There are no good guys among the factions vying for power in Syria. Here’s the situation at present, as best we can tell:
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is nowhere to be found in Damascus, according to a source, but Syria’s presidential office and Iranian officials maintain he has not departed the capital. US officials told CNN his regime could fall within days. A Damascus resident says the city is in “a state of tension and panic.”
In the south, a new uprising emerged along the Daraa province, with rebels there claiming to have seized a major military base as they charge toward the capital.
On the western edge of Syria, rebels are speeding toward the major city of Homs — where residents are fleeing ahead of potential hostilities between anti-regime and government forces.
Assad is a Russia- and Iran-backed dictator whose family has been in power for 53 years, and in the process has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The “rebels”? They seem to be an al Qaeda offshoot, perhaps affiliated with Turkey. Or are they more like the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Taliban?
It’s a pity they can’t both lose. Of course, in that neck of the woods, if they both lost something else equally awful might end up being the winner.
Perhaps – like me – you’ve been surprised at the amount of venom expressed online in reaction to the hit-style murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson. The anger I’m talking about is against the victim, not the murderer. It seems to be coming more from left than right, although there’s quite a bit on both sides that takes the form of saying either that his death was deserved or that the person is indifferent to it because of some awful experience they report with health insurance coverage, or that they perceive is common with health care coverage.
Health insurance is a business, and like all insurance it’s geared to making money. And yet people need it when they are in a state of stress, and sometimes when their lives are at stake. That makes for a real love/hate relationship that I see as inevitable. The alternative to having the profit motive involved is having the government run the whole thing, and from what I’ve heard of Canada and the UK that’s not a solution with which most people would be happy.
As medical costs get higher and higher, the rules for coverage are going to become more strict. Don’t discount the role played by the uninsured (including in many cases illegal aliens) who can’t be refused at emergency rooms and who are subsidized by the paying customers. The health insurance industry wants pre-approval for certain kinds of reimbursement, and sometimes people simply don’t comply or the situation is such (an emergency) that they cannot comply, and that can cause reimbursement problems or at least delays. And of course there’s managed care, which can restrict choices. Health insurance companies also lose a lot of money to scams and frauds, and some of their scrutiny of claims represents an attempt to detect fraud and deny fraudulent claims.
Here are examples of people’s complaints about their health insurance:
In one stark example, a Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group expressing sadness about UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s death received 62,000 reactions – 57,000 of them laughing emojis. UnitedHealth Group is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, the division that Thompson ran. …
Almost immediately after news broke that Thompson had been killed, social media users began posting about their frustrations with UnitedHealthcare and other insurance companies.
UnitedHealthcare “denied my surgery two days before it was scheduled. I was in the hospital finance office in tears (when I was supposed to be at the hospital doing pre-op stuff),” one user wrote in an X post that received more than 70,000 likes. “My mother was flying out to see me. My surgeon spent a day and a half pleading my case to United when she probably should have been taking care of her other patients,” she added, before saying the surgery ended up going ahead but calling the process “torture.”
“My breast cancer surgery was denied” by a different insurance company, another X user posted. “Breast cancer. She asked me ‘well, is it an emergency?’ I don’t know- it’s (f***ing) cancer. What do you think? I had to appeal and luckily it went through. Evil to do that to people,” she said.
Their stories could not be independently verified by CNN.
Are these cases of failure to notify the insurer and get pre-approval, or are they some sort of arbitrary denial? Often people don’t say – and that’s an important fact left out.
More:
Restricting access to health care through tools like claim denials and prior authorization, which requires that insurers approve the care in advance, are among the ways that health insurers try to weed out care that’s not medically necessary or not backed by scientific evidence – but it can also increase their profit margins. The practices, which increasingly rely on technology, including artificial intelligence, can infuriate patients and providers alike.
A class action lawsuit filed last year in US District Court in Minnesota argued that UnitedHealthcare uses AI “in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care,” according to the complaint. More than 90% of the denials are reversed …
So it often does work out in the end, but people are stressed by the process when they are already mega-stressed by the illness or accident. And AI? If it’s anything like the “chat” help functions I often encounter online when trying to deal with computer glitches and the like, it can be deeply infuriating.
But to go from there to applauding the killing of Thomspson is heinous. And it seems to be quite widespread. People think healthcare coverage should be an absolute right, but whether that coverage is by insurer or by government, health care costs are so high that coverage refusal is inevitable, and rage seems to be inevitable as well.
[NOTE: This is a revised and expanded edition of a post first published in 2006.]
Eighty-three years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked.
That’s long enough ago that only a vanishing few remember the day and its aftermath with any clarity. Many generations—including my own tiresome one, the baby boomers—have come up since then, and the world has indeed changed.
