Pacific Views

Toothache

I try to avoid talking about very much personal stuff here on the site, but I can't think of anything else to talk about today. Not that there isn't a lot going on. The Republican convention has been on in the background today and under normal circumstances I'd have a lot to say about that. A spy has been discovered pretty high up in the Pentagon, and as should surprise no one, is a good buddy of the neocons in the Bush administration. Sudan is still a shambles. Except that a whole side of my jaw feels like it's having a railroad spike hammered into it, and that's all I can think about.

Fortunately for me, I've got some platinum class pain medication left over from an ER visit. Doubly fortunate, I'll be able to go to a dentist this afternoon to get this taken care of. Best of all, my schedule permits me to not have to worry about my livelihood because this put me out of commission for the day.

It's hard to eat or swallow, the nerve in the tooth seems to have gone so haywire that the whole left side of my palate is sore to the touch. Talking isn't much fun. I don't know what people did before dentistry, but I can see why this sort of thing could seriously affect a person's life span. It doesn't seem like it's to the point of infection, which would have obvious drawbacks, but if this went on for much longer I'd be relying exclusively on meal shakes and grateful to have them. Protein is pretty important, but it's got a distressing tendency to be concentrated in foods that are pretty chewy. Yet it's a good thing to be reminded now and then how fallible the body is.

For people in a modern society who can afford health care and dental work, it's easy to forget that even simple problems can really disrupt the normal order of things. Minor infections, niggling tooth problems that sort of sneak up on you, let alone more significant health concerns. There are times in my life when I would not have been able to afford a dentist for this, and I've lost two back molars for exactly that reason, though less painfully. Times when getting the day off work would have put my job on the line. For people on the edge, a so-called minor health problem like this can push them right off the cliff into poverty. I don't have to face that today, and I'm grateful.

When I vote, though, I'll remember that at one time this could have been a problem that might have cost me a job. Maybe my electric or phone bill. Might have taken my grocery budget for a month. Maybe cost me a place to live. And I'm going to vote for the party that more often than not acts like they remember human frailty, even when they themselves have been blessed with comfort. When they make me believe they keep in mind know hard it is to struggle up that ladder, and how easy it is to get knocked off the lower rungs. I will have no sympathy for those who say it needs to get worse before it gets better, because I can't countenance making life any harder than it needs to be for people who are trying like hell to climb up.

Some people can't hold on for four more years. And some of them probably don't even know it yet. They don't deserve to have their lives ruined because someone wanted to make a political point.

A year and a bit ago, Ampersand pointed out an interview with a dentist talking about Oregon's budget cut for dental assistance to the needy. It made quite an impression on me, and still reminds me to be grateful that the gaps in my teeth are well out of sight. I probably never would have read it if Amp hadn't pointed it out:

...Most dental problems are not life-threatening. Why not cut back services in times of a budget crisis?

Look, I've got patients who won't open their mouth because their front tooth is all black with decay. We are a society that judges people by their looks. I have an 18-year-old patient who was HIV- positive from birth, and all of her teeth were decaying in the front. I fixed those front teeth, and she started crying. She said, "I've never been able to go out and feel good about how I look before." How would you feel about yourself if you had a black hole in the front of your mouth? You tell me!

But should taxpayers foot the bill for that?

I'm going to ask you one question: When was the last time you went to McDonald's and the person who took your order didn't have any teeth? When was the last time you went to Safeway and the person who was boxing your goddamn groceries had no teeth? Never. You can't get a job without your teeth. So I want to know how we're helping people if we can't give them teeth. We need to take these people who are not working and get them something so they can work and be productive--not for the sake of our budget but for the sake of our society.

What kind of money are we talking here?

It's a $600 investment if they're missing all their teeth. But this is not just a dollars-and-cents issue. This isn't a question of how we save the most money. This is a question of how do we salvage people? How do we make people become productive members of society and feel good about themselves? And it isn't by walking around without teeth.

But given the state's limited resources...

You can't do everything for everybody. I understand that. You know, some people just don't know what it's like to be on the other side of the fence. They don't know what it's like to have a toothache and not to be able to get care. And we're not saving any goddamn money! If we're going to save the money, fine, but we're not saving any goddamn money. I mean, what are you thinking? You've got to be nuts! These people are crazy! They have no sense. I'm pissed. I am really, really pissed. ...

