Just Because...I Still Love Hillary

Obamacare Coverage

A few words from the President which distills in a few minutes just why the Affordable Care Act is so important.

Also, Mano Singham gives an excellent brief review  of some of the reasons why continuing to put up with the current "system" makes no sense at all for the vast majority of Americans.

NPR reports that many doctors welcome the Supreme Court ruling that upholds Obamacare,  but, (as expected), they are also reporting that the Roberts grenade - calling the Healthcare provisions a "tax" - will indeed be deployed by Republicans seeking to use the ACA as a weapon against the president and Democratic candidates in their election campaigns.

Memo to Republicans:  That strategy will be a loser. People like and want affordable healthcare!

Speaking of losing strategies, Mitt Romney continues to campaign on the platform that he will repeal Obamacare on Day 1 if he wins the presidential election. No coherent explanation of how this stance squares with his confused stance regarding the embarrassing reality of his own Massachusetts healthcare law - aka Romneycare. Romney has had trouble striking just the right note of criticism for Obamacare without slamming his own effort at better healthcare in Massachusetts (which, incidentally, is highly popular in Massachusetts - people like affordable healthcare!). Romney wants to cash in on the success in Massachusetts while essentially saying that what was brilliant when he did it suddenly morphs into a disaster when President Obama delivers it for the country.

Hmmm. No wonder Mitt Romney is in difficulties. Good is bad, right is wrong, justice is injustice...oh wait. Romney is a religious man. He ought to be well-used to this sort of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps he won't have such a devil of a time with this after all!


Updated to add: This alternet article, Why Justice Roberts' Opinion Could Set Alarming Precedents, by Steven Rosenfeld fleshes out the reasons behind that uneasy feeling many people had yesterday when it was apparent that Chief Justice Roberts - a deeply conservative Bush appointee - had an ulterior motive for siding with the more progressive end of the Judicial bench. The tax/election red meat is only the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. But, of course.


Also, it is always a good time to provide a link to PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program).

The Affordable Healthcare Act Stands!

The news is good:  The Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Healthcare Act in its entirety.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision for the majority, affirming the provisions for the act, including the individual health insurance mandate.

Roberts did manage to throw one big, meaty bone to the Republicans:

"The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command. The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax," Roberts said in his opinion. (emphasis mine).

Look for a quick turnaround in Republican campaign strategy now as they raise the spectre of new taxation.  This will no doubt inflame the teavangelicals and the rabid fringe (Bachman, et al). Supporters of healthcare reform need to get to work immediately to counter the inevitable lies and fear tactics leading up to the November election.

But for today, let us all celebrate the fact that for the second time in recent memory, the Supreme Court has done (mostly) the right thing:  The Affordable Healthcare Act has been ruled constitutional.

Here is a brief look at what that means to Americans as individuals and for businesses.

NPR coverage.

New York Times.

I'm still on the road, but will pull together as much information as I can, and will post links to sources and analysis.

Tuesday Tonics - Hank Fox and Al Stefanelli

Still out of town, but I had to post briefly to link to two excellent FTB posts.

Hank Fox responded with his usual amazing clarity of thought and spare, straightforward writing to Ian Cromwell's call for essays elaborating on the title "Because I am an atheist". As usual, Hank has read my mind.

This ought to be passed around the blogosphere and hopefully out into other venues of mass communication. Especially this:

"…I understand the incredible human tragedy that religion represents.

Across millennia during which “hope” was measured against the willingness of an unknowable God to fix problems or provide a future of abundance for people, rather than the capabilities of hard-working, educated, compassionate humans, we Earthlings have continued to waste our vast potential, losing out on near-infinite opportunities. During that time, huge amounts of effort and wealth have been bent toward pleasing this or that capricious god, or his supposed Earthly representatives, stealing away the value of human endeavor in order to build castles of worship, create artworks of fear-driven piety, and produce – rather than textbooks for learning – mere holy books, the printed tools for brainwashing billions of hapless victims.

