Irreconcilable Differences

The threat of a constitutional convention, now that nearly 3/4 of the states are in Republican hands, keeps coming up online. Oh, woe is us, if that ever happens.

But I look on it as an opportunity. 

Think of it: Suppose the states met and we decided, hey, let's break up. We could do that, legally, if we did it with a constitutional convention. It would be the best Brexit of all time, except it would be Amerexit.

We could work on those borders a little more 

Really, to no longer have to listen to Louie Gohmert or Lou McConnell or any of those guys in the Freedom Caucus.  Let them form their own country, with wonderful border walls and state religion and no abortions and no contraception and no non white people, except of course for the slaves. 

The other day a secretary in my office mentioned she had never been to Virginia. She's from Chelmsford, Massachusetts.  She's lead a full, happy life, without ever having set foot in Virginia. I have never visited Mississippi, Alabama or Arizona.  Don't really feel deprived. In fact, I really don't like most of the people I see from those Southern States. I could still visit friends in New Orleans and Austin, I suppose, if I could get a visa for a vacation: Or maybe it would be like when I go to Iceland and England, I wouldn't need a visa, just a passport.

That's better

Let those aggrieved Southerners and Southwesterners say bye-bye. They won't miss us and speaking for myself, I think I could live without them, thank you. 

Every estimate I've seen is, economically, if the South left the union, and took the Southwest with them, the remaining country would hardly notice.  Those states get far more back from the federal government they hate so much than they put in, let 'em go. And if Kansas and some of those farm belt/Bible belt states left, our food prices might rise, but likely not too much to really cause an economic hiccup. We'd still have California, which is all we really need. We can do without corn. Maybe we'd live longer.

So, we could have a non contiguous nation. In the era of the internet, we have office workers living a plane ride away. So what?  If I were going to drive across the country and had to stop at border crossings in Kansas, would that bother me? Not at all. 

The Midwest, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota might opt to stay in with New England and the MId Atlantic states and the West Coast. That would be enough for me. 

You could still have the NFL and major league baseball: After all, the Europeans do it with soccer, across international borders all the time. 


Think how liberating that would be.  Yes, there are still guys like Jim Jordan of Ohio who remind us that not all the reactionaries are in the South, but we'd get rid of 85% of them, and those who remain in the New America might decide to go where they can live in a gated community with folks who think like they do.

Wow! How liberating. A real utopia come true.

Preserving Employees Wellness Programs Act

In another brilliant naming triumph, the Republicans have come up with the "Preserving Employees Wellness Programs Act."

Who can be against the wellness of employees? Sounds like a law even labor unions can back. 

I'm for well employees, even wellness, whatever that is. Sounds benign. Sounds good. Sounds modern. Wellness. That's more than just good health. That's, feeling, well. How're feeling? Well! I have gone to the well. I am Well man.  I am luxuriating in my own wellness.

Mutants: Can breathe underwater

But, actually, this one has that ol' Republican poison pill embedded. 
This is another one that the Republicans concocted for their corporate masters. Another one for their corporate masters, because, you know, they are the job creators.
Remember the job creators?
Turns out the job creators do not want to hire anybody for their companies who might harbor some genetic abnormality, so they want to screen their employees for genetic mutations that might mean they'd have to go out on sick leave.

Looks healthy, but what about her DNA?

That's really what this bill is all about. 
Here, sign right here. Pee in this cup so we can run drug screening on you. Sign up for your benefits package which includes health insurance for catastrophic illness, which we truly hope you are not genetically programmed to get, and by the way we are going to run a little screen on your genes to be sure.

I got nothing genetic to hide

It's nothing racial, you understand. We are just very into hiring people who will not get sick on us.  After all, when we hire you, we are making a bet on you. You say you are also making a bet on us? That may be true, but we have a way of looking into your future. Can you blame us for trying? 

You want to check my what? 

Hey, we even have a wellness program, which includes yoga, morning calisthenics and Tai Chi. But, before you get too attached, let us just do a little screening test. 

Welcome to Corporate World. 

Louie Gohmert Has a Health Plan for You

Listening to Louie Gohmert, Representative from Texas talking about his thinking on the Republican Health Care Bill this morning, I was struck by the thought:  Is this the guy who we want planning health care for American babies, women, children and men?

