Your one-stop, baseball-playoff spot
You might have heard by now that the Cardinals are back in the playoffs, clinching their berth Saturday night in Denver behind star hurler Adam Wainwright. (Please feel free to drop your congratulatory messages for me in the comments thread below.) The 2009 National League Central Division Champions have already made their case as the National League Team of the Decade with 33 postseason wins during the Aughts,
nineteen more than the Diamondbacks and Mets tied for second place.
The CM Blog will be there again for you this October, from the first pitch to the last out of the postseason, or until the Cardinals are eliminated, at which point I could conceivably lose all interest. Remember all the fun we had back in
2005 and
2006. You're going to feel as if you have a full postseason pass to sit in the Cardinals Club at Busch Stadium, or even better, on the futon in my Cardinals room at my Des Moines apartment. Hey, I didn't even
have a Cardinals room the last time the Birds were in the playoffs! (Disclaimer: Please note that blog viewing during October is technically sold out, but tickets usually become available online to the general public after they are returned from other teams or from Major League Baseball.) This is Beyond Baseball. October. 8 Teams. 1 Champion. Baseball fever-- Catch it! It's FAN-tastic.
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Actress and author Carrie Fisher has adapted her 2008 memoir "Wishful Drinking" into a one-woman stage show that opens on Broadway October 4th. If you can't make it to New York before February, she also has
a blog (granted, one with little or no baseball coverage). The force is strong in this one.
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The Pappajohn Sculpture Park opened in downtown Des Moines this weekend, three blocks down the hill from my apartment. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sunday, millionaire philanthropists rubbed elbows with degenerate politicians and curious onlookers across the street from the former landmark site of the Blue Nude Adult Bookstore and Emporium. It's the first civic sculpture garden in Iowa in which the featured pieces were not molded from butter.
"Why socialism?"
That baffoon Steve King
is right: Same-sex marriage
is "a purely socialist concept." Just like single-payer health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, and dozens of other concepts that have led to greater social justice. Same-sex marriage
is socialist because gay men and women
do "want access to public funds and resources"-- equal federal benefits and recognition.
In Europe, progressives commonly and more successfully organize themselves under the umbrella term "democratic socialist," and their countries have the highest quality of life on the globe. Liberals here (many of them social and economic conservatives in disguise) do themselves no favors by continuing to deny the label of "socialist." It makes having to make your case that much harder when you deny that a concept such as single-payer health insurance, or even the proposed "public option" for health care is not socialism. Of course it is. Federal highways are socialism. If I could co-opt George Bush Junior's fractured English for a moment, is it any wonder our kids isn't learning? We're denying a major reality of social definition.
Despite the wild success of "socialist" programs and ideals during the New Deal (each program introduced first, almost universally, by the Socialist Party of the United States a generation before), leftists have been running from the s-word all the way back to, at least, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and to the left's obvious political detriment. The capitalists were down on their hands and knees in 1932 begging the government to save them, and the New Deal did it. The capitalists were back down on their hands and knees again in 2008.
No less an intellect than Albert Einstein
wrote in 1949 that "the crippling of individuals...(was) the worst evil of capitalism," and that "our whole educational system suffers from this evil." How can a capitalist system truly uplift "the individual," as we're often told it does, when so few individuals are permitted to thrive. The success of one denies the next. Einstein wrote that he was "convinced there is only
one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a
socialist (my italics) economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals." Having a cogent left-wing is particularly imperative for the United States because our right-wingers are
seemingly dumber than right-wingers in other countries.
Don't deny your socialism. Own it. Will we allow visionaries like Albert Einstein to define our hopes and ideals on the left, or should we go with Steve King?
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Supercitizen Ralph Nader has become a
political novelist. He describes his new book instead as "a practical utopia," or "a fictional vision that could become a new reality." The book stars Warren Buffett in an only partially-fictional role. Buffett, in real life, believes he pays too little in taxes. Washington Democrats disagree.
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There have been a lot of great baseball moments throughout history that have transpired off the field. Among them: the time Babe Ruth, in a display of strength at a party, hurled an upright piano off the porch of a rural cabin into a pond of water; the time that the little black book of a notorious Hollywood madam was found to include the name of Tommy Lasorda; the time Sparky Anderson appeared as himself on an episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati," and
the time a group of late-night revelers that included Bob Uecker paid a cocktail waitress to serve an inebriated Harry Caray a drink while topless and then pretended that nobody but Harry had seen the peculiar act.
