Tag Archives: culture of no responsibility

President Obama’s Speech

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Am I the only one in the country who thought that the speech showed a strong and resolute President? 

Don’t look for passion — that is not his character.  Look for determination and a view toward the future. 

I thought he did a fine job.  Did anyone think that he could speak away the problems?  Did you think the oil was going to go back into the hole in the earth whence it came?

Let’s be real.

Please, please, please, let’s all stop expecting miracles or easy answers.  Let’s be as easy on the President as we are on ourselves.  Because we are soooo good at blaming others and limiting our own culpability in anything and we are so good at complaining but so unwilling to do our part — either through tax dollars or consumption reduction.

We are in the fight of and for our lives and livelihoods. 

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS CLEANING UP DISASTER UPON DISASTER THAT STARTED PERCOLATING SINCE NIXON — HEALTH CARE, OIL DEPENDENCE, AMERICAN COWBOY-ISM AS FOREIGN POLICY.

Anyone else willing to stand up and say that the speech was fine, that speeches won’t fix the Gulf problems and that we are lucky to have a clearheaded and intelligent leader? 

And, the $20 billion fund was a big coup since, under GOP leadership, liability was capped at $75 million. 

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BP — Beyond Pathos

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Today, there was a fire on the BP ship that is siphoning the oil from the half-capped gushing breach.  Just add this to the ever-growing list of bad and greedy decisions and botched and mismanaged corrective efforts.

Sometimes people are so recklessly stupid and ineffectual that they deserve to go to prison just for these reasons alone.   Criminal stupidity and inefficacy in the first degree should be punishable by life imprisonment.  And the entire management of BP should be shackled right about now.  And the people who didn’t fire them when their stupidity and inefficacies were evident also deserve orange jumpsuits.

And now we have to rely on the government workers led by different party machines in the various gulf states.  These are the individuals who, according to popular wisdom, didn’t qualify for the private sector jobs at companies like BP.   Give up all hope.

If President Obama could plug this hole, he would.  If they try another top kill, I am sure he will insist on jettisoning BP’s CEO, the director of the MMS (and other government officials who allowed the oil companies to write their own rules) and maybe even Rand Paul, as part of the junk blast into the hole.

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Going Nuclear with Dr. Strangelove

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How do you get someone’s mind off a headache? A strong punch to the stomach.

How do you take someone’s mind off the environmental disaster caused by the massive oil leak? Detonate a nuclear warhead.

Really? Detonate a nuclear bomb to melt the ocean floor onto itself to stop the leak?  It is ok to try new things, like shooting debris in the hole to plug it, because what’s a little more pollution when millions of barrels of oil are gushing into the ocean each day. But a nuclear bomb? Yeah, let’s compound one threat to our future with an almost certain apocalyptic coda.

Someone said this nuclear fix is safe.  Someone also said deep water drilling is safe.  Someone said the Russians exploded nuclear bombs to stop pipeline leaks, but they never did it with oil, underwater and one mile down.  Oh, yeah, just like top kill was never tried underwater and one mile down.  Gee, I wish Anyone thought through how to fix something, let’s say an oil pipe, that far down below sea level before the accident.  Boy, I never met this Someone or Anyone, but Someone sure is crazy and Anyone should be fired.

But, this is America, where Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.  So, if we look at everything ass backwards and upside down, it should work.  From that perspective, the nuclear option looks like a plan.  How about if all of the BP executives and the government officials who oversaw deep-water drilling put on some of Ginger’s old outfits and then tried to figure out what to do?  No, it wouldn’t add any brain cells (so still a zero sum game) but it would sure provide needed comic relief in the aftermath of the biggest threat to the safety of all living beings since the Ice Age.

Of course, no disaster is complete without the accompanying political grandstanding and fiascoes.  Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wrote to the President enumerating the number of jobs that will be lost because of the moratorium on off-shore drilling, even as he decries the despoliation of his state’s shorelines and criticizes the administration’s slow response.

Maureen Dowd, who is becoming pathetic, says we got the President we voted for, as if that is a bad thing —  a clear-headed leader who doesn’t lead by his gut.  The President constantly overestimates our intelligence and ability to understand the important things.  And President Obama has to stop what he is doing to go on Larry King so that we are reassured he can feel our pain.  Because we need him to hug us and feel our pain while he is protecting us from our own stupidity.

We deserve to choke on the oil slick.

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This is the media’s Hurricane Katrina

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I believe the Gulf disaster defies analogy.  

