It’s been a remarkably busy day today, what with the holidays coming up, and all. One thing’s for certain: you will never find yourself with a lack of work as a web designer for a consumer product corporation around the holidays!

But I wanted to speak briefly about a particular theme of Republican and Conservative politics that deserves some exploration. This is also in relation to the theme of “Government as a Public Square” that I’ve been meaning to return to and haven’t.

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Well, this is an interesting take on the SCHIP debate:

Randy, please don’t raise our taxes by rubberstamping George Bush’s veto against children! || Eric Massa for Congress - NY 29

SCHIP, which would be federally funded, would help alleviate state and county costs associated with emergency room care for children who do not have health insurance. Rather than allowing the federal government to pay a fair share, Randy Kuhl has opted to reject federal dollars and to throw the burden back on our local communities. With the increasing costs of health care and millions of Americans without health insurance, Randy Kuhl has decided to pass the buck to Medicaid … paid for by the property taxes of the constituents of the 29th Congressional District. He’s going to allow our property taxes to go up so that his buddies in Congress, in the Tobacco Industry and in Washington D.C. lobbyists firms can enjoy the luxury of fully funded health insurance.

Massa’s right on the money with this assessment, but it’s not one that gets much play in the media these days.  SCHIP is not really what you’d call a “direct aid” kind of program, so much as it is a targeted grant of federal dollars to states for the purposes of dealing with low-income working families.  The idea is to take some of the burden off the Medicare rolls and off straining local hospitals by providing money from the federal government.

The loss of this grant money would indeed force local municipalities to raise taxes once the tide washed through Congress, the state and finally onto communities.

Technorati Tags: Randy Kuhl, Eric Massa, SCHIP, Taxes, Medicare, Unfunded Mandates

I was watching the Sunday news programs yesterday, and on This Week, both David Brooks and George Will used the term “Middle-Class Entitlement Programs” to describe the problems with our budget. What they were referring to is the SCHIP program, with it’s ability to reach kids whose parents make as much as $80,000 a year. Both conceded that Bush’s threat to veto the bill was tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot, but they both insisted that such programs (and without naming them directly, they were referring to Social Security and Medicare, also) were ruining our nation’s balance sheets unnecessarily. Because, of course, the middle class can handle it on their own.

This is the classic case of the Republican Welfare State, a self-fulfilling prophesy and a recursive logical argument which is their party’s platform. » Continue Reading…

If you’re like me, you probably heard about the Cheesecake Factory opening and thought, “Hey! Another strip bar in Rochester, how nice!” After all, with more and more people attending college these days and tuition skyrocketing up and up, we need more places in which to meet the heaving bosoms of all those hard-working grad school strippers we’ve all heard so much about. And a place called The Cheesecake Factory seems like a really nice, clean, friendly place in which to view the exposed mammary glands and scantily-clad gluteal clefts so much a part of our American heritage in all their buxom glory.

Well, allow me to disabuse you of that errant notion. The Cheesecake Factory is in fact a large chain restaurant. The women that work there are comely, no doubt, but they are waitresses and hostesses. So, a heads up, fellas: careful where you put your singles! » Continue Reading…

More commentary on the YouTube/CNN debates of the other night.

Now we move on to the health care industry. But the YouTube user who asks this question decided to get cheeky with it. This question blends two hot-button issues into one question, “would you plan cover undocumented workers.”

But the only real answer to this question points out an important concept of universal coverage which deserves more discussion, which I will add below the fold -> » Continue Reading…

I ran across this article whilst searching my feeds for something completely different.  Rochester passed legislation last year requiring the issuing of a Certificate of Occupancy for residential property be contingent upon that property’s passing a lead test.  Moreover, we passed a number of other rules that make the cleanup of lead paint in our city much, much more feasible.

But things are not so rosy elsewhere in New York State.  We passed our legislation specifically because the state law is woefully inadequate.  How inadequate do they have to be in order to qualify for my stamp of “woefully?”  Probably a few steps short of where NYS is, as you can read from this passage:

uticaOD.com - The Observer-Dispatch - N.Y. lacks mandate to test for lead

In New York state, a dwelling’s lead levels must be checked only after a doctor diagnoses a child with lead poisoning.

“In most of the state of New York, including Utica in my view, it’s a very barbaric method of public health,” said Matthew Chachere, who represents the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning. “You are using children as biological Geiger counters to look for lead. The effects are permanent brain damage. It’s absurd to do things this way.”

Wow.  So you first have to poison a kid, then we’ll try to do something about it.  This just in: the canary in the coalmine is demanding the new Harry Potter book. . .
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Micheal Moore is soooo cool. The Sicko phenom has continued to gather steam and the production company has agreed to release more copies of the movie to smaller cities across the country. That’s great news for Universal Health Care because many rural people, especially in the Mid-West, don’t get to see films like this very often in the theatre and this is one that needs to be seen far and wide.

But what makes Michael Moore so cool is his inventive and creative ways of generating interest in the movie. Its this that Conservatives find so goading about him; they figure only Corporate America has the right to use slick promotional gimmicks. I guess that’s sorta fair, since after all, they’re usually selling us poison, so you’ve gotta work extra hard to make that palatable.