Here's a tabloid report of
one of the latest great moments, albeit less humorous than above, that occurred last Saturday night in St. Louis.
McGwire's underwriters
Remember that whole dust-up over Mark McGwire using the then-legal and available-over-the-counter supplement Androstenedione in 1998? An earnest Associated Press reporter named Steve Wilstein went snooping through the slugger's locker, uncovered the scandal, the United States Constitution died a little inside, and a generation of young baseball players grew up believing that it was ok to put any substance they wanted into their body.
Turns out that McGwire was required to take the supplement in connection with
a disability insurance policy he had taken out on his banged-up knees through Lloyd's of London during that historic summer. The drug "was part of the underwriting interest for (the) policy," according to Jonathan Thomas, a group accident health underwriter for Lloyd's.
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I wish you were all with me at my home this evening enjoying the latest Tim McCarver CD that arrived by mail today from Amazon. Yes, the longtime baseball broadcaster and greatest Cardinals catcher in history has just launched a third career singing songs from the Chris Moeller Karaoke Collection.
The offering is entitled "Tim McCarver Sings Selections From the Great American Songbook."
I really enjoyed it. McCarver, backed by a fine jazz combo from his native Memphis, lays it all out quite courageously in his dulcet, Southern-tinted tone, delivering a clear reading on such classics as "(This Will Be) My Shining Hour," Irving Berlin's "Change Partners," and "A Nightengale Sang In Berkeley Square." McCarver reportedly has had a finished product on his hands for over a year, but the several thousand CDs that were produced sat in a closet at his home because he didn't know how or where to sell them. Released two weeks ago, McCarver says he hopes people will judge his efforts as "not bad." If I had to choose one adjective to describe his work on the disc, it would be "charming."
Keeping the streets safe from the likes of me
Sorry for my blogging absence, I was out of town attending Sunday night's game in St. Louis between the Cardinals and the Cubs. I won't say much about the contest except that one game doesn't matter much when you have bragging rights for the weekend series, the season series, the standings, and have won 10 World Series Championships since 1908.
But I do want to say this today in regards to the rules of speeding in motor vehicles on our nation's highways: Laws against speeding are probably the most archaic we have on the books. What backs this statement? How about the fact that nobody obeys them? Like Prohibition, nobody respects the posted limits. The speed
maximums posted are treated as
minimums by what I would estimate to be about 95% of the drivers on the road.
Am I spouting off on this topic today because I received a speeding ticket over the weekend? No. I'm spouting off because I got
two speeding tickets over the weekend: One in Hazzard County, Missouri, and one in Hazzard County, Iowa. The only economic development program that exists today in rural America is speedtraps. Was I speeding? Of course, I was. So was everybody else. There was little traffic on Sunday morning in Mount Pleasant, and even less during mid-morning Monday south of Hannibal, Missouri. Visibility was unlimited, and I was
not driving 15 miles over the limit either time. I don't care what they say, but then I can't see the radar gun, and I can't fight it in court because I work for a living, and I live in Polk County, Iowa, but then you both know that, don't you? You can see that on my license plate. (I'm talking directly to the patrol officers now.)
In Iowa, on Highway 218, the state patrol had a helicopter out on Sunday morning, one I paid for through my numerous tickets over the years. They were clearly out to nab post-game revelers from the football game the afternoon before in Iowa City. In Missouri, a state in which it was once legal to own black people, they went with the simple sting operation, one in which the patrol vehicles line up and they pull over every 10th car exceeding the limit, making their choice of which one by color of vehicle, whether it's foreign or domestic, visible age of driver, etc. I'm not sure how they do it. It's an internal calculation that allows the officer to freely discriminate.
As I recorded these thoughts during my drive home, on cruise control at 65, with vehicles racing past me, in and out of the blind spot of 18-wheelers passing me on the left, I got to thinking: Patrol officers also look really stupid in those hats. What's with that hard flat brim? Every traffic officer looks like that guy in the Curious George stories, except that the hat is a putrid grey, the guy's always sporting a crew cut half a century out of fashion, and he's never been to "the big city" his entire life.
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Great strategy: Invite the President of the United States to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game, and you've recruited yourself a new fan. President Obama is predicting a World Series
painted Cardinal red.
