TedObamaCare

A few days ago we donated a few bucks to St. Jude's Hospitals via a campaign at a chain restaurant. We had a little family discussion about sick children, charity, cancer, and death over a nice basket of warm chips and cool salsa. Our 7-year-old son gave this some thought for a few days.

As he was considering the discussion, Ted Kennedy was being buried and I have been toying with how come up with a large co-payment I need to make to have my gallbladder removed in the face of so many other bills and our recession-battered income.

That's the context of a little discussion from last night:
- Dad, what is cancer?
- It is a serious disease that can get into almost any part of a person's body and has to be treated by doctors. Adults and children can get it, and it can kill them.
- Does it cost money to see doctors?
- Yes
- So, it costs money to save your life?
- Yes
- (Sarcastically) Um, that's kind of stupid.
- Yes

I shared a little tidbit of this on my Facebook status, which prompts an unexpected discussion about health care. The fact that this surprised me is a bit of a testament to my stupidity. The Conservative responses were about 'responsibility' of the individual, rights of providers to be paid and other things that seemed to have little to nothing to do with the central point that my son was making.

Conservatives also made the argument that 'government will screw it up worse' with great confidence. Libertarians and Reagan lovers recite the mantra as if it were true and anyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, misinformed or just naive. There's a physical fact that these people do not accept as even possible, it is the economic concept of public goods. Their existence run the gamut from national defense, to societal safety nets like publicly sponsored health care. I'm at a loss as to how to make this argument because arguing that public goods exist is like trying to argue that the earth is round. It just is.

That point my son was making is this: He is a child. He has no money. Lack of money should have nothing whatsoever to do with life or death decisions people make to seek and receive life and health. He is kind of making the point Senator Kennedy made over and over throughout his 47 years in the Senate: Health care should be a right. How can anyone disagree with such a simple concept? Only government (as much as you might hate this fact) can guarantee a right.

Mike Huckabee - Republican Asshole of the Week

“Proponents deny that the bill would devalue older people’s lives, or encourage them to accept less care to save money. But it was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” Huckabee said.

“Yet when Senator Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die, of course not,” the former Republican governor said. “He freely did what most of us would do. He chose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments.”

From: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26554.html#ixzz0PbNZGHmk

I would have gone with John McCain for snubbing Vicky Kennedy after speaking at Ted's wake, but I'm not sure what motivated him. If he was hiding his tears from the camera, his a bit less of an asshole than he would be if he was pointedly turning away from her.

Whatever the case, Huckabee's comments are horrible on two levels. He misstates Obama's position, then he uses his mistaken premise to claim that Senator Kennedy would disagreed with Obama. Shameful.

What's wrong with this person?

This chick looks very confident and passionate. I wonder if she is a lousy speller or if she really has issues with pubes.

Karl Marx's "Capital"

This summer I'm slogging through Karl Marx's masterpiece (aka "Das Capital"). I borrowed it from the library, and it seems that I have a first American printing from 1911. All the name calling and stupidity from the right wing over the first few months of the Obama Administration made it an attractive thing to do. I am about half way through.

The pages of the copy are thin and fragile. There is at least one section of pages that are missing. Some of the print is spotty, maybe due to age or poor quality of printing in the first place. I feel like I have something beautiful and original in my hands and am eagerly trying to take it into my brain. All this made more fun by the idea that nearly 150 years after it was written, this book is a bit naughty. Marx is a man who is especially vilified by the American right wing; so much so that the left can barely speak his name.

This is some early, crude economic thought and sophisticated political thought that was (like every intellectual pursuit) a product of the time it was conceived and written. Lifting the ideas and placing them into a different historical context twists the beauty of its originality. This is especially true of Marx. I'm trying to keep in mind that it was written in the middle of the 19th century.

It was a time of early industrialism and international trade. It was marked by slave trading, child exploitation, racism, sexism, pollution, dangerous working conditions and near feudal politics in much of Europe. Given that context, it was entirely sensible to make labor vs capital the central antagonism is his economic model.