Democracy for Utah - World

Palin's "pals" at AIP were working with Iran

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:58:51 -0600

This is kind of late-breaking news, but wouldn't it be nice if Obama brought this up in response to McCain's inevitable attack that Obama would be willing to talk — just talk — with Iranian leader Ahmejinedad (Salon):

"My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand."

This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one problem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that's the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year. ("Keep up the good work," Palin told AIP members. "And God bless you.") [...]

Vogler's greatest moment of glory was to be his 1993 appearance before the United Nations to denounce United States "tyranny" before the entire world and to demand Alaska's freedom. The Alaska secessionist had persuaded the government of Iran to sponsor his anti-American harangue.

That's right ... Iran. The Islamic dictatorship. The taker of American hostages. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have excoriated Obama for suggesting we diplomatically engage. That Iran.

As Putin rears his head into U.S. air space...

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:01:26 -0600

Apparently this is what Sarah Palin was talking about (via Daily Kos):

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska." –Sarah Palin

Benefits of Taiwan's single-payer healthcare system

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:18:30 -0600

Congressional Quarterly looks at Taiwan's system of single-payer healthcare, which was put into place in 1995:

"In Taiwan, we have no waiting lists," says Hou [Sheng-Mou]. "In Taiwan, the doctor works on Saturday. They operate on Saturday afternoon." Moreover, the government does not tell its citizens where they must go for care, he said. Sophisticated information technology is a part of the health system. Each resident of the country carries a "smart card" to entitles them to health care.

"With the smart card you can go to any clinic at any time without an appointment," Hou said. And there is no "gatekeeper" denying access to specialists, a frequent complaint among Americans about U.S. managed care companies. [...]

The smart card also contributes to the quality and efficiency of the system by giving doctors a medical profile of the patient and by automating payment. When a provider swipes the card, the patient's medical history and medications show up on the computer screen and the government is billed for the provider's services.

Taiwan's single-payer system isn't perfect; for example, its expenditures are slightly above its revenues, and there is less money available for R&D than in the U.S. On the plus side, Taiwan's system has far lower administrative costs: 1.6% of healthcare spending vs. 15% (as a low estimate) in the U.S. Also, Taiwan insures all its citizens while spending only 6% of its GDP on healthcare, while we spend 16% of our GDP on healthcare and still have 47 million Americans without coverage.

Toward a progressive foreign policy

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:04:33 -0600

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.

The post-American world

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:29:40 -0600

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

Darfur Petition Ramifications!! Good news!!

Mon, 14 May 2007 22:46:35 -0600

Re Darfur divestments

A family member works for Fidelity in investments. He told me that several of the callers today have asked him about Fidelity's plans re Darfur..

Please sign the petition (previous post); we do make a difference and we do matter...

Sheryl

Choosing free time over economic growth

Thu, 03 May 2007 10:22:54 -0600

Ezra Klein discusses the French presidential election and that country's love of leisure time:

The apparent popularity of the 35-hour workweek, though, deserves some attention — as does the French mandate of 5 weeks of vacation. The French like not working incessantly. They are consciously sacrificing a bit of economic growth in order to devote more time to leisure. It's a perfectly legitimate choice for a society to make. But it's never represented that way in domestic punditry, as we exclusively evaluate policy decisions based on their effects on measurable economic indicators. [...]

I'd give up a lot for a guaranteed five weeks of vacation. That's time enough to vacation with friends, and regularly see my family, and take the occasional long weekend. Indeed, I'd love to see an economist model what that would cost us. It would have to be an almost unimaginably high number to dissuade me from taking the deal.

TIME's Person of the Year: You!

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:29:16 -0700

It's rare that I read an opinion piece in the mainstream media anymore that's startlingly creative and original. But TIME Magazine's Person of the Year is someone that nobody ever would have guessed.

America loves its solitary geniuses — its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses — but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Support to Israeli Soldiers

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 23:52:55 -0600

I was sent a site address for people to show support to Israeli soldiers.

