total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

Most of you know I am a US citizen living in Canada, right? Well, I am. I moved here eight years ago, when I was 38 years old. Before that I lived most of my life in the US, sometimes with health insurance, sometimes without. So I am in a good position to answer questions comparing the US and Canadian health-care systems. Actually, I was going to post a whole long thing here making that comparison, but ... well, as some of you know, there's kind of a lot of other stuff going on in my life right now. But! Since I know there is an ad on TV right now going on, untruthfully, about how awful health care is in Canada, it seemed timely and important to say that you shouldn't believe that ad, and also, if you have any questions, please ask.

eta The discussion has magically aggregated itself on my lj, so if you want to talk about this, go here: lolaraincoat.livejournal.com .

I'm pretty sure that the title to this post - "My dreamers will wake in another America" is a line of poetry from a Patti Smith album cover from the 1970s. But who wrote it originally? Or am I just making it up? I feel a bit haunted.

( So anyway. )

Oh, and a guy sang a beautiful version of that gospel song whose name I never remember:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water
It's the fire next time

He banged on the poles and the overhead railing of the subway car for percussion. Not apropos, I hope, but beautiful.

We should try to sleep a bit more now or we'll be useless at the phone bank.


...

Hey! It is idlerat's birthday! AND it is eponis's birthday! AND AND, for those of you who know her, it is also the birthday of my beloved sister S.! Happy Birthday to them!11!

AND AND AND, here's one excellent way to celebrate their birthdays, if you are in one of the thirty-two US states in which early voting is possible and you haven't already done it: VOTE! Idlerat, especially, loves democracy and cake. So go vote today, for her. And then bake her a cake. She - like all of us - deserves plenty of democracy, and social justice, and peace, and cake.

I note with interest that the stock market has rebounded immediately after Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize. Coincidence? I think not.


...

So fishwhistle and I were trading comments about, yes, Sarah Palin again, over at idlerat's lj and then I wandered over to his desk:

me: Ah, the comedy stylings of Lola and Fishwhistle! Thank you, thank you, we'll be here all week ...

Fishwhistle, pointing to his own damn comment: And look here, this is even funnier.

me, chagrined to learn that this was true: Damnit Fishwhistle, you're always topping me - oh wait -

Fishwhistle, triumphantly: IN EUROPE! ... pity you can't post that.

me: oh yeah?


~~~

And I know I said, three posts ago, that I was going to step away from the wacky Sarah Palin facts, but ... I'm not. Stage an intervention if you must. But first:

From a link provided by, among others, the delightful Ms. djinnj, this is a collection of facts taken from Alaska newspapers by Democratic party researchers to aid opposition to Palin when she ran for Governor of Alaska two years ago. It's all good but here are some highlights:

* While Mayor of Wasilla, she presided over a wedding in the local Walmart of two Walmart employees. It made her teary. "It's so Wasilla!" she said. Among the attendees: passengers from a tour bus.

* Her brother-in-law was a losing contestant on a reality-TV show about dating. He crashed his mountain bike in the first episode.

* In 1996, she drove to Anchorage on the pretext of a visit to Costco, but really to see Ivana Trump at JC Penney's cosmetic counter. She told a local reporter how wonderful the event was because "we are so desparate in Alaska for any semblance of culture or glamour." [note Canadian spelling. More on this later. Am desperately researching possible Canadian angle. Are we sure Alaska is really in the US?]

* Either she welshed on a bet, or she has the Big Dipper tattooed on an ankle.

From other ramblings around the internet - this is somewhat less reliable - it appears that she's not a fundamentalist at all, but a member of an Assembly of God congregation, which is to say a speaking-in-tongues Pentacostalist. If there is any justice in this universe at all, there will be video of her or her family members handling snakes, and McCain will lose the entire right-wing Christian vote except for the other Pentacostals and maybe the right-wing Unitarians.

Finally, apropos of last night's speech, somebody in a comment thread over at Making Light quoted this from some other comment thread on some blog, so we'll just have to attribute it to Anonymous Internet Genius:

"Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor."

As far as I can tell, she was the only person on McCain's list of potential running mates who is shorter than him.


...

We didn't know about the big government raid last May on Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Postville, Iowa, when we drove through there last month. (A useful followup story is here, highlighting the critical, honorable role played by the local Catholic Church. See also this story on an intervention by a heroic legal translator.) It didn't make the news in Canada. All we knew was that we stopped on our way from Minneapolis to Dubuque in this tiny town that had a Productos Latinos store on the theory that it would be selling tacos - which was true, and they were excellent - and nobody wanted to answer my eager, ignorant questions about why all those immigrants were there, along with a large number of black-hat Orthodox Jews out enjoying the warm Sabbath evening. The people eating in the taqueria had jobs in a meat-packing plant, someone eventually explained, and they were from Texas. But not originally from Texas, surely, I asked. Texas, the nice guy behind the counter said firmly. Texas.

You could see that families had rooted themselves there - the store windows were full of christening gowns, quincenera outfits, and toys with Spanish-language packaging - and that without them this would just be one more dying corn belt community. You could tell by the stink, even a block away, that those jobs in the meat-packing plant had to be pretty unpleasant, nothing you'd want to do yourself. You couldn't see, unless you already knew, that 400 people had just been taken away by la migra.

There's nothing more to say about this that you don't already know.

...

I'm sitting here surrounded by towering stacks of admissions files to a graduate program, which are more than a bit daunting, and so I cruise the internet for solace and distraction, and this is what appeared today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20mobility.html?em&ex=1203656400&en=fd81d8756f45e5a5&ei=5087%0A

I always look for the phrase "first member of her/his family to attend university" in letters of recommendation; those are the students I most want to admit and to fund. It's good to have a little empirical research out there as a reminder of why that matters.

And so anyhow:

Writers of letters of recommendation! Teachers and tutors and librarians and university staff and principals and deans and department chairs and committee members and high school staff and teaching assistants and teachers' aides and Montessori teachers everywhere! Crossing guards and school-bus drivers! Politicians who don't cut school budgets! What you do counts for something! It counts for so much! Thank you so much!

And now I'll get back to reading the files, all right? All right then.

...