My healthcare musings for the week.
In the hours after South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s (whom I will continue to refer to respectfully - even though he refused to offer the same courtesy to the President of the United States) verbal diarrhea, his 2010 challenger received over half-a-million dollars in campaign donations. One week later, both candidates have racked up over a million dollars each in contributions. That’s right. Joe Wilson raised a million dollars from his constituents by falsely accusing the President of lying. The House Bill HR 3200 - the only bill there is at the moment - explicitly states that illegal immigrants will NOT be eligible for ANY of the proposed subsidies. Joe Wilson lied. Yet, thousands of Americans openly and monetarily support that lie due to their irrational fear and loathing of this President. God bless America.
In an television interview Tuesday afternoon, Former President Jimmy Carter said publicly what more than a few people have been muttering privately over the past few months. Some of the instigators, agitators and demonstrators of the blind rage against the machine we’ve seen this summer oppose this President so vehemently not (solely) because of his policies, but because he is Barack Hussein Obama, black/biracial man. Sometimes it’s easy to pick them out. They’re the ones at the protests wrapped in the confederate flag, carrying misspelled homemade posters of the President in witch doctor garb. Sometimes it’s more difficult. They couch their distain in passionate opposition to Obama’s goals, while lying about lies and misrepresenting the truth. See below.
In the same way Cindy Sheehan made it difficult for reasonable people on the left of the political spectrum to oppose the war, Joe Wilson, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck prevent actual thinking conservatives from engaging in the debate. The idea of a post-racial society is an interesting one, but there is one problem. Racism isn’t dead. It’s sitting on the couch in its "I Am Joe the Plumber" tee shirt with its misspelled homemade protest sign sipping cheap Chinese tea and watching cable news.
Am I the only one to notice that aside from screaming at the top of their lungs, the radical right really isn’t very good at protest thing? I don’t know if it’s because they’ve had less practice at it recently or what, but the results are somewhat amusing. In the wake of Wilson’s outburst, his supporters printed up and sold tee-shirts reading “I’m with Joe Wilson!” The shirts appear similar in font and style to popular novelty “I’m with stupid!” tee-shirts. So, they simply replaced “stupid” with “Joe Wilson.” Interesting. The logo for Glenn Beck’s “9-12 Project” looks strangely familiar to that of the raised fist of the black power movement or the Progressive Labor Party, groups Beck would surely condemn as un-American.
And who can forget listening to anti-government protesters describe themselves as “tea-baggers,” blissfully ignorant of the common usage meaning of the term. Perhaps they’ll get better with time. But at this point it’s just embarrassing.
This past Monday was the one year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the final trigger of the economic meltdown of 2008. To “celebrate”, President Obama announced his plans for new financial regulations in a speech in New York City. There is near universal agreement among economists that we simply cannot return to the good old days of rampant Wall Street excess, mayhem and madness. There is also near universal agreement among politicians that in spite of the chaos we’ve just been through, it will be almost politically impossible to reform the system. Something about the agencies involved and their respective Congressional committees not wanting to relinquish regulatory control to one another. I’m a little confused by this. Not that Congress would be incapable of fixing something that was broken, but that this even has to go through Congress at all. I took U.S. History and Government 16 years ago, so I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t government agencies divisions of the Executive branch? And aren’t divisions of the Executive branch subject to executive orders? To hell with Congress. Issue an executive order instructing the SEC to do whatever you want it to do. What am I missing?
Late last week, General Motors kicked of its new era with a somewhat novel idea for the automobile industry - a money-back guarantee. That’s right, if you don’t like your new GM car, you can return it after 30 days but before 60 days for a full refund. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a great idea and a terrible idea all rolled into one. If successful this could do for GM what the 10-year, 100,000 mile warranty did for Hyundai. If it fails, GM - and taxpayers - will be out millions more dollars. Kudos to General Motors for having the guts to put up or shut up. I hope they have the quality products to back up their bravado.
I didn’t see the speech, but apparently Michael Jordan made a complete ass of himself during his Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech last Friday night. From the accounts I have read, instead of being gracious and effusive with praise as other inductees David Robinson, John Stockton and Vivian Stringer had been before him, Jordan was... well... Michael Jordan. He berated former foes, admonished players for past slights, and flew the guy who took his spot on his high school basketball team to the ceremony to watch. This speech seemed to surprise a lot of people. It shouldn’t have. The same qualities that made Jordan the best player of his time - perhaps of all time - also make him a not-so-great human being. He is quite possibly the most competitive man on the planet, which is great on the court, but makes him a petty, bitter, compulsive gambler off the court. We seem to have a difficult time in this country understanding that people are always more than one thing, and sometimes we’ll get a little bit of the garbage along with the wonderful.
Enough serious business, it’s football season baby!
My NFL thoughts for week one:
These are the same old Lions. These are the same old Bengals. In fact, these Bengals may be worse than the same old Lions who went 0-16 last season. How is it possible that year after year after year, teams like the Steelers and the Patriots can be so good, while the Lions and the Bengals are so, so awful?
