HorsesAss.Org

[Typed on my Blackberry. Excuse the typos.]

At around 1:10pm, while getting ready to go to work, I stepped on the corner of a garbage bag. In that bag was the lid of a can of olives… My heel met that lid from the olive can, and well… The guy I’m housesitting for is probably going to need a new mat for his back door.

Sitting on this hospital bed at Overlake is giving me the chance to reflect, in real time, about healthcare in the USA.

This visit is going to cost me $125 bucks. Did I try to shop around, maybe to look for a better deal to avoid the ER? I did, but with a shoeful of blood, its tough to comparison shop.

Whats good about the situation is that I’m going to recieve excellent medical care. In America, we don’t ration healthcare. I’m going to get the full boat: tiny stitches, local pain meds, and a flat tube TV on the wall.

In America, we don’t ration healthcare. We ration the access to that healthcare. We run a healthcare system that no serious conservative politician in any country would advocate for. In England, Tory leader David Cameron reaffirmed his support for the NHS after a member of his party made dispariging statements on American TV. Cameron wants to be Prime Minister one day, and he knows that for its flaws, each and every Briton would pick the NHS over America’s broken system any day.

After I’ve been patched up and sent on my way, the hospital will ring up my charges and bill my insurance. They will bill at the highest rate possible to recoup for uncompensated care. You see, the simple fact that some don’t have insurance makes the insurance I do have more expensive. Whats more, my health insurance company will spend %12 of every dollar on paperwork, processing, and other overhead. Medicare, The Great Healthcare Satan, spends far less.

For all the monkeytalk coming out of DC these days, its easy to lose track of the reality of a broken healthcare system, and how regular Americans must navigate it every day, Americans of all stripes.

The doctor is on his way in, so I’ll close by saying this:

Universal health insurance is no more a socialist plot that universal car insurance.

[Typed on my Blackberry. Excuse the typos.]

From Pacific County blogger/writer Arthur Ruger, who makes a lot of good points. Worth checking out, here’s a taste:

After the last two election cycles, I backed away from lots of writing. At 63, I want to retire as soon as possible from my full-time job at the local welfare office in South Bend.

That’s right, the welfare office – where a day doesn’t go by without older American residents of our county coming in seeking any kind of relief from medical expenses that take larger and larger bites out of their fixed income.

It’s also the office where younger Americans come in – not asking for a welfare check – but to find out if there’s any kind of help with medical expenses. They don’t want a government hand out. They seek a way to keep their families safe. And they are not seeing or hearing any constructive ideas from reform opponents, especially the current minority party, it’s willfully propagandistic leadership and its public broadcast shills who are all talk and no solution.

I may not be the county expert on health care reform, but I’m willing to bet that short of medical professionals, I see the problem more closely and with more clarity than most citizens nationwide who have gone to town meetings scared, worried and nervous. They seem to feel that way because they are driven by outrage and fear inspired by the disinformation and outright lying that has come out of desperate Republican political organizing, coaching and talking point tactics.

After all the shouting, real people still need real solutions. That’s why this fight is worth it, and good on Ruger for reminding us.

When I get back to Seattle the first thing I’m gonna do is get me a handgun, and a license to carry it, and then I plan to start showing up at health care reform town halls.  Armed. You know, just in case.

After all, it is my constitutional right to protect myself, my family and my property, even if it means taking another person’s life in the process. So I invite all of you to show up armed at your next neighborhood town hall meeting and join me in teaching those pussies on the right what it’s like to be a real American.

I’m just sayin’….

No public option, no passage. And the votes are there, apparently.

You’d never know about this from most media accounts, probably because progressives aren’t screaming, yelling and waving guns around. Yes, it’s a battle of wills, and no, I can’t predict the final outcome.

But I’d wager that progressives around the country are now in little mood to compromise on anything, and we’re certainly not going to cotton to some giant industry turd with “health care reform” written on it.

While the diversionary clown shows continue, the administration faces the basic decision Molly Ivins used to describe as “dancing with them what brung you,” to paraphrase the late and great Texas columnist. It’s pretty clear that’s what Max Baucus and Kent Conrad are doing.

The conservative clown shows are already wearing thin, in addition to getting creepier, and their political utility will continue to decrease as we get more into the fall. At some point clowns grow tiresome.

So it seems like the short term strategy is to move the debate back to actual policy, rather than the incomprehensible nonsense we’ve been witnessing. You can add “death panels” to the long list of recent American political idioms like “Schiavo,” “Katrina” and “”weapons of mass destruction” that are shorthand for conservative craziness, incompetence and lies.

No rational person can do much but shake their head in sorry amazement at how the right always doubles down on being nuts, never seeming to realize that the short term media attention eventually gives way to the broader, non-cable watching public recoiling in horror.

If progressives in the House can hold firm, everyone is going to have to deal with them. If that upsets some Blue Dogs, well, cry me a river. The ongoing political re-alignment needs to be helped along sometimes, and if we wind up with fewer Blue Dogs, so much the better in the long run.

