Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

An acceptable level of violence?

The president acutally said this yesterday, during a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America in Washington:

And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

It’s received some press coverage — though not nearly enough. Violence, he is saying, is OK. It will be there. It is a fact of life.
There is violence in East St. Louis and Newark and Trenton — and that’s just the way it is, this president says. “Success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives.”
Comfortable? Acceptable? Humans are remarkably adaptive and will find ways to get along no matter what the circumstances. So the Iraqis live through the violence and find ways to make due — same as those Americans who are stuck in drug-scarred neighborhoods. That doesn’t make it right.
Then, this is pretty standard from a president who has shown little compassion for America’s cities, who pretty much ignored New Orleans in the days immediately after the hurricane hit, who has only visited New York for fundraisers and photo-ops (and a political convention), who rarely ventures outside of his comfort zone.
In many ways, this comment is like Sen. John McCain’s stroll through the Baghdad market — or like Bush I’s attempt to buy socks during the 1992 presidential campaign — another example of how out of touch the president and his administration is.
It also is another example of the president’s shifting rationale for the war and for remaining in Iraq — we’ve moved from weapons of mass destruction to deposing Saddam to imposing democracy to maintaining order to … to what? And that’s the point. What exactly are we hoping to accomplish?
It’s time to get out.
E-mail me by clicking here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Bring ’em home

Juan Cole is right: The president’s veto of the withdrawal timeline needs aresponse, but John Edwards’ approach — to send the same bill back to the president until he signs it — is probably the wrong one politically.

It is satisfying to say so, but it probably isn’t good political tactics. When Newt Gingrich played politics with the budget under Clinton and even shut down DC, it was Congress that took the hit in the polls. Just being obstreperous isn’t very attractive.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha appears to have the best idea on this — as Cole points out:

Murtha is suggesting that they don’t fund a whole year, maybe only two months. That sort of conditionality, whatever its mechanism, seems right to me.

The key is to find a way to fund the troops, but begin the process of getting them home. In the meantime, war opponents need to turn up the pressure by expanding their protests. This thing has gone on way too long.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Sticks, stones and Bill O’Reilly

Here’s a study that essentially proves what we’d already suspected — that conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly is a fear-monger and a bully, forcing the world to fit into a neat “good v. evil”/”us v. them” paradigm and using this paradigm to generate ratings and create conservative propaganda.

(That his show has grown increasingly weird as the conservative moment wanes should be a topic for another study, but alas….)

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

File under: Bad ideas in medicine

It appears that some doctors in North Jersey — and I suspect elsewhere in the state — are “are asking patients to sign a contract promising not to sue for malpractice” as a way of trying to control skyrocketing insurance costs.

As The Record reported on Sunday, the contracts are a condition of treatment and replace litigation with binding arbitration as the only recourse a patient would have should the doctor not live up to his or her end of the bargain. In addition, the contracts cap pain and suffering awards.

The contract, the story says, “blames patient lawsuits for ‘ever-escalating’ malpractice insurance rates” — a dubious assumption given that the insurance crisis faced by doctors has more to do with avaricious insurance companies than anything else. the contract, therefore, does little more than potentially penalize patients — a notion The Record rightly criticizes today:

(P)atients didn’t cause this problem. Patients should not have to sign away their rights to fix it.

The contract that patients sign states that rising premium costs are caused by patient lawsuits. Evidence doesn’t back that up. From 2001 to 2003, New Jersey had a 21 percent decline in malpractice payouts. Nationally, payouts have also fallen.

Just as when New Jersey’s auto insurance rates spiraled out of control in the 1990s, the malpractice premium increases are caused by a complex mix of factors. It is not an easy fix. The Legislature was right a few years ago to reject the idea of capping jury awards for malpractice victims. But the state needs to look for other solutions, including possible limits on the size of yearly premium hikes to doctors.

In the end, the doctors are making the wrong call on this. Rather than go after patients, they should band together with them and take on the insurance companies.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.