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You've really got to give "props" to the long-running soap opera "Guiding Light," which went off the air Friday after 72 years on television and radio. The program turned out to have a lot more staying power than the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show.
Elevating : U2 360 Tour - A-Train Concert Series - by Aaron Moeller
The biggest rock band in the world opened their 360 tour last weekend at Soldier Field in Chicago and the CM Blog was there for the second show on Sunday evening. The weather was ideal but - perhaps because it was a school night - reports put Sunday night's crowd at significantly less than Saturday's tour opener. We had general admission floor tickets and despite arriving only 20 or so minutes before the opening act - fellow Irish rockers, Snow Patrol - hit the stage, we still managed to get within 30 yards of the stage. (I measure in yards because it's a football field.)
The stage was
ginormous. Built to resemble a spaceship launch pad, relentless white smoke adding to the affect, the stage went dark as the stadium loudspeaker piped in David Bowie's voice: "Ground control to Major Tom..." One by one, the
four members of the band (still the original members from 1976) walked on stage. In succession: drummer Larry Mullen, bassist Adam Clayton, guitarist The Edge, and finally, lead singer Bono. As Bruce Springsteen pointed out when inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, U2 has proven to be the last rock band where even casual fans know all the members' names. "We're gonna play some old songs, some new songs and some songs we never sang before," Bono told the crowd. The first four songs were all new, off the latest U2 offering,
No Line on the Horizon: "Breathe", the title track, "Magnificent", and the album's rockingest tune, both a sexual come-on and global call to action, "Get on Your Boots", which begins with the line, "The future needs a big kiss."
"Chicago! Chicago!" Bono shouted repeatedly. "Irish Boy, Irish Boy," he soulfully crooned, before Edge played a familiar riff. "A Beautiful Day" was the first big crowd pleaser of the evening. Seeing U2 on a big stage, like having seen the Rolling Stones or the E Street Band, has a way of making you feel you're at the center of the universe, attending the biggest party in the world but also feeling part of history just for being there. Always referencing other artists in the rock canon, Bono continually dropped outside lyrics into the preceedings. In this song, he sang snippets of the Beatles' "Blackbird", a nod to the Police with the words "there's a little black spot on the sun today", though he pointed out it was a very small spot, and he even borrowed lyrics from local band Wilco with the words "kiss and ride on the CTA". "A Beautiful Day" is gorgeously anthemic, each time resuscitating decades' worth of the positive energy U2 has put out into the world. Don't let it get away.
The Edge's famous reverberating, echo-laden guitar, playing one classic riff after another, announced the presence of each beloved song. Bono had the crowd sing the opening verse to the next song, "I have climbed highest mountains/ I have run through the fields/ Only to be with you". "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" is the band's search for God and truth and found Bono imploring us to sing along with our "Sunday voices".
"Elevation", like "A Beautiful Day", is off my favorite U2 album, 2000's
All That You Can't Leave Behind, and is a song to show off Edge's love of distortion as the spaceship got closer to lift-off. "Unknown Caller" is a new song and was the most bizarre of the night, with an inaudible recorded message from a NASA astronaut, seemingly beamed down from somewhere above. "Your Blue Room" included snippets of "Stand By Me".
Off 1991's
Achtung Baby, "Until the End of the World" might be the band's most bad-ass song. "We ate the food, we drank the wine/ Everybody having a good time..." I cheered my agreement at that line. "....except you, you were talking about the end of the world...", which, of course, launches into the sickest guitar riff Edge has ever played, and sent me into near spastic convulsions as its the rare moment in a song that forces me to do something as painfully uncool as playing air guitar in public. "Waves of regret, waves of joy/ I reached out for the one, I tried to destroy you/ You said you'd wait 'til the end of the world..." and Edge's final riff again sprung Bono from his knees and he ran a dead sprint around the outer circle of the stage, a route akin to a 400 meter dash. He collapsed dramatically at the end of the run and sang most of "Stay (Faraway, So Close)" while flat on his back.
"The Unforgettable Fire" is the title track from a 1984 offering and reminded me that Bono is still the only guy who ever looked cool with a mullet. Tweaking the lyrics, Bono sang that Chicago is a "city lit by fireflies", in a song off 2004's
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, then he led a singalong for even the unfamiliar with the repeated lyrics, "Oh you look so beautiful tonight/ In the City of Blinding Lights".
