the story in the New York Times. In that version of the story, the US offer of aid may save the climate talks from failure, by forcing developing nations -- including China -- to be more "transparent" about its level of carbon dioxide emissions.

The official UN home page for the conference has cross-posted this article from the Associated Press, noting that President Obama is extremely unlikely to promise any significant reduction in US emissions of greenhouse gases.  Western European nations will likewise be unwilling to make serious cuts in their own emissions. Developing nations have called on western developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions at least 34 percent from their 2005 levels by 2020.

The situation puts a person in mind of the debate here at home over healthcare reform. Once again, the Obama administration will try to achieve a cosmetic change and then repackage it as substantive progress.

Lucinda Marshall of Reclaiming Medusa also has a blog called Feminist Peace Network, on which she has posted this interesting and comprehensive set of links to news and analysis about the climate change conference.

Senate to take up single payer

CommonDreams.org reports that the Senate will take up Bernie Sanders's single-payer health plan today.

Update 12/17/09: Senate Republicans used extreme obstructionist tactics to completely block discussion of Sanders's amendment to the health care bill. See this post by John Nichols of The Nation, crossposted at CommonDreams.org.

Throwing in the towel on health care reform...

That's what John Nichols at thenation.com says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is doing.

So, as it stands now, Reid appears to be ready to try and pass a health-care "reform" bill that includes neither a public option or and expansion of Medicare to cover millions of uninsured Americans in the 55-to-64 age bracket.

In other words, the legislation Reid will try to get passed before Christmas is not health-care reform any longer, it is insurance reform.

And even that is giving the proposal more credit than is probably deserves. The legislation expands access to health care to millions of Americans. That's a good thing -- perhaps even good enough to merit the support of reformers who are determined to get more care to more Americans. But it does so by setting up a scheme that uses scant federal resources to dramatically enrich insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And it fails to establish the government-backed competition, in the form of a public option of Medicare expansion, that might have kept insurance companies in line.

Thus, at the very best, just half the goal of serious reform is met. More Americans will have health-care. But that progress will be purchased at enormous, and potentially unsustainable, cost to the taxpayers.

Just read this guy's post, okay?

Writing at truthout.org, Mike Elk explains why My Grandmother Takes a Stand for Gay Marriage in Church Despite Being a Glenn Beck Follower

Worse things than infidelity

Dave Zirin at thenation.com actually has something thought-provoking to say about the Tiger Woods mess.

For example:

This is what we call chickens roosting. The least attractive part of Woods's persona--including all recent peccadilloes--is his complete absence of conscience when it comes to peddling his billion-dollar brand. As we have been writing for years here at The Nation, Tiger's partnership with the habitual toxic waste dumpers Chevron and the financial criminals in Dubai deserves far more scrutiny from the sports press than it's received (none).

Then there was the Philippines. As detailed in the documentary The Golf War, the Filipino government, in conjunction with the military and developers, attempted in the late nineties to remove thousands of peasants from their land, known as Hacienda Looc, to build a golf course. They resisted and three movement leaders ended up dead. Where was Woods? He was brought in by the government to play in an exhibition match and sell golf (not explicitly the course, wink, wink), all for an undisclosed fee. The government called it "The Day of the Tiger" and followed his--assumedly G-rated--actions for twenty-four hours. The Golf War filmmakers show clips of Woods saying to kids, "I want all of you to learn and grow from this experience. Invariably you're gonna learn life, gonna learn about life because golf is a microcosm of life." Meanwhile the developers of the course were thrilled at the PR boost his appearance gave their project. Macky Maceda, a vice-president for Fil-Estate Land, Incorporated, the golf course developer in Hacienda Looc, commented, "Oh, I think it's going to be a great picker upper for the entire country in general. Everybody's feeling kind of down with this economic crisis. And Tiger is just, I know it, he's going to give everybody a good feeling."

Senate health insurance bill gets worse and worse

Chris Bowers at Open Left has the details.

MAPS citizens panel won't have veto

According to NewsOK.com, Mayor Mick Cornett says that there is no need to give a citizens advisory panel veto power over how money from the recently approved MAPS 3 proposal is spent. Former Mayor Kirk Humphreys says that the panel needs veto power in order to be effective in its work.

OKC residents wishing to serve on the oversight board can send a resume of no more than two pages to maps3@okc.gov.

Give war a chance?

I've been trying to fight off a cold, and didn't have a chance to read this thoroughly, but Paul Rosenberg has an analysis of President Obama's War-Is-Peace Prize speech over at Open Left. It looks really interesting, and I'm going to read it sometime soon when I have some mental energy.

Lesbian wins Houston mayoral runoff

AMERICAblog reports that open lesbian Annise Parker has triumphed in a runoff election to be elected mayor of Houston, despite being subjected to homophobic attacks.

According to AMERICAblog, both Parker and her opponent in the nonpartisan runoff election, Gene Locke, are Democrats. According to the Wikipedia entry on Parker, the 53-year-old Parker worked for more than 20 years in the oil and gas industry, and has a long record of involvement in mainstream civic organizations. She was elected to an at-large position on the Houston City Council in 1997 and served on the council until being elected city controller in 2003, a post she has held since that time. She has been with her life partner, Kathy Hubbard, since 1990.

Other than the fact that Parker has been open about her lesbianism, she sounds like a fairly conventional mainstream politician. But also according to Wikipedia, "she co-owned Inklings Bookshop with business partner Pokey Anderson from the late 1980s until 1997." I thought that the name of the bookstore sounded familiar, and a bit more searching confirmed that Inklings is or was a feminist bookstore.

Nevertheless, the LA Times blog describes Parker as a "conservative," which is probably an accurate description.

