Month: April 2013

April 27th: Colon Cancer Alliance Undy 5000

Leave a comment

Last month, I wrote about my wife’s successful battle last year against colon cancer.  The only reason why it was successful is that she was screened in time. Had we waited even a few months, her result may have been radically different. 

She is now committed to helping raise money for the Colon Cancer Alliance.  On April 27th the 2013 Buffalo “Undy 5000” will be run in Delaware Park, and she and my older daughter will take part. She is raising money for colon cancer research via this page, and if I’ve ever made you think, laugh, or angry via this blog, I humbly ask you to donate whatever you can – however small. 

Your response so far has been incredible. We’re both so very grateful for people’s generosity. Amazingly, her original fundraising goal was $1,000 – she’s now raised $2,775, thanks to you. We’ve upped the goal to $3,000, and there’s another week or so to go. 

Your donation is 100% tax deductible. If you don’t or can’t, I understand, but I urge you to take colon cancer seriously. If caught early through a colonoscopy, it could be the difference between life and death. Here’s where the money that’s raised will go – to advocate, to promote and to expand access to screening, to educate, and for cancer research. 

Every day is a gift. Thanks for reading and for considering this. 

The US Senate Decides Guns are More Important than People

22 comments

20130418-065939.jpg

Courtesy Marquil at Empirewire.com

Do you think that the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees an unrestricted right to bear arms?

Does the 2nd Amendment guarantee the right of paranoid schizophrenics or clinically diagnosed psychopaths to bear arms?

Does the 2nd Amendment guarantee a toddler’s right to bear arms?

Does the 2nd Amendment guarantee the right of felons to bear arms?

Does the 2nd Amendment guarantee the right to own a tank? A drone? A rocket-propelled grenade launcher?

None of the above are rhetorical questions. I’m absolutely serious. 

Does anything in the Constitution guarantee my right – your right – not to be shot? How about the kids from Sandy Hook or the moviegoers in Aurora?

Do you think that the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution is also absolute and unrestricted in any way? You’d be wrong. There are plenty of government restrictions on speech that have been ruled constitutional. You’re not allowed to incite a riot or libel someone, for instance.

And so it is that, although 90% of Americans support universal background checks for dealer and gun show sales, the United States Senate Wednesday night was unable to defeat a Republican-led filibuster of the Manchin-Toomey Amendment. Drafted by a conservative Republican and a conservative Democrat, the amendment would have implemented background checks to prevent homicidal maniacs and felons from legally obtaining guns.

This new gun control initiative was brought about in response to the Sandy Hook massacre, where 20 little boys and girls were mowed down by a lunatic. One of the biggest efforts was to close the gun show loophole, to make sure that those sales are subject to the same background checks that retail sales undergo. Yesterday on Facebook, people argued to me that implementation of this statute would not have prevented Sandy Hook. But that’s a disingenuous argument – it’s too late for that, and you can’t retroactively prevent anything. I brought up that Australia and the UK implemented stringent gun control in response to their school massacres, and have seen none since. Someone brought up a shooting of 12 in Cumbria that took place in 2010 – the first mass shooting in the UK since the 1996 Dunblane massacre. In the US, we have mass shootings much, much more frequently than that, and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. After Dunblane, the UK effectively banned handguns.

This is what I have to say about your gun and your gun rights.

England and Wales see .7 gun homicides for every 100,000 people. Scotland has no data. Australia has .14 homicides per 100,000 of population. Canada sees .51 homicides per 100,000 people. By contrast, the United States has 3 gun homicides per 100,000 people. That doesn’t count accidental deaths and suicides. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, and close to 50% of the small arms. Access to guns and ammo are not at risk or adversely affected.

From TPM,

The legislation, written by Toomey and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), was the centerpiece of gun control efforts in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. shootings. It was supposed to be the breakthrough that led to the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. But it only picked up a few senators and hardened the opposition of many. A last-ditch effort by Democrats to win over skeptical senators by offering new concessions fell apart late Tuesday.

About nine out of 10 Americans support universal background checks, according to polls. The failed vote reflects the enduring power of the National Rifle Association, which opposed the bill and threatened to target lawmakers who voted in its favor.

“Today, the misguided Manchin-Toomey-Schumer proposal failed in the U.S. Senate,” the NRA’s top lobbyist Chris Cox said in a statement issued immediately after the vote. “As we have noted previously, expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools.”

Centrist senators who were courted eventually revealed their opposition to the proposal this week, making it all but clear by Wednesday that it lacked the votes to pass. Opponents voiced gripes ranging from an alleged infringement on Second Amendment rights to the more far-reaching — and inaccurate — claim that the legislation would set up a national gun registry.

