It appears I will spend most of my day off haggling with stubborn insurance companies, so not much brilliance from me. President Obama, I tirelessly backed you, now if you would be so kind, please fix our dilapidated health care system? (At least I have WNCW's stellar radio broadcast, Frank on Friday, to keep me company... which of course is where today's blog post title is from.) My heart goes out to everyone else currently in Medical Insurance Hell, such as Renegade Evolution.
I haven't written about the AIG scandal, mostly because I don't really understand it very well. I am patently unable to rant and rave about things I don't fully get in the first place. I mostly end up scratching my poor little head. (I have a hard time even fathoming that kind of money.) However, I do see a similarity in the AIG bail-out fiasco and our health-care system dilemma: Nobody wants to reward AIG with millions of dollars for their mismanagement, and likewise, nobody wants to fund a health care system that has as many bloated items in their inventory as the Pentagon and its once-legendary hundred-dollar hammers. How can a single monthly prescription cost over $250? This is obscene. Who wants government to pay Big Pharm and support their continued robbery of the American people? Not me. I want the drug companies fleeced, not the government!
These are deep systemic problems, and they make my head hurt.
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Some stuff to check out:
Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas Hughes, has committed suicide:
What can you say?
The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.
He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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Obama pissed me off yesterday, with his much-ballyhooed "online town meeting", as he impatiently and arrogantly waved away questions about marijuana legalization, which you know (duh!) might bail the economy out of this horrible mess. Obama seemed to find the question amusing, possibly flashing back to the days when he enjoyed a blunt or two himself. By way of Salon's Drug War Rant, comes this perceptive observation from a commenter at Daily Kos:
And from Andrew Sullivan, of all people:
But did he have to be so.... Amused with it? I'm sorry, I understand that it's marijuana, ha ha funny funny...but it was a serious question asked by a lot of people and I really think it deserved just as serious of an answer as the rest of them did [...] it was a JARRING difference from how he approached all the other questions. [...] I found the use of this particular question, and using it as a mechanism - an excuse to laugh off serious questions about the myriad of issues about pot - to be very disingenuous.
Chris Selley in the NATIONAL POST writes:
Obama's Pathetic Pot Answer. The chuckle suggests a man of his generation. The dismissiveness toward the question of ending Prohibition as both a good in itself and a form of tax revenue is, however, depressing. His answer was a non-answer. I'm tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it's trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it's deadly serious. As for your online audience, Mr president, have you forgotten who got you elected?
Selley's piece is titled Obama on the War on Drugs—status quo we can believe in, which also made my head hurt. (As we've always heard, the truth hurts.)
In other words: get a job, ya bunch of hippies. He couldn’t really have sounded any more condescending unless he’d thanked contributors, complete with air quotes, for their “groovy” questions. I’m sure the audience would have lapped it up.
Now, admittedly, the President might well be right about what legalization would do for the economy. Imagine all the out-of-work drug enforcement workers, prison guards and support staff, the mass suicides from correctional industry lobbyists, and the tens of thousands of newly released inmates thrust into an already terrible job market. But that’s hardly the point he was trying to make. Rather, he was aiming for laughs.
Direct hit, Chris.
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To the astute but anonymous reader who asks me via email, why do I link so many people who won't link me back? Hmm, good question. Mostly, it's so I can have the links handy when I switch computers around...I can't have my bookmarks everywhere, and this is the next best thing. My blogroll is composed of people I enjoy reading, whether they like me or not. And I think it might compromise some people's reputations (I'm lookin at you, lefty atheists!) to include me on their blogrolls. And then again, as I closely examine some of the blogrolls in question, I also believe only women under 50 are permitted. Or at least, no women over 50 are represented. We don't exist and are invisible.
That's probably why.
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Miss Jackie is writing about IRON over at The Vegan Diet... check out her recipes, you animal rights purists! Particularly her wonderful Iron Booster Fruit Smoothie... I am allergic to bananas but I've found strawberries and blueberries work well. Also, here is a great liquid iron supplement from Floradix, but 1) it tastes like cherry rust and 2) it's expensive (but certainly, not as expensive as red meat) and 3) it only keeps about a month after opening (refrigerated), so you have to use it up fairly quickly. But you can add it to smoothies and the rust taste isn't as noticeable.A small price to pay for not eating animals.
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I loves you guys, and hope to be back here before this evening, depending on the cooperation of the aforementioned insurance companies. (Ha!)
