Our driveways are too close together.

Benny: Roll up your windows.
Connie: Okay.
Benny: Don’t start your car! Turn that off!
Connie: What?
Benny: You can’t start your car. There’s no oil in it!
Connie: How am I supposed to know that? I’m not a boy.
Tata: Ugh. Time is traveling backwards and I’m gonna buy pink clothes.

In the future, where we have jetpacks and that 20-20 hindsight, let us not confuse what we wish with what we are doing. An example: last July, bluegal wrote:

A fellow blogger had a fit last night via email, because that blogger heard a rumor that possibly abortions would not be covered under the Public Option. I. Just. Winced. All. The. Way. To. Bed. We don’t HAVE a public option yet. It’s not a sure thing. We have to wait for the insurance companies to fail before single payer is maybe possibly back on the table, but let’s pour a heaping cup of the most divisive issue of the past fifty years into the pot right now, because it’s so very critical.

These are the words of a fake feminist, no matter how she denies it. These are the words of a person prepared to change the subject when other people’s problems disgust her. I’d like to make a joke, but what is there to say when a woman who makes panty jokes kicks people below her on the ladder? I lost my cool.

but let’s pour a heaping cup of the most divisive issue of the past fifty years into the pot right now, because it’s so very critical.

I’m sorry you’re squeamish about this but it is, in fact, very critical. Further, I can’t really tell what point you’re arguing here. Are you saying that we construct a public option, which is already a poor compromise from single-payer, then decide what’s in our compromise, and then give away our reproductive rights?

Because: no. No.

I have three words for her: Bart. Fucking, Stupak, whose coming perfidy was visible for miles. She responded:

Tata I’m saying, particularly with this issue, don’t throw gas on a flame until you know what you’re burning.

We are going to have to work out what’s covered and what isn’t, sure. For instance, I don’t want public option to pay for Arianna’s botox injections.

I’m also not going spend one minute this summer getting into an abortion rights versus free-abortion-on-demand rights argument here. And I don’t think Congress should, either.

But here’s the deal: if Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh get to call Public Option a baby killer option we’re politically done.

DONE. FUCKING DONE.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some cunning insurance lobbyist floated that rumor just to run the public plan off the rails. It just might work.

That explosion you just heard? Yeah, the top of my head blew off. There was no point in trying to show her the future – except what was certain.

O’Reilly’s going to be all over that by dinnertime tonight. You’ve bargained away the repro rights of the people the plan is supposed to cover without a fight.

Game, set, match for the forced birthers.

The health insurance bill will set back repro rights in ways we will spend decades discovering, which makes me so angry I can hardly see straight. What makes it worse is when women like bluegal, who should have been able to see past her Ick Factor problem to observe that strategically when women’s groups didn’t get out in front of this issue, we lost everything. Again. The reason it was completely foreseeable is it happened every year since Roe v. Wade was decided. Bluegal is supposed to be smart – her masthead says as much – so she either knows that or doesn’t care if repro rights survive. The argument she makes is a dead giveaway.

Here we are, in the completely foreseeable future. If you can’t guess what’s going to happen next, maybe you could ask her what she thinks won’t.

Earlier today, Dr. Mark Hyman’s bleakly titled article at the Huffington Post caught my eye. Haiti Journal: Hacksaws and Vodka was everything you might expect about the grimness of the field hospitals, but also gently heartening. The situation is slowly improving. The coverage of the crisis has been bugging the shit out of me, and at the bottom of Hyman’s page, we find a striking image of why.

Four sage white dudes. I feel safer already.

In the first days, I noticed two stories: black people trapped, injured, starving and white people shaken but unharmed. Black people looting. White people, well-fed and healthy, clucking about horror. Black bodies are loaded onto dumptrucks with bulldozers. White missionaries in Connecticut tell Haitians they’ll be back. Bill Clinton keeps a straight face. Wyclef Jean is in tears. It couldn’t be more obvious, but nobody says a word, and the media seems not to realize it runs this script over and over again, every few years, somewhere in the world.

I am all out of faith. It’s time for me to think less about politics and more about direct action for the greater good.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

This morning, I watched the re-airing of part of this report on CBS’ Early Show and I was struck by the language of the video piece and the framing within the show. This morning’s report more blatantly slathered on the talking points than what I was able to find on CBS’ website. I really couldn’t believe my ears.

Anchor Maggie Rodriguez introduced the piece with remarks about how a new insurance industry study out yesterday indicates that without individual mandates premium costs for families would increase an average of $4000. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the insurance companies would issue such a report, but the report itself is not the question the video is about. No. That question is: are the insurance companies happy?

I was getting ready for work and very busy, but I stopped what I was doing to make sure I was hearing this right. At the end of the video, the reporter – Chip Reid, I guess – said that for now the insurance companies were still at the table. Rodriguez, though, actually asked what we can do to make the insurance companies happy.

Let’s speak plainly: there’s no need for health insurance at all. People do not need health insurance. People need health care. Health insurance companies as for-profit businesses actually deny customers the needed service to make that profit, so customers by definition cannot buy what they need. Even common decency is too much to ask.

I don’t give a flying fuck if the insurance companies are happy. In fact, if it were up to me, we’d burn the system to the ground and prosecute the executives, as we created a national health service, where everyone regardless of means was treated exactly the same way. That would be justice. That would be the fulfillment of the Constitutional promise to promote the general welfare. That would be the cheapest, smartest business model for America.