So, the NRA defeated the will of 90% of the people, and prevented a vote from being held on the amendment. The United States congress cannot pass a law without 60% of the Senate, and that’s not how our system is supposed to work. Of course, in 1999 – after Columbine – the NRA supported universal background checks. What’s changed? Why must 90% of America succumb to the will of a small lobby representing a small number of people?

A lunatic shoots up a school, and the Senate filibusters a reasonable and constitutional gun control bill drafted by two conservatives.

I think that former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords said it best,

Moments ago, the U.S. Senate decided to do the unthinkable about gun violence — nothing at all. Over two years ago, when I was shot point-blank in the head, the U.S. Senate chose to do nothing. Four months ago, 20 first-graders lost their lives in a brutal attack on their school, and the U.S. Senate chose to do nothing. It’s clear to me that if members of the U.S. Senate refuse to change the laws to reduce gun violence, then we need to change the members of the U.S. Senate.

 

Health Care as a Civil Right

4 comments

I left this as a comment on Facebook in an ongoing debate over whether Regal Cinemas is going to cut hours to avoid having to offer health insurance to its employees. I am of the mind that Regal and other companies should happily treat their employees like human beings and offer basic benefits such as health insurance. It’s not like ticket prices aren’t already quite high. But to the point, I’d happily pay another buck if I knew that the concession workers and people who cleaned up the theater were properly taken care of. 

Every single western pluralist capitalist democracy has long ago resolved the issue that we don’t allow anyone – rich, poor, or middle-class – to go without access to medical care. Some have mandatory insurance (Switzerland), other have single-payer plans (UK, France, Canada), but all have some system in place to make sure that there is universal health care coverage.  

Except, of course, the United States, which is not only inexplicably proud in some cases of 40+ million uninsured people whose only access to healthcare is an ER, where the federal, state, and local governments already pay billions to reimburse uncollected bills.

How or why in 2013 we can’t get it together to make sure middle class people aren’t stuck with medical bankruptcies, unpaid/unpayable bills, or other lack of access to needed medical care is beyond me. Yet when confronted with this very real fact, the people who purport to be on the side of “liberty” can do little more except glibly to compare, e.g., chemotherapy treatment to a Twinkie, or emergency surgery to owning a TV.

In what we bill as the best and richest country in the world, absolutely you should have a right to food, shelter, and medical care. But if you start telling the middle class that if they get cancer and are uninsured that they can go screw themselves if they can’t afford the treatment, or go into bankruptcy or massive debt, then what sort of system do we have?

Opponents of single-payer point to the Canadian system’s supposed waiting times. Setting aside that, among Canadians, their medical insurance scheme enjoys something close to 90% approval, which is worse, waiting a week or traveling 100 miles for an MRI, or being unable to afford or obtain one at all. 

The Root of Cynicism is Cynicism

7 comments

Courtesy Marquil at EmpireWire.com

Mark Tuesday as a pivotal day – the day that New York’s own Machiavellian governor announced an effort to clean up New York’s election laws. The Malcolm Smith arrest for allegedly bribing Republican party bosses in exchange for a Wilson-Pakula electoral fusion cross-endorsement has, at long last, shined a spotlight on the transactional horribleness of New York’s legalized electoral racketeering. 

Yesterday, Governor Cuomo announced that he wants an independent monitor at the state Board of Elections to root out corruption and campaign finance fraud. 

Ending Wilson-Pakula would be a significant blow to the clout of the leadership of the state’s influential minor parties who grant the waivers for candidates of major parties to run on their ballot lines. Cuomo said he does not support ending cross-party endorsements, meaning major party candidates could still have fusion ballot lines in a general election.

This isn’t a perfect solution, as it still permits candidates to circulate petitions to get on a minor party line. It does, however, greatly reduce the clout that minor party bosses have, and this is a desired result. Why should the boss of a party with a single-digit enrollment percentage have any clout at all? The Daily News describes the law thusly, 

Wilson Pakula law, which gives party bosses the power to decide if candidates not registered in their parties can run on their lines. Cuomo said the setup encourages ballot lines to be traded for campaign donations.

Of course, Sheldon Silver – champion of awful – opposes eliminating a point of electoral fraud. 

“I don’t think we should preclude people from running on more than one line,” Silver said at a news conference today. “They’re only allowed to registered in one party. There has to be a mechanism for us — for people — to gain dual endorsements or more.”

