Do the Yak

...or maybe just letting her decide if there should be a plug or not. Terrific NY Times piece by Timothy Egan discussing the notion that hey, maybe we can talk about reducing the country's end-of-life care expenses without veering immediately into OMG-plug-pulling-Kevorkian-death-panels-black-helicopters paranoia and political cynicism. As Egan says, "how do we reform a system that lavishes most of its benefits on a cure for the 'disease' of aging" when many studies as well as common sense show that most people want to die at home, yet Medicare will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but won't pay for non-hospice home caregivers. And then I read about a guy who was basically lynched by a bunch of hillbillies in Kentucky . Not because he was black (he wasn't), but because he was... brace yourself... a FED! (a census worker, to be specific). And we know this was an issue in motivation for the murder because they...

Excellent obit in TIME Photo gallery of Kennedy Package of stuff in the Boston Globe I admired him more than any other politician, living or dead (except Abe Lincoln and Ted's two brothers, maybe). He was really someone to admire: a liberal, a political pragmatist, a consensus builder, a highly effective legislator... and a man born to power and privilege who stood up for minorities, women, immigrants, gays and poor people. Over the years, he did more for civil rights than anyone in American history. As just one example, America would look very different today if not for his efforts to change immigration laws that favored Europeans. Many immigrants and children of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia owe their presence in America to him -- a white male whose grandfather told him stories of "Help wanted -- no Irish need apply" signs around Boston in his youth ("Irish need not apply"). That grandfather, whose own grandparents were all immigrants who...

Christ almighty, this is fucked up in so many ways. By "this" I mean today's news that the Senate health-care negotiators have dropped the provision in the health-care reform bill that would have provided hospice counseling and other end-of-life advice . First of all... VOLUNTARY, okay?? Secondly, since when does counseling about hospice = euthanasia? Do Americans even know what hospice is? Apparently not. They're so fucking stupid that they believe these BLATANT LIES put out by right-wing nuts who don't believe the lies themselves but are deliberately and maliciously doing whatever they can to torpedo health care reform and, by extension, Obama himself. And these sheep don't bother to do some basic checking to see if such an outrageous thing might possibly be, oh I don't know, maybe a wee exaggeration? Or even a complete falsehood? Nope, they just believe what they're told by liars. Who are using this provision to play on stupid people's primitiv...

Lots of words all over the web about the juicy Spitzer scandal. Newsweek goes so far as to link to a pair of blogs with X-rated first-person accounts by call girls and johns . The fascination is, of course, about why a guy with everything going for him would screw it up (literally)? As explained in The Cheating Man's Brain: Alpha males are high on testosterone, which induces a love of risk as well as aggressiveness and competitiveness. And the risk itself is part of the reward; breaking rules is a thrill for these types of men. To be a high-profile politician requires, among other things, supreme confidence—the kind that may shade into egocentrism and lead to downfall. In other words, hubris that leads to a feeling of invincibility. Coincidentally, there's an article on Bloomberg News today about a book by Dan Ariely called "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" (which the author describes as "the evil twin" of Freakonomics )...

Today's political news actually isn't about Clinton and Obama -- it's about Eliot Spitzer, the rising-star governor of New York and anti-corruption former attorney general, the Crime-Fighting Sir Galahad Who Couldn't Keep His Lance in His Pants. Yes, he was caught via government wiretapping (one of his favorite weapons as AG) as being "Client #9" in a high-priced prostitution and money-laundering ring. He follows a well-traveled highway in American politics after Toe-Tapping Larry Craig, Gary Hart, James McGreevey and of course Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. I was going to speculate here about what causes this urge for reckless sex in men of power, but The New York Times beat me to it. The only question remaining in my mind, which a family newspaper can't address, is what exactly would make it worth $4,300 for three hours of... whatever? I mean, just how good can the sex and thrills be to justify that kind of dough? In short, what the heck were they doing...

The Democratic Crash Test Dummies Show goes on and on... 1. Since neither Clinton nor Obama will have enough delegates before the convention to win the nomination (barring something unusual regarding Michigan or Florida -- see below), the nomination will be in the hands on the unpledged superdelegates. Eleanor Clift in Newsweek floats a scenario whereby the superdelegates break the party stalemate by engineering nomination of a third person, likely Al Gore. Also, as I understand it, the rule binding the pledged delegates to their candidate goes out the window if there is no winner after the first ballot, so it turns into a free-for-all. The bottom-line question for them, of course, is who they think would be most electable for the Dems, weighing their relative strengths against McCain and support among the Democratic voters, some of whom will be unavoidably pissed off that their candidate isn't the nominee. 2. ElectoralVote.com also notes today that there's talk of a caucus ...

We are parents, and we have the meetings to prove it. Two last night, in fact. The first was a picnic at the Zervas School for parents of incoming kindergarteners. Sarah took it all in stride, disappearing like a shot to climb to the top of the monkey bars and introducing herself to strange children. I met the principal and one of the PTO vice presidents. I tried with moderate success to schmooze and network and comforted Becky, who was totally not in the mood to sit on the grass and chat and nibble on bread when others around us had pizza and she also had to pee. So I took her home to satisfy both basic human needs and then trundled off to the Riverside Children's Center meeting with parents and teachers in the Discovery Room, to which Becky has matriculated after graduating from the Turtle Room. I did a bit of schmoozing but mostly listened to the teachers lay down the rules while the girls colored in the corner. It was another landmark along the long and winding road into The ...