Pardon me, I’d like to make a couple points about domestic political current events for a moment, then I’ll stop. It’s not what this blog’s about, but I feel I need to speak about something.

The honorable, admirable, and astute John Cole posted a warning about the Health Care Reform bill working its way through the legislative lower intestine we call The Senate:

So it should be clear. If you are thinking that you can kill this bill and come back with a better one, you are fooling yourself. It is this, or it is nothing for decades, and that is why folks like Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden and other folks are sucking it up and still supporting the bill.

Okay, so the message is clear, it’s this or nothing. Now, I certainly understand that nothing is bad news. We’re in dire straits here as far as health care in America goes. But, I’m sorry, it doesn’t mean that I automatically have to support this, whatever this is.

And here’s the thing about what’s left of this: they’ve taken out any chance of a public option or expanding Medicare, but they’ve left in the mandate, the part that says that I’m legally obligated to purchase health insurance. It’s not that I don’t understand the concept of risk pools, and that it only becomes financially viable to insure everyone if everyone, healthy and sick alike, pays into the pool. But here’s my problem with this arrangement.

If I want a cell phone, I will have to enter into a contract with a giant bastard of a corporation that will fuck me in a heartbeat if it means they clear an extra fifty cents. But it is still my choice whether or not I want to have a phone. By the same token, if I want to own a car and operate it on public roads, the law requires me to purchase insurance from, again, a company that wouldn’t hesitate to do me wrong if they thought it was legal and in their best interest to do so. But I don’t have to buy a car if I don’t want to.

But the thrust of a mandate (without providing a publicly administrated alternative) is that I, by virtue of my existence and citizenship, am legally obligated to throw myself into the maw of an industry that’s been proven time and time again to be one of the most immoral, unethical, exploitive, parasitic industries in the corporate world. And, sure, it will make health care accessible to folks that currently can’t afford it… by way of a framework through which the American Taxpayer can subsidize poor and lower-middle class families. Isn’t that snazzy, how it creates a second pipeline from the pockets of those of us that aren’t bankrupt yet into the coffers of private health insurance companies. How awesome is that for a “reform” bill, thanks Democrats!

The answer is obvious, and it’s not to make the Health Insurance Industry work better. Congressman Weiner is absolutely correct on this score, health insurance companies give no value to the system. If we’re going to make healthcare available to everyone, then let’s make it a goddam public utility. And if we need everyone to chip in, then take it out of my check with the rest of the fucking taxes. And if these sorry sons-of-bitches in both parties can’t come around to representing the best interests of the American People because they’re all too dependent on revenue streams from the Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Industries, then they all deserve to burn.

But the bill that’s coming out of the Senate is no more a “reform” of the Health Insurance Industry than are the “reforms” being crafted by Obama’s Economic Team of Rubinite Wall Street Gangsters. And I’m supposed to be scared of Sarah Fucking Palin? With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans!

I swear to God, if this steaming shitpile of a bill becomes law, I will dedicate all the money, time and effort I can spare into throwing as many different size wrenches as I can into every political machine that helped bring it to pass. If this thing fails, it fails, but I’m not going to support this goddam thing, and I’m sure as hell not going to be a pawl in the Rightward Ratchet. Fuck that.

[UPDATE]: Evidently, Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias wish that lots of us that are potentially going to have to eat this shit sandwich would learn to go along to get along and pass the fucking thing. John Cole & Co.are apoplectic that anyone would decide that this thing has crossed a line over which they can’t get behind it.

But here’s Kevin in practically the same breath saying:

The individual mandate was a way of getting support from the insurance industry. The backroom deal with Big Pharma was a way of getting support from the drug industry. The change in Medicare reimbursement rates was a way of getting support from doctors. The gutting of the Medicare commission was a way of getting support from hospitals. Provisions related to biologics, home healthcare, and the prescription drug doughnut hole were a way of getting the support of AARP.

