Category Archives: Affordable Care Act

10/31/2014
4 Comments
Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama, Gasoline Prices, Great Depression, Great Recession, Mitt Romney, Pam Davidson, Public Relations, Unemployment

Hot Air

C’mon, Dems, Brag A Little!

For all our own mental and emotional well-being, I urge each and every one of you to thoroughly enjoy the lowest gas prices in four years. Acc’d’g to those who monitor such things, a gallon of gas costs, on average, $3.00 in these thirsty United States.

The link, BTW, updates itself weekly so if you go there in, say, a month, it may read something else. Here’s s screenshot of today’s reading:

EIA Gas Prices 20141031

US Energy Information Administration Report, October 31st, 2014

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Now, allow me to dump of a bucket of ice water over our collected heads: Just think how gas prices are going to rebound over the next few weeks. Does four skins a gal. sound crazy? I’m no expert in how the energy racketeers strategize the systematic emptying of our wallets but based on the utterly unscientific and fairly undependable evidence of my memory, big dips in motion lotion prices generally are followed by even bigger soars.

So save those pennies, kids.

Oh, and today’s relatively cheap gas reminds me of something else. The Republican Party is clearly the superior of the two major political cliques in our holy land when it comes to self-congratulations. This is no bad rap: I respect and envy the ability of GOP-ers to scream to the world Hey, look what I did for you!

Had the Republicans been fully in charge of Congress today and had they somehow been able to wrest the White House from that notorious Muslim plant from Kenya in 2012, they’d have been singing hosannas to themselves for the low gas prices. And scads o’folks across the land would be telling each other how fabulous the Repubs. are for getting that gallon down to three bucks. Hell, you’d think Prez Mitt Romney himself had barged in to the CEO offices of the world’s oil giants  to demand they drop gas prices.

The Democrats? Well, y’know.

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Political Science

Dems in 2014 could have run in this mid-term election on the three-pronged platform of health care, unemployment, and gas prices. They could have shouted from the mountain tops that millions and millions more of our fellow citizens now have health insurance under Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. They could have robo-called the populace about how unemployment has dipped below six percent a mere six years after the greatest global economic trauma since the Great Depression. And, natch, they could have simply given stump speeches underneath gas station signs.

Gas Station

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Nary a one of these things has been done. The dopes.

Instead, acc’d’g to political hall monitors, Dem candidates from sea to sea are too busy pretending they’ve never heard of this chap Barack Obama.

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Fighting By The Rules

Some Democrats here in and around Bloomington are aghast that local Republicans are planting yard signs where they shouldn’t be! The horror.

Party precinct captain Pam Davidson was busted the other day by a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy for swiping Republican yard signs that she swears were planted illegally on public lands. The Richland Township precinct 3 party operative was allegedly witnessed pulling out a sign and tossing it in her trunk at the intersection of Curry Pike and SR 46.

The sheriff’s deputy took her into custody. No word yet on whether or not he slapped the bracelets on her.

GOP Yard Sign

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Here’s my question: Why wasn’t Davidson planting her own yard signs — ones that say something simple like 5.9% Unemployment? You’re Welcome! or Obamacare, Like America, Works — right in front of those Republican signs?

You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. The Dems, it seems — both nationally and locally — have forgotten that simple rule of street fighting.

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07/23/2014
4 Comments
Affordable Care Act, I-69, Ivy League, The New Republic, Uncategorized, William Deresiewicz, Yale University

Hot Air

Schools For Tools

An indictment:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

These words, written by William Deresiewicz in The New Republic magazine for his piece on the Ivy League brain factories, can be applied to most university programs, including our own Indiana University.

Deresiewicz opens his article by recounting the time he participated in a Yale admissions committee session. That’s where, in his case, five people sat in a room, pored over high school students’ applications and gave thumbs up or down. Yale, the alma mater of the likes of Sinclair Lewis and Paul Krugman, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, and no fewer than 17 members of the United States Supreme Court, is, of course, among the toughest of universities to get into unless your daddy-o prints money. But there are only so many Americans who comprise the 1% so that Yale admissions committee had to reach down deep into the poorer-then-Croesus pool for the coming school year.

Yale House Flag

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Nevertheless, the lucky few who gained admission to Yale that year were the cream of the cream. Students, for instance, who listed six extracurricular high school activities on their applications, were deemed, essentially, too lazy for the place.