But check out Mike’s new promotion:

And, to show my thanks to all of you who’ll go see “Sicko” this weekend, I’m going to send one of you and a guest on a free weekend to the universal health care country of your choice! That’s right. You’ll get to pick one of the three industrialized countries featured in the movie where, if you get sick, you get help for free, no matter who you are. All you have to do is send us your ticket stub (make sure it says “Sicko” on it and has the name of the theater and this weekend’s date on it — Friday, Saturday or Sunday - July 20th, 21st, 22nd). Attach the stub to a piece of paper with your name, address, phone number and email and send it to: ‘Sicko’ Night in America, 888c 8th Avenue, Suite 443, New York, NY 10019. (Yes, you have to use that old 18th century device called the U.S. Postal Service, and it has to be postmarked on or by Tuesday, July 24th). First prize is a weekend in the city of your choice: Paris, London or Toronto. This includes airfare, hotel, meals and, most! exciting, a representative from their fine universal health care system who will give you a personal tour so you can see how they treat their fellow citizens. You’ll meet people who pay nothing for college and citizens who are in the fourth week of their six-week paid vacation. Oh, and you’ll have time to see the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben or whatever they have in Toronto that is old and tall. (If you don’t have a passport, we’ll pay for that, too!)

Who is up for seeing Sicko a second time? I am.

I was fortunate enough to have been watching CNN at one of the few times that it was worth watching. If you’d have said yesterday afternoon that such a thing would happen during Wolf Blitzer’s segment, I’d have laughed in your face.

But lo! It came to pass that on this day, Michael Moore finally shoved the crap CNN has been dishing out straight into their smug, ill-informed faces. Moments before, I sat in my couch watching Sanjay Gupta’s pathetic hit-job report, practically jumping out of my skin at the misinformation. Fortunately, Moore didn’t back down, but got pissed instead. Moore’s web group has since refuted many of the claims, some of which didn’t even properly cite his movie, on his website.

I think that this may be sort of a “Katrina Moment” for both the health care industry and for CNN. People are waking up to the fact - not that everyone else has a better health care system, but that America has an intentionally abusive system. We are noticing that, contrary to the claims of the Reagan Administration, we do not have the world’s #1 health care system. That Cuba is 39th and we’re 37th doesn’t alert us to the fact that we’re better than Cuba, it alerts us to the fact that we’re worse than 36 other countries.

For god’s sake, we’ve been told for fifty years that Communism sucks, and now we’re being told that we should be proud of the fact that we’re two states ahead of the Cuban health care system?!?!?!?!? And we’re being told that not by Glaxo Smith-Klein, not by Pfizer, not by our HMO. We’re being told these things by CNN.

So, watch the video and demand an apology from CNN. I’ll include my letter to CNN after the flip below:
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Exile at RT reports on the continuing efforts of Louise Slaughter to push for better women’s health care funding in this country in an effort to curb abortion rates (which have soared unsurprisingly in the era of “abstinence only” and sexist theological politicking.):

rochesterturning.com: turning the tide upstate

Louise Slaughter is supporting a bill that aims to reduce unintended pregnancies — part of the Prevention First initiative

This post dovetails with the recent article in The Nation concerning the initiative among the Pro-Choice movement to move the debate beyond abortion and into the more appropriate discussion of women’s health, generally:

Winning the War of Words

Now the prochoice movement is attempting to win back this war of words by talking values themselves, with the goal of reducing abortions. The aim is to connect core American values to the issue of reproductive rights by taking the emphasis off abortion rights and focusing on more universally accepted goals–preventing abortions through a broader agenda that includes better healthcare and comprehensive sex education. By circumventing the divisiveness of abortion, the prochoice movement intends to bring forward real legislative changes regarding reproductive health and rights.

This is the right direction for the Pro-Choice movement to move.  Rather than trying to remove the moral stigma of abortion, its likely to be much more effective to impost the moral stigma of sexism on those who would restrict the right to contraception, abortion and education for girls to make responsible decisions.  It’s tricky rhetorical ground, though, and it’s not going to happen overnight.

Of course, as Exile points out, the question right now is whether Dubya goes along with this initiative or not. The fact is that it tends to go against everything he and the Republicans have done in the last seven years on women’s health, so I don’t hold out much hope. On the other hand, “Prevention First” is a good political name for a bill that makes it difficult to explain the veto.

George Bush doesn’t really have to explain much anymore, though, because he’s not seeking reelection.  I would say that if he can veto stem cell research (as the Democrats are giving him an opportunity to do again, soon), he can veto damned near anything.  This bill goes against every women’s health happening in the last seven years, almost perfectly designed to be vetoed.  They’ve even got the “moral objections” of pharmacists covered in this bill.

It goes down in flames, for sure.  But it’s a fight worth having and a win for the Dems in the long run.  Wish they’d take that to heart on the Iraq War. . . .

Technorati Tags: Women’s Health, Abortion, Contraception, Sexual Education

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Wow! Last weekend, I got a flier from a woman walking down Rockingham for the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. I’d meant to post a little sumpin-sumpin on the blog about it, and specifically about their grand opening on the 14th of this month, but it was a nice summer day and you know how that goes. . .

Well, the Rochester blogging community has positively lit up with activity about this new place, which is extremely good news for them. Mustard Street was the first to post, followed closely by Exile on RT. Gosh, does it even seem worth it to add to the chorus?

Of course it does! A place like this needs our support and deserves some recognition. Sure, the public market on Union St. is similar, but this one’s just for the Wedgies! Plus, it’s an opportunity to talk about some of the benefits of shopping at a farmer’s market, so let’s discuss!   » Continue Reading…