I don't know what to think of this

Yesterday I received an email (as "a member of Hillary Clinton's online community") inviting me to join NoLimits.org. Frankly, I don't know what to think of this invitation. The website itself looks useful and interesting. When I looked at it , the posts had such themes as fair trade, and stopping the Stupak Amendment. There was a video of Hillary Clinton addressing the fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, telling attendees that "women's rights are human rights." There was a link to an Equal Pay Action Kit.

So what's not to like?

This little paragraph from the invitation email gave me pause:

Here at NoLimits.org, we're proud of Hillary's leadership as Secretary of State: working to rebuild our global alliances and serving as a strong voice for human rights. Our progressive agenda includes supporting these new directions in foreign policy, and also focuses on economic and work-family issues here at home, including the need for health care reform and new initiatives to combat the too-high rate of unemployment. We are advocates for an America engaged and active, domestically and internationally, supporting policies that truly reflect our values.

I couldn't help but wondering if these "new directions in foreign policy" include the sending of 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan by the administration that Clinton is part of. And I'm sorry, sisters, but I can't sign up to support that.

What happened to a family that didn't want an abortion, but needed one

AlterNet has cross-posted a story from truthout.org about an anti-choice Catholic couple that found compassion and help from Dr. George Tiller when they discovered that the mother was carrying a baby that would be unable to live.

Senate health bill negotiations more complicated than you've heard

First, the good news.

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors reports that

The Nelson-Hatch amendment (the Senate version of the Stupak ban) has been rejected in the Senate by a 54-45 vote. The roll call result is here. The amendment would have placed significant restrictions on private health insurance coverage for abortion services.

Then the more complicated news.

The mainstream news report that I heard when I woke up this morning said that the public option had been removed from the Senate health care bill by a "gang of ten" made up of five liberal and five conservative senators. Jason Leopold at truthout.org reports that the situation is actually more complicated than that.

Disappointing, but not necessarily surprising

NewsOK.com reports that Oklahoma City voters passed the MAPS 3 sales tax extension with more than 54 percent of voters favoring the measure.

The Yes for MAPS watch party, held in a Cox Convention Center ballroom, featured giant projection screens and flat screen televisions showing election coverage, a lighting system projecting colorful designs around the room and an ice sculpture adorning one of several food tables.

As election results came in, partygoers cheered while dining on upscale foods and vast selections of artisan breads, cheeses, meats and fresh vegetables.

A person can't help wondering if there was any cake left over for the rest of us to eat.

Remembering the Montreal Massacre

Unlike Lilian Nattel, I have a strong (if somewhat blurry) memory of finding out about the Montreal Massacre that took place twenty years ago today. But I didn't remember that today was the 20th anniversary of that catastrophic event until I read Natel's thoughtful analysis of what happened that day at the Polytechnique Institute when Marc Lepine walked in gunning for feminists and killed 14 women engineering students.

Feministing.com has a link to Catherine Porter's "Lessons of the Montreal Massacre," at the online edition of the Toronto Star, and also a link to an edgier analysis at Bastard Logic. Historiann and Feminist Law Professors also have remembrances.

Finally, Peggy Seeger's song, "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," always seems like a fitting memorial for the victims and survivors of the Montreal Massacre. Here is a version sung by her brother Pete in concert in the late 1970s.

Why I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3

On Tuesday, I'm voting against Oklahoma City's MAPS 3 proposal because the tax used to fund it -- the sales tax -- falls hardest on poor and working class people, who will benefit least from the projects that the tax will pay for.

MAPS stands for Metropolitan Area Projects.  The Oklahoma Gazette has a summary of the current proposal. MAPS 3 is a big, $777 million Christmas tree with something for everyone. It seems to have been constructed with the obvious hope of  getting people who have different beliefs about which projects are appropriate to vote for the whole proposal in order to get the parts they like.

Some of the proposed projects include a downtown park, a downtown streetcar system, bicycling and walking trails, 70 miles of sidewalks throughout the city, and aquatics centers for senior citizens. Other projects include improvements to the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds and new boating and recreational facilities on the Oklahoma River. I would be inclined to vote for many of those projects -- although I'd rather see public transit dollars spent on improving the transit system citywide, which is currently almost unusable.

But in order to get any of those projects, I would also have to vote to fund a new $280 convention center, which I consider a silly and offensive waste of money. It's a gift to wealthy downtown business owners from the rest of us, who can't really afford it. In the short term, this project would create some construction jobs. In the long term, it would create low-end minimum wage jobs with few or no benefits. And this one project would take up more than a third of the entire amount of money raised by the proposal.

I'm figuring that any one who is reading this blog post probably cares what I think about this topic, but I'm also figuring that you might like other sources of information. Here are some sources that I checked out:

About.com has an interesting history of MAPS, which began in 1993 with a "temporary" one-cent sales tax. The tax has never expired, because voters have repeatedly approved extensions of the tax for new projects.The first set of  MAPS projects has often been credited with revitalizing Oklahoma City's downtown in the 1990s. MAPS for Kids was approved in 2001, and the sales tax collected under that proposal for seven years seems to be funding much needed capital improvements for metropolitan area schools. Most recently the tax has gone for renovations to the Ford Center in order to draw a professional basketball team to town.

To read arguments in favor of MAPS3, you can go to yesformaps.com or mapsfacts.com. Propents have also produced a fairly tedious YouTube video.

Several groups oppose the extension of the one cent sales tax. There is the Campaign Against MAPS, which links to a website called Kill the Maps Tax. There is a Facebook page for Not This MAPS. Some opponents of MAPS seem to come from the extreme-right "teabagger" perspective. The blog for Kill the Maps Tax links to the site of radio talk show host Mike Shannon, who also seems to represent a hard right-wing perspective.

One piece of information that made a big impression on me was something not directly related to the MAPS controversy at all. This report from the OK Policy Blog, describes the way taxes in the state of Oklahoma affect different groups of people. That blog post links to an article from the Tulsa World, which shows that poor people are the ones who pay the highest percentage of their income in sales taxes, while better off people pay a higher percentage of their income in income taxes.

