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In Congress, Dem and GOPer Working Together to Change the NDAA | Mother Jones

"Smith and Amash's effort comes amid a bipartisan backlash against indefinite detention that has already produced legislation on the state level. Republican-dominated legislatures in Arizona, Maine, and Virginia have passed anti-NDAA legislation. Proponents of indefinite detention argue that Congress' 2001 authorization of the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban permits the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens, even those apprehended in the United States. But the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the issue. Opponents counter that indefinite detention of American citizens in the United States is unconstitutional."

Review & Outlook: The Tea Party's Inner ACLU - WSJ.com

The Wall Street Journal has a conniption fit about conservative opposition to the NDAA: "The ACLU tea partiers may be well-intentioned but they are woefully uninformed about the war on the terror. Their efforts would undermine executive war-fighting authority and the legitimacy of a terrorist detention and military tribunal system that has been established over many Congresses, endorsed by two Presidents and confirmed by the Supreme Court. They should stick to shrinking the entitlement state."

Arizona Joins Virginia in the NDAA Exodus. Is Nullification the Next New Thing? (Cutting the Gordian Knot)

"In less than a week’s time a second state has put a foot down making it clear that it will not cooperate with Federal Law which is blatantly unconstitutional. Yesterday Arizona became the second state to pass a nullification of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)."

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare | | AlterNet

“The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”

‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth (Stephenson, Grist)

I don’t think any “climate movement” is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil “1%” destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked. “We can’t say that,” Torrance answered. “Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked. “That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said. Advertisement “Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked. “We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered. “What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.” “We have not come to a position on that,” he said. “So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said. “I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”

America brings the ‘war on terror’ home (Wolf, Daily Star)

"(Judge) Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. [...] We now have it from the U.S. government lawyers’ own mouths: This law may put journalists at risk, or at least the lawyers explicitly refused to rule out that option for their client – and, as Forrest put it, they have “one very big client.”"

Obama’s evolution: Behind the failed ‘grand bargain’ on the debt (Wallsten/Montgomery/Wilson, WaPo)

"That night, Obama prepared his party’s congressional leaders. He warned Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he might return to the position under discussion the previous Sunday — that is, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for just $800 billion in tax increases. [...] White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table."

Not All Labor Leaders Happy With AFL-CIO’s Obama Endorsement (Elk, In These Times)

“There's not a lot of choice here, that’s the sad part of this,” says Matt McKinnon, political and legislative director of the Machinists union (IAM), which is affiliated with AFL-CIO and endorsed the president earlier this year. “He’s been a disappointment in several areas, but he came through with some decent appointees.” The expected endorsement represents the reality that organized labor leaders still feel trapped in a two-party system, with a not-always labor-friendly Democratic Party on one side and a downright hostile Republican Party on the other.

Elections: What Are They Good For? (Swanson, War Is A Crime.org)

Voting isn't everything. "I think Emma Goldman had a point in saying that if voting changed anything they would ban it. I think Howard Zinn had a point in saying that it doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House so much as who is doing the sitting in. The relentless ubiquitous question of how you can change the world if you refuse to engage in electoral politics strikes me as crazy. Women didn't vote themselves the right to vote. Workers didn't elect the eight hour day. India didn't vote the British out."

Part II Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States (Zeese, Occupy Washington, DC)

"When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy. "

Critiques Of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ (Huben)

"The purpose of this FAQ is not to attack libertarianism, but some of the more fallacious arguments within it. That done, libertarians can then reformulate or reject these arguments. This is also needed to help people place libertarianism and its arguments in context. It is very hard to find any literature about libertarianism that was NOT written by its advocates. This isolation from normal political discourse makes it difficult to evaluate libertarian claims without much more research or analysis than most of us have time for. Compare this to (for example) the extensive literature of socialism and communism written by ideologues, scholars, pundits, etc. on all sides. Libertarianism is scantily analyzed outside its own movement. Let's fix that."

UPDATED: Limbaugh's Misogynistic Attack On Georgetown Law Student Continues With Increased Vitriol (Media Matters for America)

Always good to have a reference, this is it. "Rush Limbaugh is not backing down after widespread condemnation over his misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before Congress recently about the problems caused when women lack access to contraception. " Multiple clips for future show and tells.

America's Death Squads (Davies, PDA Community/ZCommunications)

"Barack Obama has halted the macabre parade of hooded, shackled suspects in orange jumpsuits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine at Guantanamo, but he has not done so by restoring the rule of law. Instead, to a great extent, he has replaced Bush’s policy with a global campaign to simply kill a wide range of people in cold blood: terrorism suspects, resistance fighters, and anyone else added to secret lists for secret reasons. From a uniquely American “exceptionalist” point of view, killing suspects instead of capturing them is a convenient way to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping up hundreds of mostly innocent people in an indiscriminate global dragnet and then not knowing what to do with them. The dead tell no tales. Public outrage is contained within the faraway countries where the killings take place and does not cause domestic political problems."

Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay' (Abdul-Ahad, Guardian)

Iraq ten years after: instead of one Saddam, many little ones. "Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison. "We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else.""

Uninsured camp out for free health care

Posted by Thomas Nephew on August 2nd, 2009

In a rural corner of Virginia, thousands of people without health insurance line up
for days to receive free healthcare provided by an army of volunteer doctors and nurses.
(Reuters)

The health care is supplied by a worthy group, the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. Their founder — none other than Stan Brock, once a star of the nostalgia favorite “Wild Kingdom” — said in another video clip I ran across that he got the idea from his days in the Amazon; after a serious injury, he was told he was 29 days on foot away from the nearest health care. (Brock is careful in that interview to characterize health care as a “privilege.”)

The Amazon jungle — a reasonable model for those without health insurance in America.

Category: Post. Tags: health care. Thread RSS, Comment, Trackback. Print This

14 Responses to “Uninsured camp out for free health care”

dutchmarbel Says:
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 am
I saw a documentary on the BBC a few days ago, probabely about the same camp (sorry, my sound doesn’t work at the moment so I can’t check). I remember that one of the doctors said that the fact that they now had to do this in the States meant that they had less time to volonteer in the third world countries they originally planned the camp for.
Thomas Nephew Says:
August 2nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Hey, they’ve got no call to complain — we’re a third world country too.
dutchmarbel Says:
August 2nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
If that were true nobody would be as suprised at your ‘backward tendencies’. I’m still amazed at the number of rightwing Americans that defend the position that the French are better at organizing healthcare than the Americans could ever be
Thomas Nephew Says:
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
That’s a great line — “you’re right, I suppose; the French are better at that than we can ever hope to be.”

Re surprise: I wonder who’s still surprised at those tendencies. There’s something Hurricane Katrina-like about that video — vice-versa, actually — in the way it shows a beaten down population reduced to hoping, praying, and waiting for these kinds of “normal social function ex machina” events. The guy on the other video called it a ‘miracle’ without really questioning why a ‘miracle’ like this was necessary.
dutchmarbel Says:
August 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Some people like the status quo

Things like your healthcare system and the way Katrina could happen (and New Orleans is allowed to desintegrate) are amongst the tendencies that really suprise us. But they suprise us because on so many other area’s you guys are just like us, or even an exampe to aim for.
Patrick Says:
August 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
This video is powerful, a call to arms. I feel guilty that I’m just sitting here while this is going on.

It looks like it could have been filmed in southwestern VA. I traveled through some parts of this region attending a series of public hearings on mental health system reform in VA in the late 90s. It was quite an experience.

If some folks/policymakers think of health care as a privilege, that goes doubly so for mental health care. And Congress only recently passed insurance parity for mental illnesses, which advocates have been lobbying for, for years. (And it remains to pass effective regulations to implement parity.)

Sorry to digress. Regarding health reform, generally, I don’t think we can necessarily do it all at once, but I think our approach should be comprehensive (which in my mind means we might have to phase in various reform measures). I think we should begin with regulating the devil out of the insurance companies as well as hospitals, doctors (especially ethical regs. that extend to the business relationship between patient and doctor)and other providers.

On the other hand, the more I think about it, I believe we need a public option now (while it’s still a politically viable option). Other than its scale, do you realistically see much of a difference between it and Medicare?
Thomas Nephew Says:
August 5th, 2009 at 12:20 am
As I see it, HR3200 is mainly about regulating some aspects of health insurance more closely, but leaving for-profit health insurance and the resulting skewed incentives in place. There are very good elements, and if it insures even “just” a million or five million more Americans, that will save lives, and that will be a very good thing.

The political question is whether we should have to settle for that after waiting since 1992 and longer for serious health care reform. Some like (see, e.g., Chris Bowers) say this is a (political) non-argument — single payer was never in the cards: the Dem gains of the past 4 years were not about that kind of ‘New New Deal’-like transformation, but simply about regaining power, stopping the bleeding kind of.

