1. Man violates woman. “Christians” punish woman. Lather, rinse, repeat.
2. Since the first slacktivist post anyone actually read (from June 2002 on the old blogspot site) was about Pat Robertson’s amazing, “sentergistic” leg-pressing skills, I should note that Robertson, 83, is still boasting that his exercise routine includes 30 reps of 1,000 pounds.
3. One of my favorite holiday traditions: Alex Pareene’s annual Hack List. So far Pareene has covered Nos. 10 through 5 on the countdown. That would be Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, Peggy Noonan, Henry Blodgett, Erick Erickson and Richard Cohen. I’m looking forward to the Final Four.
4. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) incorporates a lot of the same ideas that were included in earlier, Republican health care proposals — including a Clinton-era plan from the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the health reform plan signed into law by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
That’s not news. But, as Scott Lemieux pointed out recently, the conventional wisdom we’ve all heard — and which I’ve repeated — that the ACA is “the same as” the Heritage Plan is not at all the case. “The plans are radically dissimilar,” Lemieux writes. And he explains why.
Be very, very grateful we’ve got Obamacare and not the Heritage plan.
Related: Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens doesn’t have a clue as to how health insurance works. You’d think that would be a requirement for the job, but I guess not.
5. Claire Bangasser turns to the genealogy that begins the Christmas story in Matthew’s Gospel. “Every man in this list had a woman for a mother and another for a wife.” And she provides for us “the other genealogy of Jesus, on the women’s side.”
6. Richard Beck on “Homelessness and the Mentally Ill”
As I was describing this problem and its history to my class one of my students raised his hand, clearly distressed by the plight of the mentally ill in America today, and asked, “Dr. Beck, is there anything we can do about this?”
And I said, “Socialized medicine.”
In retrospect, I answered that question a bit too quickly and provocatively. Most of my students are conservative, politically and religiously. So they are not too keen on the notion of “socialized medicine.” That’s a bad thing in their eyes.
Regardless, the fact remains that in America today there is no public safety net for the chronically and/or severely mentally ill. Mental illness brings about homelessness among the economically vulnerable. And once on the street the mentally ill will remain there until they die. There is no way for them, given their mental illness, to secure employment and the income necessary to pull themselves back out of homelessness.
And yet, wanting to address the beliefs of my most conservative students, after mentioning socialized medicine I went on to say that, if you are conservative, that churches (rather than the government) should step in to care for the mentally ill of the community, especially those who are homeless.
And yet, I noted, I know of no churches (in our city at least) that actually do this work in any consistent and comprehensive way.
7. Can-con two-fer here with Allison Crowe singing Joni Mitchell:
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