Rembrandt and the Museum of Brands
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Queerness, Politics, Environment and Shameless Pop Culture
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Will Do-Goodism make a comeback?
My prayers go out to Ted Kennedy and his family.
Cancer sucks!
Maybe the liberal lion's brain tumor will compel this country to clean its environment and give its people quality affordable health care - two things Teddy worked so hard for.
What is Massachusetts going to do without him? He's probably the most famous senator ever and embodies what it means to be a successful Irish-American and to be a citizen of Massachusetts.
-Will this help Obama, a John Kennedyesqe figure for my generation?
-Will Massachusetts lose its clout?
I feel a light is dimming on Capitol Hill.
The Wall Street Journal has a new name for Hillary's strong performance among Catholics. They christened it 'the nun theory.'
The theory holds that Hill is doing so well with Catholics because we are familiar with strong female authority figures who can be both tough in their approach and specific in their remedy of social injustice. This fits in with my own feelings of Hillary that I shared here last summer.
In recent weeks I've actually attended mass a few times: both Roman Catholic and American Catholic. The latter is a liberal and gay-friendly Catholic denomination that is under no authority of Rome. The American Catholic community meets in an Episcopalian church in my hometown right across the street from the Roman Catholic parish where I was brought up and had my first communion and my confirmation. I'm not too religious, but you have to admit this is a pretty strange coincidence, especially in light of the fact that the first American Catholic mass I attended was at Northeastern University, not in the South Shore.
But back to HRC:
In a separate "Financial Times" article, Clive Crook had this to say about our own Iron Lady:
"If Mr Obama surges back in Pennsylvania, all this will be moot. If Mrs Clinton wins comfortably there, as the polls say she will, I would hesitate to bet against a Clinton-Obama ticket.
More than anything, this is a tribute to her titanic will to win. Here is the oddest thing about this peculiar race. Totting up the arithmetic, almost every political commentator in the US regards Mr Obama as the favourite to get the nomination – while harbouring, it seems to me, an inner conviction that Mrs Clinton will somehow find a way to steal it. You cannot imagine her giving up, short of being bound, gagged and sedated." [It's such a dark line, I couldn't help but laugh!]
I do hope Sister Hillary comes through. I just hope she doesn't rap Obama's knuckles in the process.
Gosh, it's been a while.
First things first, I'm cancer-free and have been since late October 2007. Four and a half months later I find myself a full time secretary and part time gym bunny. Recently I've enrolled in a beginner's creative writing class at the BCAE (Boston Center for Adult Education) called "Getting Started." It's the perfect antidote to a late winter malaise. My professor, an old, Southie retired firefighter named Jack Canavan, is having us do homework inspired by Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way." Namely:
1.) Write morning pages (3 pages of stream of consciousness a day).
2.) 30 minutes of "artist walking a day" (seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing the world around you).
3.) One date per week with your artist within (nice way to treat yourself).
4.) Read and become familiar with a little poetry.
It's good advice. A little 'discipline' applied each day doesn't make the word so crotchety. I'm not averse to 'discipline' but I do fancy the word 'flow.' Like a stream you have to let your creativity flow wherever it may wander. A flow is a stream's own discipline, an innate sense of its' own ways. Having 'discipline' however is having the humility to accept outside advice. I want both.
I could not have written a better diatribe. This was reprinted from Real Clear Politics.
October 11, 2007
Why 'Socialism' Evokes No Fear
By Joe Conason
Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, "socialized medicine" seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water.
Yet despite that antique quality, the old buzzwords appear regularly in columns, press releases and speeches. Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential pack run around squawking about socialism whenever anyone proposes health care reform. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak warns that the federally financed, state-run Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is essentially a socialist conspiracy. So does President Bush, who has threatened to veto a modest increase in that program's funding because he doesn't want to "federalize health care."
Although the red threat still triggers an autonomic reaction among GOP true believers, the rest of the country no longer twitches to that high-pitched, far-right whistle. Most polls not only show enormous majorities favoring extension of coverage to every child, but substantial support for a radical change in how we pay and administer health insurance -- including the possibility of a single-payer system.
Why doesn't the traditional propaganda work any more? Perhaps the demise of the Soviet Union and the withering of Communism in China have had a delayed effect on public attitudes here. Both the Russians and the Chinese have turned more capitalist than the West, abandoning their former systems without substituting modern protections. The ex-Communists are more of a threat to the health of their own societies than to us. Most Americans may also have noticed that corporate bureaucracy and corruption, which figure largely in the present health care system, are not preferable to government bureaucracy. Doctors who used to wail about the dangers of Medicare have learned how unpleasant it is to deal with dozens of insurance companies, each creating different rules to cut costs and deny care. So have their patients.
This corporate model is more expensive and less efficient than the government plans that provide care in every other industrialized nation.
And most Americans may have learned by now that such systems prevail in Western countries that aren't normally categorized as "socialist," including the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. All these nations manage to provide their citizens with high living standards, industrial and technological innovation, and broad political and economic freedom, even after 50 years of national health insurance.
Meanwhile, the credibility of conservatives has diminished steadily. These days they cannot even achieve clarity on the meaning of their favorite cliches. For instance, the president hates "federalized health care," but sponsors a Medicare prescription drug program that wastes hundreds of billions on drug companies and private insurers. Right-wing definitions no longer seem so clear, either. When the government awards a billion dollars in sweetheart mercenary contracts to a wealthy Republican family in Michigan, that's "private enterprise." But when the government helps a struggling middle-class family in Maryland send its children to the doctor, that's creeping socialism.
Conservative ideology's declining relevance is again encouraging the politics of personal destruction. That must be why right-wing voices on the Internet, talk radio and the Fox News Channel have launched a nasty attack on the family of Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old Maryland boy who appeared in a Democratic radio commercial endorsing the SCHIP program. He and his younger sister, both victims of a terrible car accident that left the little girl with permanent brain damage, have both needed federal assistance because their parents were unable to afford private insurance. Certain conservative bloggers and pundits, seeking to prove that the Frost family is too affluent to qualify for SCHIP assistance, have harassed them, their neighbors and their co-workers. They have spread myths and lies about the family, their house and the schools that their children attend. And they have made repeated telephone calls to the Frost home, demanding answers to questions about their personal finances.
It doesn't seem to occur to any of these strict Christian moralists that the Frosts have enough trouble trying to care for their disabled daughter, or that the state of Maryland, under the SCHIP regulations, has determined that the Frost children are fully eligible for the help they obviously need. Let us not hear again from these mean-spirited people about "family values" or "compassionate conservatism."
Such is the devolution of conservatism in our time -- from a philosophy concerned with overweening state authority to a movement that bullies children in the name of freedom.
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.