Women Have The Most To Lose if Health Reform Fails
by Julie Menin
Host of “Give and Take,” seen on NBC In New York and juliemenin.com.
Read more here.
Imagine that you recently had a baby through a cesarean section and had planned on taking off a few years to stay at home to care for your new baby. Now with the economic recession forcing many women back into the workforce, you find that you too need to re-enter the workforce to help your family make ends meet.
The problem? Good luck finding health insurance.
Insurers in most states are permitted to consider gender when determining both individual and group rates and therefore women are frequently charged much more than men for premiums. www.nwlc.org Moreover, a C-section can be viewed as a “pre-existing condition” and insurers can now refuse to pay for future C-sections or deny a women who has had a prior C-section from health coverage entirely. Equally abhorrent, in eight states and in the District of Columbia, insurers can legally deny a woman’s health insurance application if she has been the victim of domestic violence.
In actuality, the impact on women from our current health care system is even worse than just the odious discriminatory practices mentioned above. Skyrocketing health care costs and a lack of access to affordable health care have had a greater impact on women than men according to a Commonwealth Fund study that examines how our current health care system affects women in this country.
The statistics cited in the study are staggering: seven in ten women have no insurance or are underinsured, face medical debt or are facing a cost-related issue affecting their access to health care. More than half of all women in the Unites States have had to refuse necessary care due to cost. Many women are simply not able to find coverage for maternity care at all.
One of the main problems facing women in obtaining health care is that women still earn 78 cents for every dollar that men earn. Yet women use more health care than men, in large part because of women’s reproductive care needs. Exacerbating the situation are the higher premiums many insurers charge women and thus the impact is that women have more trouble than men obtaining the critical health care that they need and therefore more women than men end up being underinsured.
When women make the majority of health care decisions for families (which they do) and when women are more likely than men to visit the doctor more frequently and be proactive about their health (which they are), we as a society are making a grave mistake in not putting quality, affordable health care for women at the top of the agenda in the health care debate.
Women are a majority of the country’s population (52 percent) and constitute more of the overall vote nationwide than men (in every Presidential election since 1980 more women than men proportionately have voted-8million more in the 2000 election and 9 million more in the 2004 election.) Yet where are the advertising campaigns in the health care debate targeted to women or the grass roots mobilization of women’s groups? I have never seen such a blizzard of ads in a non-Presidential election year as we have seen in this current health care debate, yet I have yet to see an ad geared to women.
Women have the most to gain by a passage of a health care bill (a prohibition against insurance companies charging more for premiums for women than for men as many currently do, a reversal of the policy allowing insurers to deny coverage based on a prior C section or domestic violence incident, universal coverage of maternity care, premium subsidies which will make health care more affordable for women and families.)
Women also have the most to lose if heath care reform fails yet you wouldn’t know it from the paucity of dialogue on this issue.
The messaging from the Obama Administration on what women stand to gain and lose in the health care debate has been terrible. We are the only industrialized nation in the West that does not provide universal health care, and yet, the dialogue out of Washington has focused on everything but the impact to women. The President should stand up and say how can we as a society tolerate a system that so blatantly discriminates against a group that comprises over half of our country and that clearly is not putting women’s health on equal footing.
If the Administration fails to pass a strong plan for universal health care, our nation’s chance at ever doing so will be severely comprised for years to come. We are overlooking one of our best assets to get the message out–women–who will raise their voices loudly as they have for generations to protest the perpetuation of a system that does not properly treat women equally and that blatantly does not put proper value on maternity and a women’s overall health.
The Cost of Being a Woman
Women pay more than men for similar insurance policies. Is it discrimination?
Oct 19, 2009
At a recent Capitol Hill press conference on women and health care reform, Sen. Barbara Mikulski started things off with rallying cry: “Equal insurance for equal premiums!” Four female senators spent the event discussing disparities women face in the individual health-care market, where eight states and D.C. consider domestic abuse a preexisting condition and maternity coverage is often lacking. Chief among concerns about health-care discrimination is gender rating, the health-insurance practice of charging different premiums based on gender. Mikulski reiterated the point on Larry King last Thursday: “Just like we didn’t get equal pay for equal work, we haven’t got equal insurance benefits for equal insurance premiums.”
But as is often the truth in politics, strong sound bytes betray a larger, more complicated issue. NEWSWEEK’s Sarah Kliff tried to get the facts on what some call smart business, and others call outright discrimination.
Why do insurance companies charge more?