Through those hundreds and hundreds of years, how many have starved, or died, or lived in pain and fear and enforced ignorance while fat priests sat in literal castles, built on the backs of their enslaved fellow men? Because I’m an atheist, I can despise the malignant, manipulative human spiders who spin and maintain those enslaving webs of belief."  Hank Fox, Blue Collar Atheist.

Also this week. Al Stefanelli outdid himself with an amazing and disturbing post about the Christian apologist William Lane Craig, whose veneer of academic credentials hides a pernicious and destructive determination to obfuscate and confuse as many people as possible. Al's takedown of this notorious liar is his usual epic and well-written work.  It is well worth not only reading, but bookmarking, quoting and sending onward.

A sample:

"In case you don’t know, William Lane Craig is an oft-trundled-out source of Christian apology because he has a lot of books out with fancy titles and is a pseudo-academic. As a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of  Theology in La Mirada, California, Dr. Craig spends a fair amount of time on the lecture and debate circuit, performing feats of mental gymnastics in an effort to explain some of the contradictory principles and answer some ”tough questions” that inevitably come up when one chooses to live their life according to a world view that includes magic, unicorns, giant demigods having sex with human women, wizardry, sorcery, fire-breathing half dragon-half roosters, Satyrs, human birds, bones coming up out of the ground and dancing around, UFOs, dancing and talking animals, flying people, teleportation and all the other batshittery that is in the bible." Al Stefanelli, A Voice of Reason.

Read!  Pass it on!  The internet is the last freethought medium - let's use it to save humanity.

Isn't That Just Ducky!

I am at the beach! I like the beach! I like to play at the beach!

Run, run, run, run run run runrunrunrunrunrunrunrun!!!

Oh! Hello there! Do you want to play? Hello?

Do you want to play? Let's play? Run, run run, circle, runrunrun.

Why you not play? OK, good-bye! Run run run run run runrunrunrun!

I am at the beach! I like the beach!

Isn't that just Ducky!

Now For Something Completely Different

From Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life",  The Galaxy Song!




The Galaxy Song

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Letting Go of God - Part 5

Biblical Courtship: Just Like Taliban Courtship, Only Better!

Libby Ann is the blogger who emerged from the Quiverfull movement somehow with her self-esteem intact and a sense of her own full worth as a human being somehow unvanquished. In her current series of posts at Love, Joy, Feminism she discusses the courtship rituals in the Quiverfull movement, particularly as they affect girls.

Weeping girl prostrates herself on altar, praying
not to lead men astray by her very existence.

Read Libby Ann's post about Christian courtship. The pervasive conviction about the necessity for policing female "purity", the enthusiastic acceptance of authority of a father and later the husband over daughters, and the belief that, without male authority figures' constant vigilance young women will descend into moral (sexual) disarray is almost indistinguishable from the attitudes of fundamentalist non-Christian religious groups in the middle east, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The acceptance among young women that this controlling behaviour is "protection" is chillingly similar to the ideas in which women in the most oppressive societies on the planet also are inculcated, through fear, oppressive social policies and even legal systems based upon misogynist "holy books".

Although the Quiverfull sect of Christianity is extreme in many ways, their philosophy around courtship and marriage  mirrors the resurgent religious fundamentalism in several other Christian sects. Purity ceremonies, at which adolescent girls are pledged to remain virgins until marriage (under the watchful gaze of their fathers or nearest adult male relative) have become ubiquitous in the evangelical Christian communities which have exploded throughout the USA.

With the current rash of laws put forward by conservative Christians limiting women's rights to bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom and equal human rights, it is impossible to ignore these similarities between the professed desires of the rising fundamentalist Christians in this country and those of their spiritual brethren among the fundamentalist religionists of other regions of the world.

In their contempt for and desire to control women, fundamentalist Christians have clearly indicated what the future USA of their dreams would be like should they succeed in forcing the country into Biblical theocracy.

Are we prepared for the consequences if we continue to continue to look the other way?  Will Christian moderates continue to pretend that the fundamentalist version of their cherished religion is different from fundamentalism elsewhere? How long will we continue to kid ourselves that "it can't happen here"?

The Duggars, famous TV Quiverfull family

Letting Go of God - Part 4

Letting Go of God - Part 3