Blatherings

Careless

So. Health care reform. Or, more properly, health insurance reform.

It might pass. Ms. Pelosi is even threatening us with a Public Option (which Durbin says he'll whip if it's in - I think that's a good thing). With a Public Option, we might see changes in the health insurance industry. And it won't be let in later, either, if they don't do it now.

So, for now, what we have to look forward to is a new revitalized health insurance industry, with everyone on the rolls, paying whether they can afford to or not, into a system that may or may not be regulated. That may or may not be de-monopolized.

Oh.

Joy.

We don't know. Up or down vote maybe next week. At which time, I will cease to hold my breath (as I have been doing since the Clintons promised this back in 1993).

Air America is Dead (long live Air America)

I know, old news. However, I've decided to talk about their radio show hosts, past & present, because I feel like it, and because I have nothing useful to say about the topic above. I am only going to comment about hosts I've heard more than once. Bill Press - sorry, buddy, I've only listened to you once or twice, and that's because you're on late, and when I'm driving late, I usually have the iPod cranked up.

In order of time slots:

Stephanie Miller
Pros: Cute, funny, pretty well-informed about the topics of the day (though she fell for the "John Roberts Retiring" hoo-ha). With her two co-hosts Chris Lavoie and Jim Ward (voice actor extraordinaire), and with, nowadays, constant special guests, including Carlos Alazraqui, and Hal Sparks, as well as regular input from several folks working at Media Matters. Generally balanced and intelligent, though perhaps a little too happy clappy (as she puts it)
Cons: No longer doing Stand-Up News (or at least, not when I'm listening). Not enough fart jokes. Too many jokes about hot dogs and hallways (you figure it out).

Thom Hartman
Pros: Currently the smartest one of the bunch. Prior to Rachel Maddow defecting to the TV Machine, Thom and Rachel were running neck-and-neck for the smartest people on radio (sorry Rush). Thom brings on people who are guaranteed to get argumentative on his show, and he lets them speak their peace. No matter how dumb they might actually be.
Cons: Occasionally a little too lecture-y and dry. I like facts as much as the next guy, more, maybe, but sometimes, Thom, one needs a little zip with the brain dump.

Ed Schultz
Pros: Now also on the TV machine is a fellow from the American heartland. Ed lets people talk to him, he listens, and sometimes they agree, and sometimes they don't. I don't think you can ask for much more than that.
Cons: Occasionally a little too shouty for my tastes. If I want shouting, I can always head over to Randi Rhodes (more on her later).

Norman Goldman
Pros: Smart legal person who has occasionally talked up the legal issues when it comes to actions by both the previous adminisatraion, and the current one.
Cons: Very shouty. Gets all up in folks' grilles about their viewpoints on things. If a right-wing fool comes on, he calls them a right-wing fool, and all other kinds of bad names. Being insulting is not necessarily a debating point. Don't like it when Rush calls someone a pinhead, nor do I like it when you do (even if they deserve it).

who replaced

Ron Reagan
Pros: Again, a very smart individual with excellent credentials and a long history of commentary. A pretty respectful host to folks who called in.
Cons: Any and all stories got played on this segment. Please, can we stick to simple political info, and not stories about the balloon boy or other tabloid fodder?

who replaced

Rachel Maddow
Pros: Funny, smarter than heck, is the ghey, Rhodes scholar, former AIDS-in-prison protester from back in the 80s (totally imagine her listening to a variety of Grrlpower punk bands - which may be sterotyping, but I don't care). Knows political science like the back of her hand. Oh, and Kent Jones, for his innate ability to find joy in the sublimely silly stuff people do. Oh, and cocktail recipes!
Cons: no longer on the radio, and I don't get MSNBC. Occasional clips via the interwebs ain't enough.

Randi Rhodes
Pros: former Air Force lady, so she knows her stuff about the military. "BS News" is a great segment. Pretty darn smart.
Cons: too quick to shout callers down when they come up with a slightly different slant than she does on the topic she's discussing. Way too quick. And lots of yelling. Plus, "Bounce Yer Boobies" every stinkin' Friday? Just not that funny anymore.

Those are the ones I mostly listen to. When they're being annoying, I flip over to NPR. Oh, and AM radio has what, 10 minutes of programming per fifteen minutes of ads?

CORRECTION

NYLefty has pointed out to me that several of these personalities were never actually part of the whole Air America thing, specifically Stephanie Miller, Ed Schultz, Norman Goldman, and Bill Press. If it offends them that I've included them in the AA roster, I apologize.

I should also point out, that, unless I've specified otherwise, all of these people are still on the radio, at least in my market. (AM radio voice) "Seattle's AM 1090!"

Stephanie 6-9 am

Thom 9-noon

Ed noon-3

Norman 3-6

Randi 6-9

After that, I leave it to others to fill in the blanks, as I neither know nor care.

...Paved With Good Intentions

I own a Toyota Smugmobile. Also known as a Prius. Wikipedia defines the word "prius" as "the neuter nominative singular form of the adjective whose corresponding masculine and feminine nominative singular forms are prior". Prior meaning first, or before everything else. So I am first, but have no testicles.

