The trailer for the Mexican film “Under the Same Moon” looked great, and I was excited to see it. After this watching this commercial (scroll down a bit), I might pay for it twice.
March 2008
Bob already mentioned Dennis Rehberg’s interesting position on free trade with Canada from an interview with the Flathead Beacon, but I found this claim to be interesting, as well. Your Representative is exuberant about the level of health care in the United States:
He went on to describe the U.S. health care system as “the best in the world,” noting the advances made in the areas of research and technology, as well as patients’ ability to choose their medical provider. The problem, Rehberg acknowledged, is “it’s getting harder and harder for people to afford.”
A little known fact is that the precise reason why America’s health care is not the best in the world is because so many people can’t afford it. If every American had access to Representative Rehberg’s level of free, government-provided health care his claim might be true, but when 45-50 million Americans lack health insurance, it seems unlikely that our system is the best in the world. In fact, we’re 37th in the world. according to the WHO.
The New York Times explains it best:
Many Americans are under the delusion that we have “the best health care system in the world,” as President Bush sees it, or provide the “best medical care in the world,” as Rudolph Giuliani declared last week. That may be true at many top medical centers. But the disturbing truth is that this country lags well behind other advanced nations in delivering timely and effective care.
So, do we dismiss this as another harmless rhetorical excess by a politician? No, that would be too easy. It matters when Representative Rehberg believes, or pretends to, that all Americans have access to the excellent care he receives. It leads him to claim that reducing “onerous, duplicative paperwork” is one of the most important health care issues facing the nation, rather the the staggering number of Americans who lack access to reasonably priced medical care.
This is an odd post for me. One of the things I hate most about sitting down to a Mac is using the Safari browser, because I am so accustomed to using Firefox. For the past couple of days, though, I have been playing around with the latest (first non-beta) release of Safari for Windows, and I am very impressed.
Pages render beautifully, it’s fast, and it doesn’t seem to suffer from the horrendous memory leaks that plague Firefox. I’m not sure that I can make the switch entirely, as I am attached to some great extensions for Firefox, and I’m not thrilled about the Microsoft approach to installing Safari Apple has adopted, but I have to admit to being impressed.
Give it a spin.
Lately, I can’t even bring myself to read Daily Kos and a few other major liberal blogs, which seem to have become unofficial arms of the Obama campaign in their relentless attacks against Hillary Clinton, who still well could be the Democratic nominee in 2008.
On the front page of Kos today, I am told repeatedly that Clinton can’t win, other than by attracting superdelegates (bad, evil), , and that Florida and Michigan should not be counted (morally pure).
They’re certainly interesting talking points. The first is premised on the idea that, while winning super delegates is precisely how the rules of the game were established, it is somehow morally wrong, deceptive, and under-handed, an undemocratic affront that will lead to mass defections in the fall. On the other hand, disenfranchising the voters of two critical states is permissible, because the rules demand it.
Throw in a little non-story about a Bosnia trip, and you have the summary of the anti-Hillary campaign.
The thing is, this race is from certain, despite what Obama supporters and The Politico think. (It’s certainly interesting, too, that the Politico is suddenly given credence in Progressive circles, if only for this argument.) While I support Senator Obama, I will enthusiastically support Senator Clinton if she wins the nomination, and damn it, so should the rest of Obama’s supporters, unless we want another four years of the Bush Administration, which is precisely what John McCain will bring.
Or maybe Al Gore will save the day.
I’m very excited to see Pogreba and Neiffer try to expand the discussion about education. I thought I’d put my two cents in: What sort of education do we need? The Ancient Greeks believed that in a Democracy like theirs, language skills were the key to getting ahead in life. The Romans believed that being able to discuss history, society, and language were the skills needed by a free man, hence they are called the “Liberal” arts.
The collapse of the USSR has made the world more Democratic in two ways. First, a plethora of new Democracies have sprung up, meaning that to work with other nations we must engage in discourse with millions-strong electorates, not a few hundred of party leaders. Moreover, however, the spread of powerful, simply weaponry throughout the world, a legacy of the cold war, has meant that more and more developing nations (we’ve seen it most powerfully in Somalia and Iraq) cannot be pushed around by destroying their military power, because the average person must still be convinced to not shoot at American troops. Both these are strong arguments for teaching students the ability to make a strong, thoughtful argument. Keep Reading
