Notgovernor Palin: Some Knives Don't Get Sharper

They look impressive.

The cheap Rambo knives that kids love, the ones with a gnarly black handle with dramatic chrome hand guards, a serrated edge with saw on the backside and a real compass in the stock. Kids love them because they look impressive from a distance, a cartoon of a real knife.

But you just can't sharpen the darn things. They are made of a cheap, brittle super hard "steel" that simply won't take an edge. A good knife, like my Forschner, Notch, has steel with that perfect balance, pliable enough to take an edge, hard enough to keep it. Notch stays razor sharp from being regularly pressed to the grindstone, but is not so soft it melts away from steady use.

Notgovernor Palin is a cheap knife. The past year has pressed her brain to the grindstone. She remains hard, brittle and dull. Her public pronouncements, whether on foreign policy, death panels or most recently worldwide monetary and energy policy have been infantile at best, Limbaugh parroting demagoguery at worst . Having them translated by a ghostwriter hasn't helped either, in fact, it might be better for her if she were her old opaque self. "What did she say?" is sometimes better than "She said WHAT?"

Perfect example is on her Facebook page now, and the comment in the latest Economist:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/10/the_price_of_oil.cfm

Reagan Would Have Been Disgusted

Reagan was wrong. But he was a good man.

Ronald Reagan looked at Socialism and the Soviets and saw evil. He looked at Capitalism and America and saw good. He saw totalitarianism as a system of chains. Where he saw those chains in America he tried to remove them. He believed, like Greenspan, that people were, if not "good", at least pragmatic enough to work together toward goals that lift all boats with the rising tide of prosperity.

What he forgot is that there is a reason we lock our doors at night.

The rise of Corporate rule here in America, evidenced by the continuing failures of the SEC and the chilling control of the Sickness and Death Industry over our federal government, has effectively driven Democracy out into the hallway where it can tweet all the hand-wringing liberals it wants, because it just doesn't matter anymore. Lobbyists and their cash run the legislative process now. Laws are for sale now, if you have the cabbage.

The only danger to the system is the smart voter,
so politicians use the "Men In Black" rule:
"A person is smart. People are dumb panicky animals,
and you know it."

The shameful drumming of fear into hate and hate into violence, the fracturing of America into hostile camps with the willful use of, well, evil would have sickened Reagan. Right or wrong he knew that bringing people together: in the hope for freedom, in the pursuit of prosperity was the only real way to do,well, good.

Where are we going now, Ronnie? Totalitarian Capitalism?
Do we walk backwards and sit beside China, hunkering down in the dirt to divide the spoils among the warlords and planning the next pogrom?

Senate Deckhand Max Baucus Saves Us

The line whipped overboard and the big rusty halibut hook grabbed the skipper and pulled him into the cold grey water.

It is one of the nightmare scenarios for Gulf of Alaska fishermen hauling up halibut in the late fall -- a taut line falls out of the block and the weight of fish and anchors pull it back to the bottom fast. Sharp hooks the size of half dollars click on the rail as they fly by.

Leaning over that line is the skipper. Unlike a crab skipper he is out on deck in full raingear, simultaneously driving the boat, controlling the hauler and gaffing the fish that flash up out of the darkness. If one of those flying hooks catches him- by the hand or the hip or the pants leg- it can pull him down under.

In this particular case (a story well known here in Kodiak and often retold in hushed tones at morning mug ups) the crew snapped into action. They threw the line back into the block and pulled the skipper up again, kicking and splashing like a halibut. The skipper used his deck knife and detached himself, but the weight of the water was filling his boots and sweatshirt, and he gasped and struggled as he drifted away from the boat.

One of the deckhands, Dave, acted quickly. Grabbing the throwing line and steel grapple hook he took aim and threw hard, striking the skipper directly in the forehead. The heavy hook bounced off and sank uselessly leaving a bloody dent in the skipper. Dave retrieved the hook and let fly once more, this time bouncing it off the skipper’s bald spot and pulling his raincoat over his head during retrieval. Becoming increasingly agitated, Dave sailed the hook out a third time and managed to pull one of the skipper’s boots off. The next toss was too long and the untethered line wound out completely and sank. Undaunted, Dave grabbed the long gaff hook and held it aloft, proposing to sink it into his skipper’s shoulder and land him like a halibut.

With the last of his strength the skipper waved his hands in surrender.

“No offense, Dave” he coughed “but can somebody else save me for a while?”

This story came to mind as I watched Senator Baucus trying to save us from the insurance companies, or the insurance companies from us, or whatever it is he is doing.