I don’t know about you, but I loathed the type of kid who’d list a half a dozen or more extracurricular activities under his yearbook pic (I went to an all-boys HS, so don’t holler at me for using the male pronoun).

I’ve railed on and on about how our colleges and universities these days seem to be nothing more than glorified vocational schools. Kids strive for college degrees not so they can learn to think and to reason, to learn the rigorous methods of inquiry, to become well-rounded, to be exposed to the dizzying variety of peoples who live on this Earth, and then, so prepared, be an asset not only to the species and the planet, but to get a good job as well. No. Too many kids spend four years setting themselves up as the best little employees they can be. Universities are fast becoming training grounds for adults who are docile, unthinking, and eager consumers.

Yuck.

The Ivy League schools, apparently, are the best at doing this ugly job but it’s a job shared by institutions across this holy land. Read Deresiewicz’s piece and, if you’re like me, weep.

[h/t to John Wasik.]

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Just Don’t Get Sick

Up to 15 million people already have benefitted from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Nice. That means millions more kids now get better access to preventative and urgent health care than did before Barack Obama came into office. Hundreds of thousands of families now don’t have to worry about financial ruin should a daughter’s liver go kaput or a parent’s brain suddenly sprout a tumor.

Once again, I’m not thrilled with the ACA. I want single-payer, universal health coverage. But Obamacare is the best we could do, considering the extent to which Republicans get itchy when the question of helping people who aren’t richer than certain small nations arises.

The GOP has stood on its head trying to overturn the ACA. The very idea that we as a nation should extend a helping hand to our broke neighbors strikes Republicans as un-American. They characterize those who want to help people who can’t afford $500 or $750 a month health insurance premiums as socialists, commies, or, worse, secret Kenyans.

I’ve known scads of rugged individualist Republicans whose response when asked about poor people has been Fuck ’em. That’s not shorthand; I’m quoting.

Poverty

It’s Your Own Damned Fault!

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That is shorthand for what the three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said yesterday in a ruling on federal subsidies for ACA participants. Check out the ruling and you’ll see that it’s chock-full of high-minded legalese and the splitting of hairs over seemingly inconsequential language in the original Act. The judges sound very knowledgable and Solomonic. But in truth, they’re saying Fuck you to those 15 millions who now have affordable health insurance, the emphasis on the word now. Tomorrow, if the panel’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, is another story.

We are engaged in a battle for the soul of this nation. As in, some of us want the nation to have a soul and some of us prefer us to be soulless. Funny, though, how those who seem most soulless are the same ones who talk about god all the time.

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To Sleep, Perchance…

And, speaking of courts flipping the bird at one class or another of citizens, Marion Superior Court Judge David Dryer ruled Monday that Monroe County’s newly-approved late-night noise ordinance isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and work can continue on I-69 through the night, every night.

That means a lot of people who live around SR 37 and points southwest in this county will be super cranky at their jobs for the next few months due to the banging, beeping, and clanking that’ll keep them awake all night long. A good night’s sleep is a fine thing but it is nothing at all compared to the desire of the state to lay concrete.

Interstate Road Construction

Happiness Is Wet Concrete

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The I-69 brouhaha was aboil when I moved to these parts in late 2009. Plenty of people were protesting and hollering at INDOT officials and then-Gov. Mitch Daniels that the proposed super-road would cause  environmental nightmares.They were certain, several told me, that they could derail plans for the highway. I told anybody who’d listen (most didn’t) that laying concrete is the most irresistible urge the state — any state — has. If the federal government’s primary responsibility is military defense and the overriding duty of municipal gov’t is to pick up garbage, then the state’s biggest task is to build roads. Road building is the lifeblood of a state’s economy, as well as the financial health of whichever political party is in charge. Ergo, no amount of hooting and shrieking would deter Daniels et al from paving from here to eternity.

Natch, work on I-69 continued apace, environmental nightmares be damned. On the other hand, the folks who live around the I-69 construction zones won’t have to worry about nightmares anymore. You have be able to get to sleep to have them, after all.

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07/01/2014
3 Comments
Abortion, Affordable Care Act, Contraception, GMO, Green Revolution, Hobby Lobby, Labor Unions, Mike Adams, Natural News, Sara Benincasa, US Supreme Court

Hot Air

A Law Supreme

I’m very, very lucky I didn’t have internet access yesterday.