"Uno, Dos, Tres, Catorce" are words I saw printed on the back of a thousand t-shirts on Sunday, evidence of those who saw the band on their last tour, and a place called Vertigo is nearly as thrilling as "A Beautiful Day" in terms of sending 70,000 people into euphoria. It segued into another great new song, "I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight".
The big screens then showed dark images of rioting and warfare and Bono offered a prayer for the people of Iran. Then dozens of people unrolled Irish flags for "Sunday Bloody Sunday", a song about "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, with the words "How long must we sing this song?" resonating against the screens' images.
Then an on-screen message told the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, a woman elected president of Burma in 1990, who has been almost continually under house arrest ever since, then "Walk On", a 2000 song originally dedicated to her, closed the main set. "What you got they can't steal it/ Hell, they can't even feel it..."
Being a band that counts presidents and world leaders among its friends, Bishop Desmond Tutu appeared on the big screens to say that the people fighting for social justice today, in this country, in this stadium, are the same who have been doing it around the world through time. We are indeed, "One". Speaking as someone who has sold "One" and Product Red-themed cell phones, I was also especially attuned on Sunday to the numerous Blackberry sponsorship signs around the stadium. Once
Time magazine's Person of the Year, it's well-established that no one walks the walk like Bono, and understanding the capitalist world we live in as he does, no one has done more to promote corporate activism and responsibility. And more than anyone, his sleek wrap-around eyewear has kept me fighting the good fight against the dirge of aviator sunglasses that is poisoning society as we speak.
"One love, one blood, one life," he sings every night. "... sisters, brothers... we got to carry each other... One..." which leads to an "Amazing Grace" prayer. We met up with an old school buddy at the show who has seen the band a dozen times and claimed I would never hear a better live song then when they play "Where the Streets Have No Name" (better than "Born to Run"? Really?), and the beginning
is really cool. I got a chill as I heard the famous opening notes, building in speed and volume, just as it was so perfectly captured in the
Rattle and Hum documentary film from '88.
A final encore found Bono in a black suit, covered with glowing red lights - a specter-ish Irish Christmas tree - and with the coolest stage effect of all: He sang into a microphone at the center of glowing red steering wheel that dangled from a rope hanging from the "spaceship" above. The band played "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" and during the guitar solos, he swung across the stage from the rope/microphone like Tarzan.
"With or Without You" was achingly pretty, its intensity boosting it above pop anodyne. "Moment of Surrender" was a plaintive finale, a subtle and modest closer. Then the sounds of Elton John's "Rocket Man" ushered the true believers back from space. A timeless flight.
The inanity of gender testing
The puritans appointed to police the fairness of sports often have a difficult time dealing with the realities of scientific discovery. No, I'm not talking about baseball and steroids this time. Exhibit A instead is the treatment of South African 18-year-old middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, who ran the 800 meters last month in record-breaking time at the 2009 World Championships. In the wake of her extraordinary victory, Semenya has been subjected to the public humiliation of "gender testing" by international track and field officials.
It's hard to imagine a more disgusting or humiliating scenario for Semenya to have to endure. She has been subjected to tests, possibly without her approval, conducted by a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, and a psychologist. The media-- particularly the one here in the Nifty 50, has been salivating over just such a story. "Scandal," sex, and intrigue-- it has it all. The
New York Daily News began one of its stories with the line: "Tests show that controversial runner Caster Semenya is a woman... and a man!" Maybe Semenya should just let us
all get a peek under there. Jesus Christ.
In track and field, a sport in which the not-that-distant past has had prominent leaders advocating separate competition for black and white women, maybe it's not that surprising that the gender issue would be raised in connection with such a successful young black athlete. Rumored test results supposedly have it that Semenya does not have a womb or ovaries, and that she has internal testes-- information that may come as much as a surprise to Semenya as it does to the rest of the world, as it wouldn't necessarily impact her outward appearance.
Is it really that much of a surprise though? In the U.S., one in 1,666 persons is born as 'unisex'-- and that is the appropriate word now, not 'hermaphrodite,' as even the Associated Press has referred and is still referring to Semenya. (Why not call her 'colored' as well?) Perhaps it's time to start thinking of sex and gender less in terms of "either/or" than as a spectrum of definition, as many scientists have advocated, more along the lines of a category such as eye-color. New discoveries are revealing all the time that sex is more fluid than ever imagined. Many people have ambiguous sex organs. Sometimes visible anatomy doesn't match up with sex chromosomes. Having a Y chromosome doesn't necessarily make you a man. If a person has "androgen sensitivity syndrome," they can be XY and have testes, but their body doesn't respond to the production of testosterone. There's a myriad of gene disorders categorized also, each with different resulting hormonal conditions.