Prior to 9/11, the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941 was the closest thing America had to 9/11. The differences between the two are profound, however: at Pearl Harbor we knew the culprit. It was clearly and unequivocally an act of war by the nation of Japan, which was already at war in the Pacific.
But it was, like 9/11, a sneak attack that killed roughly the same number of Americans – in the case of Pearl Harbor mostly (although not exclusively) those in the armed forces. And the Pearl Harbor attack, in the reported (but disputed) words of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, awakened the “sleeping giant” of the US and filled it with a “terrible resolve.”
In the case of Pearl Harbor, that resolve lasted the duration of the war, an all-out conflagration that required far more sacrifice of the US (and the world) in money, comfort, and the all-important cost of human lives. The scale of such a loss is not even remotely comparable to that of our present conflicts. In addition, the first years of World War II featured many losses and much peril. It was a different world, however, and failure was not considered an option.
Yes, mistakes were made in World War II and in the war that began on 9/11 and has not ended yet. Mistakes always will be made in war. The tactics and even the strategies of World War II don’t fit today’s wars. But tactics and strategies aren’t the issue – although they are extremely important. The overarching issue is will. Without that, a war cannot be won. And, in that respect as in many others, current generations don’t compare to the one known as “The Greatest Generation.”
For some contrast, go back to FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech (a misquote, it turns out: he actually said “date which will live in infamy”). Following are some of the less famous quotes from the speech; I have selected them because they speak to the question of will. FDR was assisted in mustering that will by the relative clarity of the enemy and its intent in World War II. But it still seems to me, on reading these words, that such unequivocal determination could not be summoned today in the US, even if given the exact circumstances of the infamous attack of December 7, 1941. It may, however, be present in Israel at the moment, but I’m not completely sure:
…No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God.
Just a little while ago the judge in the Daniel Penny case dismissed the first count – manslaughter in the second degree – after the jury once again announced it was deadlocked. He instructed them to resume deliberations on Monday on the second count, negligent homicide, which carries a top penalty of four years in prison.
One of the comments at that article goes like this: “Acquitted should be the only verdict! Bringing these charges is a crime. How sad. Keeping praying for Penny’s freedom.” There are plenty others in the same vein.
But the fact that the jury was deadlocked on the greater charge indicates there is at least one person – and perhaps as many as eleven – who believed Penny guilty of manslaughter in the second degree. That – and the idea that they need to come to some sort of verdict – are the sort of things that often cause “not guilty” holdouts to cave on the lesser charge as a sort of compromise. That concerns me in this case.
I also think the hung jury on the first charge indicates that the best that can be hoped for on the second charge is another deadlocked jury.
In addition, even if Penny isn’t found guilty of either charge, he faces a civil lawsuit by Neely’s father for negligent assault and battery causing Neely’s death. The entire episode has a chilling effect on anyone who might try to protect innocent people on a subway – or anywhere, really, in NYC – from threats of assault from aggressive people such as Neely.
ADDENDUM:
I'm sorry, but I am finding it hard to believe this is proper. The jury has twice now said they are deadlocked. That's a hung jury on that count. The judge is effectively dismissing it (but can he?) so they can consider C2. I can't find a single case supporting this approach. https://t.co/gIAyslAkvf
Where I practice as a prosecutor, we can amend the indictment or move to dismiss counts up until the case is given to the jury. The requirement of unanimous verdict should apply to all counts given to the jury. I have never heard of what they are attempting to do here.
Biden’s pardon of his son has many very unusual characteristics. It’s one thing for a president to pardon his son – which is already unusual. It’s another to do it like this (the clip is about two minutes long):
The word “unprecedented” comes to mind.
And now there’s apparently talk of many more pardons of this preemptive type before Joe leaves the presidency or the symbolic presidency or the sham presidency or whatever you want to call it:
President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.
Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.
The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them.
The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
“Extraordinary step” all right. Hey, why not just issue pardons to any Democrat or NeverTrumper the DOJ might want to indict during Trump’s presidency? That should do the trick.
And it’s pretty rich that Biden, the so-called president who is the person with the power to issue federal pardons, “has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet.”
What a travesty.
But let’s go back in time to a moment in history when there was a great deal of discussion in the news about the issue or a president giving out preemptive pardons. That time was almost exactly four years ago, in the lame-duck period of Trump’s first administration. For example, we have this at NPR:
President Trump is being urged to use his remaining time in office to grant preemptive pardons to people close to him, including family members and maybe even himself. …
President-elect Joe Biden has said he’d let professionals within the Justice Department assess whether a case is merited against Trump, and that decision — which would be unprecedented — is one of the toughest facing the department in the new administration.
We all know now how the DOJ and Biden ended up deciding about that, and what the results were. Hubris, meet nemesis.
More:
In an email, Crouch, author of The Presidential Pardon Power, says that “someone must have committed a federal offense, but as soon as that happens, the president can grant them clemency. He does not need to wait until the alleged offender is charged, stands trial, and so on.”