It’s no surprise that certain Democrats remain almost childishly butthurt over the election of Jeremy Zellner as chairman of the Erie County Democratic Committee.  Typically, there’s litigation pending to underscore the factionalism, most of which has to do with who controls the paltry number of patronage jobs. The Erie County Independence Party barely exists in anything but name only, and the state committee is almost exclusively backing Republicans nowadays. The Erie County Conservative Party is run cynically by Ralph Lorigo, who will only endorse candidates who oppose abortion, gay marriage, and gun control, except when convenient for him and his own self-interest. The Republicans, as one would expect, oppose Democrats uniformly. That’s how it’s supposed to work, after all. Except in judicial races. 

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that everyone united in interest against the Democratic committee apparatus would attend a fundraiser for its chief opponent – another Democrat from neighboring Cheektowaga. If people like Ralph Lorigo can help defeat Democrats in a general election, Zellner gets blamed and the Max/Pigeon people can argue that they should take over the party, and people like Lorigo get to control a few jobs here and there, thus solidifying their positions. But if you take away Lorigo’s ability to control his party’s line, that could significantly affect outcomes. 

Because none of this has anything to do with Democratic ideas or principles. It all has to do with transactional petty nonsense like who gets to hire whom for some no-show job at some city, town, or county authority. 

Abolishing Wilson-Pakula is a great first step. Abolishing electoral fusion and cross-endorsements altogether would be a fantastic second step, as it would eliminate the number of hands in the government cookie jar. 

But if you sit there wondering why people want nothing to do with western New York’s political system, and why we have a hard time getting people to run for office, you have to realize that it has a lot to do with the fact that even the smallest, least significant elected office in this area is fraught with awfulness. 

Humanity and Society

22 comments

Yesterday, unknown person or persons perpetrated an unspeakable and senseless crime against innocents in an American city.  Three people are dead, over a hundred injured – people who got up yesterday morning, got dressed, went over to Boylston to watch people finish a marathon. People like you and me. Videos showed timed, coordinated bombings going off along the Boylston Street terminus of the Boston Marathon, designed to inflict massive carnage in crowded groups of celebrants. 

There’s no sense in trying to speculate who might be behind it until there’s actual news reported about it. For instance, one would have been dramatically misinformed had he relied on the horrible Murdoch rag the “New York Post” for news about the attack. 

Some people are insufferably horrible – especially those cynical vampires who make their living by being conspiratorial, paranoid idiots. 

Boston was my second hometown, and I’m sick over this. We live in a dangerous world with a lot of crazy people, and there’s absolutely no way that we can always prevent bad people from doing horrific things, no matter what we do. 

But if you’re one of those people who see a tragedy and immediately speculate – without any proof, evidence, or information – as to the perpetrators or cause of a horrible terrorist act like this, you’re just a horrible person. Is it hillbilly militiamen protesting tax day? Is it brown-skinned people with accents? If those are the questions you’re asking right away, you’re an idiot.

If, like conspiracy salesman Alex Jones, you’re suggesting that the government is behind it, you deserve nothing but scorn and humiliation.  If, like newly minted glibertarian but former Bush supporter, Patriot Act backer, Iraq War microphone belligerent, and security-porn enthusiast Tom Bauerle, you warn against “liberties” being taken away, you’ve missed the point of anything important about humanity. When you think about how a tragedy such as this affects your personal comfort, while 400 miles away an 8 year-old dies and people struggle with catastrophic injuries, you’re sort of a monster.  

Humanity makes me sick when innocent people are murdered or attacked without cause or provocation, but also when it worries about how others’ misfortune might affect their individual political prejudices.

Same As It Ever Was

3 comments

1. This morning, Channel 4 kept teasing a story about pop idol Justin Bieber having written or said something inappropriate at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Curious, I Googled it.  It was about as dismissively disrespectful as you’d expect from a boy who dresses like this to meet the Canadian Prime Minister. I then turned the channel, because teasing a story in this day and age insults my intelligence. 

2. Western New York Democrats are divided into factions. This is newsworthy because a Cheektowaga political club has endorsed a neighboring city’s caretaker Mayor. Bob McCarthy is here to tell us this, and to transcribe what people have to say about it, and leaves us with a quip from more than 10 years ago. Insightful!

3. Donn Esmonde has wonderful things to say about the positive effects of the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus. Except when it comes to maintaining, e.g., the Trico factory as a Maquiladora memorial. 

4. You know the relentless marketing blitz for that “Shen Yun” dance thing you’ve seen everywhere now for the past few months? It’s propaganda for a cult. One that’s been brutally oppressed by the Chinese Communists, but a cult nonetheless. 

5. A letter-writer to the News makes the case for Paladino’s ulterior motive in running for the Buffalo Board of Education. You knew there had to be one. 