Salon's
Tracy Clark-Flory asks the question-- if having breasts, a womb, or ovaries is mandatory for being considered a woman, then what do we say to a woman who has had to endure a mastectomy in the treatment or prevention of breast cancer, or likewise, part with her hormone-producing ovaries to avoid a cancer risk? Has such a woman changed her sex? Has she now become less than a woman because she's missing one or more of her lady parts? If Semenya is determined to be insufficient (for lack of a more accurate phrase) in her femininity in the eyes of track's governing body, the International Association of Athletic Federations, then according to IAAF by-laws, she could actually continue to run competitively only if "her condition was treated." You gotta love that. Now we're seeing fit to attempt to
correct an inspiring athlete's natural so-deemed
imperfection.Does Semenya have an unfair advantage in her sport because of her biological makeup? Maybe. Does Yao Ming have an unfair advantage over me in basketball because he's 7 feet, 6 inches tall? What exactly would be the guidelines for determining which of the world's top athletes has a "normal" body, and who's going to be responsible for deciding?
Women are women--and men are men, for that matter-- not because of the collection of their parts but because they have chosen to
identify alternately as a woman or a man, or maybe even as both. Caster Semenya is a woman simply because she says so. The end.
"The Jay Leno Show" will suck
Your parents' favorite comedian, Jay Leno, returns to the airwaves tonight-- this time in prime-time-- despite being replaced on "The Tonight Show" in the spring and despite what
Salon's Heather Havrilesky calls "his severe lack of charm, subtlety, wit, or interviewing skills."
I don't know if Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" was ever any good. How could I? I never watched it. Not more than a minute or half-a-minute at a time anyway, 7 or 8 minutes a year, for 16 years. "The Dancing Itos" were just an invention I read about in TV Guide. (Seemed pretty lame.) I never saw the Hugh Grant confessional that turned Jay around in the ratings. (That so-called "television event" always struck me as staged and obvious.) But you've got to hand it to Jay. He's an able politician. He continues to masterfully play "the game" while
denying that he's actually playing it.
It doesn't matter if his new show is any good. It just has to be inexpensive. That's why NBC scheduled it.
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Here's New York Magazine on
King Dave.
The NFL's code of silence
The NFL season begins again this week, and I have to be reminded each year how different the atmosphere is from that of baseball. Let's just simplify to start and say that "the bar" is lower. I watched the Pittsburgh/Tennessee game Thursday night waiting for some commentary from General Electric's Al Michaels or Cris Collinsworth about the off-season rape allegations that were leveled against Steelers QB Ben Rothlisberger. If there was any discussion on the telecast, I missed it. At one point in the third quarter, I caught Collinsworth in mid-conversation describing how Rothlisberger felt he had to apologize to his teammates. Because of the unwanted publicity and distraction of the rape case, I wondered? No, because the quarterback stays in the pocket for a long time and gets sacked a lot, which then reflects badly on his line protection.
I can't remember a Major League Baseball Game of the Week broadcast this year in which Joe Buck and Tim McCarver didn't harp on Manny Ramirez for at least an inning, and that's even during games that don't involve the Dodgers. I wouldn't quite equate rape with ingesting a banned hormone either. Can you recall the last time you heard a discussion about steroids during an NFL broadcast? The idea that steroids are more prevalent in baseball than football is laughable, but the social code is different in the NFL. The network broadcasters are company men eager to close ranks.
If you get the San Diego Chargers game on your television this weekend, listen close for any commentary about Shawn Merriman's off-the-field exploits. Merriman is a once-suspended steroid user and Pro Bowl (that same year) linebacker arrested and charged with choking and restraining his girlfriend, MTV reality star Tila Tequila, last week. "Lights Out" Merriman once told
Playboy magazine, "I've been able to knock somebody out... I must have split personalities... I'm so dangerous right now I scare myself."
Merriman's is another case of 'he said, she said,' and charges were dropped Friday for lack of prosecuting evidence, but well before Friday,
a blogger at the San Francisco Chronicle began speculating about what Tequila may have done to
provoke the NFL star. She's admittedly "bipolar," you understand, not to mention-- are you ready for this one?-- "bisexual." It's similar to the time that slut Rihanna was rumored to be running around on Chris Brown, and may have given him herpes, so he had to beat the shit out of her.
