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KJ, the Democrats may not have a poster child for health care reform, but they are getting a public enemy. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter got shouted down by anti-health care reform protesters at an embarrassing town hall meeting Sunday. (At one point, Sebelius had to threaten to walk off the stage.) But even though they had Sebelius and Specter temporarily tongue-tied, for Democrats, the protesters may end up being exactly what the doctor ordered.
Pundits are already predicting a backlash against the protesters, who have been wreaking havoc at town halls since the House went on recess last week. Even though there's a wave of populist anger at insurance companies and their "pre-existing conditions," the anger that's getting all the attention right now is that of right-wing protesters who think the government is going to encourage old people to die faster. To those who feel deep anxiety at the prospect of the government tampering with their health care, the protesters are heroic, for now. But they're going to become increasingly obnoxious to many who want to engage in a substantive debate about the merits of reform. Debates are hard to have when people are screaming, shouting, and waving Bibles around. The protesters have Democrats on the defensive for now, but if they keep up their antics through August, they're going to find themselves—not the Obama administration—the source of public frustration with reform.
Photograph of protesters at a Texas town hall with Rep. Lloyd Doggett is a still from a video of the event.
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Wow, that might be the fastest Bill Clinton has ever picked up two women...
In all seriousness, it’s fabulous news that North Korea is releasing journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. But Torie, I don’t know how much light will be shed on this. According to this CNN story, North Korea’s infamous state-run media is claiming that Clinton “expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong-il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists.” I don’t buy that for a second, but given the delicate negotiations that apparently preceded this trip—the United States dropped a request for a straight-up release and instead agreed to amnesty, which implies wrongdoing—I also don’t think the the former president will waste his breath countering such obviously ridiculous claims.
Besides, Clinton probably has bigger things on his mind. Fred Kaplan writes today in Slate that it’s unlikely that someone of the former president’s stature would be sent to a hostile country merely for the purpose of getting some prisoners released. Could Clinton be trying to re-open a dialogue with the rogue nation that in May tested a nuclear device? Perhaps.
Photograph of Bill Clinton being greeted at a North Korean airport by KNS/AFP/Getty Images.
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For Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists held in North Korea since March, the nightmare is apparently over: The Hermit Kingdom’s state-run news agency has announced that the two have been pardoned and will be released.
Now that they’re free, I hope that Ling and Lee will talk frankly about their experiences in North Korea. To save face in the international community, Kim Jong-Il’s kingdom almost assuredly housed the imprisoned pair in far better conditions than most “free” North Koreans experience, and they would have been allowed to come in contact with only the most ideologically pure guards and representatives of the government. But Ling and Lee can surely at least give us some information about what the people they came in contact with were like, what sort of knowledge they had about America and the world at large, whether anyone demonstrated any warmth toward them. Some reports have indicated that North Koreans are beginning to understand more about the world thanks to pirated South Korean soap operas and other smuggled goods—did they see any indication of this?
And perhaps they will be able to answer the question that has been on my mind since they were arrested: Was their treatment in any way affected by the National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea? In 2007, Ling’s sister, Lisa, and members of a camera crew entered the country with a humanitarian group conducting cataract surgery in Pyongyang and secretly filmed what they saw. They saw a government-sanitized version of North Korea, with approved handlers and translators and only limited interactions with “real” North Koreans, but it was chilling nevertheless, particularly in its portrayal of those whose vision had been restored by the group Ling accompanied: When the bandages were removed, each headed straight for the portraits of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung, bowed, and led the rest of the gathering in thanking their leaders.
In North Korea, people are regularly and cruelly punished for the sins of their relatives: In the memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, author Kang Chol-Hwan recalls spending 10 years in a labor camp, beginning as a 9-year-old, because of his grandfather; Shin Dong-hyuk was born in such a camp and lived there until he escaped in his early 20s. And if Kim Jong-Il’s embarrassment about Inside North Korea—his regime regularly monitors such negative coverage and would surely have learned about Lisa Ling’s undercover work—made Ling and Lee’s ordeal that much worse, I shudder to think what must have happened to Lisa Ling’s handlers, those ordered to keep her and her group in line, after it was revealed that their charges carried out such a mission.
Photograph of a sign supporting the release of formerly jailed journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee by Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images.
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Jess, you asked if it’s ever okay to criticize a female public official’s sartorial choices. Check out what North Korean officials recently said about Hillary Clinton: “Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.” This was after calling her a “funny lady” and “vulgar” and “by no means intelligent.” She, of course, started it, by saying the North Koreans were behaving like “small children” and “unruly teenagers.” It’s possible that she was just playing bad cop to pave the way for her husband to rescue the two arrested American journalists. Still, these twin images of Hillary locked in a nasty spat while her husband gets to play the white knight bring back bad memories.
Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images.