On that same note, Jeanne at Body and Soul was touched a while ago by the story of a woman who lost out on work because she was missing her front teeth. The story reminded her of her mother:

...In fifth grade, my glasses broke. A tether ball hit me in the face and knocked them across the playground. The frames broke into several pieces when they hit the blacktop. I tried Scotch taping them back together, but they were too far gone, and I finally had to throw them away.

Normally that would be a nuisance, not a tragedy. Glasses can be replaced. But something had happened between the year I got the glasses and the year I broke them. When I was in fourth grade, my mother had gotten tired of being beaten up, and had put a continent's distance between my father and us. All in all, that was a very good thing, but a thirty-six-year-old woman who's been out of the job market for a few years doesn't make a lot of money, especially one who's only had menial jobs. And it doesn't help if she's missing teeth.

Last week I wrote about a New York Times Magazine article centered around a woman who was turned down for jobs because she was missing teeth. I said, without explaining, that the woman's story struck a nerve. My mother had something in common with that woman. Before we left, my father had knocked out several of her teeth, and she couldn't afford to see a dentist. My earliest understanding of how the job market worked came from listening to my mother cry that between her teeth and her Goodwill wardrobe, she couldn't get hired as a teller, and could only work as night-shift file clerk. Nobody was supposed to see her. It wasn't just the money, as important as that was. It was also about what it does to the spirit of a thirty-six-year-old woman to be told that she's too ugly to be seen by anyone.

Including me. Because she worked nights, I stayed alone all night from the age of nine on, and rarely saw her, except on weekends. And because she wasn't pretty enough for a decent job, we didn't have money to replace the broken glasses. ...

Ahh, the miracle of the free market. Solving every need, fixing every problem, so long as you have the money. There's a reason somebody came up with the bright idea to supplement the mercies of the market with the safety net of public assistance. And that's all I have to say for now.

Update: It turns out that my first instinct in this matter was correct. Never allow a dentist who has failed to properly fit a filling in two tries to come near your teeth with a drill again. For they will be sloppy, incompetent, and suggest that the situation should now be corrected by an expensive mouth surgery which they are clearly unfit to perform.

Certainly, do not procrastinate in the matter as I did.

Meanwhile, down-under ...

Australians will be going to the polls to elect a new government on October 9, about a month before US voters decide Dubya's fate. The election date was set by current Aussie prime minister John Howard, and it's no coincidence that he wanted to get his election out of the way before any the results of the November election in the US could have any fallout on Australian politics.

One of the main issues in the Australian election is the relationship of the current government with the US. Howard has been one of the most reliable — some might say servile — supporters of Dubya's foreign policies, and has been a particularly strong supporter of the current US adventure in Iraq. He's also negotiated a free-trade agreement with the US in which many Aussies believe Howard gave away far too much to get far too little from Dubya. Given that Howard is facing a particularly storng Labor party opponent, Mark Latham, you can see why the the PM wasn't about to risk having to face his voters after those in the US sent Dubya packing.

We were going to write a post about the Australian election and why people in the US should care about its outcome, but Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom has written a far better post than we could have. Given that he's Australian (and a shrewd observer of both Aussie and US politics), this magpie is happy to defer to his take on the upcoming election down-under.

Bush Promotes Tax Dodging

President Bush on August 28th, 2004, in Troy, Ohio:

...Every time they say, tax the rich, the rich dodge and you pay. ...

President Bush on August 28th in Perrysburg, Ohio:

...Well, the rich dodge and you get stuck with the bill. ...

President Bush on August 28th in Lima, Ohio:

...The rich dodge and you get stuck with the bill. ...

President Bush on August 26th in Farmington, New Mexico:

...Guess what? The rich dodge and you pay. ...

President Bush on August 9th, Annandale, Virginia:

...Just remember, when you're talking about, oh, we're just going to run up the taxes on a certain number of people -- first of all, real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes. ...

President Bush on July 14th in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin:

...That's not the way it works in the tax code. The big rich dodge taxes, anyway. ...

Leona Helmsley quoted in the New York Times on July 12th, 1989:

We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

Why is President Bush soft on rich tax dodgers like Leona Helmsley? Maybe the president is trying to tell us something. After all, Bush and his family are rich, along with many members of his administration. Are these the musings of a guilty conscience?

