Obama announced today that the U.S. will finally sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The announcement comes on the 19th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Senate must now ratify the treaty and I can’t imagine it will be a controversial vote. But Republicans being Republicans, I’m sure they’ll take the opportunity to wax paranoid about how ratifying this treaty will put blind pilots at the controls of the U.N.’s black helicopters or that we’ll have to make the space station wheelchair-accessible.

Obama also made this statement on disability rights:

I am not satisfied I am proud of the progress we have made but I am not satisfied — and I know you are not either — until every American with a disability can learn in their local public school in the manner that’s best for them. Until they can apply for a job without discrimination and live and work independently in their communities, if that is what they choose, we have got more work to do.  As long as we as a people still too easily succumb to casual discrimination or fear of the unfamiliar, we’ve still got more work to do.

Now might be a good time to mention that I’m still waiting for that phone call from the Obama administration.

Medicaid didn’t get much mention during tonight’s presidential news conference, but it’s getting more attention from the media as competing health care proposals bounce around the Capitol. Governors are coming out strongly against potential Medicaid expansions and I can’t blame them. Medicaid eats up a huge portion of state budgets and that portion has only grown since the economy tanked. Even if the feds pick up the costs of expansion for the next few years, as some bills propose, states could still be left in a lurch when the next downturn comes.

Medicaid could be an important tool in achieving universal coverage, but we need to re-examine its current cost-sharing model. States cannot be expected to cover more people while receiving only slightly more federal aid. And we need to ensure that health care reform lowers costs in public programs as well as in the private sector. More on that tomorrow.

I don’t splurge on myself often, but when I do, I tend to do so extravagantly. After my DVD player died, I decided to replace my whole entertainment system. One trip to the local big box electronics store later resulted in a hefty commission for a lucky sales associate and a LCD television of embarrassing proportions, complete with all the fixings, sitting in my living room. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet, but I expect I will weep tears of reverent awe when I pop in the Blu-Ray version of Watchmen. That is, assuming I can figure out why I’m only getting intermittent audio from my spanking new Blu-Ray player.

If anyone is interested in a gently used Tivo and or Kenwood receiver, both of which are in perfect working order, feel free to e-mail me. My prices are very reasonable. I’m also available for movie nights and televised sporting event get-togethers.

My DVD player died last night, so I made a rare trip to Best Buy today to find a replacement. The place was nearly deserted and a little eerie. I decided to purchase a Blu-Ray player since I’ll probably replace my aging tube television before long. The player also streams Netflix video, which is a nice plus. But when I got home and hooked it up, the newfangled thing produced a shaky, wobbly image.

What follows is technospeak that may assist fellow geeks in offering suggestions to my dilemma:

I hooked up the player using the component video cables that had worked just fine on my old DVD player. This produces a shaky, distorted image. When I hook it up using the red, white, and yellow RCA cables, it produces a stable image. Any ideas?

I was talking with a friend and colleague earlier tonight about how people with disabilities continue to be marginalized in various domains of everyday life, like employment and education. And then I came home and read Tyler Cowen’s wonderful article on autism and academia. Cowen’s thesis is that the skills and abilities needed to succeed in academia are the same skills and abilities that many with autism possess. Here’s a snip:

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.

But the passage that really struck me is this one:

Current prejudices are based on at least two mistakes. First, too often autism is defined as a series of impairments or life failures, thereby ruling out high achievers. It is more scientific and also more ethical to have a broader definition of autism, based on differing and atypical methods for processing information and other cognitive and biologically defined markers. That way we do not label autistics as necessary failures, but rather we recognize a great diversity of outcomes including successes.

If only we could recognize the great diversity found in the whole realm of disability. Each person with a disability has been shaped by a singular combination of experience, opportunity, and innate talent. The disability is only one variable in the equation. But our schools and workplaces consign whole groups of people to lives of ignorance and penury because they cannot conceive that a life with a disability is a life of possibilities.