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The federal government has obviously been reading the New York Times series (as has Double X) about the carnage resulting from the increasing incidence of texting while driving. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is going to have a summit about how to curb this flabbergasting new habit. (What's next? Do we have to have a summit to convince people not to give themselves pedicures while driving?) Hooray for the power of the press. LaHood makes the point that merely banning this practice is not enough; there has to be a societal shift in attitude. That's true, although it would be a good start for every jurisdiction to ban it, and also put in place severe penalties. Why do we have to relive the struggles we went through to criminalize drunk driving (which still kills too many people)? It's been established that texting while driving is more dangerous than getting behind the wheel after a couple of drinks.
To help bring a shift in public awareness, let's get some powerful public service campaigns going. Let's see the people with bodies wrecked by another driver's need to text, "c u there." Let's see the young family whose mother or father will never come home. And perhaps most powerful of all, let's have some drivers look into the camera and say that they now have to live with the knowledge that they killed someone while texting.
Photograph of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
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Here's what I heard about one proposed health care bill last week: It's "sausage". It's Soylent Green. "Page 16" outlaws my current health plan. Here's what I didn't hear: How it helps anybody who doesn't have health insurance get some. What health care reform needs is a poster child.
Of course, the way of the real poster child is fraught with peril—Hillary Clinton was tripped up by it last time around, and Joe the Plumber didn't do anyone any favors. But health care reform without the faces of our friends and neighbors attached is just so much policy babble. When I hear health care plan, I should think of the friend of a friend working a job that doesn't cover her childcare just to get the insurance while her husband fights cancer, or my talented artist buddy whose freelance work pays her rent and grocery bills, but still works a barista job for the health coverage. This month's PR blitz should bring our focus back to the people we know (like Sarah Wildman), who we know need help.
Photograph of a barista by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images.
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Was Elizabeth Gates wrong to mock Sgt. Crowley's daughter's inadequate makeup application skills? (More to the point, am I really writing a post about what some woman wrote about a girl’s eyeliner directly after their fathers participated in a hilariously manufactured “conversation” about The Problem of Race in America? Yes I am.)
Jessica asks, in light of the criticism coming at both Gates and Washington Post fashion columnist Robin Givhan, whether it’s ever “okay to write about the sartorial choices of women outside the fashion industry.” I think it’s pretty clear that stifling a particular kind of intelligent clothes-based discussion of women in power—this would apply very much to Givhan, and not at all to Gates—does more harm than good.
The libertarian universalist in me would prefer a frictionless, genderless techno-utopia in which everyone were free to bedeck herself as she chooses. But we don’t live in that world. Sonia Sotomayor could not dress as Batman for her confirmation hearings. She couldn’t even dress like a man; she had the unenviable job of finding a way to conform to acceptable standards of femininity while at the same time signaling authority and competence in her choice of wardrobe. Givhan’s column is interesting because it’s all about negotiating these kinds of cultural constraints, breaking them down and asking how well various Washington figures succeed or fail.
Mostly, they fail. For men on the job Washington and, to a lesser extent, New York, the task of communicating competence begins and ends with a dark, well-tailored suit. Women have many more wardrobe options, and more complex cultural demands to contend with, and thus many more chances to falter. Success is exciting to watch; there’s obviously something about the aesthetic of power that Nancy Pelosi and Condoleezza Rice understand that Hillary Clinton does not, so much, understand. I think we’re better off finding ways to articulate that difference than pretending that clothes aren’t a fundamentally important part of the way human beings communicate with one another. Or calling every criticism of a poorly chosen pastel pantsuit an attack on feminism itself.
Photograph of Nancy Pelosi by Chip Somodevilla and photograph of Condoleezza Rice by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.
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Sarah Wildman, who wrote in Double X about how her maternity health insurance coverage ended up nearly costing her 20 grand, went on NPR's Tell Me More yesterday to talk about her shoddy health care. Now we're soliciting your tales of health insurance woe.
Were the claims you thought were covered negated by the fine print? Did you recently lose your employer-based health insurance? Are you one of the millions of people who was forced into debt because of incomplete coverage? Either post about it in the comments or e-mail us.
Photograph by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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I’ll admit my bias up front: My father is a New York City cab driver, and has been for 35 years. That could be him in that stock photo on the cover of today’s scolding New York Times story, for all I know. The story chastises cabbies for talking on their cell phones and driving. Well, I’ll explain why they do. Starting with Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s mayors have imposed endless regulations on taxis. They raised the height of the window between driver and passenger, installed televisions and credit cards. The result, over the years, is to turn taxi drivers into chauffeurs. My father used to chat amiably with his passengers all day. Now he can’t hear what they say and they’re always on their cell phones or watching TV anyway. So he’s pretty bored. As it happens, he tries never to talk on his phone while driving. And I know most drivers don’t. Still, the thought of that New York Times reporter hopping around the city “politely” asking drivers to get off their phones makes me want to break his glasses.
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