Jim Bunning to Laid Off Workers:"Tough Shit!"

Last night one Republican Senator from Kentucky, Jim Bunning, in spite of bipartisan support, stopped legislation which would have prevented 1.2 million laid off workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits and health care on Monday, February 28. When Senator Ron Wyden (D - Oregon) begged him to allow it to pass for the benefit of those laid off workers and their families, he said: "Tough shit." And as debate continued later into the evening, he had the arrogance to complain that he was missing the Kentucky/South Carolina basketball game.

As he admitted, Mr. Bunning was really not opposed to the extension, he simply wanted the money to come from another source. Since he was not going to get his way, the laid off workers were not going to get the extension. Does that remind you of someone? Perhaps Alabama's Republican Senator, Shelby, who was holding up over 70 administration appointments because he was not receiving the pork barrel earmarks that he wanted.

Senator Bunning readily cashes his government check of $174,000 a year, and accepts his government sponsored health care and retirement without questioning where the money is coming from; but God forbid that the 10.7% unemployed Kentuckians and their families should receive a 30 day unemployment extension.

And let this be a lesson to the Senate. Do not, I repeat, do not force Jim Bunning to stay at his desk on the Senate floor when the University of Kentucky's men basketball team is playing.

And then we wonder why others around the world question our democracy when one senator can prevent a bipartisan majority from acting in the interests of the people.

The system is broken. Senators Bunning and Shelby have graphically demonstrated that fact.

Headlines

Headlines sometimes force one to scratch her head and ask, "What were they thinking?"

This headline is one of many on HuffingtonPost.com (2010/02/24). Title: "The Funniest Headline Fails Of All Times"

NBC Hates Hockey

Sunday, I spent most of the evening watching the Winter Olympics on NBC presuming that eventually they would show the U.S vs. Canada hockey game, perhaps on tape. And then after watching curling, ice dancing, and innumerable commercials, Bob Costas interrupts the bobsled event (probably on tape) to bring us the last 30 seconds of the USA's surprise victory over Canada.

The next day I realize I could have watched the hockey on MSNBC (apparently, 8.22 million Americans did so) or on Canadian Broadcasting from Windsor ("the most watched sports program ever shown on Canadian television"-- 10.6 million viewers). Although I must fault myself for not seeing it, I do fault NBC for not even running a crawl keeping us up to date since they never intended to show it or by directing hockey fans to MSNBC or CNBC.

This afternoon, Wednesday, I watched most of the USA hockey team's victory over Switzerland, and it occurred to me that NBC will never show hockey in prime time. The reason is that hockey is continuous action and cannot be interrupted for commercials after every two minutes. On the other hand, NBC will feature ice dancing, an event that can only be considered a sport in the most liberal sense, because the network can chop it up into two-minute intervals as they can with skiing, skating, bobsledding etc. These short intervals of competition permit NBC to air another whole series of ads between each performance.

Granted NBC has invested heavily in the Winter Olympics and is presumably losing money, they do have a responsibility to the viewers since they possess exclusive rights in the US. If they are losing financially, it is because of their business model or they choose to lose in exchange for ratings.

On the other hand, I guess we should be thankful that it is NBC; they do make events available to MSNBC, CBC, and USA networks.

London's CCTV Folly

Many defenders of privacy and civil liberties were dismayed when the city of London installed CCTV--a network of 10 thousand television cameras designed to monitor activity on almost every street in the city. The reason for this large Orwellian expenditure was that the cameras would deter crime and assist in apprehending criminals.

The results are in; a recent government study found that only 3% of street robberies are solved and crime rates on the streets of London are soaring. Apparently the criminals do not even attempt to hide from the cameras; they just wear disguises or masks. One would think that the authorities would have foreseen this possibility. Or maybe the authorities just enjoy voyeuristic spying on ordinary citizens.

Perhaps, "authorities" in other locations will not repeat London's folly.

The Health Insurance Leviathan

Consumers Union reports: " In the last 10 years, your family's health insurance bill has more than doubled."

Have our salaries and wages doubled in the last 10 years? Has your retirement account or 401 K doubled? For most of us, the answer is a resounding NO. The exceptions, of course, are the health insurance/pharmaceutical and Wall Street Oligarchs.

In an effort to break this pattern, the leading health reform bill would put an end to this cycle. It would require some common-sense measures that are now lacking:

1) insurance companies would have to spend 85% of our premiums on health care. (This hardly seems revolutionary.)

2) health insurance companies would have to compete against each other based on price and level of care. ( They would no longer enjoy their monopoly status.)

3) they would be required to clearly list their charges and coverage allowing the consumer to shop for the plan that best serves his interests.