Texas, of course, is a very weird place and spawns some politicos with their own ideas about health systems.






"So when [caribou] want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. … So my real concern now [is] if oil stops running through the pipeline … do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?"
--Rep Gohmert


Lyndon Johnson was from Texas and he got Medicare passed into law, but that was 1965 and he knew enough to stay out of the way of people who knew what they were talking about--you had to say that for Johnson.

Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, on the other hand thinks you can tell the United States has way better health care than, say all of Western Europe, because we order more MRIs than all those countries with government run health care. That is because we're number one in health care, of course, not because of the profit motive, which, in the eyes of Senator Cruz and Representative Gohmert can only be good, because the profit motive is what drives capitalism, which is always better than godless communism, radical Islam and socialism, not necessarily in that order.


"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place. … . Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."


--Rep Gohmert


In the case of the MRI's, an MRI in the USA (which is #1, USA, USA!) runs $2,000-$4,000) whereas in Amsterdam, where prostitution and marijuana is legal, that MRI will run you $75-100.  Apparently, it never occurred to the Senator from Texas, that number of MRI's might have something to do with what the MRI does for someone's bank account, more than what it might do for the patient.


Just saying.

So, this morning Representative Gohmert was saying he could vote "Yes" on the American Health Care Act--don't those Republicans have a genius for naming? I mean how can you vote against something called "American?"--if only they stripped the bill of the provision that health insurance covers stuff like maternity care, major surgical procedures and all like that. That's all jeest "Regulations" and government intrusion in the sacred business/customer relationship, requiring that health insurance policies actually cover things patients might need.


"There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage, and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal."
--Rep Gohmert


Oh, and Paul Ryan just recently discovered an alarming truth:  All those healthy young people across America, hard working, God fearing, Christian (and some Jews, and very few Muslims) are paying for health insurance they don't really need because they are healthy and they are paying every month and this money is being given to the doctors taking care of sick, unhealthy, probably undeserving people. If that isn't un-American, Rep. Ryan does not know what is. If that doesn't say it all about what a disaster Obamacare was, healthy people taking care of unhealthy people, forced against their will to do this. Same with Medicare--you pay from your paycheck when you are 20 years old and completely healthy for forty-five  years until you are old enough for Medicare to pay for you. That's why we've got to get rid of Medicare. And, if you die at 35 because you run your four wheel drive into a concrete wall, you don't get a dime of that money back.  And Social Security. Same damn thing! Pay for that all those years and not a dime comes back. Why, if you'd just put all that into the stock market, at least your heirs could inherit that. 


Well, let's get Obamacare first, then Medicare and then Social Security and then nobody making more than $100,000 a year will have to pay a dime in taxes and America will have fulfilled its promise for freedom and we'll definitely be #1!


Right now, with this American Healthcare Act, it's just bewildering, when you have to come face to face with a health insurance policy, all the choices you have to make, which is what the Republicans call "Freedom of choice" but which are like reading through the tax code, really painful and incomprehensible.

In Finland or Sweden or England you want health care, you go to your local doctor, who may (or may not) work for the government and he takes care of you. In America, if you are lucky, you go to the doctor and he and you and his staff tries to figure out whether your insurance company will allow you to have the tests,  prescriptions follow up the doctor thinks you need.


Hey, that's freedom! 
USA!  USA! We're number one!

Trumped Up

Is it not deliciously curious that our President's is named Trump? 

According to the Word Detective website "trumped up" dates back to the 1700's as a "fraudulently concocted" charge.
Of course, there is the trump hand, which is a winning hand.
Where do you think the meaning will settle after 4 years of our current President?


For his voters and fans, who are or will, of course be winning constantly now that he is President, of course President Trump is the winning hand.


But for the Muslims who were dancing on the rooftops on September 11th, for President Obama who was surprised to learn he had ordered Trump Tower wiretapped and that he was born in Kenya, something Mr. Obama could not recall, for obvious reasons, the fraudulently concocted side is more accurate.


Personally, I like my Trump in black, trimmed with gold.

