I'll get back to using this as a journal instead of a social soapbox (below). For that I have http://gigspad.blogspot.com/ (Slippery Slope). The events have high and low points. After an exhaustive search, Martha has found a job. Back in sales with a firm that is actually a sister company of her current employer, Budget Blinds, it focuses on organizational design components; closets, offices, garages, and appears to be easier to work and more lucrative. So on one hand, we can count on making some financial headway, but it will be full-time a juggling act for us to manage. But the boys are older and we need them to step up to the need.
The most pleasurable event was a reunion of Dixon staff at the Monocle. Charlie Smith and Scott Schearer organized it. Mary Dahm and her husband Keith came in for it and Kevin Gillogly showed up - among others. We passed cell phones around talking to the Senator and Gene Callahan and reminisced about old times. A wonderful evening.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Speaking of the Paranoid
Per that last entry about the emptiness of the right's agenda and its domination by bizarre paranoid fantasies; today Harold Myerson had an editorial in the Washington Post on the very subject -- Land of the Paranoid. This is especially relevant as it comes on the heels of the Tuscon shooting which, despite their denials, is a direct result of this kind of demonizing and polarizing ranting.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
The Vapid Right
I don't usually post social commentary here....but in some cases, it seems appropriate:
Two columns recently together offered a wonderful illustration of what's so seriously wrong with the Republican party -- especially as dominated by the delusional right wing. Steven Pearlstein in the The Washington Post on Jan 6 published Let's Kill This GOP Canard in which he wonderfully itemizes the complete lack of common sense, financial and employment sense, public health sense, and even decency that animates what passes for Republican policy. He notes that much of the intransigence smacks of McCarthy era redbaiting and "rather than contributing to the political dialogue, it is a substitute for serious discussion. And the fact that it continues unabated suggests that Republicans are not ready to compromise or to govern." The reason for that disposition was wonderfully described by E.J. Dionne in The Post on the same day with "Conservative Advice for a Congress of Professors," in which he observes that the Republican leadership (and especially their grassroots) is animated by abstractions; idealized theories that are worshiped with no practical value. As Dionne says, "Their rhetoric is nearly devoid of talk about solving practical problems - how to improve our health care, education and transportation systems, or how to create more middle-class jobs. Instead, we hear about things we can't touch or see or feel, about highly general principles divorced from their impact on everyday life." We hear the same old canards....cut taxes (even while ignoring ballooning deficits), cut spending, tort reform as a remedy for health care. There seems to be a complete and overriding denial of anything that is inconvenient or conflicts with the ideology -- whether it is factually based or not. The Speaker, unbelievably, adheres to this notion the America has the best health care system in the world, when in fact it repeatedly rates below at least a dozen other countries and at double the cost! The best we can hope for is that their rhetoric is pandering to their base (as insulting as that is) who rally to fantasies of an idealized past that never existed and paranoid demonizing of enemies who they need "to take our country back from." If that's the case, maybe there's hope that there's some rationality lurking under the vapid surface.
Two columns recently together offered a wonderful illustration of what's so seriously wrong with the Republican party -- especially as dominated by the delusional right wing. Steven Pearlstein in the The Washington Post on Jan 6 published Let's Kill This GOP Canard in which he wonderfully itemizes the complete lack of common sense, financial and employment sense, public health sense, and even decency that animates what passes for Republican policy. He notes that much of the intransigence smacks of McCarthy era redbaiting and "rather than contributing to the political dialogue, it is a substitute for serious discussion. And the fact that it continues unabated suggests that Republicans are not ready to compromise or to govern." The reason for that disposition was wonderfully described by E.J. Dionne in The Post on the same day with "Conservative Advice for a Congress of Professors," in which he observes that the Republican leadership (and especially their grassroots) is animated by abstractions; idealized theories that are worshiped with no practical value. As Dionne says, "Their rhetoric is nearly devoid of talk about solving practical problems - how to improve our health care, education and transportation systems, or how to create more middle-class jobs. Instead, we hear about things we can't touch or see or feel, about highly general principles divorced from their impact on everyday life." We hear the same old canards....cut taxes (even while ignoring ballooning deficits), cut spending, tort reform as a remedy for health care. There seems to be a complete and overriding denial of anything that is inconvenient or conflicts with the ideology -- whether it is factually based or not. The Speaker, unbelievably, adheres to this notion the America has the best health care system in the world, when in fact it repeatedly rates below at least a dozen other countries and at double the cost! The best we can hope for is that their rhetoric is pandering to their base (as insulting as that is) who rally to fantasies of an idealized past that never existed and paranoid demonizing of enemies who they need "to take our country back from." If that's the case, maybe there's hope that there's some rationality lurking under the vapid surface.
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