Crouch continues: “These pardons are not common, but they do happen occasionally.”
Accordingly, Trump could “pardon his children, his aides, his supporters, and so on for federal offenses and be on firm legal ground,” Crouch says. “The really unclear scenario would be if he attempted to pardon himself.”
We also know that Trump did none of this – no preemptive pardons. The pardons he issued were for specific offenses and as far as I know they were limited to crimes for which people were already convicted and in many cases had served time – in other words, they were very conventional pardons despite all the speculation.
This article was also written back in the last days of Trump’s first administration, and it deals with the issue of the pardon for unspecified crimes:
But another source of possible constitutional defect for a presidential self-pardon would arise if it were granted before any charges had been brought against him and without specifying the conduct being pardoned. The same constitutional objections could be raised about such a preemptive pardon granted to anyone else.
The case for the effectiveness of a preemptive non-specific pardon usually relies on the precedent set by President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for any federal crimes he might have committed during his presidency. But the constitutional validity of the Nixon pardon was never tested: special prosecutor Leon Jaworski was urged to do so at the time and was later vague in his Watergate memoir about why he decided not to.
With a handful of other exceptions, notably George H.W. Bush’s Iran-Contra pardons and Trump’s recent pardon of Michael Flynn, pardons historically have not been granted to preempt a prosecution for crimes that have not even been identified much less charged.
That indicates that the Hunter pardon could be tested in court, if the author is correct. It’s one thing to issue a preemptive pardon for a certain crime or a certain line of conduct that hasn’t yet been charged in the legal sense, as long as it is specified. It’s another to do what Biden has done, or what his aides are described as contemplating that he will do before he leaves office.
The jury is deadlocked on the charge of manslaughter in the second degree after three days of deliberation. Penny is facing a second lesser charge as well: criminally negligent homicide, which carries a maximum of four years.
The judge told the court that the jury can’t move on to that second charge unless it finds defendant Penny Not Guilty of the first count, and also gave the jury what’s known as an Allen charge, “which are instructions reminding the jurors of how much time and money has gone into the case and how imperative it is that they reach a decision.”
Deliberations have resumed.
It would be good to know if the holdouts are those saying Guilty or those saying Not Guilty. And the judge’s statement about not moving to the lesser charge without a Not Guilty on the first is interesting, in that it would prevent a deadlocked jury from a finding of Guilty on the lesser charge as a compromise verdict.
My personal opinion, from what I’ve read about this case, is that Penny should not spend a day in prison and should be found Not Guilty of both charges. I think it’s wrong that he was charged in the first place. I’ll add that I don’t like Allen charges; I don’t think jurors should change opinions to save the state money and time. At a certain point it’s a hung jury, and so be it. Would Bragg retry this case if that happened? He might just be the person to do it.
This also may be as good a place as any to mention a perception I’ve had from the start, which is that Penny reminds me of Billy Budd. When I first saw his photo (please click on that link), that’s what came to me.
From the movie:
If you’re familiar with the Melville story’s complex plot, you may see the relevance, which isn’t entirely cosmetic.
NOTE: By the way, I had to read “Billy Budd” as a high school sophomore, along with lots of other Melville. Not easy reading. And this was in a NYC public high school, albeit in an honors class. There was nothing special about my high school, either, at that time.
The body of hostage Ivay Svirsky has been found by the IDF. Svirsky was abducted alive on Oct 7, 2023, but was killed about four months later and it has been known for quite some time that he was dead:
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said at a press conference that Svirsky’s body was recovered “in operational activity, details of which cannot be expanded upon, in order not to endanger the operational efforts of the IDF and Shin Bet.” …
During his time in Gaza, he was held alongside hostages Yossi Sharabi and Noa Argamani. Sharabi was likely inadvertently killed as a result of an IDF strike, the military said in February, and Argamani was rescued in the summer.
So Israel is being tight-lipped about the details of finding Svirsky.
As if that story isn’t tragic enough, if you read the article you will learn the following:
Svirsky, 38, was visiting his parents, Orit Svirsky and Rafi Svirsky, in their Kibbutz Be’eri homes for the Simhat Torah holiday weekend when Hamas terrorists launched a massacre in the community on October 7, 2023.
Svirsky was with his mother in the sealed room of her house. She lived next door to her ex-husband, Rafi, his father.
Svirsky, who was single and lived in Tel Aviv, was known as the quintessential “uncle” to his nieces and nephews and his friends’ children. He was the only one of his parents’ four children in Be’eri at the time.
The family’s last communication with Svirsky and his mother was around 10 a.m.
The bodies of his parents, Orit and Rafi, were later found. They were buried on October 20, 2023.
