MY LIFE IN A TANKA

I'm on call all week.
Off Monday morning at eight.
It's beer for breakfast.

There's nothing like a haiku
for concise profundity.

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

I see Google has a "This Land is Your Land " theme for the 4th this year.  It's often not recognized for the very political song that it is because several verses are regularly left out. For example:

As I went walking I saw a sign there 
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 
But on the other side it didn't say nothing, 
That side was made for you and me.

Dogs strain at the leash.
A rabbit, still by the walk,
one forefoot trembling.

http://fareedzakaria.com/2012/03/19/health-insurance-is-for-everyone/

I think this got it about right. The Affordable Care Act certainly wouldn't have been the bill I would have written. For example, I like neither the individual mandate nor the employer mandate. But these were patches on the current system necessitated by resistance to more rational, fundamental change.

THE FRUITS OF THE NORTH

My great grandfather on his own land
had every kind of tart little berry
and trees full of green pie apples,
all the fruits of the north.
And he had a pond full of fish
and a boat to rent.
And after he saw
the groves of sweet oranges,
he was never happy again.

COMMENTS AFTER THE HEALTHCARE DECISION #2

Speaking of Rush Limbaugh, his contention is that the Affordable Care Act was only incidentally about health care.  The real point, he says, was getting that individual mandate into law, which would then establish the principle of unrestrained government control of our lives.  The problem with that notion is that, after the conservatives abandoned it, the IM was almost no one's preferred approach to the goal of universal coverage.   Certainly not Obama's, who advocated the public option.   Others of us lefties wanted single payor or even a national health service.  The IM was an unloved compromise.  And I think the hope was that the IM would be, for the right, the least unpalatable path to universal coverage, thus provoking the least opposition.  Well, that didn't work out too well.   But maybe it would have worked out better if we had remembered why the IM was a conservative proposal in the first place:  It was an anti-free rider measure.  That is, it was to prevent uninsured people from getting free service courtesy of taxpayors.  I see a lot of net posts raging against welfare recipients not having to take drug tests or people with food stamps buying cigarettes with the cash they don't have to spend on food.  If we'd played to that rage by promoting the IM as the way to stop crackheads from remaining recklessly uninsured, blowing out a couple arteries in their brains, and leaving us to pay for their stroke care, the tea partying in all those townhalls two or three years ago might have been in support of Obamacare.

COMMENTS AFTER THE HEALTHCARE DECISION #1

At the risk of sounding like Rush Limbaugh, I was right!  As my elder son and maybe one or two other people can attest, I said several months ago that changing the "penalty" that the individual mandate entailed into a "tax" for healthcare from which you would be exempted if you had health insurance for yourself would remove the constitutional question that requiring citizens to buy something raised.  It did surprise me that Chief Justice Roberts did the redefining himself.  But then I was reminded that the money was to be collected by means of your tax return.  And I heard that the administration's brief did include the point that the penalty could be regarded as a tax.  It just wasn't reported much.  So now I'm less surprised.