In his last two games, Jake Delhomme has turned the ball over 11 times - 9 interceptions and 2 lost fumbles. There were three quarterbacks who didn’t have that many turnovers through the ENTIRE 2008 season! This has to be the worst performance by a professional quarterback I have ever seen. Is there no one else Carolina can wrangle to replace him? What’s Jeff Garcia doing? Oh right, he’s in Philadelphia now. Can we get Steve Young out of the broadcast booth?
The Golden Boy is back. After a whole year of sleeping in late with Giselle and surfing for porn on the internet, Tom Brady is back under center leading ridiculous fourth quarter comebacks in games the Patriots by all rights should have lost. Oh Tom. How did we survive an entire season without you?
The Raiders played their best game Monday night, while San Diego played their worst. The Chargers still won. It’s going to be another long year in Oakland.
The Steelers losing Troy Polomalu for 6 weeks is the equivalent of stripping the V-12 out of a Ferrari and replacing it with the V-6 from the family minivan. While it probably won’t kill the chances of a repeat, it should at least make the division interesting.
If the league doesn’t want defensive players to play defense, just take them off the field. Defensive ends should not get 15-yard penalties for tackling quarterbacks, cornerbacks should not get flagged for pass interference for running in close proximity to wide receivers, and if a stiff arm is legal on offense, it should also be legal on the other side of the ball.
My Superbowl Picks For Week 1: New Orleans Saints vs. Tennessee Titans.
There was a John McEnroe sighting this weekend. And he looked a lot like Serena Williams. Serena lost her semi-final match due to a profanity-laced tirade directed toward the umpire. Serena later apologized for the outburst, but the damage had been done. I understand that when a referee or umpire or line judge blows a call the emotions of the moment can take over, but losing one’s cool ALWAYS only ends in tears.
Finally, what planet is Kanye West living on? At the MTV Video Music Awards this weekend, (no, the irony of that title does not escape me), West bounded up on stage to interrupt award recipient Taylor Swift, taking her microphone and blathering on about how he felt other people were more deserving of said award than Swift. What I love about this story is the reaction of the audience, the performers and virtually everyone else in America. Once people figured out what Kanye was doing, he was booed mercilessly and denounced both by his peers and the media for the rest of the night, and all the following day until someone finally got through to him and got him to offer a personal apology to Swift. Good for us. Now if only we could apply the same social pressure to Terrell Owens, and Amy Winehouse, and “the Real Housewives of Orange County,” and so on, and so on ad nauseam.
6 comments:
Finally, you write about something that I know something about! I'm disgusted by Kanye West - again. This guy has a habit of stage-bombing (I actually read somewhere that when a Euro-ish group won a Best Video award at a European award show, Kanye jumped in on the band's acceptance speech and announced that he should have won. He then said something like "If I don't win, the show loses credibility".)
How much do you want to bet that Kanye isn't packing much down south? If one thing is true in this world, it's this: IF YOU HAVE TO TELL PEOPLE HOW AWESOME YOU ARE, YOU'RE NOT AWESOME. PERIOD.
I also read that he got kicked out of the MTV Video Awards because Pink got out of her seat to jump him when he was returning to his seat. Now THAT would have been great TV.
And who cares if the President called him a jackass? He's right! Once again, Mr. President is right. While we're on the subject of the President being right, why are so many Americans afraid of him being right? You'll have to explain this to me one more time - because I fail to believe that America would prefer to accept the view of a mob of wrong white people than one right black person. Tell me that we've come a longer way than that.
ok, right off the bat, i feel like the title is a slam on me. harumph.
pretty sure no conservatives are sipping tea. chugging beer, maybe.
i'll go with you on the saints, but i think your hopes for the titans might be a LITTLE ambitious.
yeah, the raised fist thing really evokes a liberal aesthetic, not a conservative one. i'm confused by the republicans. maybe they need to try hiring cool hip people under the age of 30. do the republicans have any of those? the trouble is, cool hip people under the age of 30 are far more swayed by idealism than monetary gain, and liberalism is far more likely to offer them idealism. i give conservative guys like beck credit for trying to tap into the idealism of youth, but sadly, they're failing miserably. the other thing republicans are misunderstanding is that the upcoming generation is a very idealistic one. if they don't start attracting the young now, those young are eventually going to be middle-aged parents raising more little idealists.
maybe i'm just rambling, but i think a lot of people under the age of 30 are seriously disenchanted with the financial systems of America, and aren't going to be inclined to protect a strong capitalistic market system.
gail's right...if you have to tell people you're awesome, you're so not awesome.
man...i would have paid MONEY to see pink take kanye down. in the left corner, wearing pink hair and gauntlets...PINK! in the right corner, wearing stupid shades and a pink shirt...KANYE! get ready tooooo rumble!
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