Weekend Tids and Bits

PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION – seems to be a good opening number for a service at the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY. The pastor, Ken Pagano, is inviting his parishioners to bring their guns to church, according to a New York Times story you can read at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26guns.html?hp. If you bring your weapon openly to church, make sure it’s unloaded, because deputies will be checking, the story says. If it’s concealed, no problem.

In most states, it’s legal to openly carry a gun – you get in trouble when the weapon is concealed. The nuances vary by state and if you’re thinking of strapping on a holster, visit http://opencarry.org first.

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SOME GUYS GET ALL THE BREAKS – If an elected official has a chance to pick the day for going public with an adulterous affair, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s luck sets an example. Sanford’s love life had roughly 24 hours in the main media spotlight and was already being edged by Farah Fawcett’s death when Michael Jackson’s demise moved Sanford’s trouble to the “In other news…” sections.

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LAST WEEK WE DISCUSSED. . .

Elephants aren’t particularly afraid of mice, but the Republican Party has gone so conservative that someone yelling “Change!” at a GOP event will start the Pachyderm Party thundering and trumpeting towards the doors at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/elephants-and-mice-republicans-and.html

Something is happening in Iran, but exactly what is information hard to come by. Harder still is information about why we should care much one way or the other at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-turmoil-yeah.html

We need to do something about the environment, if only to shut up the environmentalists whose concern is so all encompassing, they were worried about cow burps at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/radical-reformers-target-cow-burps.html. No confirmation yet on the rumor that some environmentalists have developed such a concern about discharging bodily waste that they hold it as long as possible. Confirmation, of course, would confirm that they are indeed full of it.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gave in to temptation, but so did the media outfits who quoted extensively from e-mails between the lovers at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/giving-in-to-temptation-south-carolina.html

Michael Jackson’s death sparked a media frenzy of major size and minor importance at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/michael-jackson-and-things-of.html

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Michael Jackson and

Things of Importance

Things of great importance may have happened Thursday, but few will have been noticed, let alone remembered because Michael Jackson died at 50.

The pop culture creation’s death goaded mainstream media to grab public attention by the throat like a dog killing a squirrel, driving attention away from just about anything else.

Shortly before midnight on Thursday the New York Times website was running nine Jackson stories, slide shows or other links. For MSNBC, the count was seven. The splash page for The Associated Press at hosted.ap.org limited itself to two Michael Jackson stories, but over at CNN.com, there were ten links, as at The Drudge Report. The Washington Post web page also sported ten links. I stopped counting there.

This wasn’t the death of a Gandhi or Churchill or Mother Theresa. Lynn Elber of the AP had the context right: “Jackson's death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.”

So about a quarter-century ago, this guy was very, very hot. And then he had some troubles, including allegations of molesting boys and financial woes, but he was hoping for a comeback run starting July 13 in London.

So what makes his death from a suspected cardiac arrest at 50 worth all the hyper-attention?

The answer seems pretty clear. The media is in mourning for one of its creations. Jackson had talent, but it was the media following first his every success and then his every bizarre twist and decline that both made Jackson what he became and revealed the mainstream media for what it has become.

For both, good beginnings. For Jackson, a premature end.

For the mainstream media, one more demonstration that its self-congratulatory and studied devotion to news in the public interest can be vanquished at a moment’s notice by news in the service of pandering for profits.

A sad day all around.

There will be others.

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Giving In To Temptation

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s disclosure that his disappearance over the last few days had more to do with an Argentinean lover than a love of hiking on the Appalachian Trail puts him squarely in a current bipartisan gallery of American politicians with a deer-in-the-headlights moment.

Sanford is a Republican. So is Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, found on the client list of the so-called “DC Madam.” So is Nevada Sen. John Ensign who just said he had an affair with a campaign staffer.

Democrats have New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer patronizing prostitutes and former presidential candidate John Edwards with a campaign videographer.

But what we all have is an ever-growing addiction to Voyeur Journalism. The Sanford story was the hot item on the web and everywhere else Wednesday night, including his teary press conference video.

That Sanford was incommunicado for days after having left his staff with misleading information is a legitimate public question and subject of reporting. That he now says he was in Argentina with a mistress during that time is relevant, but only to the extent that it proves he misled his staff and the people of South Carolina and wasn’t available to perform the duties of his office.

The rest?

