Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Promises, promises

So where is the legislation to ban animal-human hybrids? I am prompted to ask because I'm about to go to Maryland for a Center for Mental Health Services grantee meeting, and that reminds me of something else -- Compassionate Conservatism was supposed to mean eliminating inequality for Americans with disabilities, particularly those associated with mental illness.

Remember the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health? One of the first things the new administration did was set up this commission, which made all sorts of recommendations to heal the fragmentation of services for people with mental illnesses, provide access to care for everyone who needs it, support recovery and independence, yadda yadda yadda. It turns out that the only real world manifestation of all this goodness that even got close to happening was a proposal to screen all the schoolchildren in America using a protocol developed by drug companies, so as to get them all on whatever pills Pfizer thought they should be taking. There was a great hue and cry but nothing came of it anyway because it would have cost actual money.

CMHS has just issued a new policy statement about recovery -- how everybody with mental illness is entitled to the supports they need and the opportunity to live independent, full lives, etc. That is truly charming. Meanwhile funding for CMHS is being cut.

There is not one single area of public policy -- not one, zip, zilch, nada, bupkis, zero, nothing -- in which this administration is not hypocritical, dishonest, corrupt, and just plain wrong. The pathological liar in the Oval Office says that society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable among us, by which he means the brain dead and the embryonic. People who are conscious, and who are troubled and suffering, don't mean shit to him. Actually I sincerely doubt he cares about the blastocysts and the vegetative either, or anybody or anything except his own power and the adulation of sycophants.

I hope to be able to post from the road, but it may turn out to be a problem. If I'm absent for a couple of days, you'll know why, but I'll catch up when I'm back.

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