Gender is among a set of characteristics, like age or smoking, that health-insurance companies routinely use to predict a consumer’s costs and thus set the price of their premiums. Aside from the obvious added costs of maternity care, research has found women are more likely to visit their physicians than men and thus incur higher costs. This changes around age 50, when men tend to require more health care, and the premiums for women become lower. Federal law prohibits companies with more than 15 employees from charging different premiums for health insurance based on gender or other factors. This works out fine for insurance companies, because costs get spread over a large pool of subscribers. But in the smaller, individual market, premium pricing is largely left up to the company. Insurance companies defend the practice as simple math: those who cost more, pay more, or else the system could not stay afloat. Aetna spokespman Ethan Slavin explains in an e-mail: “In the current environment, using gender as one factor in the rating process helps to ensure that premiums fairly reflect each individual’s expected costs and how they currently contribute to the overall pool of available insurance coverage.”
So what’s the problem?
Women’s-rights groups have become increasingly aggravated with the practice, which leaves some unable to afford a plan. They argue that the insurance company’s decisions are more motivated by greed than by economics.. The issue came to head last year when the National Women’s Law Center published a report finding widespread variation in gender pricing, with women charged inconsistently high rates, depending on company and state of residence. A 25-year-old woman, for example, could be charged anywhere from 6 to 45 percent more than a 25-year-old man. “The huge variations in premiums charged to women and men for identical health plans highlight the arbitrariness of gender rating,” the report concluded. (It’s difficult to tell how arbitrary gender rating is, since insurance companies do not publicize their costs, although there is at least some research finding women cost more to insure then men). Twelve states either limit the use of gender rating or bar the practice outright; others have considered similar methods. Legislators and activists taking up the cause have termed the disparities “gender discrimination.”
So why not just get rid of it?
Proponents of gender rating argue that if you eliminate gender rating (or pricing on any other risk factor, for that matter) and you run the risk of “adverse selection”: men, who feel they’re paying too much relative to the few benefits they receive, opting out of the system. As the pool becomes more female heavy, men increasingly pull out, to the point that insurance companies no longer have an interest in the market. This played out in Kentucky in the mid-1990s. In 1994, rates for young women were 150 percent that of those for young men. So that year the state passed legislation limiting insurance companies in their ability to charge different premiums based on things like race and gender. Over the next 10 years they saw low-risk individuals—the guys who thought they were overcharged—simply opting out altogether. Then the insurance companies fled, too, about 40 had left the market by 1998. So that year Kentucky largely repealed the program. The insurance companies returned to the state shortly afterward.As the Kentucky experience shows (and similar experiences in other states also demonstrate) small changes in regulation can ripple through a market to have a serious, and not necessarily favorable, impact.
But by no means is Kentucky the rule. Montana, for example, successfuly outlawed gender rating in 1993 and never looked back. A dozen states are now managing similar bans or restrictions. And even if some adverse selection does occur, advocates of gender-netural policies say that’s OK—there are larger, philosophical issues at stake. The NWLC report describes how advocates for the Montana and Minnesota bans argued that “society considers gender discrimination to be just as repugnant as racial discrimination,” and therefore should drop gender rating, just as they did for race in the 1950s and 1960s.
How will the health insurance reform affect this practice?
Right now, the tide seems to be turning in favor of eliminating gender ratings. In May, the group America’s Health Insurance Plans issued a statement in support of “discontinuing rating based on a person’s health status or gender” alongside a “personal coverage requirement to get everyone into the system.” That second part, the “personal coverage requirement” (or, in health-reform-speak, the individual mandate) is key to what AHIP is saying. Because if everyone has to sign up for health care, adverse selection becomes a moot point: there isn’t any selection at all. So it would function much like the current employer-based system, where women and men pay the same, and costs get spread across a large pool. But individual mandates have become a contested point in the health-care debate. If they don’t make it into the final legislation, expect to see insurance companies rethinking their support for scrapping gender ratings, and the battle starting anew.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/218524
Cops Called About Reporter Committing Journalism on Congressional Candidate
October 20, 2009 – 08:44 ET
“Hello, 911? This is the Dede Scozzafava campaign. Could you send a police car over to the Elks Lodge? There is a reporter here asking our candidate uncomfortable questions. Thank you.”
Something like this call went out last night when a reporter committed the “high crime” of asking Republican congressional candidate, Dede Scozzafava (endorsed by the Daily Kos), questions that she obviously felt very uneasy about answering. Scozzafava, who was recently the subject of an Open Thread here on NewsBusters, is running in the special election for the open seat in the NY 23rd congressional district. She was being questioned last night by John McCormack of the Weekly Standard when the police were called with a complaint about him for making Scozzafava uncomfortable with his probing questions. Here is how McCormack describes the scene:
Lowville, N.Y.