The State, the largest newspaper in South Carolina, was on line Wednesday with quotes from e-mails between Sanford and his lover, with promises of the full exchange in Thursday’s edition. If there is a public purpose in publishing the governor’s comment on his lover’s tan lines and other attributes, I’m too stupid to see it.

That’s clearly not a problem for the New York Times, which has the tan lines quote in detail on “The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of The Times.”

It isn’t a problem at the Washington Post either – the story on their web site carries the same quote.

So does the online reporting of The Associated Press. So does CNN. USA Today’s web site linked to the e-mails on The State’s web site.

There are probably many, many more stories and links using the quotes. If they have a general theme, it is that Sanford, a conservative who spoke often of family values, gave in to sexual temptation.

Kind of like media outfits that once spoke often of journalism standards giving in to tabloid temptation. But don’t expect them to report that – certain things are beyond the public’s need to know.

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Radical Reformers

Target Cow Burps

Radical Reformers have gone from Never Trust Anyone Over 30 to Never Trust A Cow, which will strike ordinary folk as odd, but for Radical Reformers isn’t much of a plop.

It turns out that cows, in addition to providing dairy products, meat and hides – things already seriously suspect to Radical Reformers – cows, well. . .OK, no holds barred here, cows burp. They’re ruminants, which means they chew their cud and have specialized stomachs.

This will not come as a revelation to those acquainted with cows, but it was news to the Radical Reformers, and when they discovered that cow burps contain methane, their horror knew no bounds.

Methane is one of the gases that cause climate warming. Climate warming is bad. We have this on no less an authority than Al Gore, who has transferred his expertise on winning elections to the climate debate – the pay is better, the lifting is lighter, and by the time he’s proven right or wrong, all concerned will be long dead.

So cows burping methane into the atmosphere clearly had to be addressed along with natural gas production, landfills, coal mining and the like. The Environmental Protection Agency said ruminant livestock accounted for 28 percent of global methane emissions from human-related activities,

Burping cows are a special challenge. After all, they spend most of their time just being cows, not reminding themselves that they should burp into a special collection device, which in any case hasn’t been invented.

Not to worry. In the craziness of the current environmental discussion, paying a tax to cause environmental harm is somehow better than causing the same harm without paying the tax. Never mind that the harm goes to the environment in any case while the tax goes to the government. Government needs your tax dollars, and you trust your government, don’t you?

The American Farm Bureau Federation took a dim view of the possibility that the EPA might tax farm animal burps, noting in March that “it could cost farmers and ranchers $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 per beef cow and $21.87 per hog. The fees were arrived at using publicly available government data.”

That observation caused a stir in the farm states. Farm state politicians who know a threat of having to seek gainful employment when they spot one were pretty uniform in saying it was a lousy idea. Horse trading continues in Congress, and a bill without a cow-burp tax may not be approved until later.

What should be disapproved from the git-go is discussing cow burps at all. Cows are ruminants, ruminants burp. If that’s the issue, what about the 30 million or so deer that not only eat our tulips but burp brazenly after doing so? If we think ruminant burping from about 94 million head of cattle is a problem now, what about when an estimated 90 million American bison roamed the continent, burping at will? Not to mention all those deer, antelope, African and Asian buffalo, giraffes and camels?

That might require some thinking, but that’s not the strong suit of Radical Reformers. Having declared something a sin, they will oppose it in all its forms, even if it winds up with them tagged with a cow-burp tax.

If by some quirk Congress approves any nonsense of this sort, the first herd to be taxed should be the one corralled in the United States Capitol.

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Iran Turmoil –

Yeah. So?

Americans don’t know two central things about Iran:

(1.) What’s really happening and why.

(2.) Why we should care one way or the other.

The first is pretty straightforward. We don’t have an embassy there, and news reporting under the ayatollahs of the last 30 years has been problematical at best. However much we cite Twitter, or whichever “Iranian patriot” is on the internet, all we know is there’s large-scale political unrest.

Besides, our track record of political involvement in Iran isn’t stellar. We backed the Shah of Iran, and on New Year’s Eve in 1978, President Jimmy Carter said “Under the Shah’s brilliant leadership Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troublesome regions of the world. There is no other state figure whom I could appreciate and like more.”

There was one the Iranians could appreciate and like more, Ayatollah Khomeini. His Islamic fundamentalists deposed the ailing Shah and forced him into exile here. On November 4, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized and 52 diplomats were taken hostage to endure 444 days of captivity horrible to them and humiliating to the United States.

