Reinventing the insurance wheel- what a waste

I just did a quick multiplication calculation on my calculator and came up with a number: $6,110,000,000.  I multiplied 47 million x’s $130.00  The 47 million is the number bandied about by the politicians and pimp-like activists as the number of uninsured in America.  $6,110,000,000 is how much it would cost for 47 milllion major medical policies (like the policy that I have for myself) for those people who must urgently be insured before the entire country is burned up in some sort of health care Armagedon.  I would love to see this happen because 1: it is much less expensive than any of the plans being hatched and honed by congress and 2: it would separate this part of the “crisis”  from actually reforming what is really broken in the system.

The problem is that no one in DC is really concerned about insuring all Americans.  If they erase this important issue those seeking office will lose an  issue that they have used for decades upon which  to make promises  in their diabolical quest to fool people into voting for them.  Which brings me to my point:  Washington does not solve problems that will remove a voting block from their roster of potential supporters.  Obama is entirely capable of knowing what is right and what would work.  But, alas, if he were to be successful in parting the seas or extracting manna from heaven as he insinuated he could do during the campaign,  his party would dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West did when Dorothy pitched a pail of water on her.  And unlike Dorothy who did this on accident, Obama knows what such success would mean for democrats and is unwilling to “melt” away problems that the democrats have thrived upon by not solving them.

So, instead of spending just over $6 billion, congress will spend $1 trillion and make an even larger mess than exists now.  That way they will have something to kvetch about in their campaign speeches.

JUNE 10, 2009

California

The Pacific Ocean

California 2

Cliff views at Half Moon Bay

California

Marina at Fisherman's Wharf

Obama Is In My TV Again! And again, and again!

Every time I turn around, the face and voice of President Otalksalot is being transmitted into my home.  Ok- fine turn off the tv, you idiot. Well, that’s not going to happen.  I spend my days mostly at home, doing odd chores in between office work for the business, answering the phone, and running errands.  So, the television has become much more than an appliance to me. It is my friend. 

 

However, I take the daily chance that this Commander in Thief will invade my hard to achieve Zen with his “aaahs” and “ummms” and his infatuation with beginning every sentence with “Look”.  I might actually be able to stick with him long enough to see if he has changed any of his speechifying and messaging and branding since he began his bid for the presidency over two years ago.  But, alas, every appearance by the Ostammerer  just reinforces for me that the man will never lead as needs done because he is too busy running for re-election. Every ounce of his being is obsessed with being “cool” and “smooth” and “smiley” and so “above it all” that he struggles with saying anything substantive.  Even last night he demonstrated that his answers to press questions- if one could call the words said at the president questions- rarely match up with what the press said at him.  He is so unable to formulate spontaneously and heartfelt responses because the answers we want are not about him.  He falls short every time for me because he demonstrates that he is incapable of telling us what we want to hear (like I quit!) or what we need (such as we have decided to stop giving all the bailout money to companies and are giving  it straight to the taxpayers).  Even when a person fainted at one of his “audiences” this week he joked about how fainting happens a lot at his events.  Wow!  All about him again. 

So far, this charm offensive, dodging and weaving and lack of overt passion have the press all enthralled.  Especially captivated are those media elites who are invited to the secret weekly dinners served by Rahm Emanuel where diners are treated to an exclusive audience with the The Omagnificient One.  They get to watch him eat and take phone calls from other important people all during dinner.  They are served a combination of subliminal hypnotism with a side of promises of continued intimacy with their Chosen One as long as they continue to treat him with kid gloves in their columns and broadcasts and at the “press conferences”.  Very clever and necessary if you were elected pretty much just because you are a minority and you are not George Bush. But, he will not be able to distract us forever from how he has sold the country down the river all the time smiling and acting cool.  Eventually, someone at the private dinners will be served something he or she does not like and it will all come tumbling down.  That is change and hope I can believe in.

Where is Twain When We Need Him?

Ever since the story about Nancy Pelosi having been briefed 30 times on the proposed “enhanced interrogation methods” she is nowhere to be seen.  Where is she? 

 

I envision her dressed in a jump suit wearing a hands free flashlight headdress and gloves crawling around in the basement of the capital building and or the Rayburn building searching through boxes of minutes of the meetings at which she was marked as present but now remembers a different “truth” than is recalled by everyone else who was there on those occasions.