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House Democrats are pursuing
a censure resolution condemning Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina for shouting "You lie!" at President Obama during a Congressional address Wednesday. Heckling the president: egregious. Torture: not so much.
Single-payer now!
In the waning days of the American Empire, after the subverted government had gone to such disrepair that it proved itself incapable of dealing effectively with virtually any conceivable crisis, the people were being hoodwinked by counterfeit reformers bought and paid for by the monied interests and profiteers that Jefferson, Lincoln, and even Eisenhower had warned us against.
In President Obama, we have a leader that is cowardly and as naive in political leadership as his campaign opponents last year fearmongered us that he would be. As even White House aides have admitted, the success of his presidency will ride on the outcome of his health care initiative this fall, which is why it's puzzling and alarming that the idea he's chosen to promote in hopes of reforming our disastrous medical access system is almost exactly the one pitched last year by GOP cyborg Mitt Romney.
Obama rode to Washington in 2008 on the wings of a unicorn, believing that compromise was possible with Republicans-- and even some Democrats, it now seems-- who would prefer to cut his political tendons and send his presidency to the trash heap of history next to Bush/Cheney. Obama threw the single-payer system-- the only economically-viable solution here or anywhere in the world-- off the boat months ago in return for the support of the well-heeled pharmaceutical industry. Of course, there was never a guarantee that Republicans would fall in line anyway, and so the biggest bargaining chip for his number one presidential priority was out the window before he had even finished enrolling his kids in private school.
In the United States Senate, to which Americans sent a whopping 60 Democrats with a mandate to enact policies of progressive reform, a single Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, single-handedly destroyed the Democrats' majority in respect to health care reform by assigning control of the issue in his committee to a so-called "Gang of 6" comprised of 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans, which any state-educated mathematician can tell you is not a majority at all. The three Republicans, including Iowa's Chuck Grassley, have accepted political contributions from insurance and health care companies of nearly $3.5 million between them, and Baucus alone has wrangled $2,880,631. But maybe they'll all still act in the best interests of the millions of uninsured Americans out of the kindness of their hearts.
Under House Bill 3200, employers will be obligated to provide health care coverage to their workers, but if a worker rejects the offered plan, he or she is barred from buying any other insurance in the "exchange" program, including that of the public option. To make the legislation worse, employers have no mandate or incentive to offer anything but subpar, bottom-of-the-barrel care options. The wrinkles in the legislation are in fact designed to fuck up the public option so badly that it matches the ineffectiveness of the private ones, thus insuring that "competition" will continue. As
Senator Bernie Sanders explained it to
Rolling Stone, "If you have coverage you like, you can keep it. If you have coverage you don't like, you
gotta keep it."
Even in his televised address to Congress Wednesday night, Obama admitted that the reason he believes single-payer wouldn't work is because we have an insurance industry that needs to be propped up. He didn't phrase it that way, of course, but close. He said that single-payer "wouldn't work" because the industry he's trying to protect comprises approximately a quarter of our economy. As one caustic commentator pointed out, insurance companies claiming they would be at a competitive disadvantage against a government-run plan is like Keanu Reeves claiming he got swindled out of an Oscar because he was disadvantaged by being a shitty actor.
Other countries manufacture actual products. Ours used to. Now it keeps its economy afloat by crippling the physical and mental health of its citizens. We
know our private health insurance is garbage. It's so bad that three-quarters of all people who file for bankruptcy because of health reasons
have insurance, and they go bankrupt anyway. Now they'll (you'll) be
forced to
buy this pathetic product.
There's nobody in Washington allowed to even make the case for single-payer thanks to the well-entrenched system of legalized bribery. Somebody's palm has to get greased with every piece of legislation. If we're lucky, it's
only one. There are well-financed lies circulating that single-payer would do away with private doctors when it would really only do away with private health care insurance. This would be bad news for insurance companies and celebrities like Wilford Brimley and Alex Trebek who would have to find new products to pimp to the elderly on daytime television, but it would be good news for everybody else in America. In fact, it might even
save America. It would help correct our home foreclosure crisis. It would eliminate $350 billion a year that's wasted on paperwork as hospitals and clinics send reimbursement requests to more than 1,300 private insurers. Nearly a third of all health care costs in this country go just to administration. Permitting this corporate graft upon the nation's health (literally) amounts to a bailout to exceed even the one President Giveaway already handed the banks, and with just as little taxpayer oversight.
