Who lives better, Europeans or Americans?

Good article comparing the quality of life in Europe to that in America, from New York Times Select. I don't agree with the author's anti-Michael Moore slant, but it's a good article nonetheless.

A National Gut-Check: Who Lives Better?
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: July 5, 2007

One of the memorable scenes in “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s latest cinematic provocation, comes from France, where he shows doctors in their little white cars making house calls — for free.

But it’s not just France. When we lived in Italy some time ago, a doctor came to our farmhouse rental on Easter Sunday morning to diagnose a stomach ailment. He charged nothing.

Let’s stipulate that Moore is a one-sided pamphleteer, with a bit of Mark Twain and Pat Robertson in his schtick. But like all propagandists, his job is not to find some objective truth, but to anger, challenge, ask hard questions.

With Independence Day just passed, a good nationalist shouldn’t be afraid to answer those questions. So, who lives better, us or them?

In Italy, this was a regular parlor game when friends came to visit. Inevitably, after a few days of taking in our new world — a village public school for the kids, neighbors who opened the doors of their ancient homes to us, a lengthy siesta every afternoon — our houseguests would side with the Italians. I would counter for the U.S.A., to keep the argument alive.

The Italians won on health, family and food. The United States was better on race and opportunity.

With health care, the anecdotal often carried the argument. One day, a tenant farmer named Sergio, our neighbor, woke with a terrible eye infection. He was full of pain, unable to see. Sergio got world-class care in Florence. After three days of attentive fussing in the hospital, he came home entirely well and without a bill.

Had he showed up at any American hospital — poor, no insurance — well, good luck. Especially in a place like Texas, where 30 percent of adults lack health insurance and what can pass for medical care is a get-in-line form of triage.

But even with insurance, Americans are stuck with what may be the worst of all systems: one that lets a handful of corporations make life-and-death decisions, with incentive to dump and deny.

Little wonder that the United States ranks 37th in effectiveness of health care. Italy ranks 2nd. This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season, and yet, they make our medical system look barbaric.

If our system doesn’t kill you — see the infant mortality and life expectancy rates, bringing up the rear — it can put you in the poorhouse. Medical catastrophes are the leading cause of bankruptcy, and most of those are people who have some insurance, clinging to the frayed edge of the middle class.

O.K., so what about leisure? Americans spend nearly a third of their disposable income on good times, baby. But we can’t relax. Sorry — no time. Lunch averages 31 minutes. And the U.S. ranks dead last among 21 of the world’s richest countries when it comes to guaranteed days off, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Most Americans don’t even use their allotted days of leisure. The Italians take 42 vacation days a year — No. 1 in the world. The average American takes 13.

A quarter of Americans receive no vacation at all. And it’s not like we don’t need it: one in three are chronically overworked. We even work 100 hours a year more than the Japanese. President Bush has it figured out, with his month off at the ranch. But for a profile in clueless, Bush set the mark when he lauded as truly American some citizen who told him she had to work three jobs. Ain’t that something?

Ah, but what about taxes? Europeans pay more than we do, to fund that free health care. Take that, Euro-trash, while lying on the beach. And yet, our tax system is approaching Gilded Age disparity. Listen to Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world. Last year, he was taxed at 17 percent of his taxable income, he said last month. His receptionist paid nearly twice that, at 30 percent.

Where America shines is with our multiracial society and the easy access to opportunity. It was jarring to listen to otherwise thoughtful Tuscans denigrate Ethiopian immigrants or even their Sicilian countrymen.

By contrast, nothing made me prouder than telling Italians that I came from a place with an African-American mayor and a Chinese- American governor. Or that I grew up in a big Irish-American family with little money.

A patriot should not be afraid to have this debate, vigorously — after a nap.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

Republican candidates push unproven Iraq-911 tie

This Boston Globe article analyzes the claims by Republican presidential candidates, all apparently relying on whipping up fear as their ticket to the White House, that all Muslims are essentially identical anti-American terrorists. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said, “They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.” Senator John McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

GOP Rivals Embrace Unproven Iraq-9/11 Tie
by Peter S. Canellos
Boston Globe
May 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would “follow us home” from Iraq — a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that “these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. ”

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have “come together” to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.”

