Minnesota, like a lot of states, is contemplating significant budget cuts that would affect people with disabilities. But there’s cutting and then there’s obliterating, which is what South Carolina may do to its services for 26,000 residents with disabilities. All home and community-based services would be eliminated, leaving state funding for institutional care (which is required under federal Medicaid law). As a result of these proposed cuts, family members of of people with disabilities would be forced to quit jobs in order to serve as caregivers. Even worse, some individuals may be forced out of their homes and into nursing homes. In comparison, our own proposed cuts seem almost modest.

I’ll say it again: Medicaid needs to be completely federalized to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t punished for living in a poor state that is apathetic or even openly hostile to the notion of community integration. This patchwork system certainly benefits people like me who are lucky enough to live in a generous, prosperous state like Minnesota, but it does a disservice to so many others.

Film critic Roger Ebert appeared on Oprah today to talk about his battle with cancer that left him unable to speak and eat or drink by mouth. He also demonstrated his new computer-generated voice that a software company designed using previous TV and DVD recordings of his voice. It doesn’t have the texture and intonation of a natural human voice, but it sounds enough like him to bring tears to his wife’s eyes.

Let’s hope the developers can eventually make this an iPhone app so that he doesn’t have to pull out a computer every time he wants to speak. And I have no doubt that, in another five years, this artificial voice will be almost indistinguishable from his natural voice. Speech synthesis technology has been around a long time, but it looks like it’s finally reached a point where it can truly replace a voice lost to illness or injury.

I’m going to annoy my conservatives friends by linking to this Time article that explores whether liberals are smarter than conservatives. The gist of the article is that people with higher IQ scores are more likely to say they are liberal, even though their actual views might not be as liberal as they think. In other words, liberals can be really annoying poseurs. But conservatives shouldn’t feel too threatened; the same article cites another study that shows that conservatives are more likely to be stronger and more aggressive. So once you’ve had enough of our Obama bumper stickers and push for socialized health care, you can just kick our asses.

After years of riding in the car with my head bouncing around like a cantaloupe attached to a piece of string cheese, I finally consented to using a head-strap to keep myself upright. I’ve always resisted such a device because I thought it made me look like an ICU patient out on a day pass. But after using it for a day, I have to admit that it is nice to not have my head flop on my chest every time we have to make a sudden stop on the freeway. And it kind of makes me look like a kung fu movie star, which might come in handy the next time some hottie in a Corolla pulls up beside me.

Today’s must-read is Dana Goldstein’s article in The Daily Beast on Sarah Palin and her credibility–or lack thereof–as an advocate for disability issues. Goldstein points out that, despite Palin’s lip service to “special needs” families during the election, she has made very few substantive policy statements on disability topics. This has not gone unnoticed by disability advocates:

“Since the end of the presidential election, we haven’t heard Sarah Palin articulate any specific policy proposals [on disability],” said Peter Berns, CEO of The Arc, a Beltway lobbying group representing people with intellectual disabilities. Like nine other national disability-rights leaders The Daily Beast spoke to, Berns pointed to Palin’s excusing of Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word “retarded”—even as she hammered Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, for the same sin—as evidence of her lack of seriousness. “It has unfortunately politicized the issue in ways that are not productive, and it has converted what really are bipartisan issues into partisan ones,” Berns said.

It became clear during the election that Palin was not a deep policy thinker, but it always annoyed me that the press swooned over the fact that she was a parent of a kid with Down’s Syndrome without closely examining her views on funding the services that people with disabilities need to get by in life. I don’t doubt that Palin loves her son, but I doubt she favors putting more money into Medicaid community-based services or stronger enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact, I doubt she’s spent enough time thinking about those issues enough to form an opinion. Palin is quick to call out perceived slights against her son and his disability, but a certain hollowness accompanies those protests because it seems that, for Palin, the disability community is a constituency of one.

Thanks again to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.