Single-payer is moral, it already works in every other industrialized, democratic country, and according to
this analysis, it can be had for $644 billion a year. And $484 million of that is already
being paid covering the much-higher-cost elderly and permanently disabled in the Medicare program. Just another $160 billion would make Medicare universal, and that's less than we spend per year keeping Afghanistan safe from Osama bin Laden (who by all accounts is in Pakistan), or certainly in trillion-dollar bank bailouts and bailout-following bailouts.
Medicaid, the entire Veterans Administration program, and uncompensated hospital care (explained in the link above) could be eliminated with a single-payer system, and what $160 billion would cost taxpayers home by home would be made up for in spades by Americans never again having to pony up for co-pays or out-of-pocket hospital expenses, deductibles, employee contributions on health premiums (all of which can amount to thousands now in some households), or bank bailouts for dead mortgages. State and local taxes could be reduced without having to cover their specific health-care burdens... Hell, employers might even be able to offer higher wages after being relieved of having to insure employees and their families, if they don't try to pocket it.
I don't know how to be bolder with this presentation: A single-payer system is so clearly the best and only solution that even debate at this point seems like just more dangerous distraction. It would have been the law of the land decades ago, as it has in the most prosperous countries around the globe, except that Washington D.C. is a cesspool filled with public misinformation, extortion, graft, and corruption.
Sex and the Hamptons
What is it about coming back to New York City for the beginning of fall that always makes me fall in love again with the city? I spent this Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons and the time away from the island of Manhattan left me so dreary that even the sight of the new season's Dolce and Gabbana Suede Portrait pumps in the window at Bergdorf's couldn't deliver me from my despondence.
It was the typical Hamptons mix: 150 single women, 180 single men, and nobody getting enough sex. The weekend was not without its episodic adventures. During the getaway with the girls, Charlotte was dating and fellating a man who had 'funky spunk,' we tried to help Miranda decide whether her boyfriend was a
gay straight man or a
straight gay man, and Samantha contracted the AIDS virus. As for me, let's just say that frolicking on the beach with the bold and the beautiful of the Empire State is all fun and games until you see Junior Miss Bold and Beautiful frolicking in the sand with the man who broke your heart. According to Clarke's Third Law, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I couldn't help but wonder-- Is real love so advanced that it's elegance in the extreme or it all just an illusion?
Passing back over the East River though, I came to a realization. If it's true that everyone gets one true love in their life, then maybe mine is New York City. After all, the city that never sleeps is also the city that never sleeps with anybody else. It's given me everything I've ever wanted or needed-- adventure, career, piece of mind, a rent-controlled brownstone, and my three best friends. It's home. And home is really just nothing more than the place you keep your shoe closet.
American places
Crazy Horse's monument in
the Black Hills endured another explosion in August as part of a mountain-carving process that began in 1948. Following the blast, the rock looks much the same as it did before, despite the displacement of 4,400 tons of granite. When the monument is completed, it will be the largest statue in the world and we'll all be dead. You've got to be impressed by the scope of the project.
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Last week marked the 4-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's arrival at
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, changing the city and that region forever. Yet New Orleans remains the American original-- "too old, too poor, too rich, too black, too French, too mixed, too color-struck, too class-riven, too troubled, too complicated, too beautiful."
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What in the world is going on in
Kansas City?
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Superblogger Ken Levine has just returned from
Cincinnati.
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The first annual Single Cougars Convention was just held in
Palo Alto, California.
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Are you freakin' kidding me? January Jones' family lives in
Des Moines? That's too much!
Moeller TV Listings 9/1/09
Tonight at 8pm central on ABC, it's St. Louis Cardinals great Albert Pujols taking on NBA giant Shaquille O'Neal in a home run derby competition in the latest episode of the ABC reality series, "Shaq Vs." It's the pride of the Dominican Republic against the pride of Ireland.
I'll need some convincing that this show is any good, but the event does mark, to my recollection, the first time a Cardinals player has appeared on prime-time network television, in a non-game situation, since Mark McGwire appeared as himself in a Helen Hunt dream sequence during a 1999 episode of "Mad About You."
