Is Equal Access to Health Care a Right?

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Responding to yesterday’s post, Trutherator wrote:

On insurance companies covering everything, that’s one of the choices an insurance consumer has at the moment of purchase. But once you concede your own freedom to set up the guys with guns (government) to decide how much of YOUR money to take for their health care provision, especially a government that has shown themselves so astronomically inept that federal cabinet-level departments have had repeated cases of moneys missing to the tune of even $12 billion for the Dept of Education.

My response to Trutherator follows. Continue reading →

Ron Paul Reveals More About His Notion of Freedom

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The most notorious moment in the Republican presidential debate the other night revealed something about Ron Paul the “liberty” candidate’s idea of what freedom actually means to him. Clearly some vociferous audience members, presumably members of the Tea Party, think they define it similarly, but I don’t think all Americans do or would. Continue reading →

A Country Doctor Diagnoses What’s Wrong with Obama

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And offers a prescription for real change we can believe in.

There used to be a lot more of this wisdom among grass roots activists in America. I like the ideas of Dr. Joe Mason. You like them? You can write to him here.

The universe is made of 12 particles of matter, 4 forces of nature

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How  can we remember that?

(Just a little bit of fun and wonder with science before we resume our dreary investigation of the decline of American civilization.)

9/11 Flashback: No Excuses

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I wrote this in response to an analysis of George W. Bush’s actions in the wake of 9/11 by R.W. Apple of the New York Times. It was published on Democratic Underground just a week and a day after the event that supposedly changed everything. As far as I was concerned it did nothing to change my perception that the man in the White House was illegitimate. I believe that the deterioration of the American ethos that we’ve seen since that day is due largely to that central fact, which the media continue to prefer to sweep under the rug.

No Excuses
September 19, 2001
by Burt Worm

R.W. Apple and the New York Times are at it again: trying to bestow legitimacy on a president whom many people in the United States and around the world sincerely – and reasonably – believe was not legitimately elected. Continue reading →

My 9/11: Afternoon

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Continuing from yesterday’s posts. Rather than dig up faulty memories, I’ve decided to quote myself (writing as Burt Worm) from 2003:

The city felt like Berlin 1945

I felt like I was in a Graham Greene novel, especially when I was waiting [on the Queens side], with hundreds of tired, worried people, to be allowed to cross the 59th Street Bridge. No one was crossing any bridges at all, by car, train, bicycle or foot, and I wasn’t sure I was even going to be allowed into Manhattan. Continue reading →

9/11: The Persistence of Memory

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Dali had the right idea about memory:

After writing my post on the morning of 9/11, I read this article at Scientific American: Continue reading →

My 9/11: Morning

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I first became aware on September 11, 2001, that something was up, so to speak, while waiting for a B train to Rockefeller Center at the 59th Street Station in Manhattan. I was getting a slightly late start on the day, having just come from voting for Mark Green for Mayor to replace Rudolph Giuliani.  I was feeling pleased with myself for doing my civic duty and confident that my vote would count, which, after election 2000, I didn’t take for granted any more.

The trains were moving through slowly that morning, which is not too terribly unusual. The southbound platform in particular was not moving at all;  trains sat there with doors open, confused commuters standing half in, half out,  and no sign of any chance for movement any time soon. I heard an announcement to the effect that no trains were going to Brooklyn because of–I wasn’t paying close attention, so I don’t recall if the phrase was “police action” or ” incident”–at the World Trade Center. It was probably the latter, though, perhaps, the word might even have been “emergency.” That would have been an unusual phrase to hear over the MTA intercom, and you’d think it would have stuck in the mind. Continue reading →

When I Heard the Learned Economist…

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When I read pieces by eminent conservative economists like the Hoover Institute’s Robert J. Barro’s Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics, I get the sick feeling in my stomach that the rift between left and right is becoming less and less bridgeable by day. It becomes clearer and clearer to me that, while the left may be going through a prolonged crisis of self-confidence, the right is becoming more deeply mired in an ideological morass and their project is to drag the rest of us down into it whether or not we want to go.
Continue reading →

Al Jaffee’s Mad Life

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As I procrastinate over starting a review of someone else’s biography (which is excellent, by the way), I want to share this trailer for a fascinating biography of one of my childhood heroes, Al Jaffee. The longest serving member of Mad magazine’s usual gang of idiots, Jaffee is, as you’ll see in this trailer, a highly unusual man: