All Dogs Go to Heaven Remember that Twilight zone episode where the guy dies and doesn't know it until he meets the devil and can't take his dog with him? Apparently, just like in that show, when he meets the angel, he will, because dogs count. Gotta like this pope, don't you? Showers at St. Peters for the homeless, Patti "my sins belong to me" Smith playing a show at the Vatican, and now we get to see our pets in heaven. If we can get to gay marriage and women priests, it'll be the New Jerusalem right there.

Paying for It The Liberals are abandoning their proposed $7 co-pay for doctor visits: good. It was a bad policy. The policy proposed adding this out-of-pocket tax to pay for a so-called “medical research future fund”, but the purpose was quite simply to drive people away from doctors, based on the claim that too many were going too often for too little. Are there people turning up at their bulk-billing physician’s office or clinic at the least sign of a sniffle or just because they’re lonely? Probably, but that doesn’t make Medicare “unsustainable”, as is so often claimed to be its status. In fact, Medicare is eminently sustainable, but health care itself does need work. I read a lot about various efforts being undertaken to improve health care delivery in the US and elsewhere. These may involve larger initial outlays, but the outcomes produced provide significant reductions in long-term costs well-beyond what’s spent at the beginning, and overall patient health is similarly improved. That’s big, as big, in its way, as antibiotics. It’s also smart, much smarter than driving people away from doctors or increasing the tax used to pay for health care. The supporters of the tax call it “structural reform”, but it isn’t a reform, unless you think abandoning universal health care is a reform, and it isn’t structural, as it doesn’t address health care itself. Pushing people away from health care is only going to make it more expensive as more people end up with worse health an earlier intervention could have prevented. Pushing health care into the private sector will not only increase costs, it will make it unavailable to the poor and burden the middle class, but that’s the idea, really. Liberals hate the poor. They regard poverty and illness as moral failings that should be punished. They despise the middle class for being aspirational and sucking up money that belongs to the wealthy. This is an ideological driver for the party and for the policies they seek to enact. That and the fact that Medicare was a successful Labor Party initiative for the last forty years, and nothing Labor has ever done can be tolerated. The Liberals have decided on a practice of extreme opposition, even in government, and this is one of the worst actions they’ve yet undertaken. Don’t count on the “co-pay” tax being gone forever. The Liberals are nothing if not persistent. Update: Absent the ability to put through their tax, the Liberals now propose to effectively stop paying doctors what they're owed for providing health care under Medicare. This is a despicable abrogation of their responsibility to the public and a slap in the face to doctors.

Who's Got the Guns? O.k., it's America, so the first answer is everybody. Except that's not right. What we need to remember while Ferguson burns is that the police have the guns, and having the guns means using them right. Quoting from Spiderman is simplistic, perhaps, but with great power comes great responsibility. Having guns and the right to use them means using them responsibly. Having the legal power to use force, even non-lethal force, for the purpose of controlling crime means using force responsibly, with restraint and judiciousness. A lone cop against a lone alleged assailant shouldn't require a spray of gunfire. The grand jury got it wrong. Well, they got what they got, and that led to wrong, so the question has to be what happened to lead them to their decision? Why did they think that all that gunfire didn't warrant an indictment? Maybe we'll find out from AG Holder, but I have my doubts. We surely won't find out from the arrests that will follow the riots. We didn't find out after Rodney King, either. But it's long past time we did, that we asked ourselves the questions: why are police so quick to shoot and kill unarmed black men? Why do we need our police to be so heavily armed that they serve effectively as an occupying army? Our politicians have let this get out of hand. In the scramble to be most "tough on crime" they give the police far too much leeway, far too many powers, and even where judicial restraints may exist, this requires judicial review, and it's too late by then. There were marches in the 1970's and '80's to "take back the night", a campaign against sexual violence against women. Maybe we could use some "take back our communities" now.