6. Stop picking up “WNY Family” Magazine at your local pediatrician’s office, supermarket, or day care. Someone wrote a completely false and misleading article alleging that Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, is dangerous. Every medication comes with risks, but contracting the very contagious human papilloma virus increases a girl’s risk of eventually suffering from a variety of cancers. Here is the body count for the anti-vax paranoia movement. The author stands by the story, so that paper is dead to me. 

7. Surprise! Indefinite detention of people, kept incommunicado and without trial or charge at a third-world military base might engender some bad results. America should put these people on trial or release them to their home countries. It’s long since time that they could have legally been tried within our regular criminal system. Guantanamo Bay is the most un-American thing we’ve ever maintained for this long, and all it is now is a recruitment device for more terrorists. I’m not saying these are all great people whom we should release on the streets of Miami with a driver’s license and $500 cash. I’m saying there are right ways and wrong ways to deal with criminals or terrorists. Indefinitely detaining them without trial or charge is a “wrong way”. It is a massive national shame and goes against every single thing we purport to stand for; it violates everything we’re supposedly protecting by maintaining it.  

In other news, Spring might actually arrive this week. 

La Cosa di Loro

3 comments

WNY is not run so much by politicians. It is, instead, run by the wealthy, connected developers who fund their elections. All the political refusal and reluctance to address unchecked sprawl without population growth and regional planning stems from that.  And racism, often disguised as home-rule parochialism. 

Until there is proper campaign finance reform and an abolition of Wilson-Pakula and electoral fusion, we’ll keep spinning our wheels and going nowhere. Until we address our “parochialism” head-on and re-start the regionalism discussion, no amount of cute polar bear cubs or paeans to architecture will ameliorate the unrelenting grip the small-minded and greedy have on this region. 

Stefano Magaddino and the Buffalo mob of yore might be gone, but we’ve replaced them with a new type of mafia that’s less violent but more harmful to the public at-large. 

Post-Bratstvo i Jedinstvo

Leave a comment

License plates are little, mundane slabs of metal or plastic that generally serve two purposes – to identify vehicles, and to promote a culture. I find them fascinating.

We just returned from a phenomenal, once-in-a-lifetime 3-generational tour of the former Yugoslavia, from where my parents emigrated in the 60s. Since breaking up in 1991, these countries have gone from waging war against each other to varying degrees of recovery. Slovenia is in the EU, and Croatia will join this July. Bosnia and Hercegovina is almost perpetually in political / ethnic crisis, while Serbia and Montenegro have just recently gone their separate ways, having dissolved their confederation. Macedonia is plugging away, nestled between the Serbia-Kosovo conflict and the Greek economic crisis. 

The title of this post is the slogan of the former League of Communists of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Tito and his successors promoted “Brotherhood and Unity” among the Southern Slavic peoples, who were united after World War I under Serbian rule and then fought each other mercilessly during the second World War. Perhaps it was always doomed to fail, as the Yugoslav nations had distinctly dissimilar backgrounds – Slovenes and Croats were under the Austrians and/or Hungarians for centuries. The Serbs, Macedonians, Kosovars, and Bosnians under Ottoman rule. Serbs and Croats essentially share a language, but the Serbian Orthodox Christian heritage didn’t always mesh with Croatian Catholicism, and while the former writes in Cyrillic, the latter uses the Latin alphabet. Small differences that, with the right spark, can result in inexplicable cruelty and violence. 

I have a similar fascination with international frontiers. It seems astonishing to me sometimes to think how an arbitrary, imaginary line on a mountaintop or the middle of a creek can so starkly separate two distinct languages, histories, religions, and cultures. 

During our trip, I cataloged the plates I saw that represented a once-united country. The only ones I didn’t see were Kosovo’s (although I saw several new and old-style Albanian plates, which were unheard-of when I was a kid and Albania was Europe’s North Korea.) 

Only Slovenia can display the blue Euroband with the gold stars of the EU. All the rest, except Croatia, have a blue area for the Euroband without the stars, but with the country’s international vehicle registration code. (Slovenia = SLO, Croatia = HR, Bosnia and Herzegovina = BIH, Montenegro = MNE, Serbia = SRB, Macedonia = MK, Kosovo = RKS – note that Kosovo used to be a province of Yugoslavia and then Serbia, and the two countries have not yet resolved their dispute over Kosovo’s independence). Croatia has no Euroband, but left room for it to the left of the regional code that precedes the Croatian coat of arms (shown here is PU for Pula). 

A lot of blood was shed to get to this point, where there now exist seven independent and sovereign republics where once there was one federal entity. The irony, it seems, is that they all seek to enter a troubled European confederation where the movement of people and goods would once again be completely without frontier or limit. 

1 2 3