Tonight, Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the November 3 special election in the 23rd congressional district, spoke to about 100 Republicans at the Lewis County GOP dinner at the Elks Lodge 1605. After a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, Scozzafava fended off criticism that she wasn’t as conservative as third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and urged her supporters to vote for her in order to keep her Democratic opponent Bill Owens from serving as a rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama’s agenda in Washington. It was a fairly typical evening–until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava’s campaign called the police. On me.
<a href=”http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=16&c=fa99ab07-42c2-43e0-abfb-b47f96e4b9b9″ target=”_blank”><img src=”http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=16&w=336&h=280&c=fa99ab07-42c2-43e0-abfb-b47f96e4b9b9″ width=”336″ height=”280″ border=”0″ /></a>
Uh-oh! McCormack continues to regale us with his “criminal” activity:
Earlier today Lindsay Beyerstein reported that Scozzafava responded to an AFL-CIO questionnaire by saying she would support card-check legislation that eliminates the secret ballot requirement for organizing unions. As Beyerstein notes, this contradict statements made by a Scozzafava spokesman in September.
So after the dinner, I asked Assemblywoman Scozzafava if she supports card check. “Yes, yes I do,” she replied.
Eek! How dare McCormack ask questions of a candidate! An attempt was made to stop this criminal activity but it seems to have failed:
At that point someone from her campaign placed himself between Scozzafava and me and told me I should direct all my inquires to the campaign’s spokesman. I nonetheless asked Scozzafava if her signing of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge not to vote to raise taxes means she would oppose any health care bill that raises taxes. “What kind of taxes?” she replied. Then another couple of gentlemen interposed themselves between Scozzafava and me as Scozzafava headed for the door.
McCormack later continued his criminal assault outside:
I spotted Scozzafava later as she was walking to the parking lot, and asked her: “Assemblywoman, do you believe that the health-care bill should exclude coverage for abortion?” She didn’t reply. I asked her twice more. Silence.
Finally the police ride to the rescue:
Minutes later a police car drove into the parking lot with its lights flashing. Officer Grolman informed me that she was called because “there was a little bit of an uncomfortable situation” and then took down my name, date of birth, and address.
“Maybe we do things a little differently here, but you know, persisistence in that area, you scared the candidate a little bit,” Officer Grolman told me.
“[Scozzafava] got startled, that’s all,” Officer Grolman added. “It’s not like you’re in any trouble.”
Having escaped the long arm of the law, the alleged perpetrator ponders the situation:
But I do wonder if it’s the Scozzafava campaign that’s in trouble–with a candidate who supports card check, who is unwilling to say she’d oppose a health care bill that raises taxes or includes abortion coverage, and who is so reluctant to answer questions that she has someone with her campaign call the cops when she’s questioned by a reporter who is (if I may say so) polite–if a bit persistent.
You can find out more about Dede Scozzafava and the New York 23rd CD campaign at Michele Malkin where she has been blogging extensively about it or by watching this Neil Cavuto report.
And as for the suspect in this case, John McCormack, here is a serenade for you if you are ever again caught in the act of committing journalism.
—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.
Israel’s ‘Exceptionalism’
Source
Regarding Roger Cohen’s “An ordinary Israel” (Globalist, Oct. 16): Mr. Cohen suggests that Israel should aim to be a normal state, which sounds logical until we examine what he means by “normal.”
I agree that Israel overplays the memory of the Holocaust and uses it to justify the unjustified in the name of survival. But for the sake of “normality” can Israel really afford to ignore the rhetoric of Iran’s president? Can Iran be trusted to make rational decisions?
Israel is only 61 years old and is still grappling with questions of identity, which are complex because they are intertwined with conflicting interpretations of history. That open and free discussions about identity take place in Israel is “normal,” and in comparison to our neighbors (I’m Israeli), something to be admired.
Harvey Hames, Barcelona, Spain
Israel will cease feeling exceptional when the international community stops treating it as such. It’s notable that Roger Cohen’s column appears the same day that the U.N. Human Rights Council endorses Judge Richard Goldstone’s profoundly slanted report on Israel’s Gaza war.
