Politics
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »What Would Jesus Do About Health Care In America?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 16, 2009 by admin in Politics
Sunday, August 16th, 2009And when will the Democratic Party learn that it’s not about principles, it’s about media control?
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The answer to that will probably remain open to speculation. If you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll probably say “Nothing. He’s dead, if he ever existed“. If you do believe in Jesus though, I’d hazard to guess that you’d agree that he’d say something like “Let’s stop all these wars and heal some sick people with the money we save“, unlike the Christian Right (Why do they call them that anyway? They never are.) which continues to believe in torture and war while attacking the idea of saving lives. On a more personal and practical level though, I’d like to address this Obama fellow, and his handling of the continued irrational ranting of the far right. Hey White House staff! Did you learn NOTHING from the last eight years? Somebody let me at that Napoleonic twit Rahm Emanuel. I’ll kick his midget ass six ways to Sunday and start a new media blitz where the White House DOESN’T moronically defend itself from the psychotic ramblings of a bunch of health and insurance industry funded astroturfers. FRAME THE DEBATE Mr. Obama. Don’t even directly address the idiocy that extreme conservatives and the health/insurance industries spew. Keep talking about change, and MAKE IT HAPPEN. If you keep up the ignorant and ineffective tendency to chomp on every piece of insane spin-bait they throw your way, your agenda remains doomed. Which I wouldn’t mind, except I thought when I voted you guys in that your agenda had something to do with our agenda. I also thought you were smarter than this. Is it too late to take my vote back? Unfortunately, this is not a battle over principles, it’s a battle over the media, and the current administration is losing. Routinely. C’mon you guys, you’re smarter than this. President Obama has more intelligence in his pinky than a county full of red state values voters. Let it show.
The Next Civil War: Red vs Blue
[ 7 Comments ]Posted on August 10, 2009 by admin in Politics
Monday, August 10th, 2009It may be the beginning of the week, but it’s the end of the country.
Slate recently ran a How is America Going to End game/survey in which you get to choose the way that you predict the American Empire will come to an end. Well, the results are in, and I have to say I’m a little disappointed that my chosen scenario – the Red vs. Blue Civil War – came in 13th. That map on the left highlights an interesting fact: the whole red state vs. blue state debate becomes a little irrelevant when you look at things on a more granular level. Those aren’t mega-highrises of the future, those are voters by population density. And you’ll notice that most of the spikes are blue. An American civil war may seem preposterous, especially when a crazy Russian academic predicts it, but the re-emergence of the “bubba militias” makes it seem a little less far-fetched in a country that’s been split in two by Rovian/Luntzian politics. When winning is everything, everyone loses. It says a lot when a large group of people (the average knee-jerk, ignorant Republican voter) gets behind a trillion-dollar activity that kills thousands of Americans but violently protests one that is intended to save American lives. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if things eventually got ugly on a larger scale; when you get a bunch of ignorant PBR-swilling yahoos riled up, there’s usually going to be some kind of fight. But I’m not worried. We city-folk have this one covered in spades, and we have maps and charts to prove it. First of all, we all know blue voters are smarter, and all the smart Read the rest of this entry »
Remembering Hiroshima
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 6, 2009 by admin in Politics
Thursday, August 6th, 2009As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing that came out of World War II was the 80′s song Enola Gay by OMD.
 The Bikini Atoll Test |
Albert Einstein, whose letters to FDR are credited with inspiring the race to build an atomic bomb, later said “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon seeing the results of the Trinity Test, said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds“, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Ken Bainbridge, the test director on the project, is quoted as saying “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” None of this stopped the actual dropping of the bomb on August 6, 1945. And scientist and Truman advisor Karl T. Compton’s 1946 Atlantic article If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used – while a realistic assessment – probably did little to absolve any of these men of their guilt and remorse in the coming years. I’m just glad a generation has been able to grow up without the ever-present threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, a concept that definitely drained my enthusiasm for living until my mid-twenties. We live in a much hipper era now, one in which we can play games to pick our own apocalypse, and in which the Mayor of Hiroshima can call for support of an ‘Obamajority’ that believes in nuclear-free world. Until that day comes – if it ever does – I think we owe it to ourselves to keep fresh an awareness of the horrifying devastation of nuclear war. Boston.com has a compelling photo collection documenting the bombing of Hiroshima, and the widget below lets you pick a city and see what affect various nuclear weapons will Read the rest of this entry »
American Health Care – Isn’t The Problem Really Just Greed?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 30, 2009 by admin in Politics
Thursday, July 30th, 2009What would YOU do to fix America’s health care?
I’ve always thought that health care would improve significantly if doctors started out at a very high salary which went down with every patient they lost. Since that will never happen, it appears health care costs are going to remain a slight problem. I must confess that I’m about as ignorant as one can get when it comes to what’s going on with the health care plans the senate is working on right now (it’s more than one bill). I’m also astounded that there is so much disagreement about the root causes of our high health costs. I have a simplistic belief about why health care is such a shambles in the states, and almost zero faith that legislation will fix it. I believe that most discussions about the topic skip over the two fundamental causes: greed and denial. I think that our national psyche has lost touch with the fact that taking care of each other is a fundamental aspect of being a happy human, and that when we turn human life into a commodity that can have a price, you’ll end up with the morass that is American healthcare. And if you don’t think it’s a mess, look around at other capitalist democracies . Pretty much across the board, America fails, with the highest cost per-capita , lowest life expectancy (38th out of 100), and highest infant mortality rate. Do you think Washington is on track to fix these problems? What do YOU think is the problem or the solution?
Did You Take The Red Pill Or The Blue Pill?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 24, 2009 by admin in Politics
Friday, July 24th, 2009Shirts or skins? Red or blue? Republican or Democrat? Liberal Or conservative? Is life really that simple? Maybe an online quiz can help.
I’m confused. I wish the words liberal and conservative would rediscover their meaning and stop consorting with scoundrels like the Democratic and Republican parties. And I wish we could de-politicize colors. Although it was pretty easy to choose a color in the great red and blue contest of 2008, I think I’m really something more like purple, given what red and blue have come to mean. And purple just seems a little indecisive somehow. But who – if they’re paying attention - wouldn’t be a little undecided, in a time when both near-socialists like myself and a rabid neo-con like Free Republic’s Jim Robinson joke about the need for revolution, rather than voting. I think I’d fall into the liberal category simply because I don’t want some demented, rapture-driven Ayn Rand capitalist deciding who we can have sex with, or racist nutjobs like the GOP base deciding anything for us. But I can’t say I’m ecstatic with the current administration either. I know that campaigns are poll-driven marketing machines designed to appeal to nebulous but emotional voter values (like mine), but I have to admit I still feel a little suckered by the “Hope & Change” pitch. I see the former fading in a lot of people, and very little of the latter. So rather than continue thinking for myself, which has never done me any good, I decided to submit my indecision to science, and took the Pew Research Typology Test. Give it a try, the results were surprising. So surprising in fact (it pegged me as a Conservative Democrat) that now I’ve given up on science as well. I found this Democratic Loyalty Test much more informative, with questions and choices like: Read the rest of this entry »