Can we afford to allow the present health care leviathan to double its costs every 10 years and hold our economy and potential growth hostage?

Adam Dempsey at Toledo Zoo 2/19/2010

Winter at the Toledo Zoo is usually highlighted by "Lights Before Christmas" -- always spectacular, and "Frozentoesen" in February, but even on an ordinary drab winter day, a four-year old Adam Dempsey will be able to entertain himself.

Friends at Toledo Zoo

Some friends (real and fake) that I met at the Toledo Zoo in February, 2010.

Reagan, Bush Tax Cuts & Unfunded Expenditures

Just for the record: the Reagan and Bush administrations cut taxes for the wealthy from 70% to 30%--an effective rate of 17%. The top 5% of the population make 95% of the discretionary income beyond that needed to survive, but they pay less than 50% of the taxes. In addition, we have two wars that were not paid for, the big pharmaceutical giveaway that was not paid for, and all the Homeland Security expenditures that were not paid for. If one cuts taxes and spends without funding, s/he has a problem.

Dick Francis Rides Over the Horizon

Many of us who were fans of Dick Francis and his popular steeplechase racing thrillers were saddened today to learn that he died over the weekend at age 89. With the help of his wife, Mary, he offered us a thriller a year for forty years. Even after Mary's death when he did not think he would write again, he recently brought back Sid Halley, an ex-steeplechase jockey turned detective. Mr. Francis, thanks for taking us along for the ride.

"The Last Night in Twisted River" by John Irving

American literature has been blessed with a plethora of good storytellers, and that tradition continues today with John Irving. He spins a yarn with the best of them.

Having just finished "The Last Night in Twisted River," I was pleased to see that Irving has returned to his unique type of story, a story in the tradition of "The World according to Garp," "A Prayer for Owen Meany," and "Cider House Rules." This newest novel weaves several story lines together, but the basic story is that Domonic's 12 year old son, Danny, mistakenly kills the Constable's girlfriend with the result that Dominic and Danny have to sneak out of Twisted River (a violent and troubled environment) and go underground in various places throughout the United States and Canada with the Constable in pursuit.

As with other Irving works, the cast of characters is an interesting group of troubled misfits, each of whom is carrying too much baggage. Perhaps the only two characters that seem to have a chance of achieving some sort of happiness are Danny and Lady Sky. Even the animals, particularly a dog named Hero, seem to have a set of psychological problems. A Paul Bunyon-like, Libertarian logger, Ketchum, who because of a bizarre situation in Twisted River, assumes the role of protector for Danny and his father, is perhaps the most memorable. Several of the female characters, Carmella, Injun Jane, Six-Pack Pam, and Lady Sky, although not normal, are each interesting in their own way.

Since Dominic is a cook, there is a generous amount of culinary detail. And, once again, the main character, Danny, is a successful, novelist and this results in an abundance of autobiographical detail. But much of the charm of reading Irving is the detail.

What appears to me to be a departure from earlier works is the inclusion of political comment. Ketchum and later, Danny, taking a dim view of "the scoundrel" George Bush, the stolen election, and the stupidity of the Invasion of Iraq, refers to the U.S. as "an empire in decline, and a "Lost Nation," and is fond of quoting Samuel Johnson, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

John Irving's novels usually have a line or lines that permanently embed themselves in my memory, and in this one, it is the line: "Doesn't something have to happen to you before you jump naked out of an airplane?" (p.449)

Another piece of trivia for those who remember the Vietnam War is the reference to "Kennedy Fathers." Those too young to remember will understand when they read the novel.

Irving fans and those reading him for the first time, will thoroughly enjoy the elaborate detail, the twisted characters, and the various stories that he weaves together in another successful literary novel.

Sen. Bennet Seeking Citizen Co-sponsors

Now that the Supreme Court has opened the door for special interests and corporations to spend unlimited money to influence our elections, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is co-sponsoring legislation to close loopholes, require transparency and restore fairness in the election system.

He is asking for citizen co-sponsors to endorse this legislation which will:

*Keep foreign governments and foreign corporations from using the Supreme courts recent decision to buy ads that influence U.S. elections;

* Prevent government contractors and TARP recipients from using the decision to use big money to influence elections;

*Require corporate CEOs to stand by the ads they are using shareholder funds to finance, forcing them to go on camera to say they "approve the message";

*Require top corporate and organizational donors to shadow groups like 527s to appear in the ads they fund;

* Ensure full and timely disclosure of campaign expenditures so organizations cannot mask their electioneering activities; and,

*Prevent organizations from coordinating their activities with parties and politicians.