I do have a small amount of ambivalence about my "no" vote on Tuesday. Some of the projects are worthwhile. I don't trust the organized opposition to the tax extension, much of which is based on a far-right political perspective that I don't want to support. But the Christmas-tree approach to the sales tax measure is bad public policy. And the sales tax used to fund the proposal would force poor people buying the necessities of life to subsidize wealthy developers.

I would be willing to vote "yes" on a property tax or a graduated city wage tax to fund projects that benefited the entire population, but I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3.

UN treaty proves powerful force for women's rights

Inter Press Service describes how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has become "an increasingly successful tool for challenging discriminatory laws and battling violence against women and girls." CEDAW was adopted 30 years ago this month by the UN General Assembly.

The 186 countries that that have both signed and ratified the Convention pledge to ensure equal recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights by women without discrimination. Only the Holy See, Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga and the United States have not signed and ratified the Convention.

Mammography not always a smashing success

Thanks to FeministPeaceNetwork on Facebook for a link to a commentary on the breast cancer screening controversy by the ever-wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich.

A federal government advisory panel recently proposed that women not receive routine mammograms before age 50, and to receive mammograms only every other year after that. These new proposals quickly became controversial, with many people, including feminist activists, charging that they were an effort to save money at the expense of women's lives. Ehrenreich argues that feminists should embrace the new guidelines, using her own experience as a cancer survivor to illustrate:

One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter -- only individuals do -- and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individual experience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy. Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.

And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.

As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT -- and possibly because of the mammograms themselves -- or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?

Ehrenreich also links to a post by noted breast cancer specialist Dr. Susan Love, explaining the new guidelines. Love notes that the guidelines don't say that no women under 50 should receive mammograms, but that the test shouldn't be done routinely. It should be an individual decision made by a woman and her doctor with an understanding of both the benefits and risks:

One key shift has been in our understanding of the biology of breast cancer. We used to think there was just one kind of cancer that grew at a steady pace; that when it reached a certain size, it spread to the rest of the body. As a result, it seemed to make sense that we could save lives if a screening test could identify the cancer while it was still "early," before it had spread. That's how we developed the notion of early detection. And it works, sometimes.

In the best of hands, mammographic screening in women over 50 will reduce a woman's risk of dying from breast cancer by 30%. That is a lot, but it is not 100%. Why? It turns out that breast cancers are not all the same. There are at least five kinds, with different growth rates and levels of aggression. Some are so aggressive that they will have spread before they are visible on a mammogram or form a lump. Some are very slow growing or may not even have the ability to spread, so there is no benefit from finding them early. This is because of the biology of the disease, not the limitations of screening.

One of the reasons that mammography is a less effective tool in young women is that they have a higher rate of these aggressive tumors. Younger women also have breast tissue that is more sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of low-dose radiation. Calculations by a research team in Britain published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2005 suggest that it is possible for women to develop cancer because of the cumulative radiation from yearly mammograms starting at 40 or younger. Finally, mammograms are generally less accurate in younger women who have dense breast tissue, which can mask a cancer. Thus the balance of risk versus benefit is not as clear.

Ehrenreich says, at the end of her post, that what we really need is a new women's health movement that is willing and able to ask hard questions about the causes and treatments of breast cancer, and not falling for the propaganda of what she calls "the cancer industrial complex." I wholeheartedly agree.

Empire assimilates Obama

One of my favorite blogs, Can it happen here? has an excellent analysis.

Troop surge will "magnify the crime against Afghanistan"

CommonDreams.org has reposted an eloquent opinion piece from The Guardian/UK by Malalai Joya, a feminist activist and former member of the Afghan Parliament. Joya says:

After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.

I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week's announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.

Do yourself a favor. Read the whole thing.

An anniversary to celebrate

On Facebook, I'm a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and that is how I found out that this week is the anniversary of the first sex discrimination case against the federal government, filed by the SPLC back in 1972. In Frontiero v. Richardson, the SPLC successfully challenged an Air Force policy that automatically granted medical, dental, and housing benefits to the wives of married servicemen -- but required servicewomen to prove their husbands relied on them for more than half of their support.

Soon to return to our regularly unscheduled programing

The rough draft of my novel, Sisters from Another Planet, has been completed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- and 70,575 words.

I will soon be posting more frequently on this blog, with maybe a little bit of time off to let my hands and elbows heal.

Progressive senators push back on public option

CommonDreams.org has the details.

Reid Bill rejects Stupak Amendment language

John Nichols at thenation.com reports that the Senate Health Bill Rejects Anti-Choice Extremes.

House health bill shortchanges women in many areas

As the Senate begins debate over Majority Leader Harry Reid's version of the health insurance reform bill RHRealityCheck.org reminds us that the House bill fails to cover many items necessary to women's health. In addition to the notorious Stupak Amendment limiting abortion coverage, the House bill also fails to cover such items as contraception, pelvic exams, and STD counseling.

As RHRealityCheck columnist Amanda Marcotte says:

I’m forced to suggest that the major factor is that our government is still mainly run by a bunch of middle-aged men who’ve been shielded from having to deal honestly and empathetically with women’s lives their whole lives, and therefore are prone to seeing women’s concerns as disposable at best, and at worst, as frighteningly alien and needing to be controlled. When you have that attitude, it’s easy to push aside all the ways you’ve personally benefited from contraception and abortion, and just assume the only women who need assistance in those areas are wayward sluts who need to be slapped down instead of given a hand. After all, I’m sure most of these men have had the benefit of women who quietly make sure that fertility control is taken care of, without bothering the over-privileged men in their lives.

Government task force changes mammography recommendations

Feminist Peace Network has the details.

Durbin releases poll results

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who also serves as the Democratic whip in the Senate, has released his Public Option Poll Results. Durbin's poll showed 80 percent of respondents supporting a public option.