Instead, we’re left to ponder the happiness of the motherfuckers stealing our money and our lives.

Crossposted at Brilliant@Breakfast.

How often do you read a headline and groan? Buckle up.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Arrested, Police Accused Of Racial Profiling

So I used to work in this punk rock bar where pretty much anything could happen, but what happened every weekend was the employees got tanked after closing, told very funny stories and did all kinds of things we won’t talk about until indictments are unsealed. One night, the bar’s owner Doobie told us one time some guy picked a fight with Doobie’s wife Connie. Hauled off and hit her. Knocked her off her barstool. Doobie groaned, “Oh man, you shouldn’ta done that.” Connie stood up, punched that guy straight in the face and knocked him out.

I read this article and groaned, “Oh man, you shouldn’ta done that.” This is very bad:

[Gates’ attorney, fellow Harvard scholar Charles] Ogletree said Gates gave the officer his driver’s license and Harvard identification after being asked to prove he was a Harvard professor and lived at the home, but became upset when the officer continued to question him.

“He was shocked to find himself being questioned and shocked that the conversation continued after he showed his identification,” Ogletree said.

Ogletree declined to say whether he believed the incident was racially motivated, saying “I think the incident speaks for itself.”

Some of Gates’ African-American colleagues say the arrest is part of a pattern of racial profiling in Cambridge.

Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years, said he was stopped on campus by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.

“We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if professor Gates was white,” Counter said. “It really has been very unsettling for African-Americans throughout Harvard and throughout Cambridge that this happened.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton is vowing to attend Gates’ arraignment.

“This arrest is indicative of at best police abuse of power or at worst the highest example of racial profiling I have seen,” Sharpton said. “I have heard of driving while black and even shopping while black but now even going to your own home while black is a new low in police community affairs.”

Ogletree said Gates had returned from a trip to China on Thursday with a driver, when he found his front door jammed. He went through the back door into the home – which he leases from Harvard – shut off an alarm and worked with the driver to get the door open. The driver left, and Gates was on the phone with the property’s management company when police first arrived.

Ogletree also disputed the claim that Gates, who was wearing slacks and a polo shirt and carrying a cane, was yelling at the officer.

“He has an infection that has impacted his breathing since he came back from China, so he’s been in a very delicate physical state,” Ogletree said.

But wait, there’s one more gut-punch:

The Middlesex district attorney’s office said it could not do so until after Gates’ arraignment.

Arraignment. Arrested for disorderly conduct in his own home.

Karmically speaking, we are about to see some shit go boom.

Tonight as the sun sets on a rainy afternoon, neighborhood children released from the captivity of some fearsome rec room run screaming in a sopping backyard. Under the canopy of tall oaks and maples, sounds echoes, amplified, distorted. What sounds like a rampaging mob may be two enthusiastic Marco! Polo! players, but whatever it is, it’s nearly over as bedtime approaches. I’ve been having that dream again in which I’m chained to the stake and the flames are rising, so I hope they sleep well. Someone should, but I keep getting up for little glasses of water.

Yesterday’s brief issued by the Department of Justice defending the Defense of Marriage Act knocked the wind out of me. It was plain during the long campaign that Candidate Obama was a corporate centrist, which while better than the alternatives was miles to my right. I didn’t have high hopes for progress, but I hoped we wouldn’t lose a lot of ground. Unfortunately, a whole lot of President Obama’s supporters have discovered since 1.20.09 – I have the t-shirt and everything – that their groups’ love wasn’t returned. Some of these groups overlap, but if you happened to be a phone-tapped pot-smoking union anti-war mortgage-holding uninsured olive-skinned pregnant lesbian with credit card debt, man, you are shit out of luck. But who among us is not?

As light fades under the trees, the echoes yield to the sounds of rain dripping from rooftops onto pitted concrete. It’s quiet, but quiet has layers. Traffic on the highway on the other side of the river rumbles but this sound is neutral and somehow unlike noise. The Defense of Marriage Act clearly defines GLBT people as second class citizens, and I cannot make this work in my tiny brain. So many words, so much talk, so little compassion and the result is that some people diminish the lives of other people for no reason and in ways they refuse to apprehend. It is difficult to ponder the psyche that actively seeks to harm, but this we must, over and over. The thing that is most puzzling about this oppression is that in the putting down no one is raised up. No one’s life is improved when GBLT cannot comfort one another in hospitals. No one’s marriage is strengthened when GLBT people cannot marry. No children live better lives because GLBT people cannot adopt them. No one benefits. We allow all this love to slip through our hands is because it’s easier to stick our fingers in our ears when people suffer than to embrace them.

Once, I was sitting in the fenced-in cafe of a girl bar in Asbury Park on a sunny day with my lover, my live-in boyfriend, a woman I sometimes cozied up with and our friends. That was quite a weekend. I spent a lot of it sticky. As the long rays of afternoon light combined with the beer and no particular need to go anywhere or do anything, bottles sailed over the wall and crashed at our feet. It wasn’t the first time, and certainly not the last as the neighborhood, once gay-friendly and quiet, was changing. Nothing really happened, you see. No one was injured, but if someone had been, no one stood to gain.

Even now, so much is lost you have to wonder why.