You know people have crossed a line with a reputable news organization like McClatchy deems it newsworthy to print State of the health care debate: Talk radio attacks an 11-year old. In it they describe how Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin have viciously attacked the 11 yr-old orphan by lack of health care insurance. The story of his mother is heartbreaking:

Tifanny Owens died in June 2007 of pulmonary hypertension, which is described as high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs that can lead to heart failure. The disease is considered rare. While there's no cure, it can be treated.

The treatments can cost as much as $100,000 a year and must be "consistent and constant," said Katie Kroner, the director of advocacy and awareness for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association.

"It's extremely important to have health coverage," she said.

Owens was an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant when she became sick in September 2006. As she became sicker, she missed work and was eventually fired, leaving her without health insurance. She was treated twice in an emergency room and died at age 27 after a week of unconsciousness. Gina Owens has custody of Marcelas and his two younger sisters.

Gina Owens said her daughter didn't qualify for Medicaid. State officials said that without knowing the details, it was impossible to speculate on whether Tifanny Owens would have qualified.

Tifanny Owens might have been eligible for Washington state's basic health care plan, which is aimed at the working poor. The plan has had a long waiting list for some time, said Sharon Michael of the Washington state Health Care Authority.

"Right now, we have 100,000 people on the wait list," Michael said.

The neo-con punditocracy not only doesnt believe the story, but Beck insisted, without actually giving specifics, that Gina Owens had other alternatives. Limbaugh and Malkin had the nerve to parrot the same and even worse: that there was no proof his mother would have lived longer anyway since her condition is allegedly incurable.

Unbelievable.
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It is amazing to me that racist, bigoted, xenophobic creeps like David North and Mark Krikorian are taken seriously enough in this country to have their hatred spewed across publications like The New York Times or prime-time news shows. Here's a prime example, just published at the Wonk Rom's Mark Krikorian: ‘Haiti’s So Screwed Up Because It Wasn’t Colonized Long Enough’:

CIS Fellow David North has attacked the idea of waiving TPS fees for Haitian “illegals” who are probably struggling to send every extra penny they have back home right now. Last week North suggested that Haitian refugees would be best culturally absorbed by other Caribbean countries and any refugees accepted by the U.S. should be directed to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which according to North, “have never lifted a finger to help America to resettle refugees.”

I can't even begin with this one! Is this man serious? Whatever happened a lot of those Cubans who left after Castro or during the Mariel crisis? Oh right, they ended up in Puerto Rico. And how about all the Haitians that took to boats and dingies after the fall of Duvalier? Puerto Rico, of course!

The United States actually had thousand of Haitians in immigration limbo and human rights abuse hell during the 1980s after putting them into an internment camp in Fort Allen, one of the oldest military bases in the island. And guess who got to keep all those Marielitos and Haitians during one of the worst recessions we had on the island? Why, of course, Puerto Rico!

It gets better though,


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As if it wasnt enough to have unhappy memories triggered by my 911.wikileaks.org post, my unhappiness started yesterday after I read Cooking the History Books: The Thanksgiving Massacre : Republic of Lakotah - Mitakuye Oyasin:

William Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chair of the anthropology department of the University of Connecticut, claims that the first Thanksgiving was not “a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children.” In 1637, the Pequot tribe of Connecticut gathered for the annual Green Corn Dance ceremony. Mercenaries of the English and Dutch attacked and surrounded the village; burning down everything and shooting whomever try to escape. The next day, Newell notes, the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony declared: “A day of Thanksgiving, thanking God that they had eliminated over 700 men, women and children.” It was signed into law that, “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots.” Most Americans believe Thanksgiving was this wonderful dinner and harvest celebration. The truth is the “Thanksgiving dinner” was invented both to instill a false pride in Americans and to cover up the massacre.

Am infuriated. One of the first teaching jobs I got was as a history teacher in the NYC public school system. How in the facking hell does this country get away with not teaching their children about this massacre? No wonder when it comes to public education I am on the side of conservative homeschoolers and radical unschoolers than with the Bloomberg loving UFT?

How can I look into the eyes of a child and say "Happy Thanksgiving" after reading about the horrible beginnings of "Thanks Giving"?
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Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr's Day and it was observed by many as a day of community service. Others headed straight to the nation's capital to continue enjoying the inauguration celebration. Others like me stayed home sick or had to go to work thanks to employers who still refuse to acknowledge the day as a national holiday.

Juan Cole has been on a roll tying up the historical threads that are going to make the next 4 to 8 years rather interesting. As a Middle Eastern Politics scholar, he's been relentless in his dismantling of the pro-Zionist propaganda that justified the invasion of Gaza all the while smacking ruthlessly Hamas and all those involved in islamocentric power struggles.

Tis the reason why you need to read "King's Anti-Imperialism and the Challenge for Obama" :

The Martin Luther King, Jr. that most Americans know is the man who said, "I have a dream" at a massive rally 250,000 strong in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That speech is about racial justice and ultimate reconciliation in the United States, and with the changes wrought in American law and practice by the Civil Rights movement, it is a speech that Americans can still feel hopeful about, even if we have not, as Dr. King would have said, "gotten there yet."

But there was another King, the critic of the whole history of European colonialism in the global South, who celebrated the independence movements that led to decolonization in the decades after World War II. The anti-imperial King is the exact opposite of the Neoconservatives who set US policy in the early twenty-first century. Barack Obama, who inherits King's Civil Rights legacy and is also burdened with the neo-imperialism of the W. era, has some crucial choices to make about whether he will heed the other King, or whether he will get roped into the previous administration's neocolonial project simply because it is the status quo from which he will begin his tenure as commander in chief.

The Civil Rights movement was not just about sitting on the front of the bus or eating at a cafeteria counter. It was about reparations. Reparations for the crimes of imperialism. Reparation for the subjugations, enslavement and exploitation of whole races and social classes of peoples.

In the "Let Freedom Ring" speech, the speech that I believe had him finally killed, Dr. King expresses rather poetically :
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Let that sink in for a minute.