Photography with the Left Eye

Dealing with a loved one who has end stage terminal disease is wrenching. The people (usually close relatives) who have to carry out that person’s wishes (assuming they were expressed ahead of time) has to do so with compassion and wisdom, all the while watching a person who was once vital deteriorate and suffer. Often these people become someone else…whether due to the disease or the drugs used in treatment.

I was in that situation not long ago, and I was lucky that my siblings and I together worked through it, and that my parents didn’t suffer too much, it was something I would wish on nobody–but something most of us will face.

That is why it is stunning for the Republicans, and a certain failed vice presidential candidate, have created a vast lie ("death panels") from a provision in the health bill that allows for end of life counseling. It is certainly why we haven’t heard the word “compassionate” anywhere near the term “conservative” for a good long while.

These people will simply stoop to the most blatant of lies to prevent any kind of health insurance reform. It’s a bit trite, but it seems more and more true that the members of Congress who are opposing the bill are doing so…because they have health insurance. And that’s all that counts.

(Anon.)

If you can, see the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s performance of Too Big to Fail. Well done, and a good reminder as to why there should be regulatory limits on executive compensation.

M, a couple of weeks ago

Many blog writers, and more than a few comic strip writers, frequently mention an evil thing they call the MSM. Ooooh…what is that? It’s the mainstream media. Dead trees. Almost extinct newspapers. And lots of other derisive terms.

They are missing the point. For all of its warts, the print media (I’m not now addressing broadcast media) serve an incredibly important function, and if (when?) it disappears, we will be the worse for it.

First, and most important, the daily newspaper at least pretends toward objectivity. Most small town papers regularly fail; most papers have a variety of axes to grind, depending on who is in charge, and some of the best have failed in spectacular ways (the New York Times, arguably the paper with the best reporters and longest history of actually being fair and balanced, might be solely responsible for failing to halt WPE GWBush’s stupid march to war with Iraq through poor oversight of a single reporter).

So newspapers at least pretend (and mostly truly try) to objectively report the news. What would replace the newspaper? Well, the bloggers, of course! They will provide the news, quickly and accurately. But wait….most of them us have an agenda. The Drudge report is one of the earliest examples of a blog posing as a “news” source, but, as we know, a clearly biased one. And on the left, I love Daily Kos, but to mistake most of what is written as objective news would be…a mistake.

Second, none of the alternatives even have a fraction of the budget to place capable reporters in the places that the news happens. Sure, Daily Kos has people who are in and write about Washington, DC and Portland, Maine. But when bad stuff flares up in Kosovo, they are not going to be able to send a reporter. And when they find someone who is willing to blog, who is going to vet the accuracy of what they write?

And the on-line news aggregators will ultimately need to find a way to pay their sources. Sure, I read Yahoo news and others to get my hourly fix, but I also subscribe to three newspapers, so I am supporting the infrastructure that makes it possible. How will you find out what really happened when the MSM are gone?

NBell over the weekend. She really is upside down. In the air.
This is a good time to remind you about the workshop I wrote about recently…scroll down for more.

Some time ago, I wrote about the policy objectives of one group of terrorists. I pointed out that they were unlikely to achieve any rational set of policy objectives.

On the other hand, another set of purely homegrown domestic terrorists are moving forward, by threat and murder, to achieve theirs. Operation Rescue and its ilk egg on their lunatic fringe, and good doctors die.

Paul Krugman wrote cogently about it:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).

Most of the media say that the nut cases at Fox “News” are not inciting violence (from the same column):

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

Read the quote from O’Reilly. Sounds like inciting violence to me. Violence that ends in murder.

On a happier note:

My same two delightful models from the last post…

It’s gaining momentum.

The Velvet Revolution has issued a call for disbarment of the 12 key players lawyers involved in advocating for torture in the US.

Torture is illegal under both United States and international law. The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, and it states that treaties signed by the U.S. are the “supreme Law of the Land” under Article Six. The Geneva Convention and The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment both prohibit torture and have been signed by the United States. These laws provide no exception for torture under any circumstances. Moreover, the United States Criminal Code prohibits both torture and war crimes, the latter which includes torture. The Army Field Manual prohibits the use of degrading treatment of detainees.

Despite this well-established law, under the Bush administration, torture was authorized by George Bush and kept secret using classified designations. The White House requested legal memoranda to support its use of torture and it received those authored by a host of attorneys, including John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury. Attorneys who advised, counseled, consulted and supported those memoranda included Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Michael Chertoff, Alice Fisher, William Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Michael Mukasey, Timothy Flanigan, and David Addington.

Justice will be served if this comes to fruition.