But we need to pigeon hole this one for the 24 hour news re-cycle.  Hmmm.  Hurricane Katrina.  Yeah, that’s it!  Let’s exploit another episode of human suffering for the sake of ratings.  That’s why the media asks, “Is this Obama’s Hurricane Katrina?”.  Because that was the most recent large scale disaster.  We can’t remember back almost 10 years to ask if this is “Obama’s 9/11”.

And it feeds our need, in a situation out of control, for symmetry with past events so we can pretend to understand the event and its ramifications and then go back to watching Britney Spears.   The pathology of fear symmetry.

Let’s not make this about President Obama, although it would make it easier if it were.  It is about greed and reckless indifference to our earth.  It is about a problem of unimaginable scope causing imponderable calamity for all living beings.

We elected President Obama because he is unflappable, at least in public.   Now, we are pissed because he doesn’t express constant outrage to satisfy CNN, FOX, and MSNBC and our own fear symmetry pathology.

Everyone, listen up:

Rule 1 of disaster reaction:  If the only people with the machinery to solve the problem are the ones who caused the problem, don’t piss them off.  If you make it so they can never get out from under the liability, they will take their marbles and go home and then all is lost.   Sometimes it feels good to yell at a given moment, but it hurts you in the long run (ever hear the old saw, “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”?).

Rule 2 of disaster reaction:  There is no easy resolution to this problem because no one prepared for this disaster.  Not BP and not the United States.  Preparation would have required years of research and development by top scientists and hundreds of millions of dollars.  So, blame Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II.  Even throw Carter, Ford and Nixon under that bus while you’re at it.

Rule 3 of disaster reaction:  Everyone wastes time pointing figures at others.  And take out the mirror.  All of us.  We are the problem, too.  Consume too much?  Vote for the Drill, Baby, Drill ticket?

Rule 4 of disaster reaction: DON’T TELL THE PUBLIC THE TRUTH.  WE CANNOT HANDLE THE TRUTH (Jack Nicholson was right in “A Few Good Men”).  We also expect that everything will get fixed for us, preferably within a day’s trading session at the New York Stock Exchange.

Rule 5 of disaster reaction: The media feeds our ridiculous expectations and our hubris.  So, Anderson Cooper, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Maureen Dowd, Jack Cafferty, Wolf Blitzer and whoever else:  stop with the comparisons and come up with ways to heal our earth, ways to help our fellow Americans, our wildlife, etc.  Set up a disaster relief fund.

Reality No. 1 of Disasters:  The man in charge — President Obama — wanted this gusher plugged the minute it happened.  You think he wants to go down as the president who screwed up this disaster response?

Reality No. 2 of Disasters: Everyone is an armchair quarterback.  If you can help, then help.  If you can’t, then shut up.

Reality No. 3 of Disasters: If there weren’t a disaster, the media would create one. So, for the 45th President of the United States of America, what will be your Gulf Oil Spill Disaster?

This Blogger’s No. 1 Fear: If it is ever over, we will forget about it in a New York minute.

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Rand Paul, the Prophet with the Pitchfork

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That crazy Tea-Party-er is good for America.  You’re thinking: some crazy person is guest blogging.  Nope.

Rand Paul is a false prophet.  He is rationalizing our nation’s three-decade long drift into a selfish, ego-centric theocracy.  He is giving us a way to rationalize and even celebrate our nation’s screw-your-neighbor-because-it-is-your-G-d-given-right hypocrisy.  Yes, if we listen to him, we will surely perish.

He lays bear the essential pathos of the Tea Party movement — the fight for white supremacy and control over diminishing resources.  Neo-Nazis and Neo-Klansmen with an apocalyptic rapture.

I am over-reacting, maybe?

  • He said that the President’s criticizing British Petroleum was un-American.  Does being American mean I have to applaud and support corporate greed that despoliates the earth? (Psssst, Randy, BP is headquartered in Switzerland to avoid US taxation).
  • Then he drew a line in the sand — saying that an individual’s right to be a racist is improperly impinged upon by the Civil Rights Act.  (If a black proprietor refused to serve a white man, I don’t believe Mr. Paul would be so sanguine about the protections of the Civil Rights Act.)

No, I am not overreacting.

After thousands of years of human civilization and evolution, it still all boils down to the epic battle between good and evil.  On one side of Mr. Paul’s line is our common humanity and sense of decency, justice and fair play.  All the things that — we say — define us as Americans.  On Rand Paul’s side of that line, there are only Freud’s id, chaos and brutality.