I'm keeping a running tally:
1. Obama of Kenya
2. Cheering Muslims on Newark rooftops
3. Black inner cities beset by hellish violence
4. Wiretapping Obama
5. Mexican immigrants mostly rapists
6. Muslims mostly hating everyone
7. Factories closing because of bad trade deals
8. Hillary is crooked
9. Obamacare is a disaster
10. Obamacare is in a death spiral

Stay tuned. The list grows every morning at 5 A.M.


Oh, and there's some great grape flavored Kool Aid you might want to try--there are big buckets of it just outside the White House.

Post Modern Blues: Key of Gopnik

The New Yorker and The New York Times are far more important outside New York than in it.  If you live in New York, you have so many sources of connection to what people are thinking, what's new, what's hot, what's au currant. But if you live in the hinterlands, you depend on the news from New York to keep you up to date. 

Gopnik

The paper used to arrive on my driveway, but now we get it on line. The magazine we still get in paper form. It's an event, a continuity, seeing that jazzy cover every week. And it takes all week to read through the multi-page articles, where things are examined beyond the usual sound bite. 

Like NPR radio, where I know the correspondents' names and voices,  I've got to know the New Yorker authors, Jill Lepore, David Remnick, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik.  

Gopnik often has fresh insights and his book reviews are often the only thing I will bother to learn about the books, but this week he showed signs of that dread New York degenerative disease, which has yet to be named, but which, tentatively, I'll call Public Intellectual Supercilious Syndrome (PISS).

Characteristic presenting symptoms are the use of "ism" words, referring to isms with which I am not much familiar  but which sound like something I can guess at, without really knowing.  

Postmodern Gopnik

"Presentism" is a new ism, which Gopnik has created for his review of several books in the March 20 issue.  It's cute because it's a play on all the isms we read about in the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere in the New Yorker, and it's a fresh statement of a phenomenon which became very evident during the run up to the last election:  "It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening without anything happening to stop it...if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished."

So that's cute, because he illustrates the sort of punditry he finds in the books he is about to review with this caution that what you hear about the meaning of the Trump election from many pundits is tripe, and they haven't the faintest clue what will happen next, certainly no more than you do.

Read Rousseau and Voltaire

But then we get a sentence like this one:  "Mishra's thesis is that our contemporary misery and revanchist nationalism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic reaction to Voltaire's Enlightenment--with the Enlightenment itself entirely to blame in letting high minded disdain for actual human experience leave it open to a romantic reaction."

Can't you just see a Woody Allen movie with Woody standing in line in front of some guy spewing out this sentence, and Allen going ballistic? 

But, wait. then Gopnik delivers this:  "We can't understand either the history of liberalism that produced modern life or the history of colonialism that produced Mishra's post modern collage without first understanding why the wind blew only one way."

Got that? 
Post modern collage?
Fortunately, there is Professor Google, but just try looking up post modernism and see where that gets you. 

Post Modern Author: Still love her 

Suffice it to say you could rewire your house, rebuild your car's motor, do cardiac bypass surgery, organize a global company without ever having understood either of those sentences, or even the component words, like "post modern" or revanchist--actually, that one I got.  
Does Rousseau's reaction to Voltaire actually drive anything of significance in today's America? 
Well, maybe if you are a Constitutional "originalist" and you know that Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson and all those bewigged, silk stocking'ed founding fathers were very into the French, it might matter to you.
But really, Adam, is this the way you are going to deal with the reality of a President Trump? 
Do the coal miners in Kentucky really care about Voltaire any more than they care to know about the origins of the universe? 

Not a fan of Voltaire: He smokes Joan's post modern brand

Here's a modest proposal:  Until President Trump and Steve Bannon leave the White House, let us ban from the pages of The New Yorker and  The New York Times the word "post modern." Let us add this to the list of George Carlin's forbidden words, which will grow hair on your palms, curve your spine and result in peace without honor and will be bleeped out on radio or television should some one  slip up and let that word fly.

On Wanting to Be Irish

Sidney Reilly, the Russian Jew who took on a new identity to start his espionage career, when asked why he chose that name said, "Simple: The Irish are welcomed in every country of the world, but their own."