Respondents to the poll were self-selected, so this may not be a representative sample of the US public. But because of Durbin's position as the one who "gathers votes on major issues," this poll may indicate that Durbin is willing to use his position to push the public option through the Senate.

My mother called it Armistice Day

My father was a veteran of the Second World War. My mother and father both were civilian employees of the US Army at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. I always thought of my mother as being conservative, as supporting US military efforts overseas that I considered unwise at best, but several times she expressed her regret to me at having helped to make armaments for a living. She felt this was something she had to do to support two young children, one of them disabled, after my father died.

My mother was five years old when the First World War ended, and she used to tell a story about how she fell down and skinned her nose on the pavement, and a returning veteran gave her a quarter to get her to stop crying, and called her his "rose of no-man's land." The holiday that we in the United States celebrate every November 11 is now called Veterans Day. But it began as a celebration of the end of the First World War on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of 1918. My mother always called the day by its original name -- Armistice Day. Other nations still celebrate Armistice Day -- or Remembrance Day -- on this day.

There are only a handful of veterans of this horrific conflict who are yet living, and not very many others who remember that time. I've heard World War One described as the first modern war, but maybe in some ways the US Civil War was that -- war in which modern technology created effective machines of killing that efficiently slaughtered millions of people quickly. At any rate, the First World War was horrifying and hideously destructive, shattering dreams that technological and economic "progress" were creating a peaceful and prosperous world. Woodrow Wilson sold this mess to the US public as a "the war to end all wars" and a war to "make the world safe for democracy." (Wilson is often portrayed as a progressive idealist, but he was also a notorious racist, and pursued many anti-democratic policies.)

Even today in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government promotes the polite fiction that its military interventions are designed to make the world safe for democracy.  But we have lost even the hoped for ideal of ending all wars, and I think you can see that in the change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Armistice Day celebrated the end of what people were hoping and trying to make the last war. Veterans Day assumes that we will always have wars, that there will always be a justification for the United States to invade some other nation and make it right. On Veterans Day, we are supposed to thank military veterans for their service to their country. Especially on Veterans Day, if we question US military intervention in other countries, we are accused of dishonoring the brave men and women who wear our country's uniform. Heaven forfend that we might stop invading far-off places and use all that money and person power to make our own country right.

Meaning no disrespect to anyone who now is in the US military, or who has been in the military, I am not celebrating Veterans Day today. Today I am celebrating Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent to end the First World War, and when we can hope and dream and commit ourselves toward working for a day when all of the guns in all of the wars will fall silent.

And today, I would like to thank some other people for their service to our country. First of all, I would like to thank the activists who work for peace, for women's rights, for civil rights for people of color, for health care reform, for an end to poverty, for the preservation of our natural world. I want to thank the poets and the artists and the singer-songwriters. I want to thank the school teachers and the day care workers, and the people who labor in hospitals and nursing homes. I want to thank the librarians, and the historians, and the civil libertarians. I want to thank the people who volunteer for food banks, and food co-ops, and the people who tend community gardens. I want to thank the bloggers. I want to thank the bicycle mechanics and the drivers for public transport. I am sure I am forgetting someone, but I think you get the idea. I want to thank the people whose work and whose quiet courage make the possibility of peace more real. To all of you, I want to say, thank you for your service to your country, and to the entire world.

And now I think I'm going to get back to work on that anti-war novel of mine.

On the fall of the Berlin Wall

Today, many news reports celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The events of 1989, which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, are celebrated as some sort of final victory of capitalism over socialism. I wish I had the time for a full discussion of whether what was going on in the Soviet bloc countries deserved the name of socialism -- or whether what goes on in the United States deserves the name of democracy. But, ironically, I am in the midst of writing a novel about a character who has time traveled to the present from 1989, and I need to finish 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I did notice that CommonDreams.org cross-posted an interesting article from Reuters writer Anna Mudeva that points out that In Eastern Europe, People Pine for Socialism. Memories of atrocities committed by the old regimes have faded, Mudeva writes.

Capitalism's failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.

Furthermore, Common Dreams also reports that a recent global poll shows that most people are dissatisfied with free-market capitalism.

But certainly, advanced capitalist countries such as ours don't build walls defended with barbed wire and armed guards to keep people in. No, of course not. We build walls to keep people out.

Congresswomen speak out for reproductive freedom

Thanks to FeministPeaceNetwork for a link to this post from Spare Candy that shows five Congresswomen speaking out against the Stupak amendment, to the House's health care bill. The Stupak Amendment prevents women who sign up for the public option, or who get assistance to buy insurance from the exchanges, from getting health insurance that covers abortions.

Kucinich votes against house health insurance bill

Thanks to Whole Foods Boycott Action for their link to Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich's explanation of his vote against the health insurance bill.

Here'a an interesting anaylsis of the Stupak Amendment...

...from the always perceptive Feminist Peace Network.

A bittersweet victory on healthcare reform

Our Bodies Our Blog reports that the US House of Representatives has passed the the health care reform bill.

But first, they passed the Stupak Amendment, limiting women's access to abortion. This amendment passed with the support of 64 Democrats. More explanation of the Stupak Amendment can be found here.

Counting all the dead

Thanks to CommonDreams.org for reposting this commentary on the Fort Hood massacre from New American Media. Author Aaron Glantz identifies the victims of yesterday's violence as casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seems clear that the violence that we as a nation have been perpetrating on other nations is coming back to haunt us.

How would space aliens understand our analysis of violence?

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES has an interesting post on the violence at Ft. Hood. Her main point is that news commentators spend endless hours analyzing the causes of some sorts of violence, while violence against women is accepted as an ordinary part of life, not requiring much thought.

Ironically, the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre is coming up in about a month.

