I sure hope Matt Taibbi is wrong…

Matt Taibbi, who has been one of the best writers out there writing about the crash of our economy and the resulting recession, has a pretty pessimistic post today about the health care reform situation.  And while I hope and pray that he is wrong, I fear that he is right… The monied interests entrenched against any serious reform have basically bought off all of the republicans and enough idiot democrats that I despair for any serious reform.

I wonder when we’ll really figure it out, and see that every other first world country achieves better health results for a fraction of the money we spend, and manage to cover EVERYONE.

Thirteen+ months later…

So it’s been a long time… and I need to get back in the swing of blogging. Since I’ve last blogged, I’ve seen (among other things):

• The birth of my second child
• a 13-3 record for my Dallas Cowboys, only to get nipped by the juggernaut that was the eventual Super Bowl Champ Giants in the playoffs
• My Cal Bears being about 90 minutes away from the #1 ranking in the land, only to see that slip away in the final seconds of a loss to Oregon State, followed by one of the all-time implosions (impressive even by Cal standards)
• Those same bears firing the men’s basketball coach and replacing him with a fantastic coach whose most recent college job was the head coach at Cal’s arch-rival, Stanfurd… and strangely enough, the firing came the day immediately after I sent a long, passionate letter to the athletic director indicating my displeasure with the direction of the basketball team (not that there was any cause-and-effect, but it was still a strange coincidence)
• My Angels losing twice in the postseason, both times to the Red Sox, and “blessed” with management that doesn’t seem to understand much about how to identify quality offensive players (outside of the trade for Mark Teixeira, who many people think will spurn the Angels for greener pastures)
• A very intense Democratic primary, with 3 high-quality candidates, in which my first choice dropped out the day after I decided to donate money to him, and then later was found to have been hiding an affair which would have crushed his presidential hopes had he won the nomination (and has effectively scuttled a future in politics for him… John Edwards, I think that you showed an unforgivable level of arrogance in hiding that affair)
• A mixed-race candidate win the presidential nomination of a major party
• A supposedly democratic congress caving to a president with record-high levels of unpopularity and granting him powers (and granting telecoms retroactive immunity) that a republican congress was unable to give him
• The banking deregulation chickens coming home to roost in the recent economic crisis, in which the current administration’s initial response was to give away, with no strings attached, $700 billion of taxpayer money to the very people who created the mess(!)

I’ve left out many things, of course, but those were some of the first things I thought when i thought about what I would have blogged about. My impetus for blogging again today was a quote I saw from David Sedaris in the New Yorker (h/t Balloon Juice):

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I don’t know if anyone could have put it better (although I will admit that after reading the full article, I don’t know if it was intended with the same implications that I read into it)… However, I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide .

One final link…. A great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"The Price of Being Brown in America"

While everyone knows about Cindy Sheehan being arrested for wearing a t-shirt at the State of the Union (an action that has been expressly permitted by Supreme Court Rulings, even in the Capitol), a lesser known detention from the State of the Union was the one of an Indian man (but a naturalized US citizen), a guest of Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings.

Orwellian Naming

There's a great post over at TPMCafe asking the question of why Republicans feel they have to name the laws they pass and initiatives they pursue in such false and obfuscating ways. It's as if they are afraid to tell the public what the laws and initiatives really are (giveaways to big business and Corporate America), because they know they would have no support for those initiatives. I'd also encourage you to read the second comment (the one by NickDoe); it really expands on the point the original author makes.

UPDATE: As another example, a sitting bankruptcy judge blasts Congress for the grossly mis-named "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act" passed last year.

Alito to be confirmed… *sigh*

Today, the senate voted 72-25 in favor of cloture, or ending debate on the confirmation of radical right-wing Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Democrats did an incredibly poor job of exposing Alito for who he really is. During Alito's questioning in front of the Senate, Democrats did a terrible job of exposing all of Alito's beliefs (which were easily deduced from his past decisions and writings). Of course, the Republican noise machine painted Alito as mainstream, which the media happily ate up, and the Democrats who are afraid of their own shadow were too scared to hammer Alito on his beliefs. This confirmation was not just about Roe v. Wade (although everyone should be able to see that Alito will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity), but about Alito's 19th-century views on the rights of individuals, minorities, women, etc. Even worse are Alito's views on the power of the executive branch, which should have been under even more scrutiny given the recent news of illegal warrantless wiretapping by the current administration.

Getting back to Roe v. Wade, there is one important point to note… Any senator who claims to be pro-choice but voted FOR cloture (i.e. to end debate and allow a vote) is VOTING FOR ROE V. WADE TO BE OVERTURNED. Make no mistake about it… if the right to choose is important to you, those "pro-choice' senators who voted for cloture should be held accountable at the ballot box the next time they are up for re-election.