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States.

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .

Michael Scheuer , the CIA’s former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.

“There are at least 41 groups [worldwide] that have announced their allegiance to Osama bin Laden — and I will bet that none of them are directed by Osama bin Laden,” Scheuer said, pointing out that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not overseen by bin Laden.

Nonetheless, many GOP candidates have recently echoed Bush’s longstanding assertion that Iraq is the “central battlefront” in the worldwide war against Al Qaeda and have declared that Al Qaeda would make Iraq its base of operations if the United States withdraws — notions that Scheuer said do not withstand scrutiny.

“The idea that Al Qaeda will move its headquarters of operation from South Asia to Iraq is nonsense,” said Scheuer.

The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush’s supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks — a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had “strong links” with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.

But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.

Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein’s support for terrorism — which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein’s backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Now, some GOP presidential candidates refer to “the terrorists” as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.

Romney said Friday: “You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We’ve got to make sure that we’re fighting a war on them.”

Romney’s comment in the earlier debate that “they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” struck some former intelligence officials as particularly misleading. Shia and Sunni, they said, are branches of Islam and not terrorist groups. There are an estimated 300 million Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, many of them fighting Al Qaeda.

“Are Shia and Sunni together? Is the Muslim Brotherhood cooperating with all these other groups? No,” said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst.

“There’s a tendency to exaggerate in a debate,” she added. “You push the envelope as far as you can.”

No point has been emphasized more strongly at GOP debates than the link between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. During the debates about war funding, GOP leaders have downplayed the role of sectarian violence in Iraq and emphasized the role of Al Qaeda.

On Friday, McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding, “the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

But specialists say that the enemy the military calls “Al Qaeda Iraq” is a combination of Iraqi jihadists and an unknown number of fighters from countries throughout the Middle East. “AQI” came together after the US invasion. And while there is evidence that AQI members coordinate attacks among themselves, there is little evidence that they coordinate closely with bin Laden.

In pressing his case for continued war funding, Bush last week said a previously classified intelligence report indicated that bin Laden had sent a messenger in early 2005 to urge the late Iraqi terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to aim more attacks at the United States.

But there is no further evidence that bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exerts control over Al Qaeda Iraq, according to a senior military official in Baghdad in an interview last week.

“We don’t have any direct information that would link Al Qaeda Iraq to getting e-mails, memos, whatever, from bin Laden,” the military official said, speaking under condition of anonymity.

A McCain spokesman said the senator did not mean to suggest in his debate comments that bin Laden was in Iraq. But aides to Romney and McCain, in interviews, insisted that the candidates are not exaggerating when they speak of bin Laden and the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

“The larger point shouldn’t be in dispute,” said Randy Scheunemann , McCain’s foreign policy adviser. “If there’s a territory where Al Qaeda is left unmolested, free to plan, conduct, and train for operations, they will do so.”

Romney’s national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor’s linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. “I think [Romney’s statement] was much more directed at intent — they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments,” Madden said. “There’s a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region.”

Analysts say that Hamas and Hezbollah are participating in democratic governments and that the leaders of Shi’ite militias are part of the Iraqi government.

“All of the bad actors in the Middle East get mixed up in people’s minds,” said Andrew Kohut , director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, which has polled extensively on views on Iraq. “That’s why it was easy to play on the perception that Saddam Hussein got together with Osama bin Laden and said ‘Let’s fly some planes into buildings.’ Saddam Hussein was seen as a bad guy in the Middle East, and so it all gets jumbled up in people’s thinking.”

Homosexual rights activists beaten in Moscow as police stand by. Moscow mayor declares homosexuals "satanic"

According to this BBC report, the mayor of Moscow thinks homosexuals are satanic, he bans their marches, and the police allow crowds of Christian and nationalist extremists to attack them without arrests.

From this BBC story from 2006, it looks like racism and right-wing extremism, aided and abetted by the police, is a huge problem in Russia, with many foreign exchange students describing the country as completely lawless.