If you would like to become a citizen co-sponsor, go to: info@BennetForColorado.com

Personally, I do not think this legislation is adequate to assure fair elections, but at least it is a first step in the right direction. Short of reversing the Courts 5-4 decision, I think the country needs legislation requiring a system of small dollar, citizen funded elections.

Health Insurers Drop Patients & Collect $12.2B in Profits

It's no surprise that the Health Insurance Oligarchs

want to keep things as they are. It's no surprise

they are spending millions trying to buy Congress.

Bottom line; they have a great scam going, and

they are afraid President Obama and the

Democrats are going to kill their cash cow.

The five largest health insurance companies

(see logos above) "have racked up

$12.2 billion--up 56 percent over 2008,"

according to a report prepared by Health

Care for America Now. The report goes on to

say "three of the five insurers cut the proportion

of premiums they spend on customers' medical

care, committing relatively more to salaries,

administrative expenses and profits."

The oligarchs do not question the facts of the

report, but they go to great lengths to offer

excuses for their obscene practices. In fact,

they sound very much like the Wall Street

oligarchs..

In California, a subsidiary of WellPoint

decided to raise premiums for individual

health-insurance policies by as much as

39 percent for some customers. After all,

someone has to pay for those huge profits

and salaries. (WellPoint reported a

$2.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2009.)

I guess that just is not enough, because,

after all, they have to spend so much money

in Washington to prevent Congress from

passing a sane health care .bill.

Who said this system is not broken?

What the Insurance Oligarchs Don't Want Us to Know

The insurance/pharmaceutical oligarchs, their servants in Congress, and the corporate-controlled press have worked extremely hard at confusing the issue and keeping the public from knowing what is really in the proposed leading health care bill.

How do you feel about the following?

Would you & your family like to have the exact same health care coverage that members of Congress have? Under the proposed bill you could have it.

Would you like preventive care--like an annual physical, mammogram or colonoscopy? It would cost you nothing out of pocket.

Also under this proposal, in spite of age, a pre-existing condition or family history, you could not be denied coverage.

Insurance companies would not be able to cap your care if you develop cancer or other serious illnesses.

Patients with severe problem and their families would not need to use all their savings and file bankruptcy to receive proper care.

The proposed tax credits would benefit small businesses and their employees.

In order to keep us from examining these benefits, the special interests are talking about death panels and the end of Medicare ( a program the Republicans have been trying to eliminate from its beginning). Billions of dollars (dollars that could have been used for sick patients) are being spent to confuse the issue with the result that we will once again fail to fix a very broken system.

The above information and much more can be found at Consumers Union, action@consumer.org.

Gingrich: Wrong on the Facts and the Constituion

Newt Gingrich

The Party of Fear Mongers, i.e. Republicans, are up to their old tricks; they are bombarding the air waves in an attempt to paint President Obama as being "soft" on terrorism by using the case of the Christmas Day bomber. Susan Collins, Sarah Palin, and now Newt Gingrich, "the Master of Incivility," are insisting that the Obama Administration was at fault by granting the suspect his Constitutional rights.

When Mr. Gingrich was informed that the Bush Administration had done the very same thing with the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, he claimed that was because Reid was an American. The fact is Mr. Reid was a British citizen, not American. Did Newt think he was American because his name was Richard instead of Umar Farouk and he was not balck? Anyway he was wrong!

But more importantly, Newt and his Republican friends either are unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution, or even more sinister, are trying to deceive the public as to the contents of the Constitution,

Those who know the Constitution know that the basic Constitutional Rights apply, not only to Americans, but anyone else arrested in the United States. Even the Bush Administration which was not an advocate of defendants' rights, was well aware of this basic principle. For a complete explanation, confer: Greenwald - Salon.com, "Susan Collins spreads central myth about Constitution."

The question becomes: Do Newt, his Republican colleagues, and their media lackeys think the American people are uneducated and do not know the Constitution? Or is it, these guys don' t know the Constitution?

Hypocricy Is Alive & Well among the GOP

Senator Bond Sarah Palin

As I recall, on one occasion, Jesus drove the hypocrites out of the Temple in Jerusalem. If he were in Washington, D.C. today, he would have a full-time job driving them from the halls of Congress. Both political parties have their fair share, but the Republicans are trying to establish new records as reported by Jim McElhatton of the Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2010.

"Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama's economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt. But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state.

Mr. Bond was not alone. More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government's many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers' public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home.

"It's not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington."

And then there's Sarah Palin. Where does one start? Her notes scribbled on her hand (a good junior high trick) after she found fault with the President for using a teleprompter? Or her accepting Boss Limbaugh's use of the word "retard," right after she called for Ram Emmanuel's firing for his use of the word?