Homegrown Democrat

Friday I attended an event held for the Washington State Democratic party, at which Sen. Kerry was possibly going to be making an appearance. He didn't make it, but we were treated to quite the monologue by Garrison Keillor. Keillor discussed some of the topics in his new book, Homegrown Democrat, and it was quite a show.

Bloggers talk a lot about defining our message, telling the story about why people should vote for Democrats, or why they should want to be identified with the party. Well, Keillor has that down cold. I started reading it while I was waiting to get it autographed, and I didn't put it down until I finished it very early Saturday morning. A couple excerpts from the book, which probably won't be the last I share on these pages:

(p. 18) It's the natural cycle of life, I suppose, that conservatives become anarchists and liberals conservatives. Once we Democrats were young and rebellious and lobbed eggs at the bewigged and berobed Establishment and now we're the parents with the thankless job of home maintenance, defending principles that go back to the founding of the Republic, namely, the notion of the common good, the principle of equality, the very idea of representative government.

(p. 25) The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. Not even close. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from town and clear-cut the forest and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. Their crusade against government has given patriotism a bad name. And their victory has been accompanied by such hubris as would choke a goat. One Republican columnist wrote that Democrats should give up opposing tax breaks for the rich because working people don't vote their self-interest, they vote their aspirations and are happy to give big gifts to rich people because they hope to become rich too. A little TV Republican named Tucker Carlson wrote a column saying that if Democrats want to win, they need to (1) talk tough, (2) start their own think tanks, and (3) get a sense of humor. - (3) Got one, Tucker, (2) got plenty of think tanks, except we call them colleges, and (1) shut your piehole, peabrain, or I'll set fire to your loafers.

(p. 76) My teachers Miss Story, Miss Melby, Mrs. Fleischman, Miss Hattendorf: those tireless encouragers and inspirers. They were children of the Depression who were impelled toward public service, a good career, and many of the women had grown up in large farm families and for them teaching was a shining ideal and also the path out of a hard life they knew too well, the life of serfs. The very word education was dazzling to them, and they marched off to earn their way through teachers' college and put on starched collars and pick up pointers and point. how beautiful is the life of the mind to those who know about doing laundry by hand and pressing the clothes with a hot iron from a woodstove and hauling buckets of water for the baths. Miss Hattendorf grew up on a farm in Iowa; her German parents sent her and her sisters to board with a family in town so they could attend high school. When Miss Hattendorf was about to leave for the University of Chicago and it came time to say goodbye and get in the car and go to the train, she looked at her mother standing at the kitchen sink - "I wanted to hug her, but I couldn't do it. She was a stranger to me. They wanted me and my sisters to get a good education and they made big sacrifices and that was one of them: they didn't know us anymore and we didn't know them."

There are many stories of sacrifice and idealism like hers - and one of the dark deeds of the Republican anarchists is their denigration of public service and their characterization of public servants as parasites, busybodies, incompetents. To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it - they never felt such an urge, therefore it must not exist. But John F. Kennedy knew it and gave voice to it.

(p. 194) You drive out of St. Paul into the Republican suburbs and you see what the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society accomplished: they enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody. And vote to deny to others what they themselves were freely given. Bless their hearts. But they're not Democrats.

Good stuff. Get the book for more where that came from.

Why is U.S. coverage of the presidential election so lousy?

VP Dick Cheney made a campaign swing through Pennsylvania earlier this week, and Campaign Desk's Zachary Roth went along for the ride. The thing is, he wasn't covering Cheney — he was covering the members of the press corps as they reported on the VP's activities. Roth's post at Campaign Desk does a lot to explain how the press keeps missing the real stories of the current election season.

Our favoritie part of the story was this:

Though only a few reporters got within spitting distance of Cheney, almost everyone got off the bus. Most of the photographers aimed their cameras toward a field where Liz Cheney and her three young daughters were holding out alfalfa hay for the cows to eat. "The most enthusiastic crowd all day," quipped the Los Angeles Times' Simon of the cows. But when Cheney came over to help out, the cows took one look at him and ran away, much to the amusement of the press corps.