I will forward it to anyone who sends me a "private" message from this site.

Defending Israel...

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 09:33:55 -0600

From an e mail from the Anti Defamation League
Another point of view.

http://support.adl.org/site/PageServer?pagename=sign_the_letter_to_annan

"Time and time again Israel has been attacked and demonized by the United Nations. This time it's by the new U.N. Human Rights Council that was created to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. We need to let Secretary-General Kofi Annan know this is unacceptable.

Few Americans think U.S. can impose democracy

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:00:05 -0700

AP:

Americans question the ability of the United States to create democracy in other countries, and are divided on whether successful efforts could even make the U.S. safer, according to a poll released Thursday.

Only 36 percent of those surveyed by the Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index believe the U.S. can help spread democracy — a major objective for the Bush administration in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

"People do regard it as a desirable goal," Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich said. "But from a common sense point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have concluded that democracy is something that countries come to on their own."

Darfur Lecture at the JCC tonight

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 23:20:37 -0700

I attended a lecture tonight sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women, Utah Chapter. The speaker was
Ruth Messinger, who is the current president and executive director of American Jewish World Service. She talked about her efforts to establish humanitarian aid and interfaith relief services for communities who have been impacted by the genocide in Darfur.

The speech was especially moving to some of the audience members who have been affected in their own past from the Nazi Holoucast. A refrain heard often in our culture is "never again", however, Genocide is happening in this time, right now, and not much is being done through our government to assist those who are being murdered in Darfur.

Asking the hard questions about globalization

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:16:31 -0700

Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog on globalization:

So maybe I'm an economic imbecile but I can't see how "opportunities" are being created for American workers when appliances are built in Mexico and sold in India. And whenever I have asked this of righties, I'm told a little pain is the price of progress — once upon a time horse-drawn carriage manufacturers went out of business, too.

Yes, but as I understand it people stopped buying horse-drawn carriages because they were buying automobiles instead — automobiles mostly manufactured in Detroit. So automobile manufacturing replaced carriage manufacturing; when one door closed, another was already open. Electric lights replaced candles. Home computers replaced typewriters. One kind of manufacturing was shoved aside as another took its place. Yes this was stressful on individuals who lost jobs, but technological innovations do create many new opportunities.

But outsourcing is different. What new opportunities will be created for workers by outsourcing manufacturing overseas? Please spell it out for me. I can't see it. Yes, American-owned businesses might make more money, but there's no law that says that money will be used to create more jobs for American workers. It's more likely to create more jobs for Mexican workers. How can American labor compete other than by pricing itself down?

And this from Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe:

Yaron Gamburg, Israeli Deputy Counsel, visits Utah

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 23:50:54 -0700

I was going to write an article about the visit to Utah of the Israeli Deputy counsel, Yaron Gamburg, (and I still might) but Rob Miller, the State Democrat Party vice chair wrote a fine one on his web site: http://utahamicus.blogspot.com/
Please visit his site often, it is full of news and Rob's take on current events.
Sheryl

Darfur

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 16:42:19 -0700

National Call-In Day for Darfur
This may be late, but we can still make the calls this week. Sheryl

Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005

After the success of our last National Call-In Day for Darfur, we hope that you will join us in picking up the phone once again this Tuesday, December 6.

Experts from the State Department, NATO, and leading think-tanks have repeatedly said that funding the African Union is absolutely critical to stopping what both the President and Congress have declared to be genocide. Unfortunately, $50 million intended for African Union troops in Darfur was cut out of the recent Foreign Operations spending bill. There is, however, one last chance to get that funding back before the end of the year. An effort is underway to include those funds in the Defense Appropriations Conference Report when Congress comes back into session next week. It is vital that we do everything we can to make sure that Congress knows that their constituents are paying attention to this bill, and that we expect them to include these funds. Please call your Representative and your two Senators and make your voice heard on this incredibly important issue.