In the movie, "The Commitments"  the band's manager explains how this white Irish band does the Black soul songs so well:  "We are the Negroes of Europe."

From the time I was little, I wanted to be Irish.  Not sure why.
Many of my mother's best friends were Irish Americans and we had a neighbor who actually was Irish, Mrs. Welch (married name)  and she had that wonderful lilting accent that made her sound exotic and worldly wise and when I think of Irish people I always smile, again for unclear reasons.
Flying home from Heathrow years ago, the plane started descending only minutes into our flight. Looking out my window, all I could see were clouds, white mists and then, suddenly the fields below, a patchwork of more shades of green than I have ever seen. "There's only one place we could be," I told my wife.
Sure enough, we landed at Shannon Airport and I ran from window to window in the airport, trying to get a look at Ireland.
"We've got to come back here," I told her.
Eventually, we did.

When we visited Ireland, it was the midst of the "Celtic Tiger" and the place was not at all what I expected: I expected tough, ironic people living in tough places, but the place was booming, everyone was adding on to their homes and employment was so complete they had to import Polish people to work in the convenience stores.


The people were friendly and you could almost understand them, and everyone had relatives in America who they expected you would know, because, after all you live in New Hampshire and Sean lives in Boston, just down the road.


I don't recall when I discovered not all Irish were Catholic.  In fact there were some troubles about that, I later learned.

One of my favorite Irish American girlfriends had an authentic Irish mother who was born in Londonderry.
"Derry is the name," she told me emphatically. "Londonderry is what Protestants call it. But you can be forgiven for not knowing that, at least the first time."
She was sitting on her concrete stairs leading uphill to her house and she told me about life in Ireland before she met the American sailor who became my girlfriend's father.
"I don't miss Ireland one bit, " she said. "Well, except when I do."


I'm not much of a drinker. It's something of an ordeal, but Guiness beer in Ireland is completely different than it is in the US.  As one of my friends said, "It's like heroin in a mug."
My friend, Kelleher, was much amused by my aspirations to be honorary Irish.
"The only people who want to be Irish, aren't," he said.
"I'm reading Real Lace," I told him.
He snorted, "Real Lace! Let me tell you something, all Irish are shanty Irish and that's the truth of it. Real Lace. Gawd."
How can you not like people like that?

You've Seen the Advertising: Now Read the Book

Finally, after all the months of liberals spewing venom about Trump, focused on his personality, his expostulations, his nasty friends, his inferred intentions, we have a concrete pseudo budget.

If the worst thing for a bad product is good advertising then here we have the real article: Mr. Trump intends to cut
1/ The National Institutes of Health (healthcare research) by 20%
2/ The Appalachia Regional Commission
3/ Medicaid (as part of Repeal and Replace)


Of course, he wants to slash the warm and fuzzy programs Republicans Love to Hate, but those are to be expected and are simply red meat to the tough guy Republicans, like the EPA, Meals on Wheels, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, Public Television and Radio and foreign aid, all stuff the Tea Party and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan believe government has no business doing anyway.

Thing is, most people, if they have ever heard of it, like the NIH.  The coal miners in Kentucky may not care about the NIH because they don't care about medical research. But outside of Kentucky, West Virginia and coal mining Pennsylvania, there are people who actually read, or watch the news, and they may remember Tony Fauci explaining Ebola virus, or the new treatments for AIDS, or new advances in cancer chemotherapy. So this may ring a bell with some voters.


Finally, after all the ineffectual sputtering and fuming about things about Trump which  people are offended by but others love, we have an actual concrete event of governing. Putting those grand generalities into concrete action: Cut the NIH by 20%.

It will not matter to Trump voters that his Repeal and Replace comes down to cutting Medicaid and telling the states to deal with that. But cutting the NIH is the first of many things which will finally make a difference.


Ryan's plan to cut Medicaid is actually quite savvy:  Medicaid spending is what powered Obamacare and you can kill it by cutting Medicaid. And the only people that hurts are the poor and the ignorant and the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. Unless you believe Mr. Trump, (and we think Mr. Ryan does not), Dead People Don't Vote. 


It's all coming home to roost. The first step has been taken.
Let's GOVERN!