Day: September 9, 2009

Last Wednesday night, Moveon.org held simultaneous events in the Los Angeles area. The event in Hollywood was peaceful, but in Thousand Oaks, a suburb near the Ventura County line, an altercation ended with a man biting off the tip of another man’s finger.

When my friend Michael T. told me he was attending the event at Hollywood and Highland, I asked him to send photos from his cell phone, which he did and which are published above.

In an email, Mike said, “There wasn’t a great turnout — about 200 people. Everyone held signs of candles and stood on the curb at Highland and Hollywood and waved at passing cars. Lots of cars honked and it was okay but not great.”

Mike also said he had doubts Hollywood and Highland was the place to hold the vigil. He makes a good point. It’s the busiest intersection in Hollywood. On weekday evenings, the streets are jammed with commuters coming home from Burbank and the Valley, and the sidewalks are crammed with barhopping locals and tourists, intermingled with a standing army of unfortunates, many of whom are off their meds.

Given all this, when I first heard that a man’s fingertip was bitten off at a Moveon.org vigil, I assumed it was the one in Hollywood. It happened instead out in sleepy, dusty Thousand Oaks:

“It all started with their difference in philosophy over healthcare reform,” said Senior Deputy Eric Buschow of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

The incident occurred about 7 p.m. Wednesday at a “We Can’t Afford to Wait Vigil” organized by affiliates of the activist group MoveOn.org, which drew supporters of President Obama’s healthcare plan, Buschow said. The rally also attracted several counter-protesters, he said.

[Updated at 5 p.m.: During the rally … the suspect and William James Rice got into a heated argument and began fighting, Buschow said. Rice, of Newbury Park, punched the suspect after the man called him an “idiot,” Buschow said.

At that point, one man bit off the the tip of Rice’s left pinkie finger, Buschow said.

A Moveon.org spokesperson said, it was “a regrettable act of violence.”

“We’re still trying to figure out who was the aggressor,” Deputry Buschow told the Los Angeles Times.

Eschewing Facebook, her usual platform of choice, Sarah Palin blogged an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal yesterday in which she joined other GOP pols and operatives who have recently called for killing Medicare by privatizing it:

Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

While Republican pols currently serving won’t dare even hint about their support for killing Medicare, those who, like Palin, are out of office, can afford to be honest about their party’s true intentions. As we noted last month, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey — now a GOP lobbyist and one of the prime, behind-the-scenes operatives in the Tea Bagger movement — described Medicare as “tyranny” on “Meet the Press.” (In 1995, Armey also said “Medicare is a program I would have no part of in a free world.”) And on August 19, Tom DeLay, the disgraced former Republican House leader, said on MSNBC’s “Hardball, “I want Medicare to be privatized. It shouldn’t be a government program. It’s the thing that is driving up costs. Not [the need] to have a public option. It’s Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP — the government-run programs — that are running up costs. That’s where the reform ought to be.”

At least one currently seated Republican has been critical of Medicare, although he stopped short of recommending privatizing it. Earlier this year, Rep. Tom Price (R-Texas)said , “[As] a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.”

The main reason sitting GOP pols keep their desire to kill Medicare secret is that is a popular program, and it tends to upset voters when they perceive it to be under threat. It didn’t help Bob Dole’s candidacy for the president in 1996 when his opponent, Pres. Clinton, rightly pointed out that Dole voted against Medicare when it was passed in 1965. Dole was also closely associated that year with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich who was caught on tape theorizing about how market forces might cause Medicare to “wither on the vine.” Dole lost to Clinton 49.2 percent to 40.7 percent.