Joe needs to go

Please tell me why Joe Lieberman is allowed to caucus with the Democrats when he is too busy flirting with the Republicans to give even procedural support to the most important piece of Democratic legislation in... well, ever?

There have to be some carrots and/or sticks that would work on this guy. I'm rooting for sticks.

Yes we can... in a few years

It turns out that if the healthcare bill passes, we still have to wait until 2013 to see any of the positive effects. Hopefully this will be amended before the bill goes to a floor vote. Because I don't think the voters are going to be too crazy about a healthcare reform that doesn't kick in until after the next presidential election -- what if a right-winger is voted in who immediately cancels it?

The insurance companies are already shooting at it, so there would be some serious pressure on lawmakers of the future to dismantle it, and unless there are immediate benefits to voters, there wouldn't be much risk to lawmakers to pull the plug on insurance reform.

Enough with the insults and Hitler comparisons

Alan Grayson's comment that the Republican health care plan was "Don't get sick" might have been appropriate, but his follow-up comment that the backup plan was "Die quickly!" went too far, as did his description of the death of the uninsured as a "Holocaust."

I would like to see both sides of this debate grow up and focus on the issues, instead of calling each other names like "foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals."

Still, Pelosi is right that there has been plenty of nasty rhetoric going around and that censuring Grayson only distracts from the important work to be done. This seems fair, since Pelosi also wasn't in favor of censuring Wilson.

Seriously, everyone, start being grownups and actually act like you're there to help people, OK?

Strong women are scary

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the first married couple to ever win the Pulitzer Prize, have written a powerful book about women in developing countries: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Kristof is probably best known as a New York Times columnist, and in a recent blog post, quoted Bill Gates about the value of partnering with a strong woman and wondered why so many men in developing countries are afraid of strong women, when they could be so much happier and more prosperous if they encouraged their wives and daughters to contribute financially to the family.

The blog post, of course, only gave one tiny insight from a book that has a sweeping scope. Still, commenters on the post were quick to call Kristof "sexist," because he suggested that women contribute financially when they are already doing so much of the home and family work, here and worldwide. Other readers made pseudoscientific arguments about the evolutionary reasons that women prefer dominant men. Others suggested that Kristof just wanted to complete the emasculation of men which, of course, the feminists have already started.

If you read the book, you get an even worse view, substantiated by statistics, of human nature and the resistance to any small sign of strength in women. There are all kinds of horrifying discussions of women being brutalized for showing any sign of strength and of the enslavement of women and young girls by the sex industry. Perhaps saddest to me were statistics that showed that when women's personal incomes rise, they pay off family debts and educate their children; but when men's personal incomes rise, they spend their money on alcohol, prostitutes, and other personal indulgences even as their families go without basic needs. Kristof and WuDunn don't go into the question of why this happens. I wonder if it has something to do with the question of masculinity -- the need to feel "like a man," which doesn't seem to come from providing for a family, but may come from drinking and carousing like a man. I'm really not sure and I hate to generalize or speculate too much.

I see a need in our own country for a better model of masculinity, though. With the disparate impact of the recession on traditionally-male jobs, women are taking over the old role of family breadwinner. I'm not saying that the "Leave it to Beaver" model of gender roles ever was real or worked for people particularly well, but it has been completely dismantled without much put in place to replace it. Women still do most of the work of keeping a home and family together, so it starts to seem that men are left without much of a role to call their own.

It's a hard question to answer, but I think it's still an important one. If men had a sense of themselves as powerful without dominating, maybe we'd see less pop-culture attempts to stuff women back into the box of powerless and decorative. And more importantly, maybe we'd see less gender-based violence worldwide.

Bringing down the cost curve for health care

Dr. Andrew Weil had a good line on The Diane Rehm Show the other day: "We don't have a healthcare system, we have a disease management system."

What's interesting is that on a routine visit to a new doctor, I got the kind of MRI brain scan for a headache that Dr. Weil described as wasteful. I sort of suspected that it was a silly thing to do, but what did I know? Since I haven't heard from the doctor, I'm assuming I don't have a tumor. Which was pretty much what I thought before I had the brain scan.

I used the metaphor during that post of a doctor being like a mechanic for your body: You don't know much about the machine yourself, so when they say it needs something done to it, you don't have many options but to trust them. Sure, if it was something like bypass surgery I would have had a second opinion, but an MRI? Still, you can't help but wonder if that test would have been ordered if I had different, less generous insurance.

