Second verse, same as the first

I’m having a hard time getting upset over today’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporations the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to sway voters in federal and state elections. Keith Olbermann is calling this decision “our Dred Scott,” as if it’s some sort of pre-Enlightenment atavism, with the five justices writing in the majority a collection of chronologically displaced Australopithecines*. It’s the end of the world as we know it.

In reality, corporations have controlled our politics for many decades, and today’s decision merely legalizes something that has long been an institutional reality. Those like Olbermann who would bust an aneurysm over the loss of our cherished democracy are analogous to people who, upon hearing of the legalization of marijuana, would declare, “Now people might smoke it!”

Come to think of it, perhaps today’s decision will usher in a new era of realpolitik on the Court. They should legalize marijuana, do away with highway speed limits, ax jaywalking restrictions, shred all of the blue laws.

Hmm. When did I become a Libertarian?

D.

*No idea why my brain is breaking out the dictionary. No idea whatsoever.

Who you callin’ a misguided mediocrity?

From Huffington Post (thanks, Chris):

Where could Doug Hoffman turn?

To a traveling freak show of evil creeps who want to use a misguided mediocrity to jerk around the people of upstate New York for shits and giggles.

So how do you tell me apart from Conservative Party congressional candidate Doug Hoffman? Watch:

It’s easy. He has better teeth, and I don’t go to bed with Michelle Malkin.

D.

A shortage of killing power

The sporting goods store was all out of hollow points.

There was a run on ammo at the beginning of the year, back when righteous NRA-lovin’ gun-totin’ Americans convinced themselves that Barack Obama would soon reinstitute bans on assault weapons and do God knows what else to restrict their Second Amendment rights. But the Obama Admin hasn’t done squat to please the Left’s gun control wing, and in fact, it is now possible to pack heat into our national parks.

Despite this, Americans continue to stockpile ammo. Per this Canadian Broadcasting Company article, “According to the National Rifle Association in the U.S., Americans buy about seven billion rounds of ammunition annually. But by September this year, they had purchased nine billion rounds.” As a result, Canadian hunters are having a harder time buying bullets.

The annoying thing about this? All we want is a few rounds of hollow points. Hollow points are great for home defense because they have great stopping power and they don’t penetrate walls. Safety first!

So to all you right wing nut jobs hoarding ammunition: Dammit, start sharing. Us lefties are sick and tired of settling for normal rounds.

D.

Still steamed . . .

over what folks in my profession are calling “Obama’s slander.” At his presser, he accused us ENTs of doing tonsillectomies for profit:

Responding to a question, President Obama said, “Part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works…. Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. … the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out … I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out, or whether … something else would make a difference…. So part of what we want to do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care.”

Idiocy.

This was so preposterous on its face (if anything, we lose money on that operation), it didn’t even register with me that he was accusing us of malpractice and unethical behavior. That’s what should have galled me — not the sheer dumbassery of the comment, but the insult.

You can read my Academy’s response to Obama on the link above. As Karen says, they don’t want to make an enemy of the President, so they’re walking on eggshells. But the AAO-HNS (my Academy) did something worse, which was to anger its members.

On our professional billboard, one of the other docs said it best:

The slander was about money being decision-maker of choice for operating. The concept of evidence based medicine is obscure to the general public. The response should have been that most patients who have tonsillectomy are referred from other doctors such as pediatricians and family medicine who have failed, for a variety of reasons, in controlling sore throats. Also, that the recurrent infections have disrupted the patient’s work or educational or growth process. As for the income, the surgical fee is less than the cost of 3 mid level office visits. Surgical decision-making in tonsillectomy is based on what best serves the patient’s needs, almost always after failure of medical therapy.

So the Prez decides to pit patients against their doctors, gets them wondering whether their docs are making decisions based on sound medical evidence or their financial bottom line. Slick.

That whole business got buried, thanks to Obama’s gaffe over Professor Gates’s arrest. As press conferences go, that one was a real balls-up, don’t you think? And then there was his non-answer on the question of transparency (why he’s been secretive about meetings with folks in the health insurance industry). To put it bluntly, Karen and I think Obama’s effing it all up*.

And if he does, what comes next? If the economy keeps tanking, will we end up with President Worse-than-Bush?

D.

*No, not just because of one presser. But this ain’t a political blog and I’ve blathered long enough as it is.

Is it just me,

or is our President channeling a certain starship captain?

If the man starts shouting “KHAAAAAAN!” I’m leaving the room.

D.

Duggars name #18 for Iraqi academic

I was intrigued by Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar’s choice of name for #18: Jordyn-Grace Makiya Duggar. Makiya? At first I thought Jim-Bob had hit a random fantasy name generator, and I regretted that the world had not welcomed Jotil-Snebanina Warsulo Duggar (that was MY choice for the betting pool), but then it occurred to me: perhaps this fella has more on his mind than how to find the inspiration necessary for the procreation of #19 without resorting to ungodly pastimes. Perhaps he has a political agenda.

Meet Kanan Makiya, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. This is an interesting guy:

Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam’s Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club’s Edward Murrow Award in 1992.

From the Frontline interview, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero”:

What is your own image of evil? Have you ever had an intimate personal encounter with it? Does it have its own taste and smell and configuration? …

Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it’s intimate. It’s almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct. They don’t need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words. … That’s the nature of the phenomenon. It’s hard to put into words. But you have to have that intimacy with it, that kind of shoulder-to-shoulder rubbing. …

In order for me to understand evil, to see something as evil, I have to be able to see myself in it somehow, and yet not be there. If I’m not able to do that, then it’s just a phenomenon. It’s just a thing — terrible, bad, whatever — [but] it’s not got that intimacy.

[Snip]

When I handled the paperwork of the Iraqi bureaucracy, as it has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, I see evil. I look at the paperwork. I look at the squiggles of the line and I wonder about the person who wrote in his handwriting style. …

I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. … The work is called “The Register of Eliminated Villages.” You flip the pages, beautifully scripted and done with a pencil. Then the writer of this book has covered it, folded it very neatly with a nice, great big book cover made of paper, with great big white flowers against a red background. It’s a very decorative, pretty thing. … You look at this person who has taken such immaculate care of this book, which records the destruction of 397 Kurdish villages. … You look at the book and you know you’re touching evil somehow.

So the Duggars have named #18 for a guy who quotes Hannah Arendt. I’m impressed. On the other hand, Makiya does say things that would make him very popular with those Christian Fundamentalists who think that the only thing worse than Teh Islam is Teh Gay . . .

At this point in time, in this place, at this conjuncture in our history, religion did drive those planes into those towers. In that sense, in some deep sense, some deep way, religion is responsible. … Not any religion, but Islam in particular. But you just have to change the time and the circumstance, the moment. Move back 50 years, a hundred years, whatever, and you can have an entirely different circumstance. …

I have always thought there were dark … corners in religion. I took that for granted. That’s not the surprising thing for me. … The frightening thing is rather that, in the Arab world, we have let the darkness of religion flourish. The forces that are dampening it at this moment in our history are weak, and that is frightening. …

I call bullshit. 9/11 wasn’t about religion. It was intensely political and economic — and considering the developments of the last seven years, it was horribly successful.

Any guesses for the name of #19? Considering #18, I’m betting on Jillian-Kristol Wolfowitz Duggar.

D.