Why have we come to treat everything as if it were a sporting event? Come to think of it, why do we treat sporting events as we do? I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who wondered this while watching last week’s reaction to the good news that Osama had gotten popped in the noggin (and as a result learned that it was a mistranslation and the “72 virgins” are really “72 white raisins,” which ain’t much to get by on when you’re talking all eternity, even if you eat them slowly).
This week’s attacks on Libya were summarized well by one Phineas X. Jones, who tweeted, “If I told you in 2007 that in 2011 we'd be killing Soc. Security, torturing Americans & bombing Libya, who would you guess won the election?” The Obama Doctrine is taking shape, but suddenly it is looking more like the Bush Doctrine Remixed. Is it?
Earlier today, I found myself reading an article on Bradley Manning, a soldier in the U.S. army who is suspected of being the source of the material that WikiLeaks has been disseminating. Since his arrest, the private has been placed in solitary confinement without any crimes charged against him – a seemingly arbitrary decision enabled by the army’s virtually absolute power over him. As we contemplate situations like this, supporters of such policies would likely argue that granting the government such near absolute power to hold people without charges is permissible because it is for the greater good. Opponents might say only God ought to have absolute power. Maybe God doesn’t want such power, either.
It is a good thing that there’s a new Harry Potter movie. I have no idea if “Harry Potter and the Beginning of the End” or “Voldemort Strikes Back” or whatever it is called is any good. The New York Times says it is, but it might be anyway. The Potter movies have been wonderful (well, except maybe for the last one).
The media are setting us up. This is nothing new; they have basically carried water for the Democratic Party for at least 50 years and that habit shows no signs of abating. Have you noticed that they've been telling us for a year that the Dems are going to be shelled in this election? There is more to that prediction than meets the eye.
Elections come and go. And as those cycles occur, various big ideas also have a tendency to move from their fifteen minutes of fame into the dust bin of old ideas, left there to rot without ever delivering their promised benefits. Health Savings Accounts is one such idea that, unfortunately, has mostly been relegated to that political purgatory.
The Tea Party movement threatens to be a very big presence in the coming mid-term elections. The people at the rallies are true believers. They come at their own expense and wave homemade signs. Some slogans are really very clever. What you may not know is the gatherings are heavily sponsored by major corporate donors.
Help me out here, because if it makes any sense I cannot see it. Last week I took a friend to the airport, and saw her pulled aside by three giggling — really — representatives of the “Transportation Security Administration” for secondary screening.
A very good friend of mine directed me to a recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the state of health in the US, and the delivery of said services. I say it that way because the author, David Goldhill, says an overemphasis on health management (epitomized in the phrase, “health care”) as opposed to prevention and overall well-being, may be in large measure responsible for exploding costs, and the number of preventable deaths by infection.
It started off as an “I’m sorry” I offered to a friend the other day. He asked what I was sorry about; I simply said, “the November election.” Regular readers will recall my endorsement and defense of then-Sen. Barack Obama during that election cycle.