Good versus Evil.  Yes, it is that simple.

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Justice, Souder and me

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http://m.yahoo.com/w/ynews/article/topstories/10?url=http%3A%2F%2Fxml.news.yahoo.com%2Fus%2Fnews%2Frss%2Frichstoryrss.html%3Fu%3D%2Fap%2Fus_congress_souder&.ts=1274229436&.tsrc=yahoo&.intl=us&.lang=en

Representative Souder, a G-d fearing family values man, joins the Rogue’s Gallery of the sanctimonious hoisted on their own petards.  I am not gleeful.  I don’t relish another’s embarrassments and defeats — even those people who would deny me my civil rights.

Each one of these holier-than-thou sinners begs for forgiveness and feels entitled to redemption because aliens must have inhabited his body in order for him to behave so.  Do we as a society enable the hypocrisy by forgiveness and opportunities for redemption?  What if we required that each one of these-who-have-fallen-THUD!-from-Grace accept that he is not the interpreter of G-d’s wills, G-d’s ways and G-d’s Bible?  [That is a way lot of “G-d”s for a religious conscientious objector like me.]

If pride goeth before the fall, then humility will come after it but only if we demand it of those whom we forgive. Humility and a quest for understanding of our common humanity. And maybe we will achieve peace and justice for all.

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Don’t cry for me, Argentina . . .

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No, not “Evita!” the musical sensation of the 1970s about Eva Peron.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is living out loud and proud, trying to patch things up with his girlfriend.  It was all a misunderstanding — when we heard Appalachian trail, he said “Argentinian tail”. [see http://40andoverblog.com/p?120]

But, at least he isn’t lying anymore and he maintains contact with his government on his weekends away.  If only other “family values” candidates would be open about marital issues, gay issues and the tough stuff of life that affects all of us, maybe we can re-calibrate expectations of our politicians and ourselves.  I am not saying that infidelity and lying are ok. I am saying live the truth so you don’t have to lie.  So many less lives get shattered that way.

He behaved like a child but he is trying to live as grown-up now.  It is a good start.

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Doctor, heal thyself

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The urologist who put up a sign saying, “if you voted for Obama, go somewhere else,” got his information from the Internet and . . . wait for it . . . it was misinformation.  We did not “misunderestimate” him (my favorite moment of the otherwise bleak Bush years).  He was flat-out wrong.

The Internet is an amazing tool.  It also must be viewed in its context.  Opinions — informed, ill-informed and maliciously disinformative — are out there.  It is up to each person to glean the facts, evaluate the sources and come to one’s own conclusion.  Just because I can write an opinion that you might read doesn’t mean that I am right, that I have all of the facts or that, quite frankly, I am interested in the truth.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but that doesn’t mean that each opinion deserves equal weight.  I spoke to a tea party goer about a year ago that heard on an unnamed “news” station (ok, FOX) that the health care bill would give social security benefits to illegal aliens.  Ok, let’s set aside the fact that we are not talking about E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial, or Martians, and that they are humans deserving at least the catch-all phrase of “illegal immigrants”.  I asked this woman if she ever dealt with the government.  She asked me to get to my point.  I responded that even if President Obama were seeking to give away the money in the Treasury (which he can’t because there is a 3 trillion dollar deficit), that the government needs a social security number to take any action with respect to a person’s benefits.  So if someone doesn’t have a SSN (let’s assume that an illegal immigrant hasn’t stolen one because why impugn someone who is seeking a better life here, while there are native born executives of Enron and Madoff enterprises who have committed heinous crimes and haven’t yet had their days of reckoning), then it is impossible to give that person social security benefits.  The commentator was either mistaken or intentionally misleading.

Ok, let’s be honest.  MSNBC is slanted the other way and sometimes uses inductive reasoning — basing a hypothesis on one fact — and gets the whole analysis wrong.  For me, sometimes, it is analogous to watching a show about law or maybe a doctor watching ER or Grey’s Anatomy.  It strains credulity and sometimes is farcical.

However, when I realized that I paid more in 2009 taxes than most, non-celebrity, tea party-ers pay in two decades, I realized that I put my money where my mouth is.  I believe in universal health care, medicare and a safety net for those like my grandparents who slept at night knowing that, if they lost their jobs in sweatshops, their children would not starve.  As a child of those children — the embodiment of the American dream — I pay my taxes for those like my grandparents and my parents, and not for the ungrateful masses who are the tea-party-ers.  Why?  Because this is America, the greatest nation on Earth.  But if you don’t want to buy in, that’s ok.  But there are consequences.  How about we mess with your medicare?  Would you be partying then? I hope you get along with your neighbors because if I join your group, there won’t be money to pave the roads outside your homes.  But because of my belief in America, and my indebtedness to my forebears, you get to be parasites sucking on the dream of America.  To tell you the truth, I cannot wait to heave the yolk of your entitlement of my already heavy burden.