Eggs and punches at Russian gay march
By Mike Levy
BBC
May 26, 2007

A gay rights demonstration in Moscow degenerated into violence for the second year running as right-wing and orthodox extremists attacked gay rights activists and supporters of the unauthorised demonstration.

GayRussia leader Nikolai Alexeyev was bundled into a police van and driven away moments after arriving outside the offices of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who has called homosexuals "satanic".

Mr Alexeyev was attempting to deliver a petition signed by more than 50 MEPs urging Mr Luzhkov to allow such events.

British veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell was punched in the face by an anti-gay rights protester.

After receiving the blow, he leaned on a lamppost and shouted: "Someone protect me, Someone protect me," before being roughly escorted away by riot police.

His attacker was not detained.

Protection?

The pop group Right Said Fred, in Moscow for a concert, turned up at the protest.

Band member Richard Fairbrass was hit on the nose and ran away with blood on his face.

Russian pop duo t.A.T.u also appeared briefly to show support.

"What we have is authoritarianism and we are moving towards totalitarianism," said Lydia Hmelevskaya, a 24-year-old lesbian.

"I have been beaten up on a train because of the way I look. I have the right to look the way I want to."

Nationalists pelted German MP Volker Beck with eggs and tomatoes before officers took him to a waiting police van.

He was driven away to a government building, then later released.

Italian MEP Marco Cappato intervened to stop a Strasbourg parliamentary aide being attacked.

"Where are the police? Why aren't you protecting us?" Mr Cappato shouted as nationalists gathered nearby, prompting officers to take the MEP away and drive him to a police station.

Rainbow banner

The demonstration began peacefully with dozens of journalists and scores of uniformed officers and Omon riot police congregating near a statue opposite Mayor Luzhkov's offices on Tverskaya Street, one of Moscow's busiest thoroughfares.

Orthodox extremists and nationalists arrived to speak to journalists and denounce the event.

Some chanted "Moscow is not Sodom" and "No to pederasty."

Violence erupted after police detained Mr Alexeyev.

As Mr Beck was marched away, someone briefly unfurled a rainbow-coloured banner - adopted by gay rights groups as a symbol of pride.

One extremist began punching the person holding the banner.

The police broke up the scuffle but allowed the attacker to walk away.

On numerous occasions, nationalists circled gay rights activists as they spoke with journalists, then reached in to punch or kick the person being interviewed.

One journalist was attacked because he wore an earring, which led nationalists to say he was gay.

Police intervened to arrest dozens of gay rights activists and only rarely detained their attackers.

Mayor Luzhkov's office says it banned this year's gay pride march.

But Mr Alexeyev claims the order is invalid because the letter he received from Moscow officials refers to the wrong date - 27 May 2006 instead of 2007.

Last year's march was banned and also saw gay activists and supporters attacked by nationalists.

Mr Alexeyev is seeking to appeal against the 2006 ban in the European Court of Human Rights.

Bill O'Reilly bullies Denver Post reporter on illegal immigrant drunk driver story

Following my previous post, Bill O'Reilly's bullying continues with this story about Denver Post television critic Joanne Ostrow, who wrote an article criticizing O'Reilly for the illegal immigrant/drunk driving story and calling it racist. O'Reilly invited her on the show, she declined, his staff asked her for an interview, she declined, and so his producer, Porter Berry, followed her to a grocery store parking lot and forced an interview on her, demanding an apology, all captured in this YouTube video posted by O'Reilly's fans, who had nothing but praise for him:

100% Correct! - If you are a lier, a name-caller, liberal loon and a kool-aid drinker like the one in this video, then you better hide behind a rock or something, because Bill O'Reilly will find you and make you pay for your crimes.

That woman is a stupid MORON and should be deported for being ignorant and a know nothing C*NT

Good for you O'Reilly. Those boys showed her what's what.

Geraldo Rivera vs. Bill O'Reilly on drunk driving and illegal immigrants

Check out this video at YouTube of Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly arguing about a story on O'Reilly's show about an illegal immigrant who was caught driving drunk. Rivera argues that illegal immigrants don't get drunk or drive drunk more often than American citizens, so O'Reilly is only interested in the story because it shows immigrants in a bad light and he's trying to drum up hatred of them.