In some ways it is kind of a girl car. Or, if you prefer, a nerd car. One could only hope for the HAL9000 red eyeball in the center of the dash for it to be wholly nerdly. Many many computers run this vehicle. And some of them don't always work correctly. Hence, the recall.

I am reminded of the nameless narrator (one hesitates to call him a "hero") of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, a recall coordinator for a "major" car company, who explains the company's recall policy in this way: "A is the number of cars in the field, B is the frequency of failure, and C is the likely cost of each litigation brought against the company by survivors. A x B x C = X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." I hope I haven't mangled the text too much, but that's the gist of it.

And this appears to have been the philosophy of Toyota.

For those of you living on the moon for the last six months, Toyota has had to recall a whole bunch of cars for electrical faults, causing the accelerator system of the vehicle to turn on and keep going, no matter what the driver does. This would be termed a "glitch" in the world of computer programming, but in the world of automobiles, it translates to the phrase "fatal car crash." Originally, Toyota tried to blame stuck acceleration systems on the floor mats being "too tall."

Too tall? You're kidding, right. If it's too tall for ten seconds, why isn't it too tall all the rest of the time. This was not a physical problem, and any idiot with a measuring tape could have told you that.

What drivers are experiencing is somewhat worse. The car goes over a particularly weird bump (like railroad tracks), the stabilization system takes over, and the person (being a person) puts on the brakes. This causes the accelerator to engage. In other cases, it's simply been the accelerator that's decided to engage, and no amount of braking will slow the car down.


Imagine someone driving the car, slamming on the brakes to no avail: "Stop! STOP! STOP!!!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."


Toyota used to be much more proactive about this sort of thing, not relying on others to point out their mistakes. Japanese car companies in general are known for meticulous attention to detail, and for quality standards that far exceed what's required by law. I read an article about the opening of the first Honda plant in the United States, written by a line worker. In it, he described spending all day every day for the first two weeks, building bikes for the first six hours, then taking them apart for the last two hours, all in aid of figuring out the best way to run the line. This was considered the standard Japanese model for building cars and motorcycles. From what I've read about American car manufacturers, this is all done through computer modeling and giving the line workers a few days furlough, while management figures it out. Much more cost-effective, I'm sure, but I'll bet the Honda model works better.

Anyway, I keep bringing my car in for regular maintenance, and I ask about the recall. They keep telling me that Toyota will get in touch with me if my car is one of the cars affected. Great. I'll find out my cars is a potential deathtrap when they finally decide it's my turn to get it fixed.

And even then, is the fix working?

Computer systems are as imperfect as the human beings who program them. Cars have become more complicated than the moon landers. As we gradually accept computing systems in more and more spaces in our lives, I think it would be wise to emulate the Amish. Talk about it endlessly, examine it and re-examine it before tentatively sticking one's toe in the water, and take years and years to incorporate such systems into one's life. As opposed to the "isn't that cool?" mentality, adding functionality upon functionality without perhaps, sufficient concern about whether each new function doesn't cause something else to fail under the right circumstances.

Which is all a shame, because damn, I like my car.

SNAFU or FUBAR?

The Defense Budget is hawribble! Again.

Over a trillion dollars when you account for all the non-defense stuff the defense department still gets paid for (protecting our diplomats abroad, for example, is something the Marines did until they gave the contract to the company formerly known as Blackwater, Xe).

This seems like a lot of money. I understand we're fighting two unwinnable wars at the same time, and in order to remain tough-looking, we have to keep doing that. So that's a bit of a drain on the old coffers. But perhaps there are a few things we could think about ending, or reining in, or something. Like the F22 Raptor, which apparently can't be flown in the rain, because it'll rust. $138 million bucks per plane, and they f$%king rust.

I'd also be curious about the V-22 Osprey, known for killing its occupants at an alarming rate. This is one of those, "wouldn't it be cool if this worked" sort of projects, where the rotors that are supposed to drive the plane forward can be tilted straight up to raise the airplane off the ground. Basically a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (or VTOL) plane that uses blades instead of jets. Unfortunately, if things go wrong high up (but not high up enough to deploy a parachute) the plane will belly-flop or flip over or just plain explode. $110 million per aircraft. They say they've fixed all the problems, but when you've had a test flight drop straight into the Potomac in front of various congresscritters, you'd think that's be enough to kill it.

Not so in pork-land.

It's like the growth of private prisons. Once you've started down this path, it's really hard to pull back. The DoD is a rapacious monster, and it likes its appropriations. It doesn't like to give them up. It's all about local job creation after all. Which is why the one thing we manufacture in large quantities in this country are munitions.

Can we go back to making toasters? Refrigerators? Brooms? Anything that doesn't go boom?

I know, not enough political payback.

PS: to the Repugs/Libertarians reading this: why is it, if Government is such an awful waste of money, do you trust them to spend wisely when it comes to the DoD? It's the biggest expense there is. It's 55% of GDP in this country. Why do you think they'll do that right and do everything else wrong? What's wrong with you?

SOTU Speak

Calling the bank bailouts as "popular as a root canal" is an insult to root canals.