A nasty stew of seized assets, charge and countercharge simmers yet.

Recently there was an Iranian election that may or may not have been more crooked than locally customary. Several Iranian factions seem to be seriously attempting to overthrow the current clutch of clerics and their boy Ahmadinejad, the current president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Because Americans tend to see revolutions as the freedom-loving people rising up to overthrow tyranny, they often miss it when people rise up to overthrow one tyranny in favor of another.

All of which is marginally more fascinating than a rain-soaked U.S. Open golf tourney, which leads us to the second question. Why should we care what’s going on in Iran?

Iran’s open and obvious pursuit of nuclear capability – weapons included – is an often-cited concern. We worry that if they develop nukes, they might use them, or give them to those who would. An Arab/Muslim reply to that might be “So why didn’t you worry the same way when Israel developed nukes – and if they can have them, why can’t we? And what about Pakistan? And North Korea?”

We don’t have a good reply.

Trade under sanctions certainly can’t be an issue. The feds say our 2008 imports from Iran amounted to almost $105 million, about three-quarters of that in rugs and artwork. Iranian oil doesn’t figure in the U.S. economy.

Iran forms the north coast of the Straits of Hormuz, the 40-mile-wide bottleneck through which a third of the world’s oil must pass, and there is concern that Iran might attempt to close it. The United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet would certainly enter that discussion, as would the other oil regimes who may be for the advance of Islam, but not at the expense of oil income.

Since Iran has no apparent intention of helping U.S. interests, and no real long-term possibility of seriously hurting them, someone must make a case for why the United States should care or attempt to influence what happens in Iran.

And if the case can’t be made – and it can’t – we should mind our own business. It would be a nice change of pace. Let’s hope we try it.

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Elephants and Mice,

Republicans and Change

Elephants aren’t afraid of mice – it’s a myth.

But Republicans are afraid of change – it’s a fact.

That’s the only explanation for the strident and premature Republican attacks on health care reform triggered by a Congressional Budget Office reaction to a draft not yet completely written.

The CBO said the plan it saw would cost $1 trillion over ten years and still leave about two-thirds of those without medical coverage on their own. That set the Republicans into a group moon-howl, with South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham widely quoted as saying the CBO figures were a “death blow to a government-run health care plan."

Republicans are clearly opposed to government-run anything, unless it’s something essential like torturing suspects, or spending $680 billion and more than 4,300 American lives to swap one group of corrupt Iraqi thugs for another.

Of course, we do have a government-run health plan already. It’s called Medicare, and it’s tax-supported help for those 65 and over. Medicare has been successful in keeping most retirees from having to choose between health care and bankruptcy. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965.

Where were the Republicans on Medicare in the years prior to 1965?

Republicans were opposed, of course. It was change, and they had barely recovered from the change trauma of Social Security, which they had also opposed. Besides, Medicare would cover all alike, rich and poor, and that made it socialized medicine.

Even hinting at socialized medicine guaranteed opposition from the American Medical Association, then as now a group concerned mostly with those medical standards relating to forms of payment. But the AMA had the Republican party by the ears (or perhaps other body parts).

And private health insurance companies had little interest in upsetting a business plan that allowed them to collect premiums from the healthy until they became old and ill, at which point premiums would rise beyond reach or policies would not be renewed. They helped tighten the AMA’s grip.

All the Democrats gripped was Congress, with the 1964 elections giving them a 68-32 majority in the Senate and a 295-140 majority in the House.

And so Medicare became law on a House vote of 307-116 and a Senate tally of 70-17. Half of the House Republicans saw the light – or more probably, the next election in two years – and voted for the bill More than half of Republicans in the Senate opposed Medicare, six-year terms making votes in line with purchased principles easier.

The health care politics now are pretty much as they were in the early sixties. Republicans are opposed, screaming in horror at the costs, socialized medicine and all the other monsters living under their beds. The AMA remains concerned about the doctor/patient relation$hip, and the private insurers don’t want to compete with a government plan that might give the customers an even break.

I’ll predict a health reform victory before the end of the year, but offer this bit of comfort to the Republicans mortally afraid of change. Republicans opposed Social Security and got creamed in 1936. They opposed the reform that became Medicare and got creamed in 1964. And if they continue to oppose health care reform mindlessly, they’ll get creamed in 2010.

Which should make them feel good, because there’s no change involved.

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