Points of Order

On February 5, 2010, in Controversies, Medicine, Politics, Science, by Marci Sischo
  1. Can we stop referring to it as “global warming“, please? It’s not global warming, it’s not global cooling, it’s climate change. Calling it “global warming” is a disservice to the problem. When the 90% of the American population who are unread goobers hear the words “global warming”, they think it means that we won’t get any more winters, and that every snowstorm proves global warming false. I know climate change is a complicated topic to understand, because I read about it all the time and still only ever catch about half the particulars, but what it is not is a lack of winters. “Global warming” is about catastrophic climate change. All kinds of climates. Changing for the worse. This does, in fact, mean that the east coast can look forward to some really nasty winters.
  2. Republican Senator Richard Shelby is blocking all Obama appointees until he gets billions of dollars for Alabama. He’s holding the presidential nominees hostage. This kind of crap is why we’re calling the Republicans “the Party of No”. The Republicans insistence on blocking every single piece of legislation they can, for no other reason than that they can, is doing serious harm to the future of America, and is directly responsible for the continuing polarization of American politics. I get why Obama is banging the bipartisan drum so hard. He is trying with all his heart and soul to heal this incredible division of ideals. But ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you, that ship has sailed. It is now literally pointless to attempt to reconcile anything with the current form of the Republican party. I mean, we’re talking about senators who voted “no” on Al Franken’s anti-rape bill, for fucksake! You can’t reason with that kind of people. Stop pandering to them, and let’s get on with fixing America.
  3. Okay, this is a Fox News poll, so take it with a salt block, but this poll says most Americans are unhappy with the current health care bill. Well, duh. It’s crap! Look, the health care problem in America just isn’t that complicated. People need health care. Private health insurance is a fucking scam, and we all know it. These insurance companies are taking us to the cleaners, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s a horrifying state of affairs for a country that wants to bill itself as superior in every way to every other country out there. We have several options for fixing the problem. We could do like we did with mandatory car insurance — everyone has to have health insurance, and in return, we regulate the hell out of the health insurance companies and force them to make their product affordable and efficient. I mean, I have full coverage on my car, and it only costs me about sixty bucks a month. We could do the same to private health insurance. We could go single-payer, IE, a socialist medical system like Canada and everyone else with a modicum of sense does. We could go regulation plus a public option. We could even, as Jim suggested to me the other night, try reform from a different angle, and just criminalize the shit out of current health care practices. But what we can’t do is continue to ignore the problem, or provide a half-assed, half-hearted solution that in practice will accomplish nothing, if not actually make the problem worse.

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