Cheryl Katz

Maybe I’ll just go to sleep.

City Brights: Rich Lieberman : Hello ‘Michael Jackson news’–goodbye ‘Health-care debate.

I saw this link and just thought, hmm, what does ‘medical homicide‘ have to do with our health care system? I don’t know how the prescription drug abuse problem factors in to a national health care debate, but I think it should.

I think it’s a sign of how jacked the American relationship is with health care that Jackson died due to a prescription obtained from and administered by a physician, but no one sees it as related to health care at all.  (Okay, maybe in this case it should be called “health manipulation.”)

We have a system where the very rich can pay for custom medical requests, to the point where celebrities die every so often from misuse of “legally” obtained prescription drugs.  And on the opposite end of the earnings spectrum, people who can’t afford health care at all.  Health care vs. Money, a struggle that’s killing patients at every pay scale.

I truly believe that just because one has a medical license, is paid and follows technically correct procedure for administering drugs doesn’t mean it’s right, ethical or legal to do so.  Doctors have an ethical and legal responsibility to protect the lives of their patients, and I think this includes even when they are paid highly to fill patient orders.  If I ask for a drug just because I saw a cute ad on TV, I expect my doctor to advise me of potential risks and to refuse my request if it puts my life in danger.  Call me crazy.

No wait, call it the Hippocratic oath.

Michael Jackson died.  You may have heard.

Aside from initial nostalgia for the defining cultural presence of my childhood, the liking of whom decided one’s coolness in the first through third grades, this is not life-changing news.

What is significant is the self-awareness I discover upon reflection.  In the past few days I’ve become pretty emotional, because the way I see people reacting to the death of Michael Jackson isn’t something I like.  It’s bringing out some of the uglier instincts of humans, and I don’t like seeing this in people I like and people I love.  (Or myself, but I’ll get to that below.)

So when someone wonders aloud how we can make this enormous hoopla mourning a, yeah, brilliant musician and showman who was more importantly a child molester, I get upset.  I’m not upset because of the facts of the situation, necessarily, because neither I nor anyone I know was there to tell me what happened to any of the kids whose families sued MJ for alleged child abuse.

But I can say that I’m human, and would hate to know that when I die what will overshadow any positive legacy I leave is gossip and mudslinging about my mistakes, when gossip and mudslinging do not change the past.

It’s smart to take the Michael Jackson cases and say to oneself, how can I use this to improve my life?  Can I make sure my kids are safe and with trustworthy adults?  Absolutely.

Does it change anything to trash Michael Jackson as a child molester?  Does it make any kids anywhere safer to say that Michael Jackson’s musical legacy is a pittance compared to the charges leveled against him?  Absolutely not.

Incidentally, at the time that these thoughts were arising in my head, I had been reading The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs.  In it, he attempts to be a complete literalist in following the laws of the bible, both the Hebrew and Christian texts.  Having already been troubled by the gossip surrounding Michael Jackson’s passing (and jokes even I had made at his expense throughout adolescence which I regret) I was intensely interested in the day he spent reflecting on the many prohibitions against gossip which occur in the bible.  He specifically mentions Psalms 34:13, “Keep your tongue from evil,” Ephesians 4:29, and the Talmud, but there are others even within the bible itself.

He repeatedly struggles to keep from saying anything negative about others, and it made me aware of how much humor is made at the expense of others.  How much time we spend hashing out the faults of others for no purpose other than to entertain.  (I have enough faults of my own, why do I need to expound on the failings of other people?)

Of course, my own reaction to others’ gossip, especially on the topic of Michael Jackson, has been problematic.  I haven’t been shy about sharing my opinions of gossipers, and in this regard I’m just as bad as they are.

I’m reminded of the Denis Leary song, “I’m An Asshole.”  Gossiping about the unchangeable past is probably behaviour we all could all stand to excise from our daily habits.  In my quest for “fairness” or something, my outing the gossipers is just as bad.

If I don’t have something nice to say, next time I just won’t say anything.

And maybe I’ll go read some world news headlines, for a little practical grounding.

Obviously, the protests over Iran’s recent election fiasco are everywhere in the news and media lately, and especially Twitter.

I think about Iran all the time, all the people who are just like me, wanting a voice in their government, fighting with their very lives for their votes to be counted legitimately.  Rights that we take for granted in the United States are on the “negotiation” (such as it is) table in Iran.

