Why Contraception Should Not Be Covered

In case you haven't heard the Tea Party reasoning behind their claim that contraception should not be covered in a medical plan (other than the claim that contraception is evil), you might want to listen to my story.

Yes, I know that my mother and father told me that I had been born in a hospital, which implies that a pregnancy ends in a medical procedure, but a close examination of the facts reveals their ignorance. My father was not present when I was born (fathers used to not be allowed near a birth). My mother was unconscious at the time. As a consequence, neither knew exactly where or when I was born. For example, I might have been born in the back seat of a Hudson Hornet in the parking lot. All my parents could report to me was something a doctor, seeking a fee, had told them, mere hearsay.

New Teeth

My great-grandparents lived long enough for me to remember them, and one thing I recall is that my Irish great-grandmother, Mary (Berry) Strickland, who came over on the boat in 1865, loved FDR. Some provision of the New Deal paid for her to get nice white false teeth. She was old but she still liked to chew. My great-grandfather, Sylvester Streeter Strickland, became so envious of her oral beauty that he attempted to qualify for new white teeth by jerking out his old yellow fangs with a pair of pliers. He managed one or two, and then my father found him in the garage and talked him out of the rest of what had become a desperate struggle.

Contrast that with today. ObamaCare offers to pay for false teeth for certain snaggle-toothed dwellers in the Deep South. They hate Obama for it. They hope to get even.

Who is Mitt RawMoney? (AKA Romummy)

One reason it's hard to find the core of Mitt RawMoney is that he is a bigger liar than Rush Limbaugh. He lies tirelessly. It's embarrassing. He's a tsunami of lies. It's no wonder no one likes him. But the charge that he lacks a core is mistaken. RawMoney has one. You can see it in the gaffs that he makes--gaffs occur when he forgets to lie. He reveals himself.

What his gaffs demonstrate is that RawMoney is a straightforward greed-monkey who measures issues and people in terms of profit and loss. He has no empathy. "I like to fire people," he said on TV. He's not a liberal or a conservative. Profit and loss have made him rich in the financial world. He's proud of his thefts. He refuses to apologize for grinding the faces of the poor. And he has no idea how other people react to his gaffs--he assumes blindly that people admire him.

RawMoney is in a position that Henry J. Kaiser once described for me, a corporate leader surrounded by well-paid yes men and cut off from common sense and reality. It has not yet occurred to him to ask how many corporate leaders have been elected President of the United States, so that is what he will be offering the voters, corporate leadership, a candidacy preaching the virtues of corporate greed. Wow.

Parking in SF

San Francisco has begun a program to clear additional parking places for the rich in the downtown area. Soon it will cost as much as $6 an hour to park there. Only the rich will can afford that. The political thinking is that the poor can park a few miles away and hike into town, working off a few hotdogs and window shopping along the way. You might think that this program favors those wise enough to be born to wealthy parents and inherit millions, but it is only a minor charity for the doomed. You remember what it says in the Bible: "Sooner shall a rope pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter Heaven." The rich are going to Hell. Let's not make them walk.

THE SELF DEFEATING

Jorge Luis Borges once published an essay in which he expressed his surprise when, in 1944, the Fascists of Argentine seemed pleased by the liberation of Paris by Allied troops. That event was, after all, a defeat for their side. Borges concluded two things: that the Fascists knew on some level that they were out of touch with reality and that some part of them wanted to lose.

This brings me to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. After his latest primary wins, Romney relaxed on TV by boasting of his enormous wealth and saying, with a sneer, that he refused to apologize for it. That was not what an increasingly troubled middle class wanted to hear. Meanwhile Santorum had flown to the largely bilingual Puerto Rico in order to criticize its upcoming primary voters, most of whom speak Spanish as their native tongue, for speaking Spanish.

These two fools are out of touch with reality, and some part of them understands that and desperately wants to lose the election.

The Good News

Years back Chris O'Sullivan told a lot of us that he no longer watched TV news programs, finding them uninformative. He was in a position to know, having worked once for Chris Mathews. I continued to watch TV news. Then another friend, Diane, told a lot of us that she enjoyed watching Rachel Maddow--as entertainment. It wasn't really news, she said.