Whatever a Spider Can I want Spiderman gloves. I'll probably need Spiderman shoes, too, and a forklift, but Christmas is coming . . . .

October Showers Bring November Flowers Doesn't have quite the same ring to it. But as we head rapidly into summer, for now, the Jacaranda trees are in bloom, spreading purple joy and a carpet of petals as the head towards leaf. This is the "philosopher's tree" in the Sydney University quad, a very popular tourism location these days.

Orders and Disorder It makes no sense for John Boehner to say in the same sentence that Americans "want to get things done and they don't want the president acting on a unilateral basis", when he's spent his entire time in the House doing everything he could to ensure nothing got done. Equally, it makes no sense for Obama not to use executive orders as much as he can, but I admit that sometimes Obama, and the Democrats who used to run the Senate, made no sense to me in their inaction previously. Harry Reid could have gotten a lot more done if he'd just woken up to the fact that he wasn't working in the Senate he was accustomed to from years ago, and Obama could have given up on giving away the farm in his attempts at bipartisanship, too. Now we have to hope the veto stamp has a fresh inkpad.

Cooperation Co-opted Here’s the thing: Obama always promises to work with Republicans, but Republicans don’t cooperate. Their concept of cooperation is “do what we say or we’ll do nothing at all.” It seems to have gotten worse over time, maybe since Nixon. The whole impeachment thing seems to have set a partisan divide in place that cannot be reconciled. The Reagan “small government” line has taken hold in the mind of voters to the extent that Republican politicians cannot recognize that their sainted Ronnie didn’t shrink government, he increased it; didn’t lower taxes, increased them; didn’t eliminate the deficit, increased it. Or else they simply won’t admit it was all spin and lies, although even the author of Trickle Down Economics, David Stockman, eventually repudiated the concept. Clinton co-opted much of the conservative agenda, to the country’s harm, particularly by 2008, when financial deregulation bit the country hard, leaving little recourse for the next Democrat to deal with the legacy of the incompetent buffoon, George W. Bush, who left the country mired in two wars and without the tax revenue it needed or the economic nous to deal with it. The end of the Greenspan era couldn’t come soon enough, and didn’t. Maybe this is what it really comes down to, the deliberate conflation of the economy and the society, pandering to the far reaches of the latter with anti-abortion legislation, no effective gun control, and false-flag racially discriminatory anti-voting laws, while serving the interests of the extreme end of the former, the 1% (and themselves, of course, servants of the 1%), with insane tax cuts and the elimination of any help for the poor, let alone any support for the middle class or those poised to transition to it, all with a rhetoric that treats poverty and illness as moral failings. And the country falls for it. Regularly. Clinton was a good President, especially domestically. But his personal transgressions were enough for the Republicans to gain the White House, and key governorships around the country have ensured a stranglehold on the House for many years yet to come. Carter was, if not a good President, at least not a bad one, who had to struggle more with foreign affairs than left him any way to deal with domestic, which was especially unfortunate with the rise of OPEC, let alone Iran, let alone the reds-under-the-beds fervour of Reagan. Obama, too, has been a better President than he gets credit for, if only because of Obamacare, a flawed but significant revision in the nation’s vision of itself as a progressive country. And, yes, that vision is itself flawed, although when “progressive” became a curse I’m not sure. Does it go all the way back to FDR? Sometimes I think so. The assaults on Social Security certainly indicate as much. But the assaults on civil rights suggests it goes back even further, and you’re left wondering if any progress remains possible, with so much left yet to do in making that “more perfect union”. The Republicans serve wealth alone. They hate anyone not them. And they even hate themselves. They have built their party on envy, on greed, on selfishness. They will not stop, because they can’t, not any more. It’s too late for them to suddenly become reasonable. It will take generations, if it ever happens at all, and the so-called “tea party” is doing everything it can to ensure it won’t. And the 1% are doing everything they can to ensure that any conservative impulse serves their interests and not those of the nation.