Time to write

I call this blog "Talking to Myself." It's sort of my practice blog. Once I've done a lot of practicing and feel I've got this blogging thing down, I'll start a real blog and try to get folks to read it. But I think there are two or three people besides me who read this blog from time to time, and I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm not going to be posting very much for a while, because next month, starting tomorrow at 12:01 a.m., I am going to write a novel.

The scariest costume I'll see all day

So I walk into the Red Cup just now for a breakfast burrito, and this guy comes in behind me in a Confederate uniform.

I think this is why I gave up doing Hallowe'en. Somewhere deep in my bones, I don't believe there is any such thing as a harmless fantasy. I remember an old dyke back in Oregon who told me once, "What you practice is what you get good at." Fantasy is a form of practice. (Or sometimes, it's a form a memory, but that's a different can of worms.) I don't think we completely create our own reality, but visualization is very powerful.

So I'm kinda procrastinating about finishing my breakfast and walking home. I'm kinda hoping this guy goes away before I do. Because I think it's best that I not have any opportunity to discuss his costume with him. Because from my point of view, there is nothing about the Confederacy that is quaint, comic, romantic, or worthy of emulation. If you think I'm joking, start reading the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And yes, the Civil War was about slavery. Lincoln may have started out with a willingness to continue to allow slavery if the union could be saved. By the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that was all over. The Emancipation Proclamation was a matter of pragmatic war strategy. The Union absolutely depended on the armed service of free blacks and emancipated slaves in order to win the war.

And yet, in some ways the Civil War is still not over. The war between Blue and Gray is the historical beginning of the hostility between "blue states" and "red states." Slavery was once known as "the patriarchal institution," and in the 21st century, neo-Confederates do their best to defend the rule of the richest white men over everybody else. So the guy in that gray uniform is definitely the scariest thing I'll see all day--unless someone else has the bad taste to show up wearing a storm trooper costume with a swastika or a white sheet with a pointed hood.

Free speech and hate speech

A friend of mine on Facebook posted links to two YouTube videos about some outrageous acts of right-wing incitement that have taken place recently. First is a video of the marvelous Rachel Maddow talking with former religious-right organizer Frank Schaeffer about the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Second is a video about anti-abortion vigilante Randall Terry encouraging people to burn Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid in effigy this Hallowe'en because they will "burn in hell" for sponsoring health insurance reform legislation.

Watching these videos reminded me how tricky and complicated the issue of free speech is.

The right to free speech is not trivial. It is a right that needs to be used carefully and responsibly, because the pen, and the video camera, are indeed mightier than the sword. Legal words can inspire illegal actions that have terrible consequences. Just because you have the constitutional right to say something doesn't mean it is morally right for you to say it. If right-wing rabble-rousers describe their opponents as "murderers," and invite their supporters to symbolically burn them at the stake, they oughtn't express surprise if listeners take their words as the justification for real acts of violence. And it's really not fair for them to whine when commentators such as Rachel Maddow use their own free-speech rights to point this out.

I suspect that some folks would like to go one step further and make it illegal for evil-speakers like Bill O'Reilly and Randall Terry to spew their poisonous rants. I'm guessing these folks would say that it's okay to oppose abortion rights, and it's okay to oppose health care reform -- but you need to be moderate and responsible in the way that you do this. And if you're not, there ought to be some kind of legal penalty. We have to stop hate speech before it destroys us. To these folks, I would like to say, not so fast. Yes, we need to stop hate speech, but passing a law to do that is likely to have serious unintended consequences.

Back when I was in college, I took a course in constitutional law. This was maybe 30 years ago, so I apologize that I don't remember the names of all the cases that we studied. But here is how I remember the case law on free speech. Remember how you don't have a right to "yell `fire!' in a crowded theater?" Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it came from a case involving people resisting the draft during World War I. There was a law -- I think it was called the Espionage Act -- that said that if you encouraged people to avoid military service, you were committing a felony and could be sent to jail. (You remember World War I, right? That was supposed to be "the war to end all war," but all it accomplished was the humiliation and impoverishment of Germany -- which set the stage for World War II.)

Wait. I just had a brainstorm. Due to the miracle of Wikipedia, I don't have to dig through the stuff in my junk room to see if I kept those old notes from college. I can point you to an entry about the Espionage Act of 1917, which leads me to an entry about Schenck v. United States, the case in which the supposedly liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. penned the famous phrase about fire in a crowded theater. In case this isn't absolutely clear, I want to emphasize the Holmes wrote a concurring opinion for the court in upholding this act, which had such bizarre consequences as the following:

The poet E. E. Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown, then volunteers in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France, were arrested on September 21, 1917. Cummings' "espionage" consisted mainly of his having openly spoken of his lack of hatred for the Germans.^[2] The two were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months. Cummings' experiences in the camp were later related in his novel, The Enormous Room.

Publications which the Wilson Administration determined were guilty of violating the Act "were subject to being deprived of mailing privilege, a blow to most periodicals," according to Sidney Kobre's book Development of American Journalism. A section of the Act allowed the Postmaster General to declare all letters, circulars, newspapers, pamphlets, packages and other materials that violated the Act to be unmailable. As a result, about 75 newspapers either lost their mailing privileges or were pressured to print nothing more about World War I between June 1916 and May 1918. Among the publications which were censored as a result of the Act were two Socialist Party daily newspapers, the New York Call and the Milwaukee Leader. The editor of the Leader, Victor Berger, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after being convicted on a charge of conspiracy to violate the Act; this was later reversed on a technicality. Other publications banned from the mails were the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) journal Solidarity, American Socialist, bohemian radical magazine The Masses, German-American or German-language newspapers, pacifist publications, and Irish nationalist publications (such as Jeremiah O'Leary's Bull).

I can also point you to a biography of the grand old socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned under the Espionage Act for giving this speech. He compared the despotic rulers of Germany with the supposedly democratic rulers of the United States, and found that they ruled in just about the same way. The speech is as gentle as it is eloquent, but ya know, it certainly implied that the US government was illegitimate and ought to be replaced.