Single Payer was knocked out immediately.
The Public Option stripped of Senatorial support and thrown over the side of the Finance Committee‘s boat.
And now crewman Max has grabbed the mandate gaff. He is ready to sink it into the American uninsured and the American taxpayer and land them for the insurance companies. Companies who openly pay him to do that very thing.


No offense Max, but could someone else save us for a while?

Health Care, Alan Greenspan and The Big Corporation on the Prairie

We have created a monster.

It is an insatiable soulless entity with the face of Michael Landon and the tentacles of AIG. It is the Supercitizen: the American corporation, with all the legal rights of a human being. It will be in charge of your future health care.

Part of its mythology was shaped by Rose Lane, the daughter of "Little House On the Prairie"'s Laura Ingalls. She made a good living writing trashy celebrity pieces and editing (some say rewriting) her mother's memoirs. In "a white heat" she wrote a libertarian treatise that, along with the works of Ayn Rand, were germinating seeds of a social philosophy that United States federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was able to make an economic reality for eighteen years. Lane and Rand stressed self reliance and personal responsibility and that human endeavor must be free to follow its own path. Rand's novels are heady and strident, but Lane's "Little House" books provide a romantic American background for her ideas. Chief among them are that unencumbered freedom and personal responsibility create their own morality. Their mistake was in welcoming a legal mechanism- the corporation, into the family on the prairie. Greenspan believed in the power of competition to drive honest business practices and that free markets would cause corporations to act in the best long term interests of their shareholders.

A slump shouldered Greenspan admitted to the BBC this week that he was wrong. He went on to say that crises like the one we are in now will inevitably occur in the future because of "human nature". I suggest he is wrong again. They will occur again because we made corporations into citizens. They will occur because of corporate nature.

Which brings us to the President's health care reform speech to a joint session of Congress.

The Democrats roared and stamped, the Republicans shifted and barked like restless chimpanzees and even I was choking up as the President hauled out a deathbed letter from Senator Kennedy and tore into a magnificent end game. He really hit his stride at the end: like Jabbar throwing down skyhooks on a hot night, like Ruth pointing into the bleachers of Congress. He made his foes look petty and foolish, called on his allies to stop bickering and step up and do the right thing.

But whether they chortled in glee or screeched "You lie!", they all seemed to ignore the fact that the President just left the public option firmly tied to the tracks, wide eyed and squirming.

He called the public option just an "idea", just a "means to an end", and said what was important was competition in the market. Surely if the massive corporations wringing the profit out of sickness and death are forced to compete freely they will act in the best long term interests of the shareholders.

Maybe he should take a meeting with Greenspan.

Meanwhile, in the big courtroom across the street, the Supercitizen is shedding his shackles. If the Supreme Court acts as expected it will remove all encumberances to corporate purchase of our "public servants".

And whether you like it or not, my fellow American you are fast becoming more shareholder than citizen.

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousivMolt/idUSTRE5881R720090909
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2009/08/deregulation-as-crony-capitalism.html
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/08/10/090810crat_atlarge_thurman

Darth Palin and the Imperial Death Panel

I was talking about health care with Gabrielle LeDoux last year- a real conversation rather than a duel of slogans- it is not an easy subject if you do it right- death and pain and money and fear...

I was of the opinion that health insurance companies have become a defacto monopoly on wellness resources, one that has left us a sicker, poorer nation. I have become convinced that universal access to basic health care needed to be treated like public education or the national defense- something that makes us better as a country. She questioned where the government's obligation begins and ends.

In this context end of life issues came up. The moral obligation we have to the health of our elders and their understandable hesitance to lay helplessly in a hospital bed dying just slowly enough to run through their insurance and children's inheritance while those children watch them suffer long past the point that a loved pet would be put to rest. Gabrielle was of the opinion that a zero quality life with no purpose was not worth living, even if Uncle Sam is paying. Maybe especially then.

I tend to agree, but its not easy to pull the plug on Grandma. The old bird probably made you cookies when you were a kid. If only there were some kind of Death Panel (ideally one manned by bureaucrats with throbbing mutant brains) that could make these decisions for us, pushing numbered buttons that will flush our ailing elders down a series of tubes like bad batteries in the Matrix.

Of course as a Democrat I'm all for it. Thin the collective herd. Lucky for them Alaska's Not Governor, Mrs. Palin, has leaped to their defense.

