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

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Tonight We Are All Ducks 

...I'm not even an Oregon native, but I chose to endure the slings and arrows hurled at me by both Mrs. Jack K and others because of my decision to stay home - rather than attending a long-scheduled church function - to watch one of my adopted Orygun teams play the hated University of Southern California Trojans in the raucous confines of Autzen Stadium tonight...

The root circumstances of my boosterism are somewhat ironic, given that I lived and worked for several years within the direct local Duck sphere of influence and, during that tour, I terrorized my Duck-loving coworkers by spending every football season week wearing a baseball cap of the team that Oregon would be playing that Saturday. It worked as a bit of workplace harassment back then because the Ducks weren't a very good team; sometimes the Civil War game against Orygun State (which I also root for these days) was a contest to see who could finish the season with at least one Pac-10 win...

Things are a lot different than they were twenty years ago in the bad old days. Regardless of the native differences of current residents, we are all Ducks tonight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:29 PM 0 comments

Partial Scores: Teabagger Wingnuts 1, Republican Sanity O 

...this afternoon saw a huge victory for those rock-ribbed forces of ideological purity in the Republican party, as the Republican nominee in the special election for the Congressional seat in New York's 23rd district abruptly withdrew from the contest after virtually every big name from the party's right wing swarmed into the state in support of her right-wing opponent running as a third party candidate. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, this is a huge victory for the Beckian teabagger wing of the Republican party, and probably not all that bad an omen fo.r the rest of us...

Dede Scozzafava's self-defenestration isn't all that surprising, given the fact that every failed loser and overly pumped-up unelected who-said of the teabagger wing of what was once an actual national party seemed uncommonly anxious to trample over any little old ladies or children standing in the way of their wild stampede down various jetways to catch flights to Oswego or Watertown. She actually did something that has become an uncommon grace for Republicans: she did the honorable thing for the sake of a party that clearly has no interest whatsoever in welcoming anyone into its tent who doesn't cleave to a particularly twisted sort of political philosophy. This moment is, all by itself, a Big Win for Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and all those other folks who have captured the hearts and minds of a particular constituency but haven't actually won anything for a lot longer than most people realize...

The incumbent that Scozzafava hoped to replace was a relatively moderate Republican serving in a district that Obama won in 2008 and was selected by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Army. How her withdrawal affects the upcoming election will only be answered on Tuesday, although it should be noted that the local Republican party felt that she, a hated RINO in the eyes of the massed forces of outsiders who stormed into the contest, was the best candidate in the context the political reality of the district. The special election will be an interesting event to observe in its own right, but this strange moment of political theater is, all by itself, instructive of the direction the Republican party is headed...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Friday, October 30, 2009

Reform And My Half A Loaf 

...it's all too easy to be disappointed and angry -even bitterly so - at what appears to be just another massive el foldo job by Congressional progressives in the sausage-making exercise that is the effort to craft health care reform. It is becoming clear that there won't be any such thing as a robust public option included in whatever bill finally is voted on; in fact, the possibility exists that there won't ever be a vote on the Senate floor for any bill that has even the slightest whiff of a public option, if the public musings of Joe Lieberman (for whom there is no longer any reason for Senate Democratic Caucus members to resist the urge to physically hurl out the door) are any judge...

I find myself perfectly bifurcated on this subject. On the one hand, I care about what happens to people and I want to see every American - regardless of means - have access to health care. For my whole adult life, I have seen (and railed against the necessity for) coin jars sitting at checkout counters in virtually every little small town I've lived in with the picture of somebody who couldn't otherwise pay for an available disease treatment. I once stood in the parking lot behind the Elks Lodge in John Day, Orygun for an hour after work (no, I'm not a member; it also served during the day as the parking lot for the office where I worked) arguing with a strongly libertarian coworker about the pure failure of morality that was represented by a circumstance where the health care system in the richest, most powerful country on this planet forced families to essentially grovel in the public square for money on behalf of loved ones (all too frequently children) to pay for potentially life-saving medical treatments that were readily available - as long as they could be paid for. There was, I argued that night and have argued to this day, no possible way for this country to lay claim to the title of "Greatest Nation in the World" as long as coin jars next to cash registers hold the last desperate, singular hope for survival for any American citizen. That is the obscene reality of health care coverage as we now know it, and that is the reason we need a robust public option...

On the other hand, I am the parent of a teenager who is a Type I diabetic. Talk about the absolute king hell master of preexisting conditions. Because I can shelter my two children for only so long with my FedBorg "gold-plated" insurance, I have reason to be concerned about my second-born child's access to health care insurance that will mitigate the otherwise outrageous cost of insulin and test strips and all the other little bits and pieces required to make for a sustainable life. Even without the public option, the various proposed reform bills promise a far better future for my second-born child than what now passes for the current world of health care insurance, one where my younger child might never be able to find insurance under any circumstances. Some sort of strong public option would be better for him than what the various bills in play will offer, but that clearly isn't going to happen, so he - and I - are faced with that proverbial Half A Loaf. I will be forced to be grateful to get to that insufficient point, because it is so much better than the current grim reality of the unavailability of health insurance at any price that my son will otherwise face. The way this whole debate is playing out still sucks, though...and it really sucks because the Beaten Dog Democrats on the progressive side of the caucus are the legislators who have decided to ensure that my son and I need to be happy with that half a loaf...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:19 PM 0 comments

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