A few years later I think I understand what Chris and Diane were saying. I was helped, probably, by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who present news-as-comedy in the tradition of Mort Sahl. In fact, if you watch Stewart and Colbert, you will be more entertained and about as well informed as if you watch ABC or PBS news. Stewart and Colbert are less sunk in gloom than Amy Goodman and less crazy (and much less nasty) than Rush Limbaugh, an entertainer of ancient white men and the women who obey them.

Aside from a few brute facts ("Obama has been elected President"), there is no news that matters on TV. What you see is interviews with Republican and Democratic spinners, inside the Beltway rubbishy analysis (same old hands repeating one another, totally out of touch with Kansas and California), a range of views from middle to middle-right, and no grasp of why anything is happening. For example, no one seems able to explain why President Obama keeps repeating that "nothing is off the table" in our crisis with Iran. Why is he threatening a future bombing of Iran? My hope is that it is his way to stalling Israel from bombing Iran immediately. But that's just a guess. No one on TV seems to know.

Americans know little. Most of us in Mississippi don't know that Obama is a Christian. In Alabama we believe that the world is 6,000 years old. In San Francisco voters work hard to make circumcision illegal. In Sonoma a campaign against fluoride is waging, perhaps to save the endangered cavity.

Meanwhile I watch MSNBC--it is amusing.

Painful

Chris Smith in the PD reports that Calvin Trillin said of the GOP candidates for President that "they are to a political satirist what cavities are to a dentist."

A Big Fat Idiot

Rush Limbaugh, lumbering to the defense of Joseph Kony, said that the "Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops, to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That's what the lingo means, 'to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,' meaning capture or kill. So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and -- (interruption) no, I'm not kidding."

A Seat On A Plane

I don't always agree with Melissa Harris-Perry, but among the talkers on MSNBC she ranks first, along with Lawrence ODonnoll. Today she pointed out that it's not quite accurate to say that the Republicans who hate President Obama are racist. They hated President Clinton just as much, even though Clinton was a white centrist who lived in Wall Street's pocket. In the case of Obama the Republicans have a racist card to play--that's the difference. They use racism.

The question is why do Republicans hate mildly centrist Democrats like Clinton and Obama? It seems clear that the hatred is irrational, marked by accusations, in Obama's case, of his being a Fascist-Marxist-Islamist baby killer born in Kenya who wants to turn the USA into France. So loud and crazy is this campaign that there is almost no room for the Left to squeeze in its accusation that Obama leans to the Right.

The Republican base of angry old white men and the women who obey them has reason to be angry. The system has screwed them. Many have seen themselves or their children shoved back into the crowded narrow seats in the back of the airplane with the Latinos, pregnant women and African-Americans. They have been relegated to cheap seats when once they flew first class. Their place in the seating arrangements has changed. They don't know who did this to them, but they see the Latino sitting beside them and turn to face him and his President with white hot rage.

A Liberal President

One thing to keep in mind as we near the next Presidential election is this: that Barack Obama is the most liberal President to win the office since LBJ.

Even odder, the second most liberal President since LBJ was Richard Nixon. (Carter and Clinton, two Southern moderates, aided the deregulation process that has enriched the 1% and demonized the working class.)

We've climbed a long way down the ladder.

Rumors of War

Rumors of a war against Iran are circulating. With the exception of Ron Paul, the Republican Presidential candidates seem eager for a war. They are blustering like puppet Netanyahus. The public apparently wants Israel to bomb Iran, which would be nuts. My sense is that President Obama is working to avoid the conflict. If he persists his position might cost him re-election. I tend to be pragmatic about these matters but not when it comes to an unprovoked attack on another country. We cannot, in good conscience, attack or support an attack on Iran.

I haven't seen anything that convinces me that Iran is making a nuclear weapon. And if they are, I don't see how that gives another country the right to attack them. European and American intelligence sources have found no evidence that Iran is about to make a bomb. Nada. But the bluster continues to build. It's an election issue.

What will the impact of an Iran war be on the world's economic system? Just the rumor of war has driven up gasoline prices each day, every single day, for the last month.