Mr. Cohen writes that Mr. Goldstone “is a measured man.” Maybe, maybe not. But the report he authored criminalizes Israel for tactics that lie at the heart of the Western counterinsurgency toolkit. U.S. drone strikes are one of the many examples that comes to mind.
If Mr. Cohen wants to see Israel step away from its “exceptionalism” he can help by requesting that international law be applied consistently.
Daniel Balson, Washington
I agree that Israel should not be held to a different standard. But Roger Cohen’s claim that Israel is trying to get away with everything it wants is ridiculous. Mr. Cohen is ignoring certain realities in order to justify his (flawed) view of the Middle East situation.
Israel has continuously stated that its weapons and military actions are defensive measures. From the war in Gaza last winter (a response to incessant rockets launched into the nation) to its possession of nuclear weapons (which it has never threatened to use offensively), Israel is still fighting for its survival. I’m not sure how Mr. Cohen can call a country ordinary when it’s threatened to be wiped off the map and its people are told that the greatest tragedy to happen to them is fiction.
Emily Loubaton, New York
Inside Drama Behind the Times’ Wiretapping Story
By Eric Lichtblau
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008, at 7:08 PM ET
This article is adapted from Eric Lichtblau’s upcoming book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, to be published next Tuesday, April 1, by Pantheon. He and fellow New York Times reporter James Risen won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story of the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program.
For 13 long months, we’d held off on publicizing one of the Bush administration’s biggest secrets. Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush’s top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn’t let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren’t sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House’s efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.) As the door to the conference room opened, however, a slew of other White House VIPs strolled out to greet us, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice near the head of the receiving line and White House Counsel Harriet Miers at the back.
For more than an hour, we told Bush’s aides what we knew about the wiretapping program, and they in turn told us why it would do grave harm to national security to let anyone else in on the secret. Consider the financial damage to the phone carriers that took part in the program, one official implored. If the terrorists knew about the wiretapping program, it would be rendered useless and would have to be shut down immediately, another official urged: “It’s all the marbles.” The risk to national security was incalculable, the White House VIPs said, their voices stern, their faces drawn. “The enemy,” one official warned, “is inside the gates.” The clichés did their work; the message was unmistakable: If the New York Times went ahead and published this story, we would share the blame for the next terrorist attack.
More than two years later, the Times‘ decision to publish the story—a decision that was once so controversial—has been largely overshadowed by all the other political and legal clamor surrounding President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program: the dozens of civil lawsuits; the ongoing government investigations; the raging congressional debate; and the still-unresolved question, which Congress will take up again next week, of whether phone companies should be given legal immunity for their cooperation in the program. Amid the din, it’s easy to forget the hits that the newspaper took in the first place: criticism from the political left over the decision to hold the story for more than a year and from the right over the decision to publish it at all. But the episode was critical in reflecting the media’s shifting attitudes toward matters of national security—from believing the government to believing it less.
After all, the fear and trauma that gripped the country in the months and years after 9/11 gripped the media, too; the country’s outrage was our outrage. Coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath consumed all else for reporters in Washington. As federal officials scrambled to avert the much-feared “second wave” of attacks, reporters likewise scrambled to follow any hint of the next possible attack and to put it on the front page—from scuba divers off the coast of Southern California to hazmat trucks in the Midwest and tourist helicopters in New York City. One example of the shift: On Sept. 12, 2001, another major newspaper was set to run a story on the extraordinary diplomatic maneuverings the U.S. Secret Service had arranged with their Mexican counterparts to allow Jenna Bush, then 19, to make a barhopping trip south of the border. (She had just been charged with underage drinking in Texas.) A few days earlier, a scoop about a presidential daughter’s barhopping trip getting special dispensation from the Secret Service and a foreign government might have gotten heavy treatment. But the story never ran, and the Secret Service’s maneuverings remained a secret until now. In the weeks and months after 9/11, there was no longer an appetite for such stories.
At the same time, in the first few years after 9/11, stories that have now become frequent front-page fodder—about water-boarding of terrorism detainees and other aggressive interrogations tactics, about CIA “black site” prisons overseas, or about covert eavesdropping or other surveillance programs that stretched the limits of the law—simply didn’t get written by most of the mainstream media. If we had known about them, which in most cases we didn’t, there would have been a reluctance to publicize them in those early days of the war on terror.
