Blackboard jungle

So let me get this straight -- a congressional bill designed to keep untrained school personnel from tying your kid to a chair or radiator and choking the life out of him is a bad thing, even though a 2009 report from the GAO found

"hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades."

"These methods" according to Raw Story, include a teacher sitting on a kid, mechanical restraints that might choke or restrict breathing and methods that in at least some cases, have killed children. "These methods," particularly when used against children with disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy have had grave and even fatal results and I'm quite sure that any of you with children would have something to say had your kid been strapped into a chair or held face down and suffocated. The Keeping All Students Safe Act, H.R. 4247 passed 262-153 in Congress and is designed to:

(1) prevent and reduce the use of physical restraint and seclusion in schools;

(2) ensure the safety of all students and school personnel in schools and promote a positive school culture and climate;

(3) protect students from—

(A) physical or mental abuse;

(B) aversive behavioral interventions that compromise health and safety; and

(C) any physical restraint or seclusion imposed solely for purposes of discipline or convenience;

(4) ensure that physical restraint and seclusion are imposed in school only when a student’s behavior poses an imminent danger of physical injury to the student, school personnel, or others….

Perhaps Congressmen don't have children or perhaps they are simply psychotic enough to see any federal action or regulation of any kind as a threat to freedom so grave that basic human rights are worth ignoring. 145 Republicans voted against the bill last week; only 24 voted yea. Iowa Representative Steve King probably spoke for many in insisting that the Keeping All Students Safe Act would be a first step toward a "federal takeover of the education system." We heard that scummy excuse in the 50's when schools were being desegregated and "states rights" became a euphemism for depriving people of freedom, justice and sometimes even life.

Do we have hypocrisy here, or just garden variety dishonesty -- or maybe it's more of that congressional multiple personality disorder that has these august idiots equating the abusive abridgment of civil rights by a school principal with freedom, but the Constitution's promise; the upholding of humane treatment or the very right to life of students is called a "federal takeover." When the government itself and the Republican party specifically is so afraid of the federal government that it will refuse to protect children from possibly lethal abuse by local government, perhaps it's time to sit on these dangerously disturbed, irresponsible, stupid and incompetent partisan child molesters and see how they like it.

Yes, we all want a government that has little to say about our personal choices and conduct, but that feeling is quite universal, as much as Republicans claim it for their own. What is not universal amongst sane and honest people is the desire to give the power of life and death to local school board Death Panels to prevent a wholly imaginary "federal takeover" and if there ever was a reason to restrain or isolate and punish anyone this is a perfect example.

If there is one thing clear and easily visible in American politics today, is that there is a political party that has been insisting 'it's a jungle out there' for so long, they've made America into one.

Bye Bye Norma Rae

You remember Norma Rae, although her name was Crystal Lee. Sally Field played the Union Organizer from Burlington North Carolina in 1979 and won an academy award for the performance. Ms. Field who presumably is financially secure, is still with us but Crystal Lee, who wasn't, isn't. She got brain cancer she couldn't afford to treat, she had to battle her insurance company to live up to its contractual obligation, they stalled and she died Last Friday.

Sarah Palin is right, Death Panels are real and the Health Insurance companies all have them, practicing 'delay and deny' tactics that resulted -- intentionally -- in the death of the 68 year old Crystal Lee Sutton. Her insurance company interfered between her and her doctor, she couldn't afford Chemo on her own and some employee likely got a bonus for saving the company money.

Like Most Republican arguments, the Death Panel idea illustrates the principle of projective accusation. if your president was guilty of more lies than any other in history, you start accusing the opposition of lying and if you're lucky you can find a mote in his eye and gleefully use it to deny the giant sequoia in your own. Thus to protect the insurance companies that profit by interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, dictate and deny treatment and let people die unnecessarily they accuse a system designed to stop it of doing the same thing. Americans are stupid enough to buy it.

Death Panels are real and death panels are inevitable because corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to their insured clients. Actual panels of actual people get salaries and bonuses for obfuscating and delaying claims until it's too late, or for scouring your life for some unreported case of acne or the flu to justify denying your cancer claim. A large part of your premiums go, in fact, to pay for these Death Panels and to keep the stockholders happy.

Perhaps someone will chime in here and deny it. I hope so because I'm dying to say You Lie! I can't wait to tell the inevitable troll who will insist that just like Public Schools, Public Libraries, National parks and the National Guard, Government claims administration is Socialism! You lie!

The no option option.

Now that my 65th birthday is less than 6 months away, I'm starting to get large numbers of e-mails trying to sell me motorized wheelchairs, "mobility" devices, diabetes supplies, reverse mortgages, medicare supplement plans and other stuff I don't need and don't want and have no use for. What do they know that I don't know? Nothing at all, it's just that we're all being sorted and filed like those old Holerith cards the young and hip no longer remember and finding that the many headed beast of commerce has put us in the out box can come as a shock.

For some it may be a shock to find that we haven't been a nation of individuals and individualists able to define ourselves for ourselves as the myth would have it, but things to be sorted, labeled used or put on the shelf as the corporate barons decide. It gets increasingly hard, but keeping off the conveyor belt that the great Deus ex Corporation uses to transport us from cradle to grave is worth it and I think all the more with every passing year and with the diminishing respect that goes with it.

Why, when retaining that respect, retaining the ability to steer one's life, to change it's course, to decide which road to take next, is increasingly the center of an aging person's consciousness do people insist that it's in my best interest to cover my eyes, take my hands off the wheel and trust to luck and to someone who benefits from my dying soon?

When the people would just as soon get rid of you, that's when -- and people like Sarah Palin and her coven of demented familiars certainly don't care if there are "Death Panels" in the Democratic health plan because they know of, tolerate and are supported by the death panel industry: the insurance companies. Every one that can read and does read knows that it's absolute fiction, but they keep trying to keep the meme alive and alive it remains despite absolute proof to the contrary: the government will come to your house and talk you into suicide. A government panel will decide to keep you from getting treatment to keep costs down. Sarah Says. Fox says. the billions the Insurance companies are pouring into lobbyists says. over and over until the lie becomes flesh.

How can the President make a speech and speak louder than all that money? I don't know, I can barely bring myself to hope that for once in my lifetime the magic word "socialism" won't stun our minds into submission to authority. I hesitate to hope that people will even bother to listen to him, or at least not the people who need to. I don't bother to hope much at all these days.