Reading HuffPost: How Any Liberal and/or Gay Can Get Very Disheartened

I mentioned in an earlier posting that I have been spending time reading articles on AOL/HuffPost, reading other readers' comments, writing my own comments and replying to other comments.

I think I spend too much time doing this and I am resolving to stop doing it, not because of the time I'm spending but because it's too discouraging to read what other people think and say.

For one thing, there are so many conservatives who want to bash Obama and the "libs" (or, one time, "libbs"). They demonstrate the stereotypes and animosity they hold. Of course they are entitled to their opinion, and I must recognize that there are people out there—and even a great many people—who do not or would not agree with some of my ideas. But it's looking like America is getting to be very polarized; there could almost be another civil war, I sometimes think.

Secondly, any time there is an article relating in any way to homosexuality (and HuffPost has a subsection called "Gay Voices"), all the homophobes come out of the woodwork. They are quick to state their opinion that homosexuality is wrong, it's immoral, it's a sin (their Bible tells them that). One woman said thinking about it "makes her skin crawl."

It's a disease, a disorder, it's sick, it's unnatural, it's evil. We've heard all this before. We've been hearing it for many years. And all this anti-gay prejudice is one reason why being gay is still difficult (even though, supposedly, things have gotten better in the last 50 years), and why there is a much higher rate of suicide among gay teens than for non-gay young people in the same age group.

And people will chime in with their disbelief about climate change and their antipathy to illegal immigrants (as I said elsewhere, this usually boils down to "we hate Mexicans").

All in all, I see so much bigotry, ignorance, close-mindedness, belief in misconceptions and discredited ideas. (It is a sad characteristic of human beings that they are capable of believing things that are not so.) And, as I have said before, the rhetoric of the Right often includes asserting things which they even know to be incorrect. As an example, a Right-wing anti-abortion group was actually slapped with a lawsuit for incorrectly asserting that "Obamacare" (as they delight in calling it) includes taxpayer funding of abortion.

I wrote in another blog posting about my overall, philosophical view of humanity and its prospects. I think I have become more pessimistic: I don't think we're much further along than the days when people who were nonconforming or in some way odd were burned as witches.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The New Health Care Bill

A survey finds that most Americans don't understand the new health care reform bill (which should be called the health insurance reform bill). That's not surprising, since the bill is supposed to be some 2,000 pages.

So many people opposed the bill, presumably while not understanding it. Hardly anyone knows how the bill will affect him or her (which seems to be people's main concern). So maybe they are just fearing the worst (again, as I stated or implied in earlier postings, I think people have been stirred up to believe that passage of the bill would mean the worst).

For many people, the new bill will be a good thing. How can you think that prohibiting health insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions is anything but good thing?--unless you are a health insurance company, and most of us are not.

It also removes the lifetime cap, which had meant that some people with serious illnesses that required long courses of treatment or long hospitalizations could exhaust their benefits, and then be on their own for paying all their medical costs. How can that be anything but a good thing?

And more people—young people who have not yet gotten their first job, people changing jobs—will have or keep their insurance. How can that be anything but a good thing?

I will tell you who has a right to not like the bill—besides the insurance companies. No, not even small businesses, because they will receive tax credits for offering health insurance to their employees. It's the wealthy, who will now pay a tax on their investments, and who will pay more Medicare tax.

And—I hope this does not surprise anyone—the Republican party is the party that looks out for the interests of the wealthy, and always tries to help them hold on to their money. That is why the Republicans have so strenuously opposed health care reform.

But the little guy needs to realize that this is a good thing for him (or her).

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Protests Against Health Care Reform: Misguided?

We are seeing so many lists, upon entering a new year and a new decade: the bests and worsts of the year and of the decade recently ended.

I just saw a list of the ten dumbest things said in 2009. One was a protest sign reading "Government hands off my Medicare." Okay, if you need a second to see what is wrong with that, it's that Medicare is a government program.

Do we presume the person holding that sign didn't know that? That depends on how dumb you are prepared to believe people are. Maybe, to be charitable, the person just meant, "I like my Medicare as it is, so I hope that health-care reform laws won't do anything to change Medicare for the worse." (See, I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt. And slogans, whether chanted or on signs, are always brief and oversimplify the issues.)

In either event--whether this was actually pretty mindless, or a reasonable concern--as I've said before, special interests, who don't want changes that would benefit the majority if it might adversely impact them, are behind these demonstrations, are recruiting the "teabaggers"--people who might be not thinking very carefully or are misinformed--and using them as their dupes. If ordinary people are afraid of changes coming to health care, it may be because they are afraid of change or because they have been falsely led to believe that the changes will be bad--for instance, Sarah Palin wrongly saying that there would be "death panels."

But don't get me started on Sarah Palin.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Interesting Comments from Laura Bush

The conservatives, as the media acknowledge, have been vocally stating their opposition to Obama's speech to school children. They claim it's "indoctrination." When Ronald Reagan did the same thing, or George H.W. Bush, were they crying out about "indoctrination"? I don't remember hearing any such thing, and I'd wager I'm not just forgetting.

And the Republicans marshalled people to turn out at the town meetings on health care reform and be very vocal and literally yell and scream and shout down the speakers.

And now we have the "tea parties," more of the same thing. I'd like to know who is organizing and funding these things. I doubt that they are really grass-roots or spontaneous upwellings of popular sentiment.

Evidently in a recent interview with CNN, former First Lady Laura Bush has acknowledged how partisan and polarized the country is getting. She said her husband did not succeed in "reaching across the aisle" in Congress as he had been able to do as governor of Texas; he did not expect national politics to be different from Texas politics. Maybe back in Texas he didn't have the same cronies doing the same kind of dirty work as in Washington (I won't mention any names but I've already blogged about a former Vice President--and then there was Rove).

Mrs. Bush says that the reason for all this shrillness, stridency, partisanship, and polarization is because we now have more congressmen from energetically liberal or energetically conservative (my word, not hers) districts. I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting. My own idea would have been that the Republicans are just trying to stir things up with battle cries of "socialism" and "socialized medicine" because they are already preparing for the 2012 elections.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein

Cheney and Palin Redux

I have previously written about Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. Unfortunately, both are still in the news. They will not lower their profile, shut up, or go away as I have hoped they would.

The latest on Cheney is that he was being interviewed on TV. The interviewer said that 73 percent of Americans, according to a poll, have said that they have to question whether the initial decision to invade Iraq was worth the cost to date in American lives. Cheney paused a moment, gave a dismissive gesture—I'd have to see it again to see if it warrants being called a shrug—and said, "So what?" In other words, We are the Emperor, we make the decisions and don't have to give a damn about what the people think.

And Sarah Palin has distorted what is in the health-care reform bill when she claims it includes a provision for a "death panel" that would decide when to pull the plug on the terminally ill and elderly.

This is a very serious distortion, a misreading of what the bill says. A commentator on MSNBC said he'd call that intellectual dishonesty, except that he does not want to use the word "intellectual" in the same sentence as the name of Palin.

Ms. Palin quoted a Washington Post columnist to support what she claims. If she had quoted just one more sentence—that is, the sentence following the quote—she would have included words that attack and discredit her.

On the former point, we can't be sure whether her misreading of the health-care reform bill was deliberate or simply lack of understanding it properly. I'm willing, rather than accusing her of malice, to assume it's her lack of adequate comprehension of what she was reading. However, when she reads and quotes the Washington Post, and goes no further in quoting than suits her—that is deliberately taking what she quotes out of context, and there's no mistaking intention there.

I see now (news a little bit more recent) that Obama has said she's wrong, but she refuses to back down. Why, oh why, can't everyone see her for the clown that she is?

So, even though I'm pretty sure my saying this yet again will do no good: Palin, Chaney, just shut up. Go away. I am sooo sick of you both.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein