giving

To give someone a gift and expect anything in return, even a 'thank you', is not truly giving. At best, it is exchanging; at worst, it's bartering.

One must always say 'thank you' when receiving a gift, no matter what it is. The gift is in the giving.

Dag Hammarskjold

Rants in the Void

Our incurable instinct to acquire - to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word - provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience….We pick the flower. We press body against body - bringing to naught that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessible to physical touch.” - Dag Hammarskjold

Palin's Enemies List: Lashes Out At The Media, Bloggers, And SNL Writers

During the months that she served as the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin had what could best be described as an acrimonious relationship with the press. Thrust into the national spotlight from relative political obscurity, the former Alaska Governor saw her professional record and personal story come under a powerful microscope. And as controversy was exposed and questions were raised, the animosity that Palin felt for the fourth estate became nearly all-consuming.

In her upcoming book, "Going Rogue," the former governor spends ample time airing her grievances with the way she was and continues to be treated by the media. The cast of characters she disparages range from the famous to the obscure, the national to the local - all of whom are accused of either peddling scandal or playing out political vendettas.

At one point in the book, Palin recalls ridiculing Hillary Clinton for complaining about her treatment in the press. "I wasn't really accusing her of whining," Palin writes. "Still, before criticizing her on this point, I should have walked a mile in her shoes. I can see now that she had every right to call the media on biased treatment that ended up affecting her candidacy. In fact, I should have applauded her because she was right..."

The animosity wasn't always there, as Palin writes. As governor of Alaska she had what she described as a "fine relationship" with the media - even offering up her personal cell phone number to local reporters. But a move from the statehouse to the campaign trail brought with it more critical coverage and a much larger pool or reporters. From the onset, things were rocky.

Palin writes with disgust that the "tone some reporters (and many bloggers) seemed to want to set was one of 'hypocrisy.'" Calling those who questioned the circumstances of her daughter's pregnancy "Trig truthers," she scoffs at the bloggers who, if they "weren't busy pushing fairy tales, would post threatening stories about any number of looming scandals that would drive me out of office."

Mostly, she recoils at the fourth estate's supposed sanctimoniousness. "I was amazed at how many liberal pundits seemed floored by a pregnant teenager," she writes, "as if overnight they'd all snuck out and had traditional-values transplants."

From there, Palin accuses various outlets, including the Huffington Post, of mischaracterizing her appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, in which she called the war in Iraq "a task from God."

She even bemoans the writers at Saturday Night Live for having bad taste.

"I looked at the script," she writes of the preparation for her appearance on the show. "It wasn't all that funny. SNL writers had taken the campaign's 'Drill, baby, drill' mantra and turned it into a risqué double entendre about Todd and me. I thought, Nah. C'mon, New York talent, we can do better than that."

The toughest words, in the end, are saved for Katie Couric, the CBS anchor whose interviews with Palin became a major embarrassment for the McCain campaign. As Palin writes:

"Though Katie edited out substantive answers, she dutifully kept in the moments where I wore my annoyance on my sleeve.... There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about."

[snip]

"But Katie wasn't interested in discussing these issues. And when I did, she didn't air them. Instead, when I tried to describe frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace, CBS researched the Russian leader's actual flight over the United States and called my statement inaccurate. And when I referenced Alaska's narrow maritime border to describe our close proximity to other nations, CBS reported that the Coast Guard monitored the border and not the governor."

[snip]

"But Katie's purpose - shared by most media types - seemed to be to frame a 'gotcha' moment. And it worked. Instead of my scoring points for John McCain, I knew that I had let the team down."

[snip]

"I don't think she really wanted to hear my answer because she interrupted me five times as I tried to give it. The badgering had begun. This is really annoying me, I thought. Then she asked me about abortion and the morning-after pill twelve times. Twelve different times."

[snip]

"I answered as graciously and as patiently as I could. Each time, I reiterated my pro-life, pro-woman, pro-adoption position. But no matter how many ways I tried to say it, Katie responded by asking her question again in a slightly different way. I began to feel like I was in the movie Groundhog Day."

Palin's anger towards Couric became so consuming that even when recounting a wholly different campaign controversy -- the $150,000 in clothes purchased for her by the RNC -- she felt compelled to go back and take a swipe at the CBS anchor.

Katie Couric even weighed in on the trumped-up 'controversy,' writing: 'There aren't a lot of Joe Six-packs out there who can drop six figures on a new wardrobe, so Gov. Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree seems excessive to some people."


This is especially ironic coming from Katie, whose own stylists, the B Team was told, was part of the team the campaign hired to do the convention shopping before I even arrived.

