Health care reform -- the next day

Our guest blogger today is Bill Brent (Birdman) who has some clear opinions about the political parties.

d'blank

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The healthcare/health insurance reform bill has passed. There are a couple of issues brought up in the senate that will require a revote in the house but, by all accounts, this won’t be a particularly onerous road block. Polls are starting to turn in favor of the bill and Obama. The stock market didn’t crash. The sun came up the next morning and conservatives have not found themselves in liberal gulags doomed to a future of lectures on the joys of Mao’s little red book and reading William Burroughs “The Naked Lunch” in Esperanto.

Republicans and their Tea Party shock troops have responded with death threats and bricks through the windows of democrats offices. A dozen or so republican (and one conservative democrat in LA) attorneys general have filed suit in federal court claiming the bill is unconstitutional. Senate republicans are blocking committee meetings on everything from military readiness to the environment.

Every state in the union is dealing with financial troubles to the pointing of cutting education funding and other vital services. Wasting limited financial resources on legal arguments settled in 1832 is irresponsible to the point absurdity.

I can only hope that the patina of respectability that these hard right conservatives have enjoyed in the past, has worn off. And, yes, the Republican Party that has encouraged and nurtured them falls into the same category.
I've had it with these people who tear up when they hear the national anthem, declare their love of country to point of pugnacity, and drape themselves in the flag but have no sense of a larger community and shared sacrifice for the greater good. They appear to be saying "this is my country, not yours", I've got mine, f**k you." Just as the recent threats and acts of violence are not isolated, I don't think this is an isolated view either and certainly not limited to the south. If right-wing republicans don’t want to participate in government they should simply go home and leave the job to responsible adults.

This is a big opportunity for democrats but I’m sure they’ll squander it if for no other reason than tradition.

Living the goodlife, low on the food chain

The second guest blogger on The Daily Blank is Hank Schiffman (Hankster). If you doubt what he has to say, bear in mind he is still running very impressive marathon times at 60. If more of us followed his advice perhaps the health care debate would have been less contentious.

d'blank

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I’ll be the first to admit that I am over-the-top. Unlike Dennis, I haven’t yet crossed the line to retirement. That’s not to mean approaching the top third of my life has escaped without a point of view. The ideal thing would be to integrate both financial and health strategies. Had I been more diligent on the former, I probably would be spending more time in snow sports right now. Did I mention skiing deep powder is better than sex?

On to the topic of health: it isn’t just about turning up the sweat. You are what you eat. If you eat like a pig, you might end up looking like one. But if you eat pig, perhaps too much pig, you might be risking your health.

Michael Pollan, in his book, “In Defense of Food,” advises to live by this mantra: “Eat food, not much, mostly plants.” He makes a rational appeal to avoid eating those foods your grandmother wouldn’t recognize (by which he means “natural” food as opposed to processed “food products”), eating low on the food chain, and not going overboard on quantity.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a monk and I too have an aversion to “thou shalt not” commands. There is a certain logic to looking at the hourglass running out and choosing prime rib over bean curd, not wanting to deny oneself pleasure while on the deck of the Titanic. However, bean curd might actually slow the sand flowing down the glass. If you think eating tofu is reprehensible, perhaps you might remember your first taste of hooch or drag of cigarette. Some things need time to accommodate. Discounting your great uncle, who died at 95, smoking 3 packs a day while thinking anything green was spoiled meat, it might be time for change.

A friend once said that the very thing, which kept us healthy and alive in the past, will probably end up making us unhealthy and dead in the future. He was referring to our immune system. In health, our bodies work flawlessly, keeping out germs while we go about our lives. In sickness we are a Prius with a broken accelerator pedal. As we age, our systems tend to go out of tune. We need to concentrate on doing everything we can to help keep them running right. We naturally lose our reserve capacity so we need to exercise to build it back up. Our body has a hard time dealing with metabolizing/excreting complex foreign chemicals. We were always designed to make use of natural chemicals in our foods for our immune system and to rebuild cells lost due to natural attrition. Eating complicated, unnatural chemicals confounds our immune system and may deprive our bodies of those nutrients, which we need to thrive.

Logically, eating natural foods, lower on the food chain, allows our bodies to maintain a steady course. One of my teachers once said, “There is a storm blowing out there. The older we get, the more we feel the wind.”

Abortion, religion and health care

I'm pleased to bring you a new voice today in the form of The Daily Blank's first guest blogger. The post below was written by Ken Whitaker (know to many of you as KGWhit). Given the passage of the health care reform bill last night, it is very timely.

d'blank

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T. R. Reid has an interesting column in the March 14 Washington Post. Of the industrialized nations, the United States is by far the most religious. The number of regular church goers dwarfs the western European Nations.

Yet despite our religious zeal, we have a higher abortion rate than any of the rich democracies. The reason for the lower abortion rates is attributed to universal health coverage. In those countries if a girl is sexually active, she can go to see a physician at no or little cost and get birth control at no cost. She can, if she chooses, carry the baby to term and not worry about the cost. Many young women in the US almost never see a Doctor because they can’t afford it. It is also cheaper to obtain an abortion than to deliver a baby.

You would think with the strong anti-abortion movement in many of the churches in this country that there would be an outcry for universal health care. You want to lower the abortion rate, provide cost free health care to young women. Yet the evangelical churches and the anti-choice movement have been almost silent on the health care debate except for a demand that there be no funding of abortions.

The logical question is why? Germany has only 37% of the abortions per thousand women as the US. Why, if universal health care helps to lower the number of abortions, are the right to life movement and the churches not actively campaigning to create a universal health care system here?

There is no doubt that most of the people who are against legal abortion are so from a heartfelt believe that it is wrong. Yet the leaders of that movement seem to either have turned a blind eye to the impact on abortions of universal health coverage or have only a political agenda.

It is easy to think that the leaders of the right to life movement are more concerned about the politics of abortion than actually lowering the abortion rate. Could it be that because a Godless Socialist is advocating a change in health care that the knee jerk reaction is to be against it or are they just ignorant of the facts?