The Capitol Police, who are currently working without pay, are risking their lives to protect Members of Congress, who are still on the payroll. Here’s the Post liveblog.
World Suicide Prevention Day
Reader a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q) sent in a reminder that today is World Suicide Prevention Day, as part of Suicide Prevention Month. NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has chapters all over the country (locator here) if you want to get involved. The document she sent includes this fact:
While making up less than 1 percent of the population, military veterans represent over 20 percent of suicides each year-nothing short of a national disgrace.
Maybe Richard can weigh in on this, but my understanding is that one of the many good things that will come from Obamacare is a standardized, decent, mental health coverage.
Update: The way I worded that, it sounds like vets would go on Obamacare – of course, they have subsidized VA treatment.
We Can’t Afford to “Intervene” in Syria
Not while this is happening right here in our very own World’s Most Powerful Nation, right now:
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — As a self-described “true Southern man” — and reluctant recipient of food stamps — Dustin Rigsby, a struggling mechanic, hunts deer, doves and squirrels to help feed his family. He shops for grocery bargains, cooks budget-stretching stews and limits himself to one meal a day.
Tarnisha Adams, who left her job skinning hogs at a slaughterhouse when she became ill with cancer, gets $352 a month in food stamps for herself and three college-age sons. She buys discount meat and canned vegetables, cheaper than fresh. Like Mr. Rigsby, she eats once a day — “if I eat,” she said.
When Congress officially returns to Washington next week, the diets of families like the Rigsbys and the Adamses will be caught up in a debate over deficit reduction. Republicans, alarmed by a rise in food stamp enrollment, are pushing to revamp and scale down the program. Democrats are resisting the cuts.
No matter what Congress decides, benefits will be reduced in November, when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill expires…
Surrounded by corn and soybean farms — including one owned by the local Republican congressman, Representative Stephen Fincher — Dyersburg, about 75 miles north of Memphis, provides an eye-opening view into Washington’s food stamp debate. Mr. Fincher, who was elected in 2010 on a Tea Party wave and collected nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government from 1999 to 2012, recently voted for a farm bill that omitted food stamps.
“The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country,” Mr. Fincher, whose office did not respond to interview requests, said after his vote in May. In response to a Democrat who invoked the Bible during the food stamp debate in Congress, Mr. Fincher cited his own biblical phrase. “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said…
Now if Congress wanted to mandate a targeted strike on Rep. Fincher, I would be on board with that, because his removal would be a improvement even if it just meant one less One Percenter parasite on the farm-subsidy teat. But since that’s not happening, I’m glad my new Senator (and former Rep) had the balls to vote with his brain, not his… instincts:
… Markey said he cast his equivocal vote because he wants more time to analyze the situation. He said in an interview that the resolution was written too broadly and allowed for the potential that the United States would become far more entangled in the Syrian conflict.
“My one concern is that we not get on a slippery slope — that we understand all of the steps that this action could lead to,” he said. “It’s about the resolution being too broad. It’s about the need for more information. It’s about my worry about a greater involvement in Syria.”
Asked why he did not just oppose the authorization, as did some of his colleagues who had similar concerns, he said, “A no vote would have indicated I had sufficient information on which to base the decision. Which I did not.”…
It’s being said that the Administration has already “dismisse[d] U.N. inspections in Syria of alleged chemical weapons sites”, because why wait around for a bunch of peacenik scientists when our own “U.S. intelligence community” assures us that we’ve got as much [redacted] information as we need. This would not be a great precedent under any circumstances. But why are “we” so eager to discuss the exact parameters under which “we” will splurge a whole bunch of million-dollar targeted munitions, when so many of our fellow Americans are suffering because “we can’t afford” to care for our own?
Why are “we” discussing global send-a-message military expeditions on the other side of the world, instead of talking about the various (GOP-manufactured) Fiscal Crises right here at home?
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Why do you keep passing the open windows?
Scoff if you must (and some of you will), but this blog is a community of sorts, and many of us have had a tough time lately. One thing that continues to amaze me, not just at Balloon Juice but in life generally, is the range and diversity of how people deal with anger, sorrow and pain.
Some people drink themselves into a stupor. Some people eat or smoke too much. Some people loll in front of the TV until they nod off. Some people read all the time. Some people create – food, art, prose, poetry, needlepoint, knitting, etc. Some people focus on their families or pets. Some people shop. Some people pursue romance or at least sex. Some people drive around aimlessly in a car or on a bike or wander around in the dark on foot.
With the exception of knitting, I’ve engaged in every single one of those activities at some point as a way to convince myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Obviously some of these activities are more healthy than others, but I’m not sure it’s the activities themselves that are important as a way to get through a shitty time but rather the distraction they provide.
Those are all ways to stay occupied and/or distracted, so “stay occupied and/or distracted” is the underlying strategy. Maybe every coping strategy is a species of this, but I’m not convinced that’s true. For example, I’ve been on a few heinous hamster wheels of suck in my life where I had to force myself to stop just occupying my time and make a radical change to disembark. I had to leave that horrible job or get out of that toxic relationship, etc., even though it was scary as hell at the time.