The end of the campaign did not bring with it an end to the frosty relationship between Palin and the press. There was, for example, the interview she did with the local television station KTUU for a routine Thanksgiving Day story

The station, Palin writes in her book, "set up an odd camera angle to capture turkeys being decapitated behind me... The photographer couldn't post it to the Web fast enough. The video became an instant YouTube hit."

"Now, I'd be the first person to tell you where your Thanksgiving meal comes from," Palin adds. But this was a deliberate move to make some noise."

Then there was the coverage of the various ethics complaints filed against her. Palin writes of reporters from the "lower 48" essentially stalking her daughter Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School. She claims journalists were camping out "at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home," and "incessantly call[ing] and stop[ping] by my parents' and siblings' and in-laws' homes and businesses."

The relationship, of course, is a two-way street. And to this day, the former Alaska Governor has not given a public news conference since being tapped as the vice presidential candidate. Palin, in "Going Rogue," proclaims that it was McCain campaign operatives who restricted her availability. "It got so bad," she writes, "that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto's producer."

But, even then, the disdain she felt for the media -- whose coverage she described as "pathetic and chilling" -- was entirely obsessive.

"Perhaps the national press outlets just don't have the resources anymore to devote to balanced coverage," she writes at one point. "Perhaps they've all just given up on themselves, so we've given up on them, too, except to treat their shoddy reporting like a car crash -- sometimes you just have to look."


Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Emilie Autumn

dancing leaves

the deep forest green
leaves dancing with the raindrops
a soft grey misty light
dripping through my thoughts

the trees and I, in the rain
getting wet together
we are each a child of god
no one of us the better

a gentle breeze sighs through the trees
my mind is rested, clear and bright
I open up before my lord
small and humble in her sight

here within this hazy dew
boundaries tend to blur
the eye and I not seeing straight
but the murmur of the birds

we shall fly where chaos reigns
in harmony and light
where the universe is not and is
and all is simply right

beyond reason's mere feeble grasp
where insane and gifted play
where past and future, memory and dream
lie pregnant within the day

the stars look down bemused
in cold, eternal death
whilst we dance in shadows cast
by the light of our eternal quest

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Marcia Angell, M.D.: Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.

Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)

Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.

If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?

First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.

But, you say, the Congressional Budget Office has said the House bill will be a little better than budget-neutral over ten years. That may be, although the assumptions are arguable. Note, though, that the CBO is not concerned with total health costs, only with costs to the government. And it is particularly concerned with Medicare, the biggest contributor to federal deficits. The House bill would take money out of Medicare, and divert it to the private sector and, to some extent, to Medicaid. The remaining costs of the legislation would be paid for by taxes on the wealthy. But although the bill might pay for itself, it does nothing to solve the problem of runaway inflation in the system as a whole. It's a shell game in which money is moved from one part of our fragmented system to another.

Here is my program for real reform:

Recommendation #1: Drop the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. This should be an expansion of traditional Medicare, not a new program. Gradually, over several years, drop the age decade by decade, until everyone is covered by Medicare. Costs: Obviously, this would increase Medicare costs, but it would help decrease costs to the health system as a whole, because Medicare is so much more efficient (overhead of about 3% vs. 20% for private insurance). And it's a better program, because it ensures that everyone has access to a uniform package of benefits.

Recommendation #2: Increase Medicare fees for primary care doctors and reduce them for procedure-oriented specialists. Specialists such as cardiologists and gastroenterologists are now excessively rewarded for doing tests and procedures, many of which, in the opinion of experts, are not medically indicated. Not surprisingly, we have too many specialists, and they perform too many tests and procedures. Costs: This would greatly reduce costs to Medicare, and the reform would almost certainly be adopted throughout the wider health system.

Recommendation #3: Medicare should monitor doctors' practice patterns for evidence of excess, and gradually reduce fees of doctors who habitually order significantly more tests and procedures than the average for the specialty. Costs: Again, this would greatly reduce costs, and probably be widely adopted.

Recommendation #4: Provide generous subsidies to medical students entering primary care, with higher subsidies for those who practice in underserved areas of the country for at least two years. Costs: This initial, rather modest investment in ending our shortage of primary care doctors would have long-term benefits, in terms of both costs and quality of care.

Recommendation #5: Repeal the provision of the Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. (The House bill calls for this.) That prohibition has been a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For negotiations to be meaningful, there must be a list (formulary) of drugs deemed cost-effective. This is how the Veterans Affairs System obtains some of the lowest drug prices of any insurer in the country. Costs: If Medicare paid the same prices as the Veterans Affairs System, its expenditures on brand-name drugs would be a small fraction of what they are now.

Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.

Seven Swans Cover by Sufjan Stevens (Kelsey)