Mehtna

Awesomely silly, from that source of silly awesomeness, Boing Boing.

The Liberal Media Convenes

We met for breakfast this morning, one of those breathtaking cool and bright Northern California mornings we who live here take for granted. Seven old friends, journalists (or ex-journalists) who used to work together. Three women, four men, four Jews, one African-American, two on Social Security, two Easterners, two Midwesterners, one Southerner, one Southwesterner, one Californian, all more or less straight (although two of us have gay kids). And the question arose: Who were we voting for?

Hillary.
Hillary.
Maybe Obama, maybe Edwards, maybe Richardson.
Hillary reluctantly, though Edwards and Obama inspire more enthusiasm.
Richardson.
Hillary.
Edwards.

Consensus: It's going to be Hillary. But can she win? Is the America we don't live in -- the non-intellectual, non-affluent, non-urban, non-hyperconscious, non-reading, Fox-watching America -- going to go for Hillary?

A chill went through the room.

Et Incarnatus Est

I guess if I had to call myself anything, which I don't, it would be "Christian." Mainly because I was raised in a home that was rather unenthusiastically Methodist. (I really think of myself as a "secular progressive," because whatever Bill O'Reilly is, I don't want to be.)

Christmas has become an exhausting holiday, though. Everyone works so hard to make it merry, and you can see the effort. But it's the only Christian holiday that still holds meaning for me. Easter? No. Because I can't bring myself to believe in the Resurrection. Sentimentally, perhaps, I would like to believe in something after this life, but it all seems so implausible -- and even a little unnecessary. What would heaven be for, anyway?

But Christmas is the holiday that recognizes the one Christian mystery that I can still put some belief behind: the Incarnation. The idea that God, whoever or whatever that is, could become, for whatever reason, a human being. Where I part with the Christians is in holding that Jesus is the only incarnation. I think maybe he had a lot more of God in him than most of us do, sure. But there are surely a lot of other people who have manifested the divine. Moses and the Buddha and Lao-Tse and Muhammad; Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Sappho; Dante and Chaucer and Hildegarde of Bingen and Teresa of Avila; Shakespeare and Cervantes and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe; Bach (for sure), Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven; Goethe and Keats and Shelley; Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf; James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the Marxes (including Karl); Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin; Voltaire and Moliere; Descartes and Kant and Nietzsche; Dryden, Pope, Swift; Leonardo and Michelangelo and Vermeer and Daumier and Picasso and Hogarth and Tenniel; Walt Kelly and Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson; Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks; Garbo and Dietrich, the two Hepburns, Stanwyck, Marilyn and Elvis; Fred Astaire and Bruce Springsteen and Willie Nelson and ....

Merry Christmas to them all, and to you and your favorite incarnations.

A Sick System

I knew that there was a health-care crisis, and as an old lefty I've always believed that the government should do something about it.

But it's never been a matter of personal urgency. I've always had fully paid health insurance. But now, having retired, I have to deal with plans and fees and deductibles and limits and all the other headaches that millions of people have been dealing with.

Even with Medicare, there are choices to be made on prescription drug plans and supplemental coverage. And they cost money, and involve "gaps" and limits and all sorts of headache-inducing stuff, largely because Congress has kowtowed to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Even so, it's a lot easier than dealing directly with insurance companies.

What kind of "health care" system allows a teenage girl to die while waiting for a liver transplant? You probably read the story: Nataline Sarkysian's doctors said she needed a liver transplant, but her insurer, CIGNA, declined to pay for it because the surgery was "experimental" and because there was no guarantee that it would be effective. And while the family was appealing the decision, she died.

Why is health care less important than highways, or schools, or police forces, or fire departments? We trust the government to use our taxes to fund and manage these things. Why are we so reluctant to let the government take charge of seeing to it that Americans have guaranteed access to the health care they need? If we belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, why is "life" being neglected?

Why is a governmental bureaucracy supposedly less efficient than a corporate bureaucracy? The standard conservative argument against universal health care is that it's too important to be left to bureaucrats. But it was a corporate bureaucracy that determined Nataline Sarkisyan's fate -- on the basis not of the patient's welfare but of the company's profits. My dealings with the government's health bureaucracy -- Social Security and Medicare -- have been both efficient and helpful. My dealings with insurance company bureaucracies? Not so much.

Go With the Grain

Freerice.com is an intriguing site that claims to do two things: help you build your vocabulary and feed the world's hungry. I'm not certain of its effectiveness on either count, but it's an ingenious attention-grabber.

The premise is that you're given a series of words to define. Each word has four purported synonyms. If you pick the right synonym, you earn 20 grains of rice, to be donated to the United Nations World Food Program. The ads on the site pay for the rice.

When you miss a word, you're given an easier one. When you get one right, you're given a slightly harder word. The site keeps track of your score, too. I got up to level 50 a couple of times, but fell back to level 46 or 47 pretty quickly. At the upper levels, you're getting words like apologue, petrous, secern, axenic, furcula, altazimuth, and retrorse. Time for some educated guessing.