I have been thinking about them a lot, and following progress on Twitter, supporting my brother-in-law’s efforts to set up proxy servers, and praying for the protesters.  But I haven’t been writing because, unlike in all my personal reflections, I absolutely don’t know what to say.  I don’t want to fill this space with clichés.

(If you’re interested in helping out with our proxy server efforts, let me know.  I’ll email you what limited information I have so far.  Rest assured your $10 or $20, or whatever you could afford to offer, would go a very long way.)

BBC NEWS | Americas | 106-year-old voter chooses Obama.

This is as close as we’ll get to a confirmation of the divine endorsement Obama (“the One”) has seemed to have.

OK, well actually it just made me smile.  Yay voting!  (Especially for Obama.)

…at the very least, I want to know what he’s saying.

Op-Ed Contributor – Buy American. I Am. – NYTimes.com.

Last night Ben and I watched clips of Senators Obama and McCain roasting each other at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.  Both of them were absolutely hilarious, but to be perfectly honest, McCain’s was funnier.  Maybe he’s just had more experience working in comedy, maybe he’s just a funnier guy (perhaps his whole calamity campaign was really a big misunderstood joke?)

What struck me about McCain’s roast was how genuine and good natured it seemed.  It was a tone I haven’t seen in his campaign, but wish I had.  He also spoke honestly and non-comedically about the accomplishments of Obama, a gesture that was so poignant that it made the comedic parts seem even funnier.  It was a nod to the very real possibility that he will lose, and a very graceful move.

It reminded me of the John McCain who got eaten by the Bush-Rove machine in 2000.  It gave me a glimpse of what people liked about the (more) moderate, decent-seeming guy who ran an honest campaign and got his ass handed to him by a dirty smear campaign.  And if we’d seen more grace like that in his campaign (or a different running mate), perhaps he wouldn’t be lagging so soundly in the polls right now.

But instead he ran a campaign that resorted really early in the game to tactics like this:

TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Latest McCain Robocall Alleges That Obama Denied Babies Medical Care.

It’s TPM, so clearly there’s a leftish bias behind the reporting, but they have audio of the call and it is appalling.  Even after the “campaign reboot” it’s the same old BS, a twisting of facts in attempt to smear Obama.

It doesn’t surprise me, exactly, but the juxtaposition of the two McCains is just really disturbing.

Oh well; on to Election Day!

Obama is leading in every national poll now by at least 8%.  FiveThirtyEight.com has his chance of victory at over 95%. I think many signs look optimistic for an Obama victory on November 4 (my birthday!  Guess what I would like for my birthday….)

So why am I (still) afraid to feel hopeful about this year’s presidential election?

Hate speech has become a scary but real part of the McCain-Palin rallies.  McCain made one reserved effort to set his supporters straight about Obama, saying he was “not someone to be afraid of as President.”  But supporters are still yelling, “Kill him!” at Palin speeches, and the incidents go unrebuked.

Race is clearly still a factor in this campaign.  I thought we had effectively moved on from it after the whole Reverend Wright saga of the summer, but it has come back, and uglier than ever.

I know that the people yelling slurs – hell, the people who attend rallies at all, especially to see Sarah Palin – are wingnuts who are coming out to see someone with views as extreme as their own.  Somehow, this doesn’t help me feel more settled about the whole thing.

I came across this idea of the Bradley Effect.  It hadn’t occurred to me, and yet makes some sense, that polls might not indicate the way people will actually vote, when race is a factor in a campaign, because who would want to admit out loud to a pollster that they are racist?  I really think that far more people have racist thoughts than are willing to admit to them – which in a sense is good; it’s good to have a filter on racist behaviour!  And yet, not so much at the polls.  However, a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post questions whether the Bradley Effect ever really existed at all.

Whether or not it is a real factor, it certainly does seem plausible.  People can be scary and unreasonable about issues like race.  And I am so scared that if enough people are lying, all the polls could be reversed.

I read a good piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s hard sell to working class white people.  It goes to show how far removed even I am from a working-class mentality that it would never occur to me to be suspicious of Barack Obama’s pledged policies because they seemed too good to be true.  The first case study featured is a woman who works two jobs to support herself and her nieces, for whom she is the primary caretaker.  She specifically was suspicious of his tax plan, saying that the $250,000 threshold for the higher tax rate seemed like “someone who had won the lottery” and that she thought eventually that threshold would be lowered.

