Betsy Boop

“Hudson Hayward Hemingway,”
a Chihuahua with pink earrings
stolen from Gay bar, still missing.

Boy, I am naïve! I had never heard of Betsy McCaughey until I saw Rachel Maddow say one night that she (Betsy) was the person who started the “Death Panel” nonsense, and that she also had been responsible for helping kill the Clinton attempt at health care reform. She was also said to have some position in the health care business, so I just assumed she must be somebody of some importance. She appeared last night on the Daily Show, an appearance so pathetic it made me swear never again to assume anything. Far from being someone of importance she turns out to be just another blond Republican bimbo who has no idea what the hell she is talking about. Her attempted explanation of why she was opposed to whatever it was she claimed to be opposed to was so pathetic, so disorganized, so tortured, so absurd, I actually began to feel a bit sorry for her. Of course the damage has already been done, with old people in a panic that Obama is going to pull the plug on them, and the Obama people in a panic trying to convince a gullible public they are, indeed, a gullible public. It’s absolutely amazing how one idiotic woman can cause so much trouble. But, then, look at Sarah Palin.

I am constantly amazed at what constitutes human behavior, especially when it is something I simply cannot understand. A man in Seattle, with a history of domestic violence, stabbed his wife some 17 times with a barbecue fork, killing her, in front of their children. He was sentenced to 22 ½ years in prison. What amazes me the most about this is not why he didn’t get life in prison, or 99 years, or even 50 years, but why he got 22 ½ years. I concede there may be some reason or logic behind this kind of sentence that I simply do not understand, but really, 22 ½ years? Some people have received more than that for marijuana possession or other crimes nowhere near as serious, and what does the ½ year provide? I think perhaps the State of Washington may just have something against even numbers, I recall their fine for not having a seat belt is $101, a similarly strange sum.

Is Jerrold Nadler a lone voice crying out in the wilderness of fraud and deceit? He has reminded us that if Obama fails to investigate the torture business under the Bush Administration he will be breaking the law. Under the law a country is required to investigate instances of torture, they supposedly have no choice. Nor can the nation legally, as Holder apparently wants to do, simply investigate one small element of a broader torture pattern. Nadler is regarded as one of the brighter legal minds in Congress. He insists there should be an independent investigator. Will anyone listen?

I must say that I like Obama, I like the idea of a stimulus package, I am all for putting people back to work, I also think we should have cars and trucks that get much better mileage. However, I’m not sure I think the cash for clunkers was such a great idea. I mean, we have enough trouble in the U.S. with planned obsolescence, and this program seems to me to just be a new and perhaps worse example. This is especially true, I think, because these old cars will not be sold to poor people who can’t afford anything else, nor will they be the source of parts, they will, as I understand it, just be junked. Now this might be great for people who can take advantage of the situation right now, but there must be many who cannot, and how long will the effects of this program last? That is, the car companies are rehiring and hiring at the moment to replace the cars sold under cash for clunkers, but what happens next? Will we eventually scrap the next generation of cars to keep the factories going? I mean, this seems to me terribly artificial, and perhaps short-sighted, when it comes to solving our long term manufacturing problems. Can we just keep manufacturing products to fail and be replaced in order to keep our system functioning as we have been doing? In Europe, especially in Germany, they manufacture quality products that last. Indeed, many people live in houses and use other buildings that are two and three hundred years old. Here we tend to tear everything down after thirty years or so. Our economy is based on waste, and what can be more wasteful than cash for clunkers? I don’t think we should have an automobile manufacturing system in which cars have to be replaced every year, or even every two, three, four, or five years. Cars and everything else we make should be made to last, and they should also be made to last. And we should also stop buying all kinds of stuff we don’t really need and then having to rent storage space to store it when the next generation of junk comes along. If we really want to solve our economic crisis we are going to have to drastically change our ways. I wonder if it is at all possible. I am not sanguine about the possibilities.

The world is too much with us;
late and soon,Getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
William Wordsworth

TILT:
Siberian tigers sometimes kill and eat Asiatic black and brown bears. It is said that some tigers imitate the sounds of these bears to attract them.