If I had, it’s a sure bet I would have written something that would have gotten me into the hottest of water with the FBI, the Secret Service, the NSA, Academi (nee Blackwater), Control, Sgt. Friday, TJ Hooker, Dirty Harry and any other law enforcement cartoon characters you can imagine. I’m hot. And if you’re not, well then, you and I have wildly divergent views on what this free society should look like.

The US Supreme Court Monday not only ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby refusing to pay for slut pills, it also further chipped away at organized labor in this holy land. Some thoughts:

  • Not only are corporations people, acc’d’g to this Court, but they are religious.
  • Justice Antonin Scalia has positioned himself as a strict constructionist ever since he came on the national scene. He’s not; he is a theocrat.
  • The five justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby are, natch, white men. They also were nominated by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Anybody, therefore, who bleats that there’s no diff. between the Democrats and the Republicans is an idiot.

Conservative Justices

Boys Club

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  • Clearly, the five Republican-nominated justices cherish the right to believe in a mythical creation figure who has issued a laundry list of dos and don’ts for humanity over the right of women to control their uteri. Kids, that’s just bizarre.
  • Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the dissent for the minority. She is becoming a superstar on the interwebs now, with people posting pull quotes from her angry denunciation of the decision all over social media.
  • The Supreme Court also ruled that gov’t employees who don’t want to be members of unions don’t have to pay dues. That means those workers can benefit from collective bargaining w/o sharing the cost. And the Republicans say they’re four-square against freeloaders!
  • Justice Samuel Alito wrote that public employee unions are “lobbyists.” These Reagan/Bush/Bush dudes, my friends, are awfully confused.

In other Supreme Court news last week, the Nine ruled unanimously that municipalities cannot bar anti-abortion protestors from verbally assaulting or otherwise violating the personal space of abortion clinic clients on public sidewalks. As you know, any number of cities had instituted buffer zones to keep “pro-life” zealots away from women trying to enter the clinics. (Read Sara Benincasa’s remembrance of being so assaulted when she went to an abortion clinic some years ago.) I get the reasoning behind the decision, even if I don’t like it. So I was wondering, can atheists now stand outside churches and temples and shout “Suckers!” at worshipers trying to enter therein?

Overall, the importance of the November mid-term elections cannot be overstated. If the Senate goes GOP, we’re going to move even further toward the Radical Right than we have already..

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Choose Your Friends Carefully

In other news of late, the influx of undocumented Central American kids in this holy land has resulted in heart-wrenching pix of and stories about the young ‘uns being warehoused in cold, dirty, concrete-floor holding centers. But the self-idolators and tinfoil cap wearers who run the crunchy, conspiracy-theory laden website Natural News have gleaned an even more insidious bit of fallout from this sad state of affairs.

Mike Adams, who’s the “brain” behind Nat. News, wrote that all these dirty immigrant kids are going to pollute our population with all their yucky germs.

Here’s Adams’ headline:

Unloading disease-carrying immigrants in large US cities a ‘perfect storm’ for pandemic disease outbreak

In the body of the piece, Adams writes that one of the reasons we should fear the kids is that they haven’t been vaccinated. A practice, BTW, that Natural News has opinionated time and again is horribly dangerous to our Aryan American citizenry.

I’ve always felt the zealot natural food and anti-chemical crowd has a bit of a Perfect Race streak in it. As in, sure, the Green Revolution has fed hundreds of millions of starving souls in Africa and Asia but, golly gee, are all those saved lives worth it if we get a trace of synthetic fertilizer in our organic cookies? There are trade-offs in every decision, as any adult would acknowledge, but the hyper-natural gang is convinced that American food must be pure, pure, pure even at the cost of a potential mass starvation in India.

Immigrant Detention

Not Perfect

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Adams adds:

If infectious disease isn’t bad enough, this immigration wave also consists of “sex offenders, murder suspects and gang members….”

Old Joey Goebbels would have been proud.

BTW: Adams feels the Obama Admin. is way cool with this wave of undesirables because, “[a]fter all, these are future Democratic voters!”

Lots of natural food, sustainable agriculture, anti-Monsanto-ites seem to dig Mike Adams — who calls himself the “Health Ranger” — because, well, he and his peeps are four-square against GMOs and such.

That’s scant reason to hitch one’s wagon to a bunch of crypto-Nazis. It’d be like the vegetarians of America plastering bumper stickers of A. Hitler on their cars simply because he, too, refused to eat meat.