So his parents were murdered at the outset, and Svisky was taken hostage and killed months later. I hope his surviving siblings and nieces and nephews find some comfort in the fact that at least his body has been recovered. RIP.
And France’s Macron is saying – hey, let’s reward those Palestinians with a state! What could possibly go wrong?:
French President Emanuel Macron and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced they would co-chair a conference for the establishment of a Palestinian state, according to a Wednesday AFP report.
The conference is expected to take place in June.
“In the coming months, together we will multiply and combine our diplomatic initiatives to bring everyone along this path,” AFP quoted Macron as saying.
“We want to involve several other partners and allies, both European and non-European, who are ready to move in this direction but who are waiting for France,” the French president added.
Here’s a very interesting discussion that’s relevant to some of these issues:
This guy discusses something that seemed mysterious shortly after the 2024 election – so many fewer votes than in 2020. It seemed to point to evidence that fraud had occurred in 2020. But it no longer seems that way, for reasons that will be explained in the clip.
That actually doesn’t mean that election fraud did not occur in 2020. It merely means that the missing votes – and where they are missing – don’t offer any proof or even any strong indication that it did. I have claimed from the start, and I continue to claim, that because of the relaxation of the security rules for voting in 2020 and the overwhelming number of mail-in ballots, it is impossible to tell and I don’t think we will ever know. But the number of fraudulent votes wouldn’t have had to have been in the millions – just enough to account for some of the swing state margins.
I was talking recently to the only person I’m close to who is also on the right, and the topic of Trump-hatred came up. I said that I thought a huge part of the intensity of that hatred was snobbery.
In other words, Trump is déclassé. He may have been born with a silver – or golden – spoon in his mouth, but his personality “reads” differently. He’s not an intellectual, which makes a lot of intellectuals think he’s dumb. He doesn’t speak in polite euphemisms, which makes them think – correctly – that he’s crass. He’s a braggart. He’s sometimes a bully.
Now you either find those things so repellent that you can see nothing else, or you don’t care all that much. I don’t care all that much, and I see a lot else that’s been good for the country and the world. Sometimes it pays to be a bully in the international arena.
Of course, it’s not as simple as that. But I think that snobbery is at the heart of the intense distaste so many people feel for Trump – including some on the right.
But this post isn’t really about Trump. It’s about snobbery, something I’ve never quite understood.
When I was a child my family was financially comfortable. We had a nice house, not big by today’s standards but more than adequate. Same for our food – unfancy but plentiful enough and tasty enough. Clothes? Again, their numbers fit quite nicely in my old-fashioned closet that was about three feet wide, but it seemed like an abundance to me.
I had friends who were richer and friends who were poorer. My parents – both of whom had been to college, and a father who was a lawyer – had friends who had college degrees and friends who had dropped out of high school because of the Depression. I found it merely sort of interesting to hear my mother tell stories of their personal histories – she’d known almost all of them since childhood – but it had no bearing whatsoever on whether I liked them or not.
In childhood I was envious of those friends who had more harmonious home lives than mine, not friends who had more money. I spent a lot of time in the homes of friends – observing, observing, observing, like some infant anthropologist.
And I had certain déclassé interests myself, although I didn’t think of them that way because I didn’t have the concept back then. When I was about eleven years old, for example, I wanted to grow up to be a hairdresser. My mother at first thought it amusing but then thought it needed to be discouraged as not a proper ambition.
And then there was my love for the roller derby. I suppose that’s where this essay was going from the start. From about the age of seven to ten, I was a huge roller derby fan. I watched it on TV every week – I think on Sunday afternoons? – and looked forward to it immensely. I knew the names of all the skaters, and their numbers. For my favorites, I even knew their birthdays. It was something, I suppose, like pro wrestling – which of course is part of Trump’s world, although I’ve never been keen on wrestling and lost my taste for roller derby in adolescence.
But for a while I found roller derby thrilling. It had that element of real athleticism and of good-versus-evil pageantry and showmanship. And even the women in the roller derby had to be aggressive and sometimes fought. My childhood had involved a certain amount of physical battling, as well, and so I was no stranger to the need to defend myself against more powerful forces (an older brother, for example).
I was not repelled by the roller derby. I was inspired.
I started nagging my parents to take me to see a roller derby game in person. That involved going to Manhattan’s 14th Street Armory. They refused, but our kindly housekeeper volunteered to be my escort, and that’s how I ended up having that wish fulfilled. It was a huge place with a huge crowd. I already knew that the roller derby tracks were banked, but in person the angle of the bank seemed far far greater than on TV. I was astounded that anyone could skate on that steep a track. But one thing was disappointing – the entire room was shrouded in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. In those days, smoking seemed not only allowed but required.
And suddenly I wonder whether the vastness of YouTube includes some clips of the roller derby of my youth. Sure enough, it does. And although this is taken a few years earlier than my time, I recognize some of these players:
