Category Archives: Misc

A great reason for universal healthcare…

Well…during this whole contraception nonsense that has been roiling the waters in DC over the past couple of weeks, one thing that gets lost is the fact that it is the system of healthcare and insurance that is employer provided that is causing the problem. The patchwork of the types of employers from straight business to religious based organizations and making rules that fit all of them just raises costs for everyone in part because that patchwork requires many more regulators and administrators than a Medicare for all plan would do…and, as I’ve said many times before and that studies have shown, the overhead costs of Medicare for all is around 9% of the program; not the almost 30% that private insurance costs. There is one more thing that most people who have jobs and insurance don’t understand…that when you get older like me, employers won’t hire our cadre since they think it will inflate their healthcare costs…something that could be taken away if there was a single payer system…then we could be hired on our merits, not on an age issue that we have no control over….geez…

Okay…I did want to add one last thing…nothing to do with politics but it WAS Joe Walsh on the Grammys Sun night…it wasn’t just a cocktail induced haze….yay…going out to see if I can find the actual footage….

The boredom is crushing…

Well…it has been a crushingly boring day today so I’m back to just do anything to get my brain working again…I’m just not a basketball fan but that is the only thing that is on…I’ve even read the paper twice already so that is done for the day and it is only 3…and it is 4 1/2 more hours until the Wings come on…there has been no help on the political side, either, so I can’t really report anything there…so, what to do? I’ve got the Post up on another tab so maybe I’ll go over there and look for a minute…okay, I’m back from there and I could write one about the whole contraception controversy…one of the things that I find startling is that all of the repub candidates are against women’s contraception…how can this be in 2012? How can the party of limited government want to take away a basic right from 50% of the population? I guess it’s because they always want to limit the rights of people they don’t agree with….and that, I think, is the problem with the repubs these days…when they get elected, they only govern for those who voted for them…they lack the big vision necessary for such a complex country but also continue with the damn doom and gloom every day…I just don’t want to hear it anymore…geez…

Just a short one about the Grand Rapids Press…

Well…The Grand Rapids Press has been apart of my life since I learned to read so many years ago and, with that history, I have to comment on the changes that have come to that paper in the past few weeks. I know that the newspaper business has been in decline for the past couple of decades but why do the owners of the Press want to speed that decline? That is exactly what will happen with the de-contenting of the paper…making it just a compiler of articles that you can get in many other places. Don’t these people understand that the reason people read newspapers is to get something unique; that will deal with news from the local community but to also have depth of national and world reporting along with commentary that reflects all of the differing points of view? Over the past few years, the Press has abandoned it’s guise of fairness to pick up the banner of the far right with people like Michelle Malkin and the rest of the Fox News propaganda machine that do nothing but hate Obama and do everything in their power to minimize the initiatives that he has proposed to benefit all Americans…not just those that Fox News gets paid to shill for. One of the last comments I want to make is that with the proliferation of sources for news, the idea is that people will pay for value in those sources…but yesterday, when I picked up the Press to purchase it and noticed that it was about 20 pages worth of nothing for the new price of a dollar, I finally realized that there is no longer value there…so, after more that 50 years of reading the Press, I will have to say goodbye….the million plus people in west Michigan deserve better…geez…

One last short thought on Komen…

Well…started to think outside the box with my conspiracy hat on tonight (no, it’s not made out of tin foil) and came up with this wild idea that I haven’t heard anywhere else. What if Komen was trying to put a competitor out of business? Hear me out….most of the services that the two organizations support are similar and there is quite a bit of overlap in the communities they serve….so what if Komen wanted to be the only provider so they threw their support behind the right wing conspiracies to destroy Planned Parenthood. I know, it’s something out of “The Sopranos” but it could be happening…you heard it here first….and probably last…

A few short thoughts…

Well…I just wanted to comment a little on some things that really don’t have the meat to be an entire article here….yeah, I know, I’ve turned really small ideas into whole columns before but I don’t feel like it today…so, here goes…I am a little heartened by the unemployment numbers that came out the other day and my hope meter for ever finding another job went up a little but I know I have to temper it a little since this has happened before and I’m still not working…I did like the poll numbers that came out a few days ago, too…where Obama is 6-7 points ahead of ole Mitt in the general election polling but I do understand that a lot can happen in the next 10 months…one of the striking things from one of those polls is the results of a question that asked if people liked ole Mitt more the more they heard him….and 54% of the people didn’t…so now ole Mitt is going to not say anything the rest of the election cycle? Then there was the study done over the past couple of years that found that conservatives in the US are much less intelligent than the rest of the population…things that anyone would know if you ever listen to them…Oh, one last thing, the right wing idiot that was coordinating the attack by Komen on PP has resigned (or was fired)…I say good riddance….there is no place for politics in health issues, especially womens health that has been the hotbed of controversy since I was little…