I wasn’t immune to the shifting in attitudes after 9/11. In early 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared at a congressional hearing I was covering and announced, with dramatic aplomb, the unsealing of indictments against two Yemeni men, including a radical cleric accused of personally delivering $20 million to Osama Bin Laden. There was more: The cleric, Ashcroft revealed, said he had received money for jihad from collection at the notorious al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. I didn’t wait for a break to rush out the door of the hearing room and call our assignment editor, who would soon be preparing the story list for the next day’s front page. “This is big,” I told the editor. “Ashcroft says Bin Laden was getting money from a mosque in Brooklyn.”
Sure enough, the story ran at the top of the front page of the next day’s paper. But among my colleagues in the paper’s New York metro section, there was much less enthusiasm: The story, our Brooklyn reporter thought, was overblown, the evidence of an actual link between the Brooklyn mosque and al-Qaida thin. His skepticism was borne out: While the Yemeni cleric was ultimately sentenced to 75 years in prison on terrorism charges related to his support of Hamas, the sensational charge that the Brooklyn mosque was used to raise money for al-Qaida and Bin Laden had melted away to all but nothing by the time the case concluded.
For me, the story about the Brooklyn mosque, along with others, like the justice department’s wobbly case against “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, were eye-openers. By 2004, I had gained a reputation, deservedly or not, as one of the administration’s toughest critics in the Justice Department press corps; the department even confiscated my press pass briefly after I wrote an unpopular story about the FBI’s interest in collecting intelligence on anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the United States. To John Ashcroft and his aides, my coverage reflected a bias. To me, it reflected a healthy, essential skepticism—the kind that was missing from much of the media’s early reporting after 9/11, both at home in the administration’s war on terror and abroad in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
That shared skepticism would prove essential in the Times‘ decision to run the story about Bush’s NSA wiretapping program. On that December afternoon in the White House, the gathered officials attacked on several fronts. There was never any serious legal debate within the administration about the legality of the program, Bush’s advisers insisted. The Justice Department had always signed off on its legality, as required by the president. The few lawmakers who were briefed on the program never voiced any concerns. From the beginning, there were tight controls in place to guard against abuse. The program would be rendered so ineffective if disclosed that it would have to be shut down immediately.
All these assertions, as my partner Jim Risen and I would learn in our reporting, turned out to be largely untrue. Jim and I had already learned about much of the internal angst within the administration over the legality of the NSA program at the outset of our reporting, more than a year earlier in the fall of 2004. Still, the editors were not persuaded we had enough for a story—not enough, at least, to outweigh the White House’s strenuous arguments that running the piece would cripple a vital and perfectly legal national-security program. It was a difficult decision for everyone. I went back to writing about more mundane terrorism and law-enforcement matters, poking around discreetly to find out what had happened to the NSA’s eavesdropping program. Risen went on sabbatical to write a book about intelligence matters. Then, one night in the spring of 2005, he called me out to his home in suburban Maryland and sat me down at his computer. There on the computer screen was a draft of a chapter called simply “The Program.” It was about the NSA’s wiretapping operation. “I’m thinking of putting this in the book,” he said. I sat and stared at the screen in silence. “You sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked finally. He shrugged.
Risen spoke with our editors about what he was contemplating, and so began weeks of discussions between him and the editors that ultimately helped to set the story back on track. Risen’s book was a trigger, but we realized we weren’t in the paper yet. We still had to persuade the editors that the reasons to run the story clearly outweighed the reasons to keep it secret. We went back to old sources and tried new ones. Our reporting brought into sharper focus what had already started to become clear a year earlier: The concerns about the program—in both its legal underpinnings and its operations—reached the highest levels of the Bush administration. There were deep concerns within the administration that the president had authorized what amounted to an illegal usurpation of power. The image of a united front we’d been presented a year earlier in meetings with the administration—with unflinching support for the program and its legality—was largely a façade. The administration, it seemed clear to me, had lied to us. And we were coming closer to understanding the cracks. By the time we met with White House officials in December 2005, Keller had all but made up his mind: The legal concerns about the program were too great to justify keeping it out of public view. The only real question now was not whether the story would run, but when.
That decision was helped along by a chance conversation I had soon after our White House meeting. The administration, I was told, had considered seeking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to block publication of the story. The tidbit was a bombshell. Few episodes in the history of the Times—or, for that matter, in all of journalism—had left as indelible a mark as the courtroom battle over the Pentagon Papers, and now we were learning that the Bush White House had dusted off a Nixon-era relic to consider coming after us again. The editors in New York had already decided they would probably print the story in the newspaper for that Friday, Dec. 16, 2005, but when word of the Pentagon Papers tip reached them, they decided they would also post it on the Internet the night before. That wasn’t routinely done at that time on “exclusive” stories because we would risk losing the scoop to our competitors, but the editors felt it was worth the risk. The administration might be able to stop the presses with an injunction, but they couldn’t stop the Internet.