Seemingly trying to fork more fertilizer on the blossoming career of Shannyn Moore, Mrs. Palin's Facebook writer has stuck to her guns on the existence of the nonexistent Death Panels in the health reform bill, which in actuality is an attempt to establish protocols for advising patients on their options at the end of life. Hospice and pain management and how long you want them to keep your heart beating inside your empty shell are not easy subjects, and the idea is to discuss them with your doctor and your family before you turn into a turnip.

Mrs. Palin's writer (the writing is not bad: clear and concise, unlike this) makes the astonishing assertion that such counseling, even though completely optional, amounts to a threat to the counselee because money for it it is included in a reform bill that also aims to cut costs in health care.

But what kind of counseling are dying people who are in pain getting now? Doesn't it amount to "How much money you got?"


Her writer goes on to question adviser Ezekiel Emanuel's concept of a sort of triage of health resources, concentrating them on those people most likely to get well. This is, at least, a worthy subject: (death and pain and money and fear), and yes, the idea of care being doled out according to your statistical likelihood at recovery is a bit creepy. But these decisions are being made now by computers calculating actuarial tables factoring in "preexisting conditions" and how just much blood can be squeezed from that turnip laying in that expensive hospital bed.

Death and pain and money and fear: that's what health care reform is really about. And at the end of her Facebook post Mrs. Palin's writer does a frightful trick: as a result of Emanuel's "priority curve" she goes on to predict health care "rationing". Of course the poor souls to be rationed don't have any health care at all right now.

The lousy commies.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=116471698434

Enough Dancing Mr President: Its Time to Throw Some Punches

There is a classic Saturday Night Live skit in which a clever caveman is widely admired by the tribe. Until a jealous hunter bashes in his brains while he sleeps.

"Now Grok is smartest!" the hunter explains to the audience.

The Republican party is sick of Obama being the smartest. And they are trying their hardest to bash in the brains of health care reform with their favorite rock: fear.

Like brimstone preachers they have conjured demons for every pew: health care reform will mean victory for the communists, mass executions of the elderly and will bankrupt the nation.

Mr.Obama they are not going to negotiate.

But it should be pointed out that they are fighting with rocks. They have brought hysterics to a brain fight. Nowadays smarter is stronger.

Get on your feet, Mr. President and step to the middle of the ring. You cannot negotiate this fight. Your opponent is a brute. But if you step up and start jabbing you can take him down. He is fat with lobbyist cash and flush with fearful rage, but the truth can make him sit.

If you abandon the "public option" as easily as you have "single payer" you have chosen to negotiate a fistfight. You are dozing while the caveman raises the rock.

Off Halibut Fishing

This morning we will put on bait and ice and groceries.
Tonight we will untie the boat and the skipper will steer her between the green and red cans and out, out, out -- away from the dirt and degradation, away from phones and friends and fools who keep us shackled to the ground.
Tomorrow we will hunt for halibut with pieces of pollock and strips of salmon stuck onto big round hooks. Tomorrow while the boat's big wheel chops the water beneath our feet we will bait and bait and bait. Under the aluminum deck shelter the big stereo will pound out an endless playlist while we stand at our stations with fingers flying. A good crabber is strong, agile and relentless. A good longliner is quick, dexterous and relentless. Fueled by coffee and rock and roll, we will pound through the work until its done and the racks are full of baited tubs, like coiled snakes with hundreds of fangs.
We don't drag a big net behind the boat. We will set out our gear late tomorrow night: flags and buoys and big anchors on either end a long line of hooks in the middle. We'll let them soak overnight and haul them the next day, pulling hooks up one at a time, keeping the big flats and carefully releasing what we don't want. Many of the released fish survive (a big carp down south was caught and released over sixty times before it died recently, of natural causes).
The halibut we pack in ice, much the same way they did it a hundred years ago. The quality of halibut, like the red rockfish, is actually improved by its time on ice. We clean and ice the fish as they come aboard, standing around the cleaning table, the furious flappers flinging blood onto our faces, each of us wielding his own favorite knife. Some favor deadly stillettos, some the rounder tipped butcher knives.
After the sets are hauled we will rebait the gear until after midnight, then set again in the early morning hours while we watch a movie (usually a comedy) dialog blazing through the tower speakers we have strapped to the racks.
Then we get a nap. Sleep is a wonderful thing when you really need it.
The next morning, after strong coffees brewed through Mr. Coffee espresso machines, we haul again.
There is a feeling that you get when you step out on deck in the morning- boat moving in the swells under your feet, birds loitering around us, the whales rolling by.
The long, long look to the horizon on such a morning just makes you happy in a way you can't be with your feet in the dirt.