My point should be obvious. Laws restricting "hate speech," or laws restricting criticism of the government are just as likely -- or more likely -- to be used against progressives, feminists, and left-wing radicals than they are to be used against right-wing haters like Randall or O'Reilly.

Any feminist worth her salt has been accused of being a "man-hater." Advocates for the rights of people of color routinely accused of hating white people. Critics of US intervention in other countries are routinely accused of trying to destroy the United States.

As painful as it is to contemplate, in order for the right of free speech to be safe, it has to apply to the hateful and immoderate as well as to the thoughtful and responsible. We need to distinguish between hate speech and hate crimes.

There is a difficult but very effective way to stop the haters. We have to do what Rachel Maddow does. We have to speak out against them.

Free Market efficiency is a myth when it comes to health care

Our Bodies Our Blog has a great post on activism to pass a health-care plan. It includes this great little six-page document that summarizes the issues at stake.

Is this good news or bad news?

T r u t h o u t reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that the health care bill that will be introduced on the Senate floor will include a "public option"--a government run plan that will compete with private insurers for the business of individuals and businesses not currently covered by insurance. The catch is that states will be able to "opt out" of the public option, and deliver their residents into the clutches of the health insurance industry.

Former Oklahoma legislator challenges bizarre new abortion law in well-publicized case

I think most folks would like to see a reduction in the number of abortions that take place. As a feminist, I support the right to choose abortion because it is sometimes the best solution to a bad situation, and because I support the right of women to make decisions about what goes on inside our own bodies.

If we want to reduce abortion, the most practical way to do that is to empower women to keep from becoming pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. We might do everything in our power to make contraception and family planning services available. And -- call me an old school lesbian feminist if you like -- we might even work to overturn compulsory heterosexuality.

Instead, the Oklahoma Legislature takes the patriarchal approach of trying to bully and humiliate women who seek to end an unwanted pregnancy.

I first learned of this story in an e-mail update from the National Partnership for Women and Families. Their post relied largely on an online article in the Guardian of London, which linked to a piece on Salon.com about an off-the-wall new Oklahoma law that takes truly bizarre steps to interfere with the rights of women to have an abortion. The Salon.com piece linked to the web site of the Center for Reproductive Rights, and this is the best place to begin to read about this bizarre new Oklahoma law.

According to CRR, back at the end of September

former Oklahoma state representative Wanda Stapleton, along with Shawnee, Oklahoma resident Lora Joyce Davis, filed a legal challenge against an Oklahoma law that will impose a host of restrictions on women's access to abortion and cost the state over a quarter of a million dollars a year to enforce. The plaintiffs are represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights and argue that the state legislature overstepped its authority by enacting a statute that will both violate the Oklahoma's Constitution and waste taxpayers' money.

The Oklahoma Constitution requires that laws address only one subject at a time, but the new measure covers four distinct subjects, including redefining a number of abortion-related terms used in the Oklahoma code; banning sex-selective abortion; requiring doctors who perform abortions or treat patients who have had abortions to report extensive patient information to the state health department; and creating new responsibilities for the State Health Department, the State Board of Medical Licensure and Supervision, and the State Board of Osteopathic Examiners relating to gathering and analyzing abortion data and enforcing abortion restrictions. According to the legislature's own estimates, implementing the new reporting requirements will cost the state $281,285 during the first year and $256,285 each subsequent year.

Lynn Harris at salon.com has a chilling description of the new law :

The required questionnaire (see PDF of entire law), practically as long and elaborate as eHarmony's (and containing fishy questions such as "Was there an infant born alive as a result of the abortion?"), does not include the name, address or "any information specifically identifying the patient." But opponents argue that the first eight questions alone would be enough to out any woman in a town of 200 or smaller.

Also, doctors failing to provide this information would face criminal sanctions and loss of their medical license.

It isn’t unique for a state to post health data on its Web site. However, Oklahoma’s requirements are by far the most extensive as such. The law's supporters claim they want this information to be made public so it can be used for "academic research," but according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, its collection method makes it useless for that purpose. (If a woman sees more than one doctor concerning her abortion -- primary care and abortion provider, say -- the data, collected each visit, will appear to represent more than one patient.)

The good news is, thanks to CRR, the law -- originally scheduled to go into effect Nov. 1 -- has been stayed pending a Dec. 4 hearing.

Also, according to CRR, back in August

a state district court struck down a 2008 law that included, among other abortion restrictions, the most extreme ultrasound requirement in the country and a requirement that would have limited the availability of abortions performed with the medical abortion pill. The court in that case ruled that the statute included too many disparate topics and therefore violated the state constitution.

CRR is also challenging the current law on the grounds that it addresses more than one topic, in violation of the state constitution, which gives hope that the new law will also be overturned.

Tests are not always for the best

We've all heard that early detection is important to help prevent deaths from breast cancer--but sometimes the benefits of screening are questionable. The American Cancer Society, long a proponent of mammograms and prostate cancer screening, has started to take a more cautious approach towards these tests.

Feminist Peace Network (one of my very favorite blogs) has a thought-provoking post on this topic. Over-testing has the effect of causing women to undergo treatments that they don't really need, while not really helping to prolong lives.

It seems to me that health care reform means not just providing health insurance to everyone, but doing our best to make sure that treatments benefit patients, and not just the profit margins of health care providers.

Is insurance industry running scared?

Maggie Mahar at Health Beat asks Why are Health Insurers Launching An 11th Hour Attack on Health Care Reform?
and says, in a long but very interesting post, that it's because they know that a public option has a very good chance of making it into the final health care bill.

US banks still in trouble

Thanks to CommonDreams.org for picking up Paul Krugman's New York Times op-ed piece on the continuing troubles of US banks.