More: Campaign Desk also has an interview today with Sandra Endo, a reporter for NY1, New York City's 24-hour cable news channel. While the interview is mostly about press coverage of the upcoming Republican National Convention, Endo dropped in this comment when asked to compare the 2000 and 2004 elections:

The bottom line is, presidential campaigns have become so restricted and staged that candidates rarely take questions from the press. Clarifications and positions are explained by campaign managers and spokespeople. That is not unique to this year, but I sense it could be getting worse.

That quote explains even more about the bad coverage, doesn't it?

Blogs & News

I never realized until reading this piece by Ken Layne just how many people shared my hatred of gratuitous registration, or that I wasn't the only one who always registers as a 90 year old male from some random zip code. The site he refers to, one that allows people to bypass the offending registration, is up and running again.

Ms. Musings with a post and good links on how fairy-tale archetypes reflect young women, how they've changed over the years, and the way they're being used in marketing gimmicks. Also, a book review post that focuses mainly on a recent article that argues for a re-translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, saying that the original translation was so badly flawed that it significantly distorted the meaning and coherence of the text.

Trish Wilson with evidence of a growing trend in court regulation of mothers' behavior, discussing a recent case where a custodial mother was jailed for smoking in front of her children.

The Guardian covers a recent study indicating that pollutants are causing a rise in brain disease. Yet another case of privatizing profits while externalizing the costs of business.

Ampersand has a good blog and news roundup of his own. Also: Yesterday was the anniversary of women getting the vote. Why is it that the term activist judges never applies to judges who go against legislative decisions in favor of conservative causes? What it means that the latest so-called partial birth abortion ban failed in a highly sympathetic federal court.

The Sideshow talks about our homeland insecurity and the recent columns of Bruce Schneier.

Atrios: MoveOn is a PAC, not a 527, not that the media can be bothered to figure out the difference. He notes here that the Republican convention will get more network time, and below that you can find the ratings numbers that show the lately abyssmal CNN dropping below MSNBC.

Pinko Feminist Hellcat has some book recommendations.

A little while ago, Respectful of Otters posted about something I don't think I've covered on the blog here, the new requirements that emergency rooms ask about immigration status. Sounds like an epidemic just waiting to happen.

Kathryn Cramer has more on the intrigues of the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea.

Daily Kos: Another Swift Boat lie well and thoroughly demolished. In the one act of retaliation they're capable of, the International Olympic Committee's anger at Bush's use of the games as a political symbol will cost New York the 2012 Olympics. The GOP platform committee has decided to avoid even the token gesture of throwing a bone to social moderates.

Max Sawicky on rising poverty numbers and what should be the top campaign issues.

Matt Yglesias on how to spot a bad political idea, why the Bush campaign should maybe avoid the 'poisoning pregnant women' point.

At Seeing the Forest, Big Dan has a lengthy and interesting post on the merits and demerits of the death penalty.

Beautiful Horizons has a post on the Chilean judiciary's decision to go ahead and try Pinochet anyhow.

The Coup That Wasn't

The whole story sounds like a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. The son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been arrested in South Africa on charges that he was planning a coup in Equatorial Guinea along with several accomplices, also in custody. Oh yeah, and when they arrested him, he was packing to move to Texas. Some highlights [emphasis mine]:

...Seventy people are on trial in Zimababwe in connection with the alleged plot. The majority of them were arrested at an airport in Harare in March, where they had been aboard a plane allegedly bound for Equatorial Guinea. Another 19 are on trial in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea.

Prosecutors claim the men on the plane were mercenaries led by Briton Simon Mann, 51. Mr Mann is the founder of Executive Outcomes, a mercenary company, and a neighbour of Sir Mark in South Africa. He was arrested on the plane in Harare and is currently in a prison in Zimbabwe while his trial continues.

The Equatorial Guinea government has accused the millionaire oil trader, Ely Calil, of having helped to organise a coup from his west London home, and has issued a warrant for the arrest of David Hart, a former adviser to Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Portillo.

...The alleged plotters were said to be hoping to exploit Equatorial Guinea's huge oil reserves by installing their own leader, Severo Moto, who is currently in exile in Spain.

Others implicated in the alleged plot include South African arms dealer Nick du Toit, who faces the death penalty if convicted. His co-defendants face prison sentences of up to 86 years if the case is found proved against them.

...Equatorial Guinea pumps 350,000 barrels of oil a day, and has become Africa's third-largest oil producer since offshore development began in the mid-90s. ...

