Gunning for Health Care

This is too good just to post on my Facebook page.

I was just looking through this column for a graph or two to quote here, but the whole thing is a must-read.

Those Americans

Even at the start of the Obama era, I have to marvel at the dumb stuff we continue to pull years or decades after the rest of the world has clued in. Like, oh I dunno, climate change.

Or how about the fact that our idiotic drug and gun policies are destroying Mexico?

Or that there are two dozen other industrialized nations -- including ones that our soldiers fight with -- who allow gays to serve openly in the military? My mind is particularly boggled by the story of this guy who was an Arabic translator who was fired six months after 9/11 because he was gay!!

Maybe when I go to Australia next month, I can affect, say, a German accent? Or maybe just wear a shirt that says "My house has solar panels, I don't own a gun and I don't hate gay people. Oh, and I believe the earth is a few trillion years old."

Guns vs. cars: No contest

There is much hand-wringing, and rightfully so, this week about guns and how 30,000 people a year are killed by guns and how we need to revisit gun control (though not enough angst, me thinks, about how the Virginia Tech shooter wouldn't have had access to the weapons he used if Dubya had signed the renewal of the assault weapons ban, but that's another post).

And yet 41,000 Americans are killed each year in automobile crashes. That's about three-and-a-half Virginia Techs a day. And millions, of course, die each year of diseases caused by obesity and inactivity, which can be largely attributed to the sedentary lifestyle our car culture has enabled. Yet no hand-wringing there. No calls for more public transit or fewer roads. No outcry for expanded bike lanes or walkable cities. I guess it's easier to call for stricter gun laws when only 38 percent of American households own firearms, while 60 percent of American households have at least two cars. For most Americans, you'll have to pry the steering wheel out of their cold, dead hands.