At another section of the article, Packer quotes a lifelong Democrat and former Hillary supporter as saying, “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

I have never understood racism.  I wasn’t raised in a bubble, in a fantasy world with no biases, but I was raised to treat people with basic respect.  So I not only can’t fathom not wanting to vote for a qualified candidate who happens to be black, but I can’t fathom extending my fear to the possibility that he might seek retribution for previous generations’ grievances on behalf of an entire demographic of our country.

We don’t know anything for absolutely sure yet, I think, about the state of hatred in this country.  I want to believe, and I hope, that America is a country that can elect a black man to be President.  I’m a little petrified about what happens if we aren’t ready, and it’s McCain-Palin sworn in on 1-21-09.

So here’s hoping that the white working class can cast off any remaining doubts, if not that Obama is the perfect solution, then that he is by far more on their side than McCain is.  And here’s hoping that the polls outstandingly in Obama’s favor speak for real progress in American “race” relations.  (“Race” because… we are one human race.)

Come on, America – let’s do this one right.

I know I’m a card-carrying Liberal with a capital L and all that jazz, but when I try to keep up with top stories by using Digg’s politics page and Reddit, it really irks me that all the political stories appear to be left-leaning.

Specifically, I’m tired of weeding through piles of Huffington Post articles, which are generally opinion pieces posted as news.  I like my slanted liberal feeds as much as the next leftie, but for the love I would actually like to know how conservatives view the news as well.  (There has to be something out there besides Fox News.)

Is this because Internet users tend to lean left, and therefore to be expected of any user-driven content engine?

Where do you go when you want either balanced, or biased in a right-leaning way, news?

$700 billion…  and it’s not working….

I haven’t posted since the markets went to hell because, truthfully, I don’t really understand what is happening.  I understand only in basic basic terms, but I can’t take an 18% stock market crash and turn it into information about how my experience or anyone’s experience feels the impact.  Perhaps it’s too soon for the real effects to get to the individual level.

So, global economic crisis.  John McCain thinks more deregulation and more oversight are the correct response to this.  Obama thinks oversight is a good response.  I agree with Obama, but only to the extent that I really understand what’s going on.  Which is not much.  It seems that there should be checks in place to make sure that risk is being appropriately analyzed before banks do major things – but you’d think that the free market would actually encourage such a thing. It seems like any business enterprise would be well served to research its transactions, examine the credit of loan applicants, check out the security of the mountains of loans it wants to buy, BEFORE entering into these transactions.  Call me crazy.

Did government intervention really bring huge financial institutions to give risky loans to risky borrowers without concern for the risks involved?  And even if the government pushed for loans to be more widely and riskily available to credit-unworthy applicants, then did government make banks buy packages of risky loans from other lenders without fully examining the risks?  I don’t think so, but I really don’t know for sure.

It seems to me the answer is reasonable but not excessive government oversight of business?  My husband asks me, where is the line?  And that’s a good question.  I’ve been getting twisted and feeling ill trying to figure out how to answer that very question.  It seems like regulatory conditions are set as a reaction to past events, not in any kind of forward-looking way.  It also does seem like in some ways, regulations can be harmful because they allow businesses to stop thinking about what is safe, or what is best for consumers and instead to focus on what they CAN do within the scope of regulation.

*sigh*  I’m getting a headache and upset just trying to talk about this.  I have no vocabulary for economics.

It occurred to me, what if voting for Obama IS the wrong answer for the economy?  I don’t know, but I don’t think this is the case.  It’s possible that he will attempt to implement too much regulation, but this seems like a better answer than McCain’s “deregulate!” response.

Take the economy out of the picture (this takes a big imagination, but anyway…) and of course I’ll vote for Obama.  (This is not seriously in question, but the subject of the economy is so abstract for me that I had to examine the possibility that Obama might not have the answer.)  I agree with most of Obama’s policies, and on the one area I really don’t understand, I think his solution sounds more reasonable.  So… I rest on my previous decision.

And that’s about all I can write on the subject.  I will now return to my previous state of confused silence.  Good day!

If John McCain really knows how to get Osama bin Laden, then why doesn’t he share this info with the people who can go do it RIGHT NOW?

“Country First” is some BS when you have this great and valuable information and will only share it if and when elected.

That is all.