As another Texan, Jim Hightower, used to say, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Today’s release of R-71 data has the process nearly half-complete. Now 65,531, (47.6%) signatures have been examined in completed volumes. There have been 7,201 invalid signatures found, for an uncorrected rejection rate of 10.99%.

The invalid signatures include 6,165 that were not found in the voting rolls, 470 duplicates, and 566 that did not match the signature on file. There are also 24 pending signatures that I’ve not counted either way.

The 470 duplicates suggest that the overall rate of duplicate signatures for the petition will be about 1.84%. This is slightly higher than what we saw last week, from Tuesday through Friday, 1.62%, 1.74%, 1.73%, and 1.69% respectively.

Using the V₂ estimator, the number of valid signatures is expected to be 121,475 exceeding by 898 the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot. The overall (i.e. duplicate-corrected) rejection rate is about 11.78%. (Last week we saw 11.61%, 11.53%, 11.54%, 11,65%.)

A Monte Carlo analysis of 100,000 simulated petitions gives this distribution of projected valid signatures for the petition:

In only 34 of the 100,000 simulations did the measure fail to qualify for the ballot (those red bars on the left). The median number of signatures was 121,478 with a 95% confidence interval between 120,951 and 122,003.

As we saw last week…the measure has almost no chance of being rejected.

After the fold, I provide a rather dry analysis by small batches of signature pages for the R-71 obsessives and stats wonks….

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With reports that the Obama Administration is considering backing down on the public option – a health care proposal that is supported by roughly 3/4 of the country – due to the way the debate is being portrayed in the media, I get the sense that we’ve witnessed what might be an even larger media failure than what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. At least then, the public was in far more of a position to buy into the lies being put out by the special interest groups leading us into that mess. But what has happened over the past few weeks in the health care debate has transcended that. A narrow set of interests who profit very handsomely from our incredibly overpriced health care system have managed to derail a popular initiative put forth by a popular president. It’s another loud warning that the ability of Americans (and media personalities) to figure out when moneyed interests are lying to us is not keeping up with the myriad ways we’re all being lied to.

A big part of this distorted debate has focused on end-of-life issues. An innocuous provision in one of the health care bills was incorrectly characterized by former Alaska Governor and losing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin as “death panels“. The issue itself was nothing more than a provision to allow for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions to be covered. As I’ve pointed out previously, these end-of-life sessions have a well-known positive effect when people take advantage of them. In fact, those who discuss these issues openly and honestly with their doctors tend to outlive those who don’t. The idea that there’s anything to fear from something like this is so absurd that even Sarah Palin herself didn’t buy it back in 2008 when she endorsed end-of-life counseling as Governor of Alaska.

Instead, much of what happened after Palin dropped that turd into the health care debate punch bowl reminded me a lot of what happened last year during the I-1000 campaign, where opponents of the death with dignity initiative piled lies on top of bullshit on top of more lies in order to convince people that a law that was working very well just across the border in Oregon would somehow be a disaster here in Washington. One can easily see the parallel to the current health care debate, where we can look to countries like France – which has a world-class health care system that relies heavily on government involvement alongside private insurance – to see that moving towards more “socialized” medicine is not a slippery slope. And we rarely saw the media (either last year or right now) take a forceful approach to separating fact from fiction this way.

Fortunately, the I-1000 debate was only about a single contentious issue, and in the end, it didn’t really matter that Martin Sheen was telling whoppers in a commercial that aired every 10 seconds in October, or that the Seattle Times was giving editorial space to a crackpot conspiracy theorist who actually believes that Washington’s death with dignity law was specifically worded to allow people to kill their rich parents. It still passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. I think that’s one thing to be optimistic about. I remember having a conversation with Will around this time last year (he was working on the I-1000 campaign) as he was freaking out about all the bullshit being shouted through media outlets who arguably should have had much better baloney detectors. I told him there’s no way it wasn’t going to pass, and I ended up being vindicated on that front.

The national health care debate right now is a complete buffet of every contentious issue that borders on health care. End-of-life care is just a small tibdit. Abortion, government regulation, illegal immigrants, and taxes are each separate elephants crammed trunk to tail into this room. And while the people whose paranoia far outweighs their ability to grasp complex issues continue to show up at town halls and scream their heads off, I still hold out some hope that enough Americans are taking the same thing away from the spectacle that I am, that we’re really not doing a good enough job in this country of treating the mentally ill – and that’s just another reason we need to improve our health care system. Sadly, we’ll still likely have to improve how we keep ourselves well-informed first.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they hang out with, and so when HA commenter I Got Nothin’ went trolling around Susan Hutchison’s Facebook page, he couldn’t help but notice her friend Orly Taitz.

And who is Orly Taitz? Only the crazy queen bee of the “birther” movement, a woman who accuses mainstream journalists of being Brownshirts, and who compares the Obama administration to Nazi Germany.

