If Not Now, When?

It seems to me that the entirely wrong people are running the healthcare debate.  The idea has occurred to me before, but it really hit home last night as I was watching The Ed Show.  He had a man on from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee who was promoting this ad targeting Max Baucus.  They started talking about some of the polls being run asking if they would support a public option and even a majority of Republican voters said yes, yes they would.

That got me thinking: where in the world ARE all these people?  All you see and read and hear about is how many people are protesting at town hall meetings, marching on Washington (and depending on who’s talking the numbers there range from a tens of thousands to the biggest march on Washington EVER), and generally being rather scary and they’re all against healthcare reform.  The lies and misconceptions and contradictions are spread further and further with each newscast.  Debunking them doesn’t seem to help because it doesn’t stop Republicans and even Democrats like Max Baucus from continuing to talk about them as if they are the truth.

And yet no matter how many times they’re said, they’re still lies, heinous, ridiculous and inflammatory but lie nonetheless.  All you need to do is one itsy bitsy paragraph in the bill to know that illegal aliens will not be given healthcare; a slightly longer portion and some rationality is required to know that the bill isn’t going to set up “death panels” or kill grandma. 

Politicians are caving, though, slowly but surely, to a very vocal minority in this country that is apparently very easily duped.  So where’s the majority?  Where are the marches on Washington to SUPPORT healthcare?  Where are the big statements that will be picked up by the media?  Pot lucks and petitions are all well and good, but this is the time to take back the conversation with something bigger. 

The sad part is that I believe we could easily take this back with a big enough protest.  We are more coherent, more rational, and just all around more people, but from what I’ve been hearing, nothing big is in the works.  If anyone knows who to contact to get this ball rolling, I really believe that we need it to hold our politicians accountable to the people WE elected.  We must demand that they use this majority we’ve given them to push through the bills we want with or without opposition support.  If Bush could do it, so can we.

Hooray for #37!

Here’s a video about the rank we have as far as quality of healthcare in the world set to a cute little ditty.  A bit of humor in a deadly serious debate that’s getting more and more radical.

The Gonzales Cantata

A beautiful and hysterical reminder of how underhanded and arrogant the Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department was.

RIP Ted Kennedy

It’s tragic that he didn’t get to live long enough to see his biggest goal, healthcare reform, being passed.  He will be desperately missed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/26/ted-kennedy-dead-legendar_n_268978.html

 http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/08/sen_edward_kennedy_77_dies_after_cancer_battle.php

An impressive list of his accomplishments for equal rights: http://jezebel.com/5345863/the-lion-sleeps-tonight-ted-kennedy-leaves-long-impressive-legacy?skyline=true&s=x

He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

12 Carry Guns Outside Obama Event

Does anyone else think this is scary?  From TPM Muckracker:

About 12 people were carrying guns, including at least one semi-automatic assault rifle, outside a building where President Obama was speaking today.

No one was arrested outside the VFW National Convention in Phoenix, according to the Associated Press, where hundreds of people demonstrated both for and against health care reform. There are no reports that the 12 were part of an organized group.

The man spotted carrying the assault rifle and a pistol, who gave his name only as “Chris”, was asked why he was armed. “Because I can do it,” he said. “In Arizona, I still have some freedoms.” You can watch the video from ArizonaCentral.com (go to about 1:30). He’s being interviewed by a man who’s also wearing a handgun.

Two police officers kept close by. Carrying guns, including the AR-15 assault rifle, is legal under Arizona law.

“If we need to intervene, we will intervene at that time,” said Detective J. Oliver.

CNN’s Ed Henry reported seeing a second man with an assault rifle, but that has not been confirmed.

These reports come less than a week after two people brought guns to a presidential event in Portsmouth, N.H. At Obama’s town hall there, one man was arrested for having a gun hidden in his car after the Secret Service found him at Portsmouth High School hours before Obama arrived carrying a pocketknife. He didn’t have a license for a concealed weapon.

Another man in Portsmouth was spotted carrying a gun in a leg holster outside the school. The unconcealed weapon was legal under New Hampshire law and he was not arrested. Later, when asked why he brought the gun, he replied, “That’s not even a relevant question. The question is, why don’t people bear arms these days?”

And that’s not all. A man brought a gun to a town hall with Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) last week, without incident. At an event with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), someone dropped a gun, but he had a permit and no police report was taken. And two weeks ago, a New Mexico man tweeted that reform opponents should bring guns to town halls and “badly hurt” SEIU reps.

I know this is legal and they’re expressing their right to bear arms and all, but this is an event that the President of the United States is attending.  Aren’t any of them even slightly worried that they’ll go to scratch their back and the Secret Service will put two in their chest? 

Beyond that, what makes this even more terrifying is the violent sentiments that surrounds the health care debate in general.  People are getting into fist fights at town hall meetings; imagine if any of those people had been packing an assault rifle.  Angry people plus high powered weapons do not make a good combination for calm, reasoned debate.