Phil Taubman called us into his office to hear the official word: We were publishing the story, Keller told us. Smiles washed over the room. Rebecca Corbett, who edited the story and had been a strong champion of it, inquired about the play it would get. There’d been talk of a modest one-column headline on the front page. She wanted to know whether we might be able to get two columns, maybe even three. This seemed like a story that would have legs. Keller demurred. He wanted the story to speak for itself; we would be discreet without looking as if we were poking the White House in the eye with a big, screaming headline about NSA spying. This wasn’t the moment to quibble over the size of the headline. After all this time, after all the White House’s efforts to derail it, we were happy to see the story in the paper at all; in the back of the A section, among the bra ads, would have been fine.
Eric Lichtblau is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. He covers the Justice Department for the Times.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2187498/
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Copyright 2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Michael Barone Makes Stuff Up
September 22, 2009 2:09 pm ET – by Eric Boehlert
Source
Barone’s recent Washington Examiner column is awash in casual misinformation, as the conservative writer claims liberals just can’t handle criticism. That all the mini-mobs were doing this summer were raising substantive differences with Obama’s policies. And c’mon, why are Democrats so thin-skinned. Are they afraid of democracy? Of dissent?
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Just the usual nonsense.
But then Barone (surprise!) started making stuff up:
But it’s interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer’s town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man’s finger in California. These incidents don’t justify a conclusion that all liberals are violent. But they are more evidence that American liberals, unused to hearing dissent, have an impulse to shut it down.
Oh my, suddenly conservative martyr Kenneth Gladney is 65-years old? I have to say that this story of the supposed “union thug” beat-down keeps getting better and better over time. It’s just another classic round of right-wing telephone tag masquerading as journalism. And in this game of tag, Barone is definitely it.
I doubt the columnist even cares what the actual facts of the story are. But on the off chance he does, he ought to post a correction because, as far as I can tell, in the context of the health care debate, no “65-year-old black conservative in Missouri” was ever beaten up this summer. Period. Barone just made that part up.
What did happen this summer was that Lou Dobbs and right-wing blogosphere, desperate for proof union thuggery, helped peddle the questionable tale of Gladney, who is a black conservative from Missouri. The exaggerated claim was that outside a town hall forum, Gladney had been brutally beaten (nearly to the point of death, according to some comically embellished accounts) and that a union thug was to blame. `Wingers even had YouTube video of the bloody beating to prove it.
The problem was when you watched the clip, viewers saw Gladney get pulled to the ground before he popped right back up less than two seconds later. Viewers saw Gladney walking around after the incident without an obvious scratch on his body, and in no apparent pain.
But within hours, and then days, the tale improved greatly. Soon Gladney showed up in a wheelchair at a right-wing rally thrown on his behalf. Why? because he was viciously beaten!!! Or something.
So yeah, the whole tale has been vastly improved over time in order to suit the right-wing mantra of how violent liberals are. And sure, if Barone wants to peddle that nonsense in his column, he’s free to do so. And Lord knows he’s peddled worse junk over the years.
But here’s where the correction comes in and I’m not sure how Barrone is going to avoid this one. He wrote that the black conservative victim in Missouri was 65-years-old. (Oh, the humanity!) In fact, Gladney, according to the St. Louis Post, is 38 years old. Barone was only off by 27 years. And yes, it’s a big deal becuase the supposed age of the (supposed) victim is supposed to send Barone’s readers into shock. (They’re beating up seniors!)
Question: Does Barone, and the Washington Examiner, do corrections? Or are facts for suckers.
UPDATED: Sadly, Gladney’s martyr-like website is down due to lack of payment. The Washington Independent’s David Weigel also notes that it’s been a whole month since union thugs supposedly beat Gladney within an inch of his life, and yet not one of his attackers have been charged with a crime; a vicious crime conservatives claim was captured right on tape!! Guess the St. Louis PD doesn’t see it that way.
Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.
The Recycling Myth
The Recycling Myth
Mises Daily by Per Bylund | Posted on Monday, February 04, 2008
Source
As a Swede I get to hear a lot of the myths of how wonderful a country Sweden supposedly is — the “prosperous socialism” it stands for, a role model for the rest of the world. For instance, quite a few friends from around the world have commended me on Swedish recycling polices and the Swedish government’s take on coercive environmentalism.