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06/05/2014
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Affordable Care Act, Afghanistan War, Bloomington City Council, Bowe Bergdahl, General Motors, Gerber's Big Mac and Fries, Hoagy Carmichael, Mark Kruzan, McDonald's, Obamacare, Richard J. Daley

Hot Air

Bim Bam Boom

Quick hits today. Enjoy.

❂ As far as I can tell, that Gerber’s Big Mac and Fries baby food dinner that everybody seems up in arms about simply does not exist.

Facebook Meme

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Facebook triumphs again over reality.

❂ Alright, let’s assume that this Bowe Bergdahl fellow left his camp for the worst of reasons. That is, he no longer supported the American war effort in Afghanistan and simply decided to desert.

Now, the military pounds it into your head not to quit in an engagement area because your absence can affect the safety of your mates and, from a purely selfish POV, you need to know your mates won’t be there to protect you anymore should you bolt. Simple enough, no?

So, just for argument’s sake, we’ll pretend we can somehow know what was in the mind and heart of the newly-returned POW when he wandered away from his gang some five years ago. Let’s pretend he was no longer loyal to either the American cause or his buddies. So he split.

When the going got rough his pals weren’t there to bail him out. Bergdahl was on his own. And he paid the price. He promptly got caught by the enemy. He was held for half a decade by a bunch of wild-eyed, Duck Dynasty-bearded loons who hate music, women, and the West in no particular order. That’s a significant slice out of anybody’s life.

Berghdahl

Bergdahl In A Taliban Video (Reuters Image)

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Do we need to punish him further?

❂ With the success of the Affordable Care Act‘s health insurance exchanges and the knowledge that some 11 to 17 million people in this holy land no longer have to live in mortal fear that they’ll break a leg or pop an appendix lest they be financially ruined, shouldn’t the Democrats this election year be running on Obamacare?

For all his sins, long-ago Mayor Richard J. Daley used to say to rallies of the faithful, “I’m wit’ you.”

Richard J. Daley

Power To Da People

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With all 435 House seats up for grabs in November, aspiring Dem congressbeings as well as those hoping to hold on to their sweet seats should be telling the Murrican peeps, “Yep, I’m with you. My party got you health insurance. The other guys not only were dead set against it, they’ve been standing on their heads for four years now trying to take it away from you.”

Then again, no one of late has accused the Democratic Party of being smart.

❂ Speaking of being found guilty, when do we start throwing GM execs in prison for their 13-year delay on recalling cars whose faulty ignition switches have killed dozens?

Totaled Car

GM Exec A: “Golly Gee, Do You Think We Should Recall Our Cars?”

GM Exec B: “Nah. Let’s Wait A While.”

GM Exec A: “Okay. Where Do You Want To Go For lunch?”

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That’s the question. The answer, as any sentient watcher of goings on in this holy land well knows, is never. This is America, duh.

❂ So, everybody’s happy now that the Bloomington City Council last night unanimously approved a plan (paywall) that’ll protect our sacred Courthouse Square from the evil empires of McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Papa John’s “pizza,” and the terrifying Olive Garden, no?

Now, the only eateries allowed in our picturesque downtown area will be run solely by aproned aunties with flour on their hands. And they’ll occasionally stop by your table to remind you to finish your peas.

That’s what we want, isn’t it?

Only that’s not what we’ve got. The plan is a watered-down version of an earlier proposal that would really have banned Ronald McDonald and his spine-chilling confreres from Corporate Logostan. Our town’s Chamber of Commerce suffered the vapors when Mayor Mark Kruzan’s original reg was under consideration five years ago. The CofC-ers were certain it would be the downfall of Our American Way of Life. Consequently, ixnay on the chain ban.

Now this mighty burgh’s statespeople have drawn up an iron-clad municipal law that’ll require restaurant operators to pass through the gauntlet of the city’s Planning Board. My good god in heaven, chain restaurants’ll have to get a special permit before build on the Square. The stern members of the PB will ensure that proposed edifices, be they chain- or auntie-run, will maintain the Square’s historic character. Like this, for example:

Courthouse Square

Land Sakes! Is This The Year Of Our Lord 1943?

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A walk around the square, my friends, is a trip in a time machine.

It’s good to know that when McDonald’s does open up a restaurant on the Square, those Golden Arches will appear just as they did back in the 1920s when the young IU law student Hoagy Carmichael had a hankerin’ for a Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddle.