So all these interest groups get huge concessions, that ultimately entrench their power even more deeply while giving Americans a bigger, harder punch in the face, so that they’ll get on board. But I’m supposed to sit on my hands and ignore the fact that the parts of the bill that would have enacted real reform have been decimated, and that what’s left includes a provision to feed me to private insurance companies like so much shark chum, without bothering to so much as inconvenience said companies with a strong, strict regulatory framework. Huh.

Again, fuck that.

[UPDATE AGAIN]: Just so.

Via Dennis Perrin, who remains justifiably skeptical that there’s Hope for Change, a perfectly simple solution:

…the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

Ding! We have a winner!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the hell kind of socialist I am: I’m the kind that thinks health care falls ought to fall into the same category of public service as your local fire department, that’s all. I’d also like to be over and done with the way we do health insurance today, and I can’t understand why anyone is defending such a disgusting, avaricious industry. (You think we don’t already have death panels?)

I had jury duty this morning, so I had to hit the road early to get down to the US District Court building down at 3rd NW and Constitution. I didn’t end up having to go though, because about a mile from home, where 9th St NE passes under the Michigan overpass, someone drove their car into me.

It was a bizarre collision, actually. I often cut through the CUA Metro Station on the way to Monroe, because it seems safer than crossing Michigan (which local motorists treat like a freeway) at 10th. But I’m rarely there at that time of the morning, when people are dropping train commuters, and it was pretty busy with people slowly making their way around the circle. I came up to the stop sign on 9th, and came to a stop. I freely confess that I don’t always come to a complete stop there, any more than the cars do, but I do when there’s shuttle buses and cars coming through. This morning, I full stopped.

And as I was sitting dead center in the middle of my lane, behind the white line, a woman in a red Corolla came up to the intersection and started to turn left onto 9th. At first, I thought she was making the turn a little too tight, but figured she’d correct and go wider, since I was standing there right in front of her. But she kept turning, and started to accelerate. I started yelling at her to stop her car, since I was directly in front of her, but she kept coming. And when it was clear that she wasn’t going to stop and I couldn’t get out of her way, I jumped up and right as hard as I could, holding on to Cledus with my left hand, and tried to dive.

I pulled it off to the extent that the damage was minimal. She thumped the bike but it bounced off her hood since I was no longer holding it down on the ground. I mostly got out of the way, but took a pretty good thump to the left knee. And once she’d hit us, Cledus and I, she finally stopped. More than half her car was in my lane, and the center of her engine was squarely over where I’d been standing.

Now, I didn’t know who was behind the wheel of the Corolla, but I had adrenaline shooting out of my eyes and was vividly aware that someone had just driven their car directly, head-on into me (at low speed, thankfully), and was um… upset. Furious. My flash reaction was to start punching the car as if it and I were in a bar and it had just taken a swing at me. I didn’t, but I did start yelling at the driver to get out of the car, with several profanities interlaced, loud enough to wake folks all over the Metro station from their Monday morning fog, screaming questions at her about what she was doing and why she was driving straight into me. She yelled back at me, “I didn’t see you! I didn’t see you!”

What followed was typical, and I made a bunch of mistakes. The only person who saw the whole thing was the Comcast cable guy in the van right behind me, who got out and calmed me down, and then got into his van and left (which I honestly didn’t notice him doing). One witness in the wind. I let her move her car out of traffic while I called the police without getting a picture of it, which was another mistake. There was no wreckage or skid marks, and once the officer arrived she claimed that I was in her lane, and I’d hit her car. Not only was she lying through her teeth, but she was yelling at me indignantly like she believed it. I was able to find 3 people who’d seen what happened shortly after I yelled at her to stop the car, and could positively place her car in my lane, but the one person who saw the actual collision wasn’t there to talk about it. I’m waiting to hear from Comcast to see if they can help me find the vanishing cable guy.

She didn’t get so much as a ticket.

The bike’s amazingly okay, the only thing wrong with it is that my noodle bars are a little lopsided, they’ll need replacing, and the mudflap on the rear fender tore away. But the brake levers are fine, the wheel’s true, the forks are straight, and there’s not a scratch or a dent anywhere on the frame so I suppose the dismount-and-dive worked out.