Private mercenaries, an arms dealer, the bored son of a former head of state acting as a money man, an oil trader, and one nation with very little political or military clout, but enough oil to make it a good target. Who knows why they didn't get away with it, maybe the first group to be arrested sang like canaries, but this might have wound up another case of forgettable civil war in Africa.

Now, why civil wars in Africa are forgettable, that's something to take up with the press. I'm just glad that Sudan has finally made an impression, maybe it will be a new trend in reporting. You know, covering important things.

The Swift Boat Liars smear.

Brought to you by the credulous and lazy US press, as ably demonstrated by Brian Montopoli, Thomas Lang, and Zachary Roth at Campaign Desk.

The initial ad by the swift boat vets came out in August, which had shaped up to be a slow news month, politically speaking. Issues like Kerry's health care plan weren't capturing viewers' imaginations, there hadn't been a terrorist attack or notable capture for months, and Iraq, continuing U.S. casualties notwithstanding, wasn't generating much new news. With its natural bias towards ratings-generating conflict, the media readily embraced the SBVFT story, which, with its harsh allegations and clearly demarcated opposing sides, had about it the smell of blood in the water.

As radio talk shows and cable shoutfests seized upon the "story," the few outlets that initially ignored it or gave it little play were forced to ratchet up their coverage -- a classic example of the elements of the media lower down the professional food chain effectively setting the news agenda. Yesterday, Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor of the New York Times, confessed to Editor & Publisher magazine that "I'm not sure that in an era of no cable television we would even have looked into it." And James O'Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, fretted to E&P; about feeling forced to follow a story that he might not otherwise bother with, just because it's gotten so much air time from the carnival barkers who populate daytime cable and radio.

That sort of thing could have been avoided had news organizations been more aggressive in exploring the SBVFT when it first organized. Last May, without much fanfare, SBVFT held a press conference announcing the group's formation and laying out its agenda. In an open letter to Sen. Kerry, the group wrote, "Further, we believe that you have withheld and/or distorted material facts as to your own conduct in this war," and in a press release let it be known that it intended to publicly examine Kerry's war record. That night, ABC and NBC ignored the development entirely on their nightly news broadcasts, while CBS provided a short report. On Fox News, political correspondent Carl Cameron delivered a report remarkable for its similarity to those seen on TV in recent weeks. He recapped comments from veterans both in support and critical of John Kerry, adding that some of the veterans who are now critical of Kerry previously supported him in 1996. According to Cameron, the Bush campaign denied any involvement in the attacks. Kerry, he said, was doing his best to stay out of the fray. And with that (after a few brief debates on "Hannity & Colmes"), the story went to bed.

In June and July, the press hardly moved the story an inch. By the time the SBVFT resurfaced in early August with its first ad, the story had lain fallow for three months. So the news reports that came out in the wake of the ad elaborated little on Cameron's original story. No news organization, it seems, had seen fit to launch a more thorough investigation into the veterans, despite their coming out party months before.

The "fog of war" can cloud newsrooms just as much as it does battlefields, of course. But given the SBVFT's open letter and virtual declaration of war on Kerry last spring, such investigations should have come as a matter of course.

Throughout August, even as the Swift vets' book hit bookstores and a second ad was rolled out, the campaign press mostly continued to frame the story as a "he said/she said" battle -- at least until last week, when what had been an oddly quiescent press corps lurched awake and began to subject the story to closer scrutiny. The New York Times and Washington Post published articles highly critical of the SBVFT earlier this week, and the Times today meticulously laid out the connections between the swift boat vets on the one hand and lawyers, political strategists and donors to the Bush campaign on the other.

After countless unchallenged segments on the cable news shows and print articles repeating a variety of erroneous SBVFT claims, the mainstream press had belatedly awakened from its summer dormancy and measured spurious claims against known facts. But it had come far too late.

Campaign Desk calls the Swift Boat non-issue one of the lowest points of media coverage of the US presidential election. This magpie has to agree.

While CJR's Campaign Desk sometimes misses the mark, they're hard to beat for dissecting the connections between bad reporting and the failure of reporters to ask questions when presented with spin. We read Campaign Desk every day. You should, too. (And if you haven't done so already, make sure to Make sure to go read today's entire Swift Boat article, rather than just taking in our excerpt).