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04/18/2014
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Affordable Care Act, Anti-semitism, Bloomington City Council, Bloomington Deer Task Force, Deer Culling, Mark Kruzan, Ukraine

Hot Air

Gotcha Covered

So, now its closer to 15 million* people who’ve signed up for health insurance under the provisions of the ACA.

That’s no failure, folks. The combined 2012 US Census bureau population estimates for the three largest cities in this holy land — New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — is 14,909,352. Let’s call it a draw; there are now as many people insured under ACA guidelines as live in the three most prominent American cities.

Anti-Obamacare

Really?

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And the “fiasco” online rollout of the ACA exchange is only some six months on. The Republicans are hanging on to this issue by their fingernails. ACA works, even though the GOP has stood on its head to sabotage it.

Do I love ACA? Hell no. I want single-payer, universal health care like every other civilized country in the world has. But, I’ll say it again, ACA is better than what we had and it’s the best we can do right now as long as the social Darwinists of the Right have the legislative votes.

[*You’ve been seeing the 8 million figure that the corporate media is throwing around, but that only includes people who’ve become insured via the federal exchange. Some 6 million more are now covered under their parents policies, who have pre-existing conditions, had reached some arbitrary liftetime benefits limit, or qualified under Medicare and Medicaid expansion. All of them have benefitted from the ACA.]

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Politics?

So, perhaps Mark Kruzan is running for yet another term as mayor of this sprawling metrop.

Yesterday he vetoed the plan to allow hunters to cull the deer population around Griffy Lake. Believe it or not, it’s the first time he’s vetoed a city council bill since he became Boss in Chief in January, 2004.

Can it be that he weighed the votes of those who hate deer eating their roses against those who hate the idea of Bambi being shot up like Sonny Corleone on the causeway?

From "The Godfather"

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This may be bad news for any of those hoping to grab Kruzan’s chair in 2015.

In any case, the council can override Kruzan’s veto simply by re-voting on the bill — as long they vote 6-2 again. Council rules call for a two-third vote to negate a mayoral veto. My guess? At least one of those six is going to get cold feet.

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The Jews Lose

And so, now we learn that virulent anti-semites constitute at least some fraction of both sides in the Ukraine dust-up.

This despite the strong possibility that those flyers demanding Jews register their families and property being circulated in the city of Donetsk may have been created by Ukraine nationalists trying to smear the Russian partisans there.

The New Republic magazine quotes Russian expert Fyodr Lukyanov, who believes the flyers are fakes: “I have no doubt that there is a sizable community of anti-Semites on both sides of the barricades, but for one of them to do something this stupid — this is done to compromise the pro-Russian groups in the east.”

Just a reminder that anti-semitism is ingrained in much of the pop. of Europe. It existed when England expelled the Jews in 1290. It existed when Spain threw its Jews out in 1492. It existed when mobs attacked Jews on Kristallnacht. And it exists today.

Anti-semitism

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Why? Simple: There exists within every society a capacity to hate. It’s part of our genetic make-up. And it’s the greatest challenge we as a species face.

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04/02/2014
1 Comment
Affordable Care Act, Algonquin Round Table, Barack Obama, Dorothy Parker, National Poetry Month, Ross Gay, Soma Coffee, Tony Brewer, Vicious Circle

Hot Air

Rhyme Season

April is National Poetry Month.

My fave poet is Dorothy Parker. She was a smart-ass par excellence back in the 1920s. Parker was a member of the fabled Vicious Circle that met daily for lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Her regular lunch and repartee partners included Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Heywood Broun, and Ruth Hale. People like Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, and Edna Ferber dropped by on occasion.

Parker

Dorothy Parker

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They engaged in banter and wordplay that fascinates to this day. Because a number of the Circlers had syndicated daily newspaper columns, the group’s bons mots would spread across the nation in those quaint pre-TV, pre-interwebs days. For instance, Parker was challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence one day. It didn’t take her all that long to pronounce: You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.

As the group grew through the ’20s, the Algonguin restaurant’s maître d’ began seating them at a huge round table, ergo, the repast became known to outsiders as the Algonquin Round Table. They referred to themselves as The Board. Their lunches, natch, were dubbed Board Meetings. Acc’d’ng to legend, the maître d’ assigned the group a new waiter named Luigi one day. From then on, they called themselves the Luigi Board, a takeoff on the Ouija Board, a popular toy at the time.