My left knee’s got some stiffness, but nothing’s torn or broken, and I have full mobility. The quart of cortisol coursing through my blood vessels probably did more long term damage than the actual impact, but I’m putting the knee on ice for the day and keeping an eye on it just in case.

The worst part of it, really, is having to re-evaluate whether or not I want to keep riding the streets of DC. My guess is that this won’t keep my off my bike, but Mrs. Higgins and I do a lot of riding around on the big bikes with the kids, we go the long way and keep to smaller streets, and ride as safely and defensively as we can. But that woudn’t have helped in this situation, and that’s really the scariest part of it to me. There was no sun in her eyes, the lighting was perfect, I was standing at a dead stop in the middle of my lane, upright, and she was headed straight at me. How am I supposed to drive and maneuver defensively when I’m stopped in the middle of my lane, directly in front of an oncoming driver? How do you account and compensate for a driver whose blind spot is 10 to 30 feet directly in front of her?

I love DC in ways that I could not have known I would when we moved here 3 years ago, but I can say without reservation, as someone who came of driving age in Southern California and lived with a car in San Francisco, that nowhere I’ve ever lived compares to DC for shitty drivers. (Its been pointed out to me that I’ve never lived in Boston, so perhaps it gets worse.) At first, I thought it was because so many of DC’s motorists come from other places, and bring the bad habits of their native roads with them, making it impossible to have a common road culture where everyone knows which rules to bend. But now I’m not so sure, the locals are dangerous too. Sure, most people drive pretty well, and every day I consciously take note of those drivers that acknowledge my presence, and give waves and smiles whenever I can. But the bad ones here more than compensate for the competent ones, and they’re dangerous.

I’m sure this isn’t an uncommon reaction, but I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about whether or not I’m willing to do that with my kids anymore, or for that matter, willing to risk making them orphans. I know this without lengthy reflection: Davis, Madison, Boulder, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and all of Holland are at the top of the list of candidates for our next (and perhaps last) move. And maybe sooner than later.

[UPDATE]: It was pointed out to me that if I’d gone ahead and rolled through that stop sign and either zipped across before she got there or slithered around her aft, I wouldn’t have gotten hit. How about that, Mr. Forester?

[UPDATE AGAIN]: After some initial anxiety, I did ride in today, on Cledus Jr. I figured a low-geared single speed would keep my top speed down, which would be good for getting back in the saddle. Also, his offroad agility would give me the opportunity to immediately jump a curb off the street and onto someone’s lawn if I freaked out. All in all, it went pretty well, and I smiled/waved at least 5 people on the way in.

[UPDATE YET A THIRD TIME]: Here’s an animated dramatic recreation, but without me yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop your fucking car!“, the subsequent crashing noise, or the raging river of profanity that followed.

The president issued an order yesterday to stop the military tribunals at Guantanimo. This stood out for me.

Following Monday’s hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

“Today we were in the presence of true evil,” said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. “Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going.”

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

“My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11,” he said. “When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, ‘Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.’”

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, “No, right here, at Guantánamo,” then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

Report after report concludes that most of the people we held at Guantanamo were never affiliated with Al Qaida, weren’t picked up on any battlefield, and were being held for little or no reason, which means we were destroying lives and families across the globe in response to 9/11. I mean, put aside from the odd Taliban foot soldier who was conscripted, never understood what was happening to him, but finds himself imprisoned a world away from his family with no hope of escaping the Kafkaesque nightmare we’ve created. Perhaps you can’t stir up sympathy for anyone that picked up a gun for the Taliban. Fine. What about the fucking Uyghurs, that everyone, everyone, understood weren’t even peripherally involved? What about the fact that 18 Uyghurs were held in isolation for years and years in Cuba? Why isn’t Donald Arias concerned about that, and how can he be certain that he’s in the presence of “true evil” knowing any of that?