Krugman argues that "while the wheeler-dealer side of the financial industry, a k a trading operations, is highly profitable again, the part of banking that really matters — lending, which fuels investment and job creation — is not. Key banks remain financially weak, and their weakness is hurting the economy as a whole."

As if to prove Krugman's point comes the news of CIT Group's worsening condition. CIT is a lender to small and mid-sized businesses whose collapse could seriously threaten the chances of recovery in the real economy.

Reflections on Marriage

Melissa Harris-Lacewell has some really interesting Reflections on Marriage over at thenation.com.

Afghan women don't want more US troops, CodePink founder tells Obama at fundraiser

AlterNet has the story.

Earlier in the month, Evans recently visited Afghanistan over a ten-day period along with a group of CodePink activists, and she was clear in a recent AlterNet article about what she saw -- a humanitarian crisis: "The United States has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in eight years of military action: what have we achieved? Most of the country is in worse condition, the bordering countries are less stable and death fills the air. According to the United Nations, Afghanistan is ranked 181 out of 182 countries for human development indices. Life expectancy has fallen to 43 years since the U.S. invasion. Forty percent of the population is unemployed, and 42 percent live on less than $1 a day."

What real reform looks like

Maybe, like me, you've received an e-mail from barackobama.com urging you to attend an Oct. 20 event designed to get folks to call their congress critters in support of the president's health care plan.

Maybe, like me, you've been concerned that the president doesn't really have a health care plan, but often seems eager to pass any kind of legislation that says "health care reform," just so he can claim it as an accomplishment.

If so, I think you will want to read a great post by John Nichols over at thenation.com, who says Here's What to Tell Obama, Congress About Real Reform.

How pilot lights work

Recently I re-lit my floor furnace. While I was at it, I took lots of pictures and posted them on Facebook, along with lots of little comments. One of the comments I made was that the pilot light of the floor furnace generates enough electricity to operate the thermostat. (In the event of an ice storm bad enough to cause a power outage, this is a handy little feature.) A viewer of this Facebook album asked, reasonably enough, does the pilot light really generate electricity?

Well, yes it does, it says so right in the manual for the floor furnace. But my manual doesn't say how this works. Fortunately the web site How Stuff Works seems to have the answer to this question.

Thermocouples generate electricity directly from heat. They take advantage of an electrical effect that occurs at junctions between different metals. For example, take two iron wires and one copper wire. Twist one end of the copper wire and one end of one of the iron wires together. Do the same with the other end of the copper wire and the other iron wire. If you heat one of the twisted junctions with a flame and attach the two free iron wires to a volt meter, you will be able to measure a voltage.

In a pilot light, one of the junctions of a thermocouple is sitting in the pilot light's flame. The electricity that is created runs to a small electromagnetic valve and holds it open. If the pilot light blows out, the thermocouple quickly cools off. It stops generating electricity and the valve closes.

Pretty neat, huh?

What will Congress do now that it has five health care bills?

Open Left has an interesting post describing how the five bills that have been passed by House and Senate committees will turn into one bill that becomes law.

Insurance industry bites hand that feeds it as finance committee votes on health care bill

Whoops. I've been so busy getting ready to write a novel next month that I started to lose track of the health care debate.

When last we visited this debate, three House Committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had already voted on some version of a health care bill. Now it's the turn of the Senate Finance Committee, which is scheduled to vote today.

The Finance Committee is chaired by Montana Senator Mike Baucus, who is variously described as a moderate Democrat or an insurance industry toady, depending on who is doing the describing. Baucus's goal has been to create a "moderate" bill that Republicans and the for-profit healthcare industry can support. For Baucus, the key to gaining that support has been not to have even a very watered-down version of a public option -- a government-run plan that would compete with private insurers.

The problem is, the Finance Committee bill--like the other bills making their way through Congress--requires almost everyone to purchase health care insurance, and without a public option, that could be a very expensive purchase. According to National Public Radio, in order to address this issue,

Last-minute changes made subsidies more generous and softened the penalties for those who don't comply with a proposed new mandate for everyone to buy insurance. The latter change drew the ire of the health insurance industry, which said that without a strong and enforceable requirement not enough people would get insured, and premiums would jump for everyone else.

AMERICAblog points out the irony of the insurance industry attacking the Baucus bill, and in another post, links to this video of  New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner explaining how the insurance industry's opposition to the Baucus bill makes the case for a public option:

Don't let states opt out of public option

Maggie Mahar over at Health Beat explains why its not necessary to allow states to opt-out of a public option in order to pass a health care bill--and why it's not right.

Fun with a floor furnace (Don't try this at home)

I have always thought that one should never expect anything from the weather. By its very nature, weather is ever-changing and unpredictable. Nevertheless, the recent cold and rain in Oklahoma City caught me by surprise. I wasn't thinking that I'd need to light my floor furnace for at least another month. Then I noticed that the temperature inside my house had started to drop to uncomfortable levels. Yesterday, it was 55 degrees inside. This morning, it was 50. Time to act.

Fortunately, last year when I bought my little house, I downloaded the manual for my floor furnace from the manufacturer's web site. So, after a delicious breakfast at the Red Cup, I got right to work.

First, I needed to clean the darned thing. This required me to get out my shop vac.

Then I had to put the cat away in the bedroom so she wouldn't get into the furnace when I opened it up to clean it. Next, I removed the register and the inner casing. Here's how it looked after the register was taken off, while the casing was still in place. I like this photo because you can see the controls over on the left, and how the whole thing fits together:

It took a while to vacuum out all of the accumulated dust, debris, and foreign objects. About two-thirds of the way through this process, I had to stop to clean out the vacuum. The hose seemed to be clogged with cat hair. Go figure. Once I finished with this step, I removed two of the vent covers from the house foundation so that the heater would be properly vented once it was lit. Then it was time to go under the house.

