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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, July 31, 2009

It's Hard Out Here For A...erm..uh...Blue Dog 

...Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) is incensed. He is outraged! He is, in fact, acrimonious!! Like Father Mulcahy, he may well be persuaded to violence. Why, you may ask, would Congressman Taylor be be in such a dire emotional state? It is quite simple, dear reader; Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform has dared to accuse him of being a party to the dirty political business of actually arriving at a compromise that would allow a health care reform bill to move out of Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee...

Rep. Taylor, in his fit of extreme pique, called Grover and his gang "lying sacks of scum" and, I must confess, I am in that rather large cohort of American citizens who would find no particular objective argument with his assessment. As it so happens, however, Rep Taylor's extreme outrage is directed at ATR's suggestion that he is acting like a Democrat who actually wants to find some way of reforming health care that will actually benefit his constituency and other Americans. And that, my friend, twists his tail more painfully than you could ever imagine, because Rep. Taylor is a DINO's DINO, representing in many respects the last vestiges of the Strom Thurmond branch of the Democratic party that still exists in the Deep South...

Rep. Taylor is pretty clear in stating that he will have no truck with all this touchy-feely health care reform nonsense if it means taxes, near-term deficit spending, or another Gawd-awful 'Govnmint' program. In all fairness, he has been fairly consistent over the years in opposing deficit-increasing proposals - including Gee Dub's disastrous tax cuts, which is why "baby-drowneder" Grover and his gang are after Taylor in the first place. At the same time, Taylor is not the sort of guy you are going to turn to seeking support for the idea that every American citizen should have a right to guaranteed, affordable health care...

Rep. Taylor is a pimp for a host of political viewpoints that haven't had any sort of traction in the mainstream of Democratic policy for a couple of decades; if he were to announce first thing Monday morning that he had decided, after long heartfelt discussions with his family and his priest, that he was going to follow his heart and switch political affiliation to the Republican party, no one would notice. It is perversely amusing, though, to see him slinging around phrases like "sacks of scum" (apparently, as a Roman Catholic, he can't call his targets 'scumbags') directed toward a group whose criticism almost every other Democrat would just simply ignore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:56 PM 0 comments

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Too Much (And Too Little) Of A Good Thing 

...so you're sitting there looking out the window at the old '93 Bronco out in the driveway, with all its physical wear and tear from 195,000 miles of faithful service, and you're thinking "this 'cash for clunkers' thingie might be just the ticket to getting me into a new ride with better gas mileage"...

The good news is that you would be right, because the Kelly Blue Book value of this rig is about $1300 (assuming "fair" condition and average XLT trim level options)...

The bad news is that you may be too late. The "Cash For Clunkers" program, officially known as the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, was supposed to be in play from last Friday, 24 July, until 1 November or until the $1 billion in the fund was exhausted (although many dealers decided to roll the dice and book deals before the official start). However, the prospect that 13 CARS Program deals per dealership already on the books is an accurate statistical average for all of the 23,000 dealerships who signed up for the program means that car buyers may well have burned through that $1,000,000,000 in one week...

The early returns suggest this program has been so wildly successful that its Republican opponents can do little more than look back wistfully to those morning-dew-bespeckled halcyon days when they had nothing more to worry about than a strange, crazed ticket of presidential and vice-presidential candidates that called into question why any clear-thinking American voter would trust their party to walk the family dog, much less run the country. The program has clearly been too much of a good thing in the sense that it exposed a pent-up but natural desire of people to buy new fuel-efficient vehicles to replace the old beaters that economic circumstances forced them otherwise to hang on to...

On the other hand, it's too little of a good thing because its creators failed to accurately estimate just how much demand there might be out there for just such a program. It shall be left to the economist gurus to pick the point at which increased car purchases as a result of federal subsidies crosses some "good idea/bad idea" line, but as far as pumping new car sales and improving the environmental 'green-ness' of cars actually on the road, the money that has been committed and could (and should) still be committed to expand the program looks like a lot better deal from a 'money well spent' standpoint than all those shrink-wrapped pallets of Jacksons that have been shipped to Iraq over the last six years...

This admittedly unattributed suggestion that the CARS program will end after one week is a truly gobsmacking moment, because the breathtaking overrun of its own established parameters suggests that not even those people we are fervently trusting to lead us out of this current economic wasteland don't fully understand all the in's and out's of the trouble we're in...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:52 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 26, 2009

"Too Little, Too Late" Coming Home To Roost 

...this AP story is truly grim, describing the ways in which American soldiers coming home from Iraq with deeply buried psychic wounds that were insufficiently addressed by the command structure at Fort Carson went on to murder people once they got back home to Colorado. The piece contains all the usual 'right words' by Fort Carson personnel insisting that all the right things are being done to treat troops who have been struggling to turn off the 'in harm's way' switch once they get back to "the world", as home was called back in the Vietnam era...

The problem I have with this AP report is that it is all too little, too late. Daniel Zwerdling of National Public Radio began covering the story about inadequate mental health care and aggressive actions by NCO's and officers at Fort Carson to browbeat returning troops into "manning up" and ignoring their own mental health issues almost three years ago (click on the sound files; the print transcripts apparently no longer exist)...

The AP article folds uncomfortably but naturally into the framework that Danny Zwerdling built back in December of 2006. As different pieces of one larger history, the two story lines (with Zwerdling and NPR taking the checkered flag by a couple of years) highlight the fact that military culture hasn't matured all that much over the last 35 years as far as addressing the mental health of soldiers are concerned. The AP story is illuminating insofar as it provides a new opportunity to identify the pressures of a dangerous combat setting that can lead individuals to do otherwise inexplicable things, but the story in itself isn't new...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:34 PM 0 comments

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