 

What was it that Mark Twain said?

 

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “ 

 

 

Yes, that’s it!  And these words should be carved on the walls of every hallway and in all the rooms that any of our esteemed leaders may find themselves in so that they might be reminded that governing and re-election would be a snap if only they were guided by and abided by Twain’s words.    Instead of putting all their energies into the never-ending and all consuming strategies of fundraising, huddling with lobbyists, and making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows and then having to research what they said, what they knew and when they knew it and then trying to match their stories up with the records of the actual events, they could more appropriately and more productively occupy themselves with “doing the PEOPLE’S business”.   

 

But, alas it has always been so: our elected leaders have a different concept from us of what their job is and what telling the truth can be.  They skillfully deflect and parse.  They ignore or deny. They play to the y party sycophant news show hosts who never require that they take responsibility for their actions.

 

The political wheels seem to take forever to grind forward on everything except when caucusing on tax increases and spending.  Just look at the decades that these useful buffoons have spent debating health care reform, social security reform, and tax reform- the real things that real people care about.  Instead they keep getting caught up in the thick of thin things that they think will help them to keep their seats like abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and any thing else that they perceive has a special constituency voting block.  And that is why Nancy Pelosi can’t accurately remember what she was told in those 30 briefings on the “enhanced interrogation methods”.  She couldn’t care less about anything for which the constitution provides, such as national security.  She was probably daydreaming about her next gay pride parade, or her next trip on the government jet, or what evil thing she would say about George Bush at her next turn at the dais outside the Rayburn building or when her next botox appointment was scheduled.  And now she is rummaging through boxes and boxes of old papers hoping she doesn’t break a nail.

 

 

Dear Kathleen- Parse this!

Washington Post contributer Kathleen Parker wrote last week about how the use of enhanced interrogation was arrived at by the Bush administration because Bush tortured the English language  til he found a way to justify the use of certain techniques to be used on captured Islamists after 9/11.  Her touchy feely feely rationalization about why, as the superb Americans who should always be setting a good example, we should not make a boo boo when trying to get animals to talk about their plans to blow more of our country up.  So, here is what I wrote to Kathleen yesterday:

 

When are you going to write about parsing and torture of  words and terms like “hope” and “change” and ” tax cuts for the middle class” and “the same old failed policies” or” bi-partisanship” or ” a new tone” or  any other insincere cliche that is coined and used to brainwash the ignorant and or gullible electorate?  How we treat “detainees” or “foreign contingencies” or “enemy combatants“ or “terrorists” hardly “defines” who we are, ma’am since all terms and behavior and meanings depend solely upon which party is in power and how they chose to use the application of techniques of selective memory and the use of governance by hindsight.

 

This well-timed new debate over settled policies is just a political ploy and does more to damage  “who we are as Americans” than the measured use of “enhanced interrogation techniques“.  Aspiring to be above the behavior of brutal enemies is belied by the daily news reports of how Americans rape, murder, molest, beat and yes, torture each other. Our local paper reported about a 6-year old boy who has been burned on the buttocks with a blow torch by his father and his uncle as punishment for some infraction.  Poor little Cayley Anderson was probably murdered by her mother by the use of an application of a sleep agent so the mother could go out and party.  A Sunday school teacher allegedly kidnapped and murdered a child who trusted her.  An Iphone game called “Baby Shaker” is possibly the worst example of who I do not want to be defined as. These crimes and forms of torture and video games are more indicative of who Americans are than the pretend drowning of an enemy who would behead any one of us on command.

 

You elite writers of the “truth” are so busy trying  to outsmart each other that you completely miss what is really wrong with America. The human condition rolls along generation after generation and is forgotten and rarely written about unless it makes the headlines.  And getting a by-line or a headline is your entire motivation.  You need to make headlines in order to perpetuate an audience.  And it is for that same reason that Obama has stirred up this hornet’s nest again.  To distract us and to remind us why we voted for him and to keep us off balance or distracted or mollified as he spends more than 200 years worth of tax dollars in one tax quarter. And when he is gone the headlines about what he did and when he did it will provide more sensation for the new “guy” or “gal” in the White House.  I wonder how many thousands of other Americans will be beaten and raped and murdered by other Americans and whose stories will never make the paper.

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