How about that?  Let the generous, gentler and kinder America (thank you, Bush I) reclaim what is America.  I live America — I work hard, I pay my taxes, I pray that the government is good, right and just, I do not believe in torture and I give charity to those who need help to jump start their lives.  Yes, what Jesus would do.  And I am a Jewish, lesbian, Ivy League educated, Northeastern elitist.  And I embody the promise and opportunity of America more than most of the greedy, uncharitable, talking heads that pollute our airwaves.

Bring it on.

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The Health Care Debate

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Let’s just hold this space for my rant, once I get it under control.  Setting aside what you believe, there are people in the country who have behaved so abominably in the tactics they used and the violence they unleashed.  And they are maybe worse than unpatriotic, because what they did undermines our system of government and our society.  I believe that these people are traitors to our nation and its government because they want to win at all costs, without thought to the preservation of the union.  In contra-distinction, those opposed to government action under the Bush-Cheney years did not physically and verbally attack lawmakers who put us in debt for generations, have rifle scopes put on where lawmakers live, and say things like, “you’re a dead man!”

Sen. McCain wants to repeal some of the very things that were part of his platform, until he changed with the direction of the wind.  Some maverick.

Many of our representatives have breached their oaths of office.  And in the process, they have stoked class warfare and racial distrust and enabled fringe groups to deny the legitimacy of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

But, still, I haven’t gotten my thoughts together yet, so stay tuned.

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Why Airlines Should be Punished

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I recently flew to and from California.  Years ago, the quality of ticket I purchased would have been in the “leisure traveler” section.  Soon that name was too grand and the designation became “coach”.  From there, it tumbled further down the slippery slope into “economy” class which meant no one cared if you had an aisle seat right next to the stinky bathroom.  This trip has confirmed that the tumble has gone into free-fall and the proper designation is “cattle-car” class. 

On the way there, parents separated from their children reached across strangers to hand their drooling children some bribe to try to stay quiet.  Then the parents put on their Bose headphones — you know the ones that block out all sounds.  Excuse me, but don’t you think that we — the poor strangers subjected to your whining progeny– deserve the headphones and you deserve to hear your children? 

And I can’t forget the guy who pretended we were seated in first class by expanding his elbows not only into my personal space but in my very rib cage.  (Really?  Did you really not feel some resistance to your expansion, you creepy man?)  I pulled down the tray table, put my pillow on it and then did a face plant into the pillow, so Mr. Strange-as-G-d-makes-us can elbow away.

On the way back, I took the red-eye and I was tired and aggravated.  Already one guy held up an entire line of people to get his laptop out of his bag.  And it was not my imagination — the seats were smaller.  I am a little person and I felt like I was busting out of the seat.  Also, someone (or more persons) took all of the space in my overhead bin.  I was seated in the bulkhead so I had to stow everything.  While the idiot man getting his computer held everyone up, I noticed someone adding a satchel to the luggage in my overhead bin.  When I got to my row, I took the satchel and handed it back to the guy and said, “this is not going to work, I have no seats in front to stuff my bag under.”  He took it and didn’t put up a fight.

And WHAT is with people not turning off their smart phones when asked?  I was about to lunge at this young woman whose tweeting was obviously so profound and important that she could risk endangering us all.  My colleague seated next to me stopped me so that I would not be arrested and carried off the plane in restraining gear.

And, $3 for earphones?  Soon we are going to have to pay to use the restrooms. 

Airplanes today are just gross and need to be upgraded for humane use. 

Ok, I remember flying Air Myanmar.  The planes seemed like demo models because they had indentations where the oxygen mask and the flight attendant button ought to have been.  Also the seats flopped back and forth on take-off and landing.  I sat next to a Buddhist monk so I felt safe.  My friend was in a row with only one seat; the rest of the row was penned-in for some yaks who were also welcomed aboard in that way that only a repressive regime can welcome a visitor (“Good luck, if you have it”).

So, airplanes today aren’t the most inhumane I’ve experienced but I am going to save my pennies and investigate private plane service.  I bet it costs about the same as first class, which isn’t even first class anymore.

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