Cardinal Rode Insults Religious Women

Cardinal Franc Rode, the Pope's man in charge of investigating U.S. Catholic nuns, gave a speech in Rome last month suggesting that Vatican Council II opened up a period of experimentation that caused young women to avoid becoming religious sisters. I guess that means: it's not our fault, it's the fault of those misguided sisters in the United States who were led astray by Vatican II.

But he was not finished; he then continued: "Faced with an aging membership and fewer vocations, many religious orders have turned to 'foreign vocations' in places like Africa, India and the Philippines." One might ask, "What is wrong with that?"The cardinal then said the orders need to remember that quality of vocations is more important than quantity.
Yes, you read it correctly; Cardinal Rode is suggesting that the "quality" of sisters and nuns in Africa, India, and the Philippines is substandard.

Thus, the American nuns, led astray by Vatican II, are too secular and those "foreign" nuns are somehow inferior.

What is his problem? With that attitude, is he capable of conducting any kind of "investigation" involving religious women? Where does the Pope find these guys?

The Eleven-Minute Super Bowl

Watching Super Bowl XLIV, I was once again reminded that I am an idiot. I allowed the NFL and CBS to waste 3 hours and 34 minutes of my time. If I had recorded it, I could have replayed just the actual plays in eleven minutes.

I started watching at 6:30 P.M. (kickoff) and turned the TV of at 9:45 P.M. (Drew Brees taking a knee to end the game). In that 3 hours and 45 minutes of time, I saw ELEVEN MINUTES of actual football plays. These highly paid stars performed football moves less time than "The Who" did in their painfully embarrassing half-time show. Granted, the game lasted 60 minutes of those 3 hours and forty five minutes, the plays only accounted for ELEVEN MINUTES. The rest of the 60 minutes was consumed with huddles, running the play clock down to 1 or 2 seconds, and players walking around. I guess the other 2 hours and forty five minutes were consumed by the sad half-time show, CBS's football experts who must have taken pep pills, and commercials, several of which were misogynistic. And I did learn that the the disturbing news that the E-trade baby is in a sexual relationship.

Given all that, and given that I am an idiot (or maybe because of that), I enjoyed watching the New Orleans Saints win their first super bowl.

USC's Lane Kiffin Offers a 13 year-old a Scholarship

Lane Kiffin

This man has a true penchant for getting his name in the headlines. Lane Kiffin, the newly hired coach of USC, a man, whose record as a head coach with two schools is 7-6, offers a scholarship to a 13 year-old seventh grader. David Sills, the 13 year-old, may someday be a good quarterback, but it's ridiculous to offer him a scholarship. On the other hand, it put Lane Kiffin's name in sports headlines, and in the final analysis, that may be what this is all about.

It also may deflect attention from USC's problems with the NCAA's rule commission. we are not talking about the large amount of money Reggie Bush made playing at USC. We also are not talking about Seantrel Henderson, the nation's number 2 ranked prospect, who is waiting to see what NCAA penalties are imposed on the Trojans. You can be sure that if the NCAA comes down hard on USC and their recruiting, Seantrel is out of there on the next flight.

Let's hope other NCAA universities are not going to follow USC and the Lane Kiffin circus.

Obama Does Not Bow to China's Pressure

Dalai Lama President Obama

One gets the impression lately that the Chinese feel they are now the superpower and can dictate to other countries, including the United States. They, on the other hand, bristle when the US suggests they allow basic human rights, eliminate censorship, and open the internet.

They have been trying to dissuade President Obama from meeting with the Dalai Lama whom China accuses of pushing for Tibetan independence.

Thankfully, President Obama has decided to meet with whom he chooses. He is sending the message that, although the US would like China's help with a solution to the nuclear situations in Iran and North Korea and the climate change crisis, China is not going to tell him with whom he can meet.

As for their differences with the Dalai Lama, he insists that he is not pushing for Tibetan independence.

Senator Shelby's Abuse of Power

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

A single, greedy, and arrogant senator, Richard Shelby (R-AL), is preventing the confirmation of 70 nominations President Obama sent to the Senate. The reason? The President has not approved two "earmarks" (read "pork") the Senator slipped through on the back of other legislation. The two projects, of course, would send $40 billion to Alabama. And now that the press has learned that he is using the power of this "extraordinary 'blanket hold,'" he is not available for comment.

If you think this sounds like a spoiled seventh grader playing schoolyard games, you are correct! The brat is saying: If I don't get my pork barrel projects, I'll hold the Administration's nominees hostage.

Of course, as a Republican, he favors reducing the federal budget---unless of course $40 billion is going to be spent in his State.

And the other issue is, which lobbyists wrote these "earmarks" for him and what is he getting from them?