Amazing!

New Zealand artist protests
Environment Minister by sculpting
his bust with cow manure.

It’s amazing! I watched a few minutes of the debate on health care and was astounded to learn there are apparently two totally different bills, the one described by Democrats, and the one described by Republicans. As I learned long ago that too much hot air is not good for me I fairly quickly turned it off. It’s a bit difficult to describe what is going on as a “debate,” because they do seem to be talking about two entirely different things (bills). As Pelosi and the Democrats seem to feel they will have enough votes to insure passage of this monumental bill, I trust that by morning I can feel they have succeeded. But wait! They have succeeded! The House passed the health care bill with 220 votes (219 Democratic and apparently 1 Republican who must be out of the loop). So Obama and the Democrats have managed to do something no one has been able to do for somewhere between 60 and 100 years. Hooray!

And if they do succeed (they did), the Republicans will once again find themselves on the wrong side of history, just as they were when Social Security and Medicare were passed. For at least a hundred years they have battled nonstop against anything and everything designed to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, and for anything and everything that would benefit the wealthy and the huge corporate interests. This time they have, in my opinion at least, made such utter fools of themselves we might hope they would hide somewhere for the next few years and say nothing. Witness the absolutely disgusting display that Bachman and her loony supporters put on the other day as a case in point. You might also watch the video going around of Republican men despicably shouting down women as they attempted to have their say about health care. This was truly like something out of the dark ages. Of course they had Wilson’s boorish shouting at Obama for a model, as well as some of their past Brown shirt activities (as in the 2000 election that apparently established a precedent for fascist activity in the U.S.).

I expect the Stupak amendment will pass that will not allow taxpayer money to be used for abortions, thus denying legal abortions to poor women who need them the most (it did). These anti-abortion fanatics apparently believe that women (and their doctors) have abortions just for fun, and that the responsibility for children stops once the fetus is born. I hear many people, especially in Congress, say, “I don’t agree with them (abortion opponents) but I understand where they are coming from.” I don’t agree with them and I don’t understand where they are coming from. I believe there are usually if not always perfectly good reasons for abortions and they are not done casually or just for fun (and if done early enough do not destroy a viable human life, but that is for another time and place). Furthermore, I think the alternative to abortion (neglect, abuse, and abandonment) is often worse.

I see references now fairly commonly that refer to the “Democratic debacle” of Tuesday. I hate to be so dense but I don’t get it. Democrats won two more Congressional seats, one of them in a district that has not been Democratic since the Civil War. I guess the “debacle” has to do (in the MSM anyway) with the loss of the Governor’s races, one in New York and one in Virginia, and the loss of the New York City mayor’s race. Granted it would have been better had Democrats won, but it seems to me these races were perfectly predictable. Corzine was a most unpopular Governor who had not produced what he had promised, was a long way back in the early polls, but with Obama’s support only lost by a much smaller margin than predicted. Bloomberg is apparently regarded as one of the best mayors ever (although why I could not say), and also spent around 100 million dollars of his own money to get re-elected, and then only won by a small margin over a not very well known Democratic opponent. Virginia, apparently since time immemorial, has always elected a Governor from the opposite party in power. How you can consider this somehow bad for Democrats I find highly questionable, and given the fact that the exit polls indicated Obama had little to do with the voting, I think I am right about this. Of course whether I am right or wrong is irrelevant.

LKBIQ:
No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean them - campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving again.
Bill Clinton

TILT:
I finally did it! I found something that did not appear on Google – tolstovakas (the name of a kind of peasant blouse Leo Tolstoy started wearing).