I agree with him on how to deal with the aftermath of the bank bailouts, i.e., getting little fees from all the banks that haven't paid everything back yet. Stabilizing the economy he hasn't done.


As the the 2 million who'd have jobs if he hadn't done what he did, I don't know. A lot of the Recovery Act (AKA the Stimulus Bill) was for temporary programs that injected a small amount of capital into select markets, then stopped. Cash for Clunkers, First-time home buyers credits, etc. Short-term spikes do not a recovery make.


Infrastructure. How lovely. About damn time.


It's nice he's talking about how wages have gone down or stayed flat while everything else keeps going up.


Nuclear power plants. "Safe, clean nuclear power." What planet is this guy living on? Clean means no waste. Nuclear power plants that don't generate waste are fast breeder plants that recycle the plutonium, and use molten sodium as a coolant. Molten sodium, on contact with air or water, explodes violently. Once the reactor is done giving up energy, or is no longer maintainable due to age and/or simple decay, the fuel is still viable, still radioactive as hell, still the most poisonous substance on the face of the earth. I read somewhere back in the seventies (when we were all afraid of being bombed off the face of the planet) that a grapefruit-sized ball of plutonium had enough radiation in it to kill everyone on the planet if they would just stand close to it for a few minutes.


"Offshore areas for oil and gas exploration." Who is this, Sarah Palin? Jeebus....


More exports would be good, yes. Don't we have to make things to export them?


I agree with him on education, as far as it goes. I'd love to know how, for example, the State University system in California got to the point where it costs $10,000 per semester for tuition. How is that affordable education for anyone who qualifies? Then again, the private prison industry is the fastest growing business in California.

While he states that "a high-school diploma no longer guarantees a good job," and that's true, why is that true? I don't know many manufacturing line work jobs that require a Bachelor's Degree. An MBA in riveting? Perhaps if more of our manufacturing base hadn't been outsourced to other countries, and high schools still did a good job educating people, this wouldn't be an issue. Oh, yeah, and then there's the unions. Moribund, antiquated, still very necessary unions.


"I do not accept second place for the United States of America."


This, apparently, includes being first in highest cost of health care on the planet. Or spending six times on the military what our next rival down the line (China) does.

Keep waving the flag, that's all you're good for, apparently.

State Of The Onion

I have two quibbles with Mr. Obama, and his grandiloquent speech:

Nuclear energy, no matter how you package it, or play with it, or hyperbolize it, isn't "clean."

Ever.

The second is, when you talk of all the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or whatever you want to call them, that we've killed in 2009 vs. 2008, are you sure that's who you killed? And were civilians killed as well? Any kids?

Other than that, a pretty decent speech, and hopefully one that the Democrats are listening to. In one section, hs basically scolded the Senate and the Congress saying, "you've got the votes, use 'em."

And to all of these twits: if you continue to do things that are only politically expedient, you're going to be voted out of office.

UPDATE

I will read the whole transcript as carefully as I can and do some sort of analysis. Especially on the parts where he says [APPLAUSE]. I love those...

Addendumb to the Below

By the way, I forgot to mention this about the Supreme Court decision to let corporations rule the roost:

Now foreign-owned American companies can influence elections. If you're not happy about the Senator from Citibank, how about the Congressman from Dubai Investments, Ltd.? Or the President of Bin Laden Construction?

(by the way, all of these points were made, and made better, by Greg Palast, about a month ago, when this decision was still pending)

Sociopathic Politics

The Supreme Court has done it - they've made corporations people.

Welcome to the future election of the Senator from Citibank.

Thanks to the above link, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1896, the Supreme Court at the time ruled that corporations were allowed certain protections under the 14th amendment, because of what a court reporter noted in the header record of a decision that didn't talk about whether corporations are people. And in a different Supreme Court ruling on Buckley v. Valeo, they stated that the limiting of campaign contributions was, in fact, a limit on political speech, i.e., money equals speech.

I know, my reaction was "huh?", too...

So now, in their incredibly finite wisdom, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has decided that corporations have the same rights as all of us real people. They can "talk" just as loudly as they want, because to do otherwise would be to restrict their rights as "citizens."

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a corporation vote.

Thus, corporations now have the right to contribute as much as they want to political campaigns, to particular candidates, or to particular issues. They can spend as much as they want on smears and disinformation, and they pay for the news to be broadcast as well. If AIG is paying for the fact-checking of what AIG is saying, who's to say whether AIG is lying?

There was a movie made a few years ago, a documentary entitled The Corporation. Essentially a series of case studies where the corporate model is held up to the mirror of psychoanalysis, and does not come off well. Corporations (large ones) tend to follow either a psychopathic or a sociopathic personality, i.e., there's no empathy, there's no real sense of community, and the driving force is (pretty much) greed. I know, duh, but...

A few years ago, a gentleman named Marc Kasky brought a lawsuit against Nike for lying about it's labor practices in Indonesia and Vietnam. Nike said this was protected speech under the 1st Amendment. They cited the Santa Clara v. SP Railroad decision. In other words, they could lie about whether they were mistreating their workers because it's "free speech, man!" The court ruled against them, calling it "commercial speech," which has to be factually accurate.

Would this court rule the same way, now?