The way it has been presented to me, Sweden has succeeded with what most other governments at best dream about: creating an efficient and profitable national system for saving the environment through large-scale recycling. And the people are all in on it! Everybody’s recycling.
The latter is actually true: everybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state’s monopolist garbage-collection “service” no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn’t that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).
So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.
The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment. (What about the economy?)
But it doesn’t end with the extra work at home and the extra space in each and every kitchen occupied by a variety of trash bins. What do you do with the trash that isn’t collected? The garbage collection service (which nowadays doesn’t offer collection too often, usually biweekly or monthly, even though the rates mysteriously seem to be much higher than before) only accepts certain types of garbage, generally only biodegradable food leftovers. But do not worry; it is all taken care of.
The authorities have established trash collection centers in most neighborhoods where you get to throw away your trash. These “centers” offer numerous containers where you can throw away your trash — there is one container dedicated for each and every kind of trash and they are all neatly color-coded to help you find the right one. But this means you better have separated your aluminum from your other metals and your newspapers from your soft and hard papers before you get here. You wouldn’t want to throw away dirty milk cartons or unsorted paper, would you?
But it seems people do just that: they cheat if they believe they are better off doing so. So the authorities have responded by making it more difficult to cheat. Their first measure was to redesign all containers so that it is more difficult throwing the “wrong” trash in them. For instance, containers for glass have only small, round holes where you put your bottles, and containers for hard paper and carton materials have only letter-slit shaped holes (you need to flatten all boxes before recycling — that’s the law).
Well, that didn’t do the trick. People kept on cheating. And the more difficult the authorities made it to cheat, the more difficult it was to get rid of the trash even if you intended to put it in the right place. So people went to these centers and simply put everything next to the containers instead — why bother? The authorities responded by appointing salaried “trash collection center spies” (!) to document who was cheating so that they could be brought to justice. (There have actually been a few court cases where people have been tried for not following recycling laws.) Need I say the attempt to appoint spies didn’t work either? After a rather hot-spirited debate in the media, all spying at trash collection centers was abolished.
But the real question here is not to what degree the authorities are ignorant of what spurs human action. We already have numerous examples of this ignorance being quite huge. The question is: does this recycling structure work? The answer is that, from a government point of view, while it can probably be thought of as working, from an environmental point of view, the answer is definitely “no.”
Americans Detained By Iran
By CHARLES LEVINSON
BAGHDAD — Three Americans were detained on Friday by Iranian authorities after crossing into Iran from the Kurdish territories in northern Iraq without permission, according to Kurdish officials.
A State Department official said the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was investigating the reports of missing Americans and was taking the possible detention “very seriously.”
“It looks like the three of them were kidnapped and they may have been taken into Iran,” he added.
According to Qubad Talabani, the Kurdish Regional Government’s envoy to Washington who is currently in northern Iraq, the three Americans had camped out in the mountains on the eastern border of the Kurdish territories on Thursday night and were detained after accidentally crossing into Iran on Friday.
“Three Americans were backpacking on the border areas between Kurdistan and Iran and they stumbled into Iranian territory and have been detained by the Iranian authorities,” Mr. Talabani said. “Some of their belongings have been found very close to the Iranian border where it appears they camped out last night, 500 meters from the Iranian border.”
The Kurdish-Iranian border is closely monitored by Iranian security forces. Iranian-Kurdish separatists have long used northern Iraq as a base of operations for attacks against Iran.
The Americans’ detention may complicate U.S. efforts to engage Iran diplomatically over its nuclear program. It also comes just days after the Iraqi government launched a raid on a camp of militant Iranian dissidents that the U.S. military had given protection to until recently. Iran praised the raid while Washington criticized it.
Unlike the rest of Iraq, where Americans must secure a visa ahead of time, in the Kurdish territories Americans are given a visa upon arrival at the airport. Relatively safe compared with the rest of the country, Iraq’s Kurdish north has attracted some tourists in recent years to its lush mountainous terrain.
Another Kurdish official said that a fourth American had stayed behind in the Kurdish city of Suleymaniya while his friends went trekking into the mountains because he was feeling ill and is in the custody of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
The official said that notebooks found among their possessions suggested the missing Americans had been traveling in Syria and the Palestinian territories before coming to the Kurdish territories.
“Our security services are going through their stuff trying to figure out what they were doing here,” the official said. “From our initial assessment it was just young kids trekking into an interesting part of the world, part fun, part adventure and it looks like they got themselves into a wee bit too much trouble,” the official said.