That was the only way back to (relative) mental health. I’m not suggesting that making a radical life change can cure clinical depression, which I believe is a chemical imbalance that is just as much a medical condition as diabetes. But I think we do have the power, in some cases, to change our lives in a way that can jolt us out of feeling so sad or angry or downtrodden or ashamed. And doing so can improve our overall mental health, just as lifestyle changes can mitigate the course of certain types of diabetes.
So even though I’m afraid of where this thread might go, I’m going to ask anyway: Have you ever found yourself languishing on some horrible hamster wheel of suck and found a way to change your thinking and/or actions enough to get off of it? In a world that is so filled with sadness, impermanence and pain, what makes you keep passing the open windows?
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Fighting the Stigma
Speaking of the ugly Calvinism / Jansenism curled at the shriveled core of too many American hearts, bravo for Kristen Johnston for her NYTimes articles on “Turning A Disease Into A Sideshow“:
“Kristen Johnston admits to being a total drug addict and alcoholic for years!”
After 20 years of being a famous person, I’m happy to say I have pretty thick skin when it comes to press. However, when I saw that headline, which ran recently on a major entertainment Web site, I stopped in my tracks. The entire article was based on two quotations from an interview I had given to a completely different publication to promote my TV Land series, “The Exes.“
At the end of the interview, I had been asked a few questions about a book I wrote, “Guts,” which is mostly about the time my guts blew up in response to my lengthy love affair with booze and pills; this part is what the Web site used. “Guts” was released a year and a half ago, and in that time I’ve been very open about my disease, discussing it on countless talk shows and in hundreds of articles, so it wasn’t exactly breaking news…
… Most people believe addicts are selfish, delusional jerks who have no qualms about destroying themselves and everyone who loves them. Even the reality shows focused on addiction, like “Intervention,” “Rehab With Dr. Drew” (thankfully canceled) or that show where people have bizarre addictions like eating chalk or scouring powder, have done almost nothing to educate Americans. All they’ve really achieved is keeping addiction an oddity, a sideshow. It’s entertainment for the “nonaddicted” who happily watch from the couch while cramming down two large pizzas and a case of light beer, thinking, “Thank the good Lord that’s not me.” …
This is an epidemic that now claims more lives per year than car accidents. It kills more people per year than guns. Drugs are now the No. 1 cause of deaths in emergency rooms. Yet there is zero government financing for research. There are no swanky benefits to raise funds to eradicate it. A minuscule percentage of those who suffer can afford to get help, because most insurers refuse to cover treatment. We imprison those whose only crime is being an addict, and I can’t even get the New York City schools to let my organization, SLAM, NYC, build a sober high school.
I’ve had it. We’re not a joke anymore. It’s time for addiction to stand up and demand some respect. Because every time someone is ostracized for being an addict, every time there’s a breathless, trumped-up, sensational headline, every time we giggle at a wasted celebrity, and every time addiction is televised as salacious entertainment, yet another addict is shamed into silence.
And before anyone says, “WTF, sober high schools?”… forty years ago, in my white working-class parochial school, there were plenty of kids started on their addiction journey by the time they were in the seventh grade. (And not just the Irish kids, either.) There’s more lip service today about how it’s a disease, but just as with fat-shaming, too many people want to believe that addiction is moral weakness made physically evident.
Young Black Men: The New Learning Experience for Scared Gun Nuts
Oh fuckitall:
One of the jurors who acquitted George Zimmerman said she had “no doubt” he feared for his life in the final moments of his struggle with Trayvon Martin, and that was the definitive factor in the verdict.
The woman, who was identified just as Juror B37, spoke exclusively to CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Monday night. She is the first juror to speak publicly about the case.
She said she believed Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” the night he killed Martin, but that he didn’t use “good judgment” in confronting the Florida teen.
Martin’s heart was in the right place. Right where it should be when this scumbag shot him through it.
And then this gem:
When Cooper asked the juror if she would feel comfortable with Zimmerman being a neighborhood watch volunteer in her community, she said, “if he didn’t go too far.” She added, “I would feel comfortable having George (as a neighborhood watchman)…I think he’s learned a good lesson.”
It’s 2013, and black people are still a prop or object lesson or, well, slave to white people. I guess that makes sense, since wingnuts keep telling me MLK would have been a conservative.
I know we talk about epistemic closure and Republicans, but after this week-end, I am so fucking happy this place is dominated by like mind human beings with souls, consciences, a genuine concern for animals and people, and empathy. The alternative blows and I don’t want to live there.
Young Black Men: The New Learning Experience for Scared Gun NutsPost + Comments (161)
A Doomed Experiment
Crusading journalist / egomaniacal hack Glenn Greenwald released Part Deux of his interview with noble whistleblower / foul traitor Edward Snowden yesterday:
Instead of engaging in the ritual Denunciation of the Firebaggers and Shaming of the Obots (which is so very last month), let’s focus instead on this one thing Snowden said:
Beyond that we’ve got PRISM, which is a demonstration of how the US government co-opts US corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back-ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly in an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”
The companies in question have all denied providing the NSA “direct access” to their data, so either they are mistaken, lying or obfuscating or Snowden is. Whom do you believe and why?
Bonus points for anyone who can answer without accusing someone else of being an emoprog or torture apologist.