Some of the detainees were undoubtedly involved in planning or executing attacks against the U.S., but since we stepped over every bright line of human rights during their interrogations, bringing them to a fair, legitimate trial will be impossible. Maintaining the moral integrity and legitimacy of our judicial process is a prerequisite to bringing the perpetrators of 9/11, as well as terrorists we may apprehend in the future, to justice. But Joe Holland apparently doesn’t think this is important, or at least, doesn’t think it’s important in cases involving people even remotely suspected of involvement in the attack that killed his son.

And that, folks, is why victims of violent crime should never, ever be able to weigh in on how justice is best served. You can’t blame these people for being in pain, or for the depth and breadth of their grief. If I lost any member of my family to violence, I imagine I would be similarly consumed by heartbreak, rage, and vengeance. I am, after all, human.

By the same token, you can’t expect these folks to think rationally about what’s fair and just. I’m not saying that these families, or victims of violence generally, can’t overcome fear and anger to see clearly, but it shouldn’t be surprising if they can’t, and we certainly shouldn’t be asking their advice on how to proceed. It’s a circus sideshow, and the military folks that brought them down to Cuba to stir them up in front of the press ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves.

The makings of another shit sandwich, left by George W. Bush, for all of us to figure out how to eat. Thanks for that, George, and bon apetit America.

The issues surrounding Israel’s recent attacks in Gaza are swirling and complex, and I don’t know if anyone can even say the words “Israel” and “Gaza” in the same sentence these days without inspiring spittle-flecked invective from both sides of the perceptual chasm.

My own view is that both sides hate each other more than they love their own children, and that this will continue until that’s no longer the case. I’m also not happy that my money’s purchasing weapons that will ultimately keep the fire burning bright and hot. I also realize that, as an American, despite the fact that I was as opposed to the strategy and tactics of the GWOT as anyone could be, I have zero moral authority or credibility when it comes to counseling other nations to resist the temptation to lash out with violent, irrational military responses to attacks by a handful of extremists.

I also despise the language people use to talk about military action. The terms “fighting”, “kick ass”, “defend (one’s) self”, and even “strength” are terms appropriately used when discussing a bar brawl, where two violent actors punch and kick each other until one or both have had enough. They have no place in honest conversations and arguments in which children are blown up or immolated by modern weapons of war, and I find the practice (especially by Americans) disgusting.

One thing that I do know, though, is that Max Blumenthal is a fucking bad-ass.

(h/t Dennis Perrin)

I realize that I’m a wide-eyed idealist, naive to the realities of doing business in this day and age, but I still can’t wrap my head around a paragraph like this:

Proposition 2 would require that starting in 2015, calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be provided space to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely. Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty; opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers by raising domestic prices and exposing consumers to cheaper, ostensibly more dangerous eggs from other countries.

Now, we’re not talking about giving every calf, chicken, and pig be given an acre of grassy meadow to run free, and a string quartet to score the scene. We’re not even talking about letting them see the sun. Nor are we talking about making this happen tomorrow, or a year from now. And this is light years away from mandating that industrial meat operations handle their wastes the way we require cities to do it.

We’re just talking about making their cages, the place they will likely spend their whole lives, big enough for them to be able to extend their limbs and turn around. That’s all. I mean, Christ, if you were going to establish a base-level, lowest common denominator standard for not being completely inhumane, that might be a good place to start.

But there’s so much in this paragraph that’s wrong.

Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty… No, I don’t think it will. It goes a short way towards mitigating intense, widespread suffering, but that’s a ways off from actually preventing cruelty.

…opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers… When you’re managing a massive, highly efficient industrial factory system of growing meat, you’re no longer a “farmer” in any traditional sense of the word, so please discontinue attempts to play on my sympathies by putting a wheat chewing actor in overalls in front of me. Also, peddle that “concern for the consumer” bullshit to someone who’s buying it, this is all about your profit margins.

It’s just stunning to me that this is even a close contest.

Years ago, I used to play poker with friends every so often. This was well before the current Texas Hold’em craze, so we’d play Draw, Stud, Black Mariah, Low-Hole Chicago, Screw Your Neighbor, what have you. Everyone would buy in for $20, chips would ebb from one side of the table, flow the other way, mass in one pile then split into several, as chips are wont to do.