—Peter Spiegel contributed to this article.
Write to Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A6
Iranian Americans Crying Out for Freedom
Iranian Americans Crying Out For Freedom
By Susan Safa
Iranian Americans have been protesting against the Islamic Regime of Iran for decades. Since the eighties, some Iranians would occasionally congregate at US embassies and chant, “Down with Dictators. Freedom for Iran!” This would go on for hours in extreme weather conditions where people would stand and wave lion adored flags symbolizing the government in power in Iran before the Islamic Regime.
Following the recent fraudulent elections in Iran, which ended in the death of innocent young protesters, the crowds around the United States have grown. With an estimated 1.5 million Iranian Americans living in the United States, major cities throughout the country have graciously allowed this group to show support for their brothers and sisters with peaceful marches. On June 28, 2009 the city temporarily closed off the streets of Westwood and Santa Monica Blvd., allowing protesters to march for four miles around the Federal Building. On July 22, 2009, hunger strikers began a three day silent protest outside of the United Nations headquarters in New York. So what exactly has been going on in Iran?
It begins with Iranians wanting what all humans have the right to enjoy: freedom. More Iranians, especially the younger generation, have had a taste of freedom via the internet. Thus, a big group of Iranians believed this election could lead to change. The majority of the voters who were idealistic toward change were between 18-21 years of age. The month before the election, the youth were allowed to dress freely and enjoy themselves in public for once. Women were allowed to wear makeup, and the restrictions on women’s head scarves became more lenient. This gave the impressionable youth the false pretense that “this regime supports you.” This was in vain as the young people, particularly female, were weary of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei’s extreme dictatorship. Mousavi would still have to lead under Iran’s clerical system; however, if one is given the choice between bad or even worse, the lesser of the two evils seems promising. The young students donned their green in support of Mousavi, hoping for a change in the regime.
Polls closed at midnight on election day. Approximately two hours later, the results of the paper ballots were announced. Ahmadinejad had won the election by an amazing landslide. The unfair election was the momentum young Iranians needed to begin an uprising. By 10 AM, the students began protesting in the streets. They began jumping on cars and set three buses on fire. By day two, the protest rapidly spread throughout different cities in Iran. The eve of this second day, dissenters who were communicating via cell phone began to lose service. By day three, use of cell phones and the internet were obsolete in Iran. The protesters were no longer able to communicate. The world lost contact with the already isolated Iran.
Before getting into the clashes between protesters and agents of law enforcement forces, it is important to know the way the law enforcement system is set up. Law enforcement in Iran is based on a tier system. Tier one are the regular police. Their vehicles are marked by a blue stripe. Next, are the Basij. They are given a license with free reign to arrest anyone for anything. Members of the Basij tend to be less educated, and receive a bonus to fulfill this duty. The bonus may be monetary compensation or even guaranteed acceptance into college. They tend to carry batons and occasionally guns. They are quiet and some are believed to be from neighboring countries. Members of the Basij are known for beating Iranians to death. The third tier is known as the “special force.” They have been trained as commandos and are all armed. Their vehicles are marked with a green stripe. The highest form of law enforcement in Iran are known as the “seh pah” (three legs), or the “revolutionary guards,” who are under the direct control of Khahmanei. Typically when the revolutionary guards come out, the lower tiers let them have complete control of the situation. The most unusual part of this protest was that all of these levels remained out in an attempt to control these millions of protesters.
A man named Farbod was protesting in the streets of Tehran the same day the infamous Neda was shot. Farbod witnessed a young man killed by a gunshot to the face. Describing the moments after the shooting, Farbod said, “I just ran home. I had seen enough.” Having lost his mother a few days earlier, Farbod did not want his father to bear with two losses in one week, so he ran. Farbod has been traumatized as a result. He explains, “I still haven’t seen the video of Neda because I can’t bear to watch it. We were just silently walking in protest not hurting anyone. How can they do this?”
The world has finally seen the evil ways of this regime. Khamenei has lost all credibility, within Iran and the rest of the world. However, internationally, no politicians have acknowledged the elections as fraud. One young protester from Iran says he believes, with time, there will be change. “It is still early. We need more unity. The youth have united against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei but we still need a leader. We need a goal. We need an aim.”
A message to the youth of Iran – rest assure, the world has heard you. The minds of Iranian youth will no longer to be controlled by fanatic dictators. With protests around the world, from the Federal Building in Los Angeles all the way to Europe, people have shown support for democracy and freedom in Iran.
