Not Entitled

I guess I'm one of the 47% not entitled to healthcare. My insurance provider just refused to help cover the costs of a medical procedure my doctor recommended. Next I'll find out I'm not entitled to food, either. It's a good thing I have a garden (though here in September, it's mainly bearing okra, eggplant, and basil; that stir fry could get a little old).

Eggplant, okra, bell peppers, peas from our summer garden

Public and News Media All Agog over an Adulterous Affair.....

Okay, while I didn't watch South Carolina governor Mark Sanford at his news conference where he confessed to his affair with a woman in Argentina, just a few minutes ago I did read a little of those e-mails released by some unknown person to a South Carolina newspaper. I was titillated enough to scan the e-mails but not enough to read them entirely. And as I clicked around the Internet for news today, I thought about how the news media has followed the Mark Sanford story so closely the last few days. Everyone was all agog.

What a wonderful news media we have, so ready to reveal the most salacious details of any secrets of our leaders and stars, so reluctant to ask really serious questions about those same leaders and stars. Oh, yeah, there are reporters who pursue the truths our government would like to bury in an unknown, mass grave somewhere. There are newspapers that will publish the stories. But our popular media--the cable news and major networks--well, they are are all about ratings and viewers. Who wants to hear about the recent report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody? Golly, the executive summary alone runs to 19 pages. (The report itself is 263 pages long.)

Who is interested in listening to boring reports on health care reform? So what if our Congressmen and Senators are owned by insurance companies and health care companies? According to those same Congressmen and Senators, we have the best health care industry and insurance in the world. Ha. ha. Let us return, instead, to this story about the dalliance of ole Mark Sanford. Now that's a story that rocks our world.

Update: Rush Limbaugh blames President Obama for Republican governor Mark Sanford's affair with a woman in Argentina. According to Rush, Sanford was just so dispirited by Obama's presidency that he sought relief from that despondency in the arms of another woman. P-L-E-A-S-E! This is a stupid argument on so many levels, least of which is that it disregards the fact that Sanford began his affair before Obama won the presidency.

Finally, of all the comments I've read about Mark Sanford's affair and the public interest, these struck me as most worthy: John Dickerson's article, "Heartless," at Slate and Gary Kamiya's "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford", at Salon. Move along, people, nothing to see here but the sad complexities of the human heart. Get a life of your own.

Quote for the Day: Healthcare and Farmers

Reading an article that Tom sent me and that I linked to two posts below, I came across an interesting quote. The article is about sustainable farming, the hard truths of trying to farm organically and the collective will needed to amend our farming practices. Here's the quote:

If we're going to ask the market to pull in a new direction, we'll need to give it new rules and incentives. That means our broader food standards, but it also means money—a massive increase in food research. (Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.) And, yes, it means more farm subsidies: The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we're going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model. For example, one reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance. Thus, the simplest way to encourage sustainable farming might be offering a subsidy for affordable health care. [my emphasis]

Barack Obama has it right: everything comes back to health care. Solve the health insurance problem in this country, and other problems will be on the way to being solved, or at least one big hurdle to solutions will be removed.

Source: Paul Roberts, "Spoiled: Organic and Local is so 2008," Mother Jones, March/April 2009. www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008