If Karl Rove is offended, they must have done something right…

Well…I missed the big Clint Eastwood ad during the super bowl yesterday but I had heard that it was something special so I just went out and watched it…and a big part of the reason was that Karl Rove was offended by it saying that the phrase “it’s halftime in America and it’s time to play the second half” is just a thinly veiled endorsement of a second Obama term. Karl, any time you are offended by anything just tells me that who is speaking is on the right track…why would anyone care what ole Karl thinks anyway? This is the guy who brought us the nastiest, small politics in American history and planned and abetted the outing of Valerie Plame which put many of our CIA people at risk just to cover up the lies about African uranium that the bushies pushed to get us into war in Iraq. My take on the ad was this: that America has fought through the problems of the past few years and has stayed in the game…has gotten to the second half of the biggest game in our lives and now can build on what we did in the first and keep fighting to win…Karl…you ignored the fact that this was an ad that ran at halftime of a football game…what a more appropriate place for the metaphor that was used? I applaud Chrysler for trying to strengthen the American value that we are all in this together and we can win if we keep working together…something that ole Karl or the rest of the repubs will never understand…geez…

Why does the right hate women?

Well…I was vacillating quite a bit whether to write one about this topic but I felt I had to…I’m sure you’ve heard of the huge fiasco between the Susan Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood that has played out over the past few days where Komen decided to stop funding womens health services through Planned Parenthood for some reason that kept changing as the week went by…which, to me, stinks of trumped up nonsense. The initial reason was that they will no longer fund any organization that is under investigation…and, it just so happens, that some obscure, extreme right wing congressman has opened a “personal” investigation into Planned Parenthood on whether they are paying for abortions through illegal means. What I think happened is a coordinated attack on Planned Parenthood by this congressman and people at Komen who colluded to give cover to the right wing pressure that has been building on Komen to cut ties with PP since it is the right’s favorite target in it’s attempt to put women back in their place and deny them the care that is sometimes only available through PP. How many more times do we have to see and listen to these right wing idiots who are hell bent on making life harder on the poor? When are women from the right and left going to say enough, that their bodies belong to them and for everyone else to butt out? I hope it’s soon, and I hope that Komen collapses with the loss of it’s backbone…geez…

The Supreme Court finally got one right…

Well…I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the fourth amendment’s sanction against police searches without the use of a warrant this past week. This case stemmed from a police action in DC where a suspects car was tagged with a GPS unit without the use of a warrant (actually, the warrant they had obtained had expired) so they could track his movements for weeks on end. The court got it right to throw this case out and support the overturning of the suspects conviction, stating that the use of the GPS unit was a “search” that was covered under the fourth amendment….I have not had much to applaud from the Robert’s court that gave us “Citizens United”, and has been the type of activist court the the repubs howl about…but, this one time, they got it right…now they need to extend this protection to other intrusions that come from the tracking of cell phones without warrants that some police departments have started to use…

Is anyone surprised?

Well… I have to laugh at the surprise that has been coming out of some quarters in Europe that the economy there has slowed markedly over the past few months with the head of the IMF now saying the continent will go back into recession this year. What did they expect? When you slash spending and pay for workers, the result has always been slowing growth…just as Keynes postulated in his economic theories that have been so derided by the right here in the US. One of the things that everyone seems to be ignoring in the headlong rush to austerity across the globe is that you can never cut your way to growth….that cuts in spending and infrastructure investment will certainly mean years of slower growth instead of the robust growth that comes from deficit spending in a recession. I feel we have lost the ability to be objective in economics as the partisanship of politics and ideology have blinded us to what works in climbing out of recession…but, I think that is the aim of the repubs with their only stated goal over the last 3 years is to defeat Obama; no matter how much damage is done to the country…geez…

One last thing for today…

Well…it has been a prolific day for me and I wish I knew why so I could repeat it….this will be short one and probably should have been put in the musings one that I did previously…but I didn’t so here goes….the one reason that companies always give for sending jobs overseas is the huge difference in labor costs between the US and China, but a new study that has come out in the past couple of days is that the difference is only about 20% of the total product cost…so, for example, if you have a 200 dollar flat screen made in China….it could be made and sold here for 240 dollars and would put many of our neighbors back to work and start to restore the American dream. I, for one, would happily pay the extra 20% if that would mean one of the unemployed here in Michigan (maybe me) could get a good job. One of the things we all must remember is that, with the hollowing out of our manufacturing base, we have permanently lowered demand so much that we can’t grow our way out of the malaise the economy is in….geez…