After an hour or two, we’d end up playing either Guts or Ace-Two-Three for the rest of the night. Both games involved playing for the pot, such that one winner takes the pot, one or more losers match it, and it could grow pretty fast. Inevitably, someone would go in (often with a great hand but not always) and lose a pot that would bust ‘em. If they didn’t have the cash to cover, the table had no choice but to let them write an IOU, otherwise the people that had lost real money wouldn’t have a chance to win it back. So, if the busted player didn’t win their IOU back, someone else would own their paper.

Now here’s the thing about IOU’s on our table. If you had to write one out, well, that was that, you were in the hole and we were okay with that. If you held someone’s IOU, you could sell it to someone else at the table for chips, and the bidding depended on whether or not people thought you were good for it. There were some fairly hilarious scenes where someone watched indignantly as their IOU’s were bought and sold for fifty cents or a quarter on the dollar. In some cases, someone might throw down with “I’ve got twenty Woody-bucks for whoever gets me a beer from the fridge.” Woody’s credit rating was less than stellar.

But under no circumstance was it okay to put someone else’s IOU into a pot in lieu of money. The pot would take your IOU if you were busted, but not until your last chip, dollar, and penny was gone, because everyone else was putting real money on the table. The rare attempts to pull such a stunt resulted in shouting and ridicule, with the offender sheepishly replacing the note with chips or cash.

So here we are, with several “too big too fail” companies, bloated with mountains of IOU’s, trying to force we-the-people to buy them with real money that we get from our I-get-up-every-goddam-day-and-go-to-work-for-a-living wages, at what they say is a fair price. For my family of four, they want us to put up somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand dollars to buy these IOU’s at full face value. And we’re going to have to do this because they took these fucking IOU’s from anyone and everyone, over and over again, and were calling them “chips” the whole fucking time.

These Diamond Jim motherfuckers, these blow-thirty-grand-on-coke-and-strippers Wall Street scum, want my real wages in exchange for their shitty IOU’s. The wages I earn by going to work five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of every fifty-two. The wages from which taxes are taken to keep our roads in repair, to fund my children’s education, to give some relief to folks in a jam and a boost to folks who need a hand getting on their feet. The wages that they all said couldn’t support the tax revenue that might give us single-payer health care, subsidize college tuitions, or build up a respectable transit infrastructure.

Well fuck that. Any bill that comes out of Congress seeking to rescue these dishonest, avaricious sociopathic sons of fucking bitches without getting an equity stake, and without giving me my pound of flesh, is unacceptable. Otherwise, I say we let the whole fucking thing collapse.

I like Bernie Sanders take on it. Too big to fail? Too big to exist.

Let’s say that a New York State Senator, driving through NYC in his black Mercedes, nearly crushed a cyclist. How do you imagine he might respond? Would you imagine he’d roll his window down and say, “get your hands off my car, you fucking asshole”? How would you feel about that?

Well, Colin Beavin, blogger and Transportation Alternatives board member, is a much nicer and more level-headed person than I am, and a role model for those of us trying to be good. He took the opportunity to pen an open letter to New York State Senator Jeff Klein, and to invite him to discuss transportation policy and traffic congestion with TA’s Executive Director.

Should I find myself in such a situation, I hope I have the presence of mind to realize what a great opportunity it is to discuss these issues with someone in a position to do something about it, instead of, um, some other way. Keeping perspective like that when you’ve just come uncomfortably close to not getting to see your daughter grow up is impressive. Good show, Colin!

If you’d like to contact Senator Klein to encourage him to take advantage of this opportunity, you can email him at jdklein@senate.state.ny.us, or give his office a call at 718-822-2049. As tempting as it is to tell Senator Klein to “get your car off our bikes, you fucking asshole,” it probably won’t get anything done worth doing, so if you’re gonna call or email, support Colin’s idea that they meet to discuss. That’s my official recommendation anyway.