I don't really want a mechanic for my body, I want someone who would be more of a wellness coach. But how do you find something like that? The healthcare system doesn't pay doctors to talk to their patients (maybe that was what was so scary about those "death panels" -- the idea that doctors might have to talk to their patients). Doctors make money on office visits, but it's a flat rate, so the sooner they get you in and out, the more money they make.

Not surprised, just disappointed

I was in a sandwich shop yesterday waiting for my lunch with some three seemingly senior citizens, a couple and another man. Let's call them Harry and Louise, and Frank. Frank was bragging about his recent vacation, and Harry and Louise said how much they loved to travel, but they couldn't often get away with Harry working all the time. "Why don't you retire," Frank asked, "You can't take it with you." Louise said, "We're hoping they finally do something about this insurance thing. Otherwise we have to hold out until we're old enough for Medicare. We'd go broke if we tried to buy insurance on our own."

I hope Harry can keep working because he won't get any relief from Max Baucus and his committee. They have released a proposal that a major proponent of health care reform says is worse than no reform at all for many families:

Under the Finance Committee proposal, individuals would be required to obtain insurance. But to drive down the cost of the package, Montana Democrat Max Baucus's Gang of Six -- a gang that pointedly does not include Wyden -- trimmed the size of the subsidies available for those who could not afford insurance on their own.

Now, a family earning three times the poverty level -- $66,150 for a family of four -- would have to pay up to 13 percent of their income for health insurance. And that's just the premiums -- not counting deductibles, co-payments and out-of-pocket expenses.

"I don't know very many working-class families who you can look in the eyes and say: 'Do you have that kind of money in your checking account?' -- because they don't," Wyden told me.

Those without coverage would face a fine of as much as $3,800, unless costs exceeded 10 percent of their income, in which case they would be given an "affordability exemption." In other words, they wouldn't have insurance, but at least they wouldn't be penalized for it.

"Folks are having trouble affording coverage that meets their families' needs now. And they have been hearing from the White House and Congress that they're going to get health-care security," Wyden said.

If the Baucus proposal passes, he said, "They're going to say, 'Huh? Health-care security means I pay a whole lot more than I'm paying today or I get to be exempt from it, or I pay a penalty?' They're not going to say that meets the definition of health-care security."

The "hardship exemption," he said, is "a big congressional punt." The people most in need of insurance -- those in their late 50s and early 60s -- will end up saying, as Wyden put it, "I'm just as uninsured as I was before I heard all the politicians speak."

All of this to try to court Republican senators, who aren't interested in supporting anything that could be considered a victory for Barack Obama.

There are other bills. Hopefully something that really helps people (other than insurance company shareholders and CEOs) will be salvaged from all this, or we will have yet another heartbreaking missed opportunity on our hands.

What's your primary emotion about 9/11?

A program that aired yesterday on NPR described Richard Cohen's desire for revenge for the 9/11 attacks, and asked people to call in about what emotions still linger, 8 years later.

I was at work on the day of the attacks and remember feeling very confused. Planes were crashing into buildings and falling out of the sky and no one seemed to know why. I thought there was immediate danger to all of us. I called my husband, who works at a high school, and he hadn't heard. Then I remember feeling sick as everyone kept watching the events on television and providing a constant update. I wanted to shut it out and hide under my desk.

It wasn't until the next day that we knew what was really going on. I actually suspected it was domestic terrorists, similar to Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City, until we learned otherwise. The targets seemed similar.

I understand the desire for revenge, but for a long time, my primary emotion was anger at how quickly our real pain and suffering were turned into false justifications to attack Iraq and take away our freedoms. The way patriotism turned ugly into a way to knock anyone who disagreed with the decisions our leaders were making still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth too.

The attacks made us all feel vulnerable, and I think that the desire for revenge is, in a sense, a desire to put things back to a state where we could believe we were safe and isolated from the rest of the world. There is no realistic way to do that. Capturing Bin Laden would help bring some justice, but it wouldn't make us safer. There are enough other people willing to take his place.

Like most of the callers, I just feel deep, unrelenting sadness. First, for all the lives lost on that day. Also, for those lost or hurt in the days since. Not only the immediate victims of the attack, but the first responders who were sickened trying to help others, the military men and women who died or were wounded in the two wars those attacks launched, and all the civilians who have been casualties of those wars.