Overused Orwell

As anyone who heard me talk about the book 1984 can tell you, I’m a big fan of Orwell.  I think he’s a great writer who honestly lays out the dangers of giving unquestioning allegiance to the government.  Truly there are important lessons to be learned from his works. 
 
Recently, however, his name and references to these works have been vastly overused, especially in regards to the healthcare debate.  Every time you turn around some Republican congressperson is talking about how Orwellian the bill is and how something or other about it is comparable to 1984.  Meanwhile, people are swallowing this like some kind of pill that innoculates them against rational thought.
 
I don’t know if this indicates the power of Orwell or the power of fear and hatred, but the proliferation of these patently absurd ideas has proven almost impossible to counter.  How do you reason with people who think that the government is going to tell their grandmother that it’s time for her to die or willfully kill off children with disabilities .  One column in the Investors Business Daily, the nutjob editors said that “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”  TPMMuckraker points out: “Hawking, who is recognized as one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th and 21st century, was born in the UK and has lived his entire life there.”
 
Now there’s a new “Orwellian” theory that this plan is going to allow government bureaucrats unlimited access to your personal bank account, a power which they will then use to strip you of all your money in order to fund the healthcare program .
 
Time to bury your savings in your backyard and make an underground bunker so you can hide from the Thought Police.
 
Of course none of these claims are true, but the fervor that’s being built against reform based on these lies is only making it harder for it to go through.  One must wonder if Republicans actually believe these things or if they’re merely dancing to their puppetmasters’ tune (read: the multi-billion dollar insurance industry). 
 
If you’d really like to see something Orwellian in all of this, it’s not anything that’s in this healthcare bill.  This watered down version of a public option is in force in nearly every other “civilized” nation in the world, and yet no rational person would say that Britain or Norway are comparable to Oceania.
 
Instead, I propose that we start looking for Orwellian tactics in the way ignorant people are reacting to Republican politicians and shock-jocks.  Like Winston Smith in the hands of the O’Brien, they’ve convinced themselves that the Party line is absolute truth, even if in the process they have to believe that 2+2=5.

Healthcare Horror Show

I think this is my new favorite video.

History Continued

It’s ironic that we thought we wouldn’t have time yesterday to see everything and then ended up having more time than we needed because today we almost ran out of time entirely to see everything in Washington D.C.  We road a tour trolley which had two routes, the green and the orange.  The green went up to the north side of the city, around the National Chapel and down Embassy Row.

The second picture is of the British Embassy.  We went down Embassy row so fast and there were so many on both sides of the street that I couldn’t get pictures of them all, no less remember which country’s embassy was in the pictures I’ve taken.  There are a few, though, that are pretty obvious, like the British one here.

We were on one of those trolleys were you can get off and then get back on the next one, so we got off at the National Cathedral and went up in the town to get a great view of D.C. from above.  We stayed on until we could switch from the green line to the orange line, then went to see the monuments and White House.

The White House was really cool, though smaller than it seems in the movies and pictures.  It was cool to think that President Obama was sitting in there, doing something important, like finalizing his choice for Supreme Court Justice (now revealed to be Sonia Sotomayor).

The monuments were also amazing and indescribable.  They make history come to life a bit more, I think, especially the Vietnam Wall.  Just as it was disconcerting to see the headstones at Arlington Cemetary, it was equally disturbing and sad to see all thsoe names of brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters, who died in this war.

I also really loved the Lincoln Memorial, with his second inaugural address and the Gettysburg address on the walls.  It was such a huge memorial, too, which is another thing that you don’t get quite as well in pictures.

I also loved the inscription over his statue: “In this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”  Seeing things like this always makes me wonder if the people they’re dedicated to ever thought that such a thing would be made for them.  I don’t know how they could have.

Tomorrow is the national zoo, which I’m looking forward to like crazy.  We’re going to get there right when it opens and stay as long as possible

Historical Overload

Today (and tomorrow as well) was all history, which is fitting as we’re approaching Washington D.C.

We got a late start because the front desk forgot our wake up call (that led to a bit of cursing in the morning) so we were worried about having enough time to see everything we wanted to see and not being rushed.  Really, we only had two major stops planned: Mount Vernon, home of George Washington, and Arlington National Cemetary, but then we had a hotel planned in D.C. (got a great deal through Priceline.  It was impossible to find anything below 100 dollars, even below 200, without it!) that we needed to get to at a reasonable hour.  We figured at BEST we would get there at 8:00pm.  Certainly not ideal, but we planned to deal with it.

We stopped at Mount Vernon around noon and it was really super neat.  I absolutely LOVE Washington, he was just such a perfect man to be the first president.  Who else would turn down the CROWN for goodness sakes, and then voluntarily RESIGN after only eight years when everyone else was asking him to stay longer?  Really an amazing guy who basically created the office of the presidency.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to see his house, where he lived and worked and the place he loved best.  It’s a gorgeous place; rolling Virginia hills, huge colonial house, and a view to die for.