I don’t agree with that completely, but more importantly Bowers ignores the quality of the ‘public option’ proposal under consideration. HR3200 allows for one — and depending on how robust that option is, it might eventually grow to Medicare-like, single-payer like predominance among the ‘health insurance exchange’ participants; a kind of Wal-Mart of health insurance with monopsony buyer power. But the big word is ‘might’ and the odds are it might not. For one thing, it’s not a done deal, and might get dropped altogether at some point in the legislative process. But single-payer critics like PNHP and Kip Sullivan argue that even the “public option” on the table at the moment is so pale a version of the original idea as to be all but stillborn, mainly because there’s no pre-enrollment so the option has to fight for its clients — as I understand it most of us are walled off from it because having employer based insurance makes you ineligible, whether you’re fond of that insurance or not. According to Sullivan, the public option we’re liable to get is a ‘bait and switch’ from the Jacob Hacker proposal that gained popularity in the past years — 10-15M clients after years, vs 100+M clients right away under the original proposal. In this view, insurance companies are winning the fight — so far — to keep ‘public option’ small, weak, probably disproportionately unhealthy clients, etc. If so, ‘public option’ could die a ‘natural’ death at some point in the middle run, even in the short run, and discredit the health care reform movement in the process.

Then again, yet other estimates have public option reaching near 50M clients. I don’t know who’s right. But while I’m not a health care reform wonk or daily activist, I do see/suspect a difference between public option and the single-payer Medicare-type vision. My sense is that you *could* “get there from here” (here being public option’ whatever that turns out to be) — but the opposition is working hard to make that take a very, very long time.

I hope eRobin will drop by and set me straight on these things — she’s a friend who’s more radical than I am “but” is working hard for the HCAN alliance; that alliance is supporting/influencing the mainstream Dem. congressional proposal process. I think the main argument for that process is the hope that some sizeable percentage of those people in the video find some kind of health care relief so they don’t have to get their care in stables at a state fair site, and/or don’t have to go bankrupt to deal with major medical bills. I don’t want to be a single payer advocate who denigrates the good that can come of less sweeping reform; any reform is welcome, I just want as much as possible.
eRobin Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Hey, Thomas! As usual, I don’t think you need to be set straight. I agree with your evaluation of the weaknesses of the public health insurance plan option. They are making it hard to get into. The House bill gives the insurance industry a three year (!!?!) head start to cover as many people as they can with improved plans. And even with that, the plan may be watered down even further or dropped completely, although I don’t see the latter happening now.

As weak as this reform will be - and it will be very, very weak - I don’t think that we have an alternative but to support it and continue to push to make it as strong as possible. Sadly, just as it would have taken a million people marching in major cities and venues across the country to win a very strong reform, it will take that many to secure even a moderate one. We simply do not have that sort of popular will in this country right now. As my friends and I always say to each other when we learn of the latest weakening of the reform or of the latest bad deal cut with industry, “Paris would burn.”
eRobin Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
How do I download that video? I thought all YouTube videos were d/lable
Thomas Nephew Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I don’t know anything about downloading, but it ought to be embeddable on your web site just like it is here. If you install RealAudio, you can sometimes download videos on the fly, though I can’t say what would happen for this video.
– I wonder if the Kucinich bill might make sense — allow states to implement their own single payer bills, take federal preemption off the table. (ERISA’s supremacy is what did in Fair Share Health Care a couple of years ago here in MD.) I imagine I’ll find out Kucinich’s bill doesn’t have good prospects either, but that might be a way to go.
eRobin Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I think that K’s bill is a good idea with promise. But, I live in PA, where there is a strong movement to achieve state-single-payer.

I want to put it on a dvd and use it a forum I’m hosting on monday. may just hope the place his wifi and run it from youtube.
Thomas Nephew Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
OK, I was able to install RealPlayer SP Beta from http://www.real.com. Once installed — download + install took maybe 10 minutes on DSL — run it and check the settings under “Tools / Preferences / Download and Recording”. You want
a) a check mark next to “enable web download etc for [your installed browsers, presumably IE7/8 +/or Firefox]. This probably already checked for you.
b) Show the “download this video” button … “on page load for 30 seconds.” This originally says 7 secs, which isn’t long enough, I think.

When I then visited the YouTube site for this video — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzuvpZwFyUs — a little popup “download this video” button appears on the upper right corner of the video. (It also reappears if you mouse over the video panel.) If you click it, eventually (2-5 sec) a download process begins, resulting in a ~17MB “Uninsured camp out for free healthcare.flv” file.

The application offers other video file formats, but they’re mostly for iPods and whatnot. For computers, this .flv format is all they offer. That may mean you’ll need to have RealPlayer loaded on whatever computer you use to replay the .flv file.
newsrackblog.com » Blog Archive » Re: Fw: SENIOR DEATH WARRANTS Says:
August 12th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
[...] Uninsured camp out for free health care [...]
American Street » Blog Archive » Re: Fw: SENIOR DEATH WARRANTS Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
[...] much as any other country, and if we do nothing, those costs will rise to 37% by 2050. People are camping out by the hundreds when they have a chance to get free health [...]