But don’t you worry, Hutchison’s friendship with Taitz doesn’t make her a Republican. After all, Hutchison is also Facebook friends with Joe Mallahan, so that makes her about as nonpartisan as they come, right?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUaca8wP9w[/youtube]

Marc Emery is expected to be sentenced to a 5-year prison term right here in Seattle on Monday, September 21. Rallies are planned in his support in a number of U.S. and Canadian cities on Saturday, September 19th.

NPR has the story of how an Orange County retirement community set up their medical marijuana coop.

A Clallam County man who was a medical marijuana provider won a victory in the state Court of Appeals when they overturned his conviction and ordered a retrial.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy isn’t buying that the Mexican government is upholding human rights in their (our) war on drugs.

The Economix blog at the New York Times breaks down the rates of illicit drug use from state-to-state. Washington is in the top ten, but still lags behind Montana and Alaska.

As I learned this week at Netroots Nation, some leaders lead through mere words, while some lead by example. For Drinking Liberally’s Justin Krebs, it’s definitely the latter.

CBS News examines the similarities and differences among the five different health insurance reform drafts in Congress:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irwmdDMZVP0[/youtube]

Now examine this mini-debate between Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31-1SFncpIw&feature=player_profilepage[/youtube]

This is remarkable. First, Hatch refuses to take sides in the “Obama Death Panel” canard! Hatch then lets loose with a series of blatant lies (“government take-over”, “cut medicare”, “eight in ten of Americans really want their health insurance coverage and don’t want to lose it”, “nameless, faceless bureaucrats setting healthcare”, “single payer”, “government plan”).

Much of what Hatch is saying isn’t simply “alternative interpretations” of facts. They are fabrications that are so discordant with the actual provisions in the drafts that this can only be intentional deceit.

This is what Republicans are reduced to? Putting their senior statesmen on mainstream TV to tell barefaced lies to Americans? I mean, there is a deep tradition of politicians “spinning” facts to their cause. But discarding facts altogether? We tolerate unashamed lying from pundits and political operatives…but a U.S. Senator?

Or perhaps Republicans have become so enmeshed in their lies that they no longer recognize objective truth. This goes beyond deplorable; now it’s just pitiable.

There is no fundamental right to profit from selling private health insurance.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4jcdy4QZdQ[/youtube]

Jeffrey Feldman caught Rep. Jay Inslee in the hall yesterday at Netroots Nation, and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop as they talked about what we (that’s you and me) need to do to help pass real health care reform. Shorter Inslee: show up!

I’m on my way down to Hempfest right now. I will update this post as the day goes on.

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Thursday a federal court rejected a permit to build a 305 foot dock in an environmentally sensitive area on Maury Island, essentially halting Glacier Northwest’s controversial gravel and sand mine for years to come, and State Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark deserves a huge “thank you” for helping to realize a key campaign promise:

Last year, the company gave $50,000 to a political action committee that supported former Republican State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s re-election bid. Sutherland lost, but signed a lease for the project days before leaving office. His successor, Democrat Peter Goldmark, who’s campaigned on a promise to try and stop the project, immediately announced plans to more thoroughly scrutinize the lease. In early July, he ordered the company to do no work until it could prove to him Puget Sound would see no harm. Earlier this week, the company responded with a 17-page letter — and a promise that it still planned to start work next week.

Now, the project is on indefinite hold, and a protest scheduled for Saturday on Maury Island instead will become a victory party.

I started writing this post while sitting in the audience of a health care forum with Gov. Howard Dean at Netroots Nation (just reasoned, rational discusion, FYI… no angry, disruptive teabaggers thus far), and was feeling a little nostalgic at this particular turn of events.

It was at last year’s Netroots Nation that I celebrated my biggest blogging accomplishment of the year, my success at forcing the Seattle Times and other media outlets to front-page then-incumbent State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland’s embarrassing sexual harassment scandal… a scandal I broke.

As a blogger, I know that I have made a difference over the past few years, but this was one of the few times that I could really quantify it. Despite being snugly in the pocket of mining and timber interests, Sutherland was a personable guy and a self-proclaimed moderate who appeared to be well liked by members of the press, and up until this point in the election cycle the Lands Commissioner race and the challenge from Goldmark had received very little media attention.

All that changed after the scandal, as journalists and voters started paying closer attention to both the candidates and the issues, with Goldmark eventually squeaking out a one percentage point victory… close enough for me to almost confidently say that my coverage likely helped swing the election.

Of course, one of the main issues in that election was the Maury Island gravel mine, and it’s tremendously gratifying to see Goldmark living up to his campaign promise to block it. This past legislative session notwithstanding, elections do matter, and thus what we all do to influence elections matters too. Yes, it’s hard to quantify, and so much easier just to be cynical, and no individual should pat themselves too hard on the back for the outcome of any election, as it’s the voters in the end who deserve most of the credit for making the right choice. But for those of us who devote ourselves to such things, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-congratulation if that’s what keeps us going.

How long that alone can keep me going, I don’t know.  But I might as well enjoy the moment.