When we first got there, the line to go inside the main house (the “Mansion”) was humongous, so we roamed the grounds, saw his carriage, his riding chair (hysterical, imo), and his grave, which I wish I could have gotten better pictures of.  We also saw sheep and a bull with the sharpest horns I’ve ever seen.  All these pictures will eventually go up at www.takingpictures.wordpress.com.

Later, when we went back around to the front of the mansion, we saw that the line was a lot shorter so we hopped on and got to go through and see the whole inside (no pictures were allowed, unfortunately).  The coolest parts for me were seeing the chair he sat in as president, the trunk he used to carry his stuff as a general in the Revolutionary War, and the bed that he slept and eventually died in.  The tour people who gave spiels at each little section were very good, too, though I wouldn’t want to repeat the same two minute speech over and over and over again all day long.

All in all, we spent about 3 hours there before we moved on.  We were really worried thinking that it would take us 2 hours to get to Arlington.  The map we had made it look really far away, so we were prepared to have to come back to it the next day.  But when we finally got our GPS programmed it told us it would take something like 10 minutes to get there!  It felt like we had driven through a dimensional rift somewhere and magically appeared right next to Arlington.  It was amazing.

Of course, we had plenty of time to see everything before it got dark.  We got on one of the tour buses because we were through with walking for the day and got to see the changing of the guards which was really awesome.  I’d seen it already when I went to D.C. and Virginia with my high school band, but it was no less cool the second time around.

Then, disaster struck!  My camera battery died.  I tried to switch it with my backup battery, but of course that one was pretty much dead, too.  I got only a few more pics before it died.  Luckily, the tour was pretty much over, so I only missed a few more photo opportunities before we left.  We got to our (really nice) hotel at a decent hour, ate at a super awesome chinese restaurant (I had yummy tofu ), and now I am going to go to bed.  Tomorrow we’ll explore Washington D.C. and my camera batteries will both be fully charged.

More Duke with a Side of Williamsburg

Seeing as how everything was closed on Sunday and no one was around, I decided that I needed to go back to Duke the next morning to talk with someone from admissions.  We were lucky enough to have chosen a hotel that had a shuttle to campus, so I hopped on that (even woke up early, VOLUNTARILY, a miracle in and of itself) and got to the Law School a little before 8:00am, when it opened.  I only had to wait a few minutes before someone opened the doors for me.

The thing that struck me from teh first about the building was how many windows it had.  I absolutely love buildings like this that just let in so much light.  They seem less…enclosed to me if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I found the admissions department, only one person was there and they were from financial aid and couldn’t answer all my questions, so I grabbed every piece of literature they had and sat to wait.  Eventually, a man came in, saw me, and promised to speak with me when he had finished getting his coffee and settling into his office.  I told him not to rush and turned down a few other offers from people who came in later to wait for him.

I had a bunch of questions which he was very nice and extremely helpful in answering.  We had a good talk and I got a lot of great advice before he sent me on my way with a map of college and told me to explore all I wanted (as if I needed encouragement ).  He also said he was looking forward to seeing my application, which made me happy, even though I’m sure he says that to everyone.

It wasn’t until later when I took a better look at the business card he gave me that I realized I had been speaking to the DIRECTOR of admissions, which was pretty dang cool.

I left the office and headed to find the Moot Courtroom that was marked on the map.  I read that first year students did this moot court class where they eventually did a competition at the end and I really wanted to see where that was held.  A really nice professor helped me out by pointing me in the right direction when I was looking lost and it was SUPER cool when I got to go in and stand at the podium and pretend I was giving an argument

I also got to look at some of the classrooms, which were all really bright and AWESOME.  I noticed they each had microphones at the students’ seats so that when you get put on the spot EVERYONE can hear your answer, too, which’ll be nerve wracking until I get used to it.  Of course, I had to go to the law library as well which was enclosed in the building itself and was super cool as well.  Needless to say, I am crossinge every finger I have hoping I get into this place.

I also stopped by the environmental college again (a short walk from the law school) and though all the counselors were at a meeting, I did get to talk to a SUPER nice assistant who gave me every piece of awesome information they had on the program I’m interested in.  I’m also ridiculously excited for THAT aspect as well

Eventually, though, we needed to head on to Williamsburg and we did so (I missed about 2 hours of the drive, though, because I completely spaced reading all my Duke material ).  We actually got started around the time we figured we would, but that meant we got to Williamsburg a little too late for all the really great re-enactment stuff.  I did get to hang out with one of the founding fathers, though

We got lots more pictures, though, which will eventually be posted at takingpictures.wordpress.com and it was really neat to walk around and see all the old buildings and the various people in costumes.  I was still hyped from Duke, but when we finally got to the hotel, walking around Williamsburg had zonked me and I hit the sack.