Here's what it looks like under the house as I crawled back toward the underside of the heater:

The chimney needs some repair, which you can tell when you crawl up closer to it. (I need to find a mason.) The furnace itself has a little bit of external rust, but it seems to be in good shape.

I inspected the furnace, all the fittings I could see, and the connections of the flue to the furnace and the chimney. I cleaned all the debris out of the debris pan. First I tried a little brush, and then a rag. Finally, I used some canned air, and that did the trick. You can barely see part of the debris pan in the photo above. Look for a little flat thing on the bottom middle of the furnace.

Here's where the flue enters the chimney:

This photo shows some of the other issues I need to resolve with the house. First, I need to dig (or, possibly, have someone dig) a French drain to keep water from dissolving the east wall and flowing under the house:

But I have a novel that I need to write in November, so that project may have to wait for spring.

I love to hang out under my house, but eventually it's time to get myself out from under.

And then it was time to go back indoors and light the furnace, following the instructions in the manual. At first I didn't see the part about holding down the gas control while I used the automatic spark switch, but it worked just fine with a match. Now my house is warm and cozy.

Some of that is due to the fact that my floor furnace is blazing away merrily, but I also had a lot of help from my friends in getting the house ready to move into. And when it's cold outside, having good friends keeps my heart warm.

And I still ain't satisfied

It is a beautiful gray October morning, and the inside of my head this morning is still gray and foggy, because of the weather, because I work nights and it takes me a while to get going in the morning. So I'm sitting at my desk with my front door open, and absent-mindedly browsing my blogroll, when I come across this post on Open Left. It's basically a link to this video:



Sometimes the sun burns through the clouds a little bit, and I think I'd like to sit out on the porch and play the harmonica, or maybe sit right here at my desk and re-write a few poems, or maybe do some day-dreaming and note-taking for the novel I'm going to write next month. But instead, here's this interesting and complicated issue about a domestic partnership referendum in Washington State sitting in front of me.

And for me, this could get really complicated. I'm an old-fashioned lesbian feminist with lots of reservations about the old-fashioned patriarchal institution of marriage. And thinking about this ignites the burning nostalgia for a time in which we were going to change the world, really change it, so that everyone was equal and free, and not just try to take our equal place in a fucked up oppressive system. Maybe nostalgia is the wrong word, because I try to live every day of my life to do my part to make that free and equal world possible.

I'm not talking about utopia. I'm not talking about a world free of sorrow or pain. I am talking about a world without the rulers or the ruled. I don't think it's easy, but I think it's possible.

I'm not explaining this very well. I don't know if I can.

So I will confine myself to a much more limited goal. I will give you links to a couple of Wikipedia entries to help you understand the situation in Washington State, and keep my ambivalence and my complicated feelings to myself.

The first entry describes domestic partner laws in Washington State, and the second entry explains Referendum 71.

The wind is still blowing and the sun is still trying to break through. I'm going out now to sit on the portch.

Abortion funding under health insurance reform

Jessica Arons has an interesting analysis at RHRealityCheck.org.

Health insurance reform -- read all about it.

Here are some reference links about the health care reform debate.

There are currently three bills making their way through Congress, being considered by five different committees. Three different House committees are working on versions of HR 3200. The Senate's HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) has its own bill, and the Senate Finance Committee is working on yet a different bill. The Senate will merge its two bills, and the House will pass a final version of HR 3200. After that, a conference committee will put together a final version of the bill.

Much of the debate around health care reform centers around the advisability of something called a public option. You can find a description of Jacob Hacker's original proposal for a public option here. (HR 3200 contains a much watered-down version of this proposal that would allow the public option as a choice only for those who don't already have some form of insurance coverage.)

The public option was originally conceived as a compromise that would not be as controversial as single-payer health insurance (sometimes called "Medicare for all.") You can read the text of HR 676 here. You can find more information about single payer on the site of Physicians for a National Health Program. I also wrote a recent post on a conservative version of single payer called balanced choice.

Some of my favorite sources for health care legislations news include

• Our Bodies Our Blog
• RH Reality Check
• Health Beat
• Ezra Klein's blog
• Healthcare Newsladder
• Common Dreams (a great site for all kinds of radical news and views)

Happy reading.

Battle over healthcare public option continues

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee rejected an amendment that would have added a public option to their health care bill. John Nichols at The Nation thinks this is very bad news.

Maggie Mahar at has a very different analysis over at Health Beat.

We knew that the Senate Finance Committee would reject the public sector option. Now they have done just that.

This is not news. Nor is this a “fatal blow” for progressives.

Will the public option survive a vote on the Senate floor? Probably not—though it could happen. But this still does not mean that the public option is dead.

We know that the bill that emerges from the House will contain a MedicareE (for Everyone) alternative. The House bill and the Senate bill will then go to conference. This is the moment that matters. As a respected HealthBeat reader who knows Washington well recently told me, “Everything else is foreplay.” Much of what we are reading now is posturing--by some politicians ( Charles Schumer deserves an Emmy), by some pundits and by unnamed sources who want reporters to think that they know more than they actually know.

I would be happier if I thought both the Senate and the House bill would include a public option. But that isn’t necessary. All that is necessary is to get a bill through the House, and a bill through the Senate, with or without MedicareE. In Conference, where the two bills are merged, they can put the public option back in.

This all depends on the White House stepping up to support a public option. Mahar thinks that President Obama and his aides will do just this because their political survival depends on delivering health care reform that really works.

When Mahar refers to "MedicareE" it looks as if she's referring to a version of the public option that would allow everyone who wanted to do so to sign up for Medicare, even if they had not yet reached age 65. It would be very good news if this is so, but such a proposal is much stronger than anything in the original language of HR 3200. (I'm reading the darned thing, so I have some clue what I'm talking about.)

Meanwhile Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin insists that a bill including the public option could pass the full Senate by a "comfortable margin."

About Roman Polanski

AngryBlackBitch has said almost everything I would have wished to say on the subject.