Something Phishy

The government's do-not-call list is a great accomplishment, virtually wiping out telemarketing calls in our house. We still get the occasional guilt-inducing charity calls -- tickets to the policemen's ball and such. But for the most part silence.

Lately, however, we've been plagued by robocalls that have either skirted the do-not-call list or are in outright violation of it. The ones that claim to be from "your credit card company" offering a way of lowering your rates. Since these don't identify themselves as any bank or credit union with which I have a card, I'm pretty sure they're phishing scams. But I don't know how to make them stop. They usually offer an option -- "press 9" -- to remove your number from their list. I've pressed nine or two or whatever number they ask for a few times, but to no avail. Instead, I'm now getting calls that offer to extend my "vehicle's warranty" which they tell me with some urgency is about to expire. (The warranty on my "vehicle" expired a long time ago.)

So now I'm beginning to wonder if the opt-out number is a scam, too -- as on e-mail spam, which often asks you to reply if you want to be removed from their mailing list. I learned a long time ago not to do that.

Anyone know of a way to report these guys?

A Cure for the Blues

A Trivial Matter

In thinking about the current race for president, I noticed that we seem to have an unusual number of candidates whose surnames end in vowel sounds: Obama, Giuliani, Huckabee, Romney, Tancredo.

• Only three presidents had surnames that ended with vowel sounds. Can you name them?
• How about the four whose surnames ended with a silent e?
• Sixteen of the forty-two men who have been president have surnames that end in what consonant?
• What is the most common presidential first name? (There are six who share it.)

Answers in the comments section.

Politics as Ususal

Sorry for the paucity of posts the past few days. This blogging thing, I’m told, only works if you keep it up regularly. I’ve been blaming my dilatoriness on this head cold and on a review deadline. The cold is still with me but the deadline has been met.

And there’s good news on the DSL front: The problem seems to have resolved itself. I finally did a wholesale shutdown. I reset the modem – that paperclip trick where you poke a little hole in the back of the thing. And when everything came back up, voila! The VCR, on the other hand, still seems to be stuck in a time warp four and a half hours away.

I’ve been meaning to write something about politics – one of those so-you-know-where-I’m-coming-from posts.

My parents were New Deal Democrats. Having suffered the blows of the Depression, they thought of FDR as the Great Deliverer and of his party as the hope of the future. And even when most of their kinfolk deserted the party in the 1960s, they remained true to it.

I’ve never found a compelling reason to depart from their beliefs – or at least their political beliefs. I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a Republican. And I certainly can’t find a reason to do so this year. Where did they get these guys?

• Romney is the Oakland of politicians: There is no there there.
• McCain withstood the torture of the Vietnamese, but the loony right has made him strip himself of all his once-praised integrity.
• Giuliani is the product of media hype, a weird little man whom the careless media converted into a hero after 9/11 – to the amusement and disgust of many New Yorkers. But now all the sordid little secrets are oozing out of his closet.
• Huckabee? Now, really. President Huckabee? Never having voted for a Republican I’m sure not going to start with one who’s also a Southern Baptist preacher and doesn’t believe in evolution.
• Thompson? If we have to elect a character actor, why not Paul Giamatti? At least he’s a good one.

No, I can easily vote for almost any of the Democrats. I’ve never had any problem doing that – even with Hubert Humphrey.

I think I like Edwards the most, because what he’s said about poverty and health care makes sense, and even though he’s doing the usual waffle on gay marriage, at least his wife came out for it. But the media have been unkind, focusing on the $400 haircut. So he’ll wind up third in the early primaries, and by the time I get to vote in California, he’ll be out of the picture.

Obama is charismatic and incredibly smart, but I’d rather wait to vote for him in 2016. I’m just not ready yet to vote for someone young enough to – gulp – be my son? Back in 1987, I wrote a piece for the Mercury News’ now-defunct Perspective section in which I bemoaned the fact that half of the Democratic candidates were younger than me.

I may have to vote (shudder) Republican next year.

It's not that I like any of their candidates. George Bush makes me think of those Ralph Bellamy characters Cary Grant took Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunne away from. And I want to see Bob Dole stand in front of a mirror; I'll bet he doesn't reflect in it.

But at least they're old.

Not real old -- just old enough to be president. Bush is 63, Dole 64. Which makes them old enough to be my . . . well, my uncle.

The “George Bush” referred to there is H.W., of course. And no, I didn’t really vote for him – I voted for Dukakis. But there are times when I almost feel nostalgic for him. That’s because of his son, who makes me think of what one of the Ralph Bellamy characters might have fathered if he’d married the kind of character played by Gail Patrick or Binnie Barnes: a selfish, resentful spoiled brat.

The younger Bush’s relentless incompetence, combined with his stubborn refusal to use government as anything but a vehicle for enriching his own kind, has put us in a terrible predicament. John Dean, who should know, since he worked for a president who pointed us in this direction, calls it “broken government.” I fear that it’s true, that it will take years to remake the federal government into an efficient and beneficial instrument of policy, to weed out all of the hacks and incompetents who have infested the Justice department, the intelligence agencies, and all of the agencies concerned with quality of life, such as the FDA, OSHA, FEMA, the EPA and so on.

Which is why I’m reluctantly deciding to cast my vote for Hillary. She’s the one who has direct knowledge of the way the federal government is run. The question is whether she knows how to make it run again.

Five years ago, I reviewed Joe Klein’s book “The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton” for the Mercury News. Since then, Klein has become something of a joke in the blogosphere – indeed, he’s often referred to as “Joke Line” – because he’s stuck in the centrism of the 1990s, which often makes him urge Democrats to be more conciliatory to the right, and occasionally betrays him into uninformed and wrongheaded characterizations of the left. But he did have some shrewd and informed things to say about the Clintons, for example:

''Over time, I decided that the wisest course regarding the Clinton marriage was to be indiscriminately credulous, to believe all the stories: He was chronically unfaithful. They fought like harpies. They were political partners. They were best friends. They loved each other madly, in every sense of the word. None of these were mutually exclusive. . . . Which is not to say that it wasn't a stupefyingly weird relationship.''

I also wrote:

''The Natural'' is weakest when Klein attempts to sum up the concrete achievements of the Clinton administration -- but Klein can give you a sense of the human beings at work. He's particularly good at quick-hit descriptions. Al Gore, for example, ''had a genius for subservience (and also, unfortunately, the submerged, constricted anger that often accompanies such passivity).'' Klein says of Ralph Nader that his ''personal asceticism and low-key style masked a sour and unrelenting demagogue.'' And Hillary Clinton's staff ''suffered from Tippi Hedren Syndrome: They looked as if they were about to be attacked by birds.''

Clinton's gift was an ability to overcome crisis -- unfortunately, many of the crises he faced were of his own making. The drifting, indecisive first term, with its disastrous bungling of health-care reform, led to the Republican triumphs in the election of 1996. This proved to be the challenge Clinton needed, Klein says: The ''battle against a rigid American mullah named Newt Gingrich would consume the next several years. It would prove successful; indeed, it will probably stand as a textbook example of how a tactically astute President can transform a position of weakness into strength.''

I don’t know how much of this tactical astuteness has been transferred to Hillary. I suspect that she possesses more of it than her husband does. And I feel sure that she knows the ways of Washington far better than any of the other candidates – firsthand knowledge.

And because I think we’re going to be in serious trouble unless the next president knows how to make Washington work – for all of us – I guess that’s why I’m hoping she wins.

That said, I’ll probably still cast my primary vote for Obama … or Edwards.

Puzzlements

You know that bit of techsnark: RTFM? (If you don't, you can find the definition here.) Well, I'm the guy who RsTFM. I've always been a friend to technology, as long as I don't have to look under the hood. I can string cables with the best of them. I can hook up the stereo to the TV and the printer to the tower and the modem to the router. So why am I lost in computer hell with my DSL problem? Gimme a break.

Moreover, I even know how to set the clock on a VCR. (Yes, I'm still using a VCR, mostly to tape shows for other people. I figure if I succumb to Tivo, I'll spend all my time watching stuff I shouldn't.) (Oh, and I've never had a VCR that blinks 12:00 when it hasn't been set. I've gone through a bunch of them since the mid-1980s, and every one of them has blinked --:-- instead.)

So, anyway, I reset the VCR in the living room after the last time the power went out. And I put it on automatic, so it checks for the time signal from the satellite box. But for some reason, it has reset itself so that it's four and a half hours off from Pacific Time. Right now, the clock on my computer tells me it's 11:50. The VCR is informing me that it's 7:20.

I know better than to ask a real techie for an explanation. ("The dilbert in the grommit has gone out of sync with the paxil. You should recycle the motown so it aligns with the dystrophy.") I can live with it. But I don't deserve it. I've been so nice to you machines.

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Another puzzlement: Why do people say stupid things to reporters? They surely can't believe what they're saying, can they?

Case in point, a woman in Iowa who told a reporter that she opposed a program to provide breakfasts for poor schoolkids. "I work hard for what I have. Why should I buy somebody else's kid breakfast?"

Jeez, lady, because you live in a society where things work together. You buy the kid breakfast so he can get an education and get a job so he can pay taxes too -- the taxes that provide you with roads to drive on, people to put out the fire that threatens to burn down your house, the army that's supposed to protect the country, the pipes that bring water to your house, and the cops who arrest those guys who didn't get good breakfasts as kids so they didn't get an education and therefore didn't get good jobs and wound up robbing your house instead.

Some people forget that promoting the general welfare is established as an American duty in the preamble to the Constitution.