 Ouija

Luigi’s Weegee

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It can be said (if one wanted to speak pretentiously and presumptuously) that Bloomington’s own Boys of Soma is a direct descendent of Parker et al‘s Vicious Circle. Only we’re not vicious (not too much.) Nor are we as talented and accomplished as that gang. Ah, forget I mentioned it.

Anyway, my fave Bloomington poets are Ross Gay and Tony Brewer. Pick up one of their books this month and lose yourself in their meter. Read anybody’s poetry this month. Write some of your own.

Go ahead, play with words. It’s fun. And you just may hit upon a creative usage for the word euthanasia in a sentence.

Chinese Children

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A Healthy Success

Okay, so twenty-somethings now get to be covered by their parents’ health insurance policies. People with pre-existing conditions get to sign up for health insurance. Lifetime benefit caps are out. And the poor now can afford health coverage so that they don’t have to make the choice between that and Dumpster diving for dinner tonight.

In all, more than 10 million Murricans who didn’t have health insurance last year now have it this year. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet some corporate media outlets still refer to its “disastrous rollout.”

What disaster?

What did I miss?

Wait, you mean because some people had trouble logging on to a massive, never-before-attempted online enrollment system for a few weeks, the ACA is a disaster?

In that case, I wonder what we might call a health care system wherein some 40 million people routinely find themselves shut out of simple medical care. An annoyance? Business as usual?

I’ll go with the latter. That is, it was business as usual until Barack Obama got his ACA through the Congress in 2010. The Act profoundly changed the way we provide medical care in this holy land.

Sawyer/ABC

Former Republican Flack Diane Sawyer Reports

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I’m not in love with the ACA, mind you. But until we have universal, single-payer health coverage in the United States, it’ll have to do. And it’s one hell of a lot better than what we had before.

And if the Dems had any brains, they’d run with that ball through this year’s mid-term elections. They’ve got at least 10 million votes in their pockets right now.

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11/19/2013
3 Comments
Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama, Health Care Reform, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, New York Post, Philip Nobile, William Manchester

Highest Office In The Land Hot Air

Paper Tyrant

Can we lay to rest once and for all the absurd fiction that Barack Obama is a fierce tyrant who at any moment will seize all our guns, march us off to re-education camps, and otherwise crush us under his jackboot?

You know, the picture of him as the despot who’ll change this holy land forever as promulgated by Me Party-ists, Right Wing talk radio hosts, Fox and Friends personalities, and other reality-challenged stutterers and judderers?

Obama

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Because, after all, the first Kenyan-born, communist, socialist, abortionist, coke-snorting, gay-sex-loving Commander in Chief wasn’t even able to convey to his staff and the heads of all appropriate federal departments that his signature health care reform had damned well better roll out smoothly or somebody’s ass would be on fire.

BHO’s background, as the sane among us realized from the get-go, was not that of even a sergeant-at-arms but more as a maître d’. He was a community organizer, for pity’s sake, something that squawking heads like Sarah Palin made hay out of back when she had pretenses to relevance. That means he was schooled and expert at gathering everybody ’round and hearing their opinions and suggestions, no matter how fercockter they may be. Community organizers are loath to tell anyone to shut up, to get with the program, to refrain — please! — from insisting for the twenty-three-thousandth time that such and such an alderman or mayor be forthwith brought up on charges of crimes against humanity.

Community organizers are conciliators. They’re listeners. They’re includers. Even if those who are to be included bring as much to the party as your wacky pack-rat uncle who refuses to go online because…, well, because.

They are not martinets. Nor are they mighty brigadier generals who’ll mold a disparate bunch of farm boys and street corner toughs into a single-minded fighting machine.

They persuade people to press doorbells.

They do not say things like, Goddamn it. This project better come out right. If not, I’m gonna eat you for breakfast!

And this is the guy who hundreds of thousands of loons fear will put the nation in shackles?

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“Serenity” at 30,000 feet

I know you’re dying for news like this: JFK who was whacked 50 years ago this week, apparently died happy. At least that’s what the ever-reliable New York Post has to say.

The Prez and Jackie, according to a piece in yesterday’s tabloid, “joined the mile high club” during a flight from San Antonio to Houston the afternoon before his fateful drive toward the triple overpass. According to writer Philip Nobile, historian William Manchester wrote that as Air Force One flew over Texas, the Kennedys “enjoyed their last hour of serenity” in their private cabin.

Dallas, November 1963

The Serene Couple

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Gird yourself for  tons more dispatches along these lines as the half-century celebration continues this week.

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