While I continue to believe that “health care” is a poor, but necessary, phrase to describe the delivery of services normal people, who prefer to be well, would rather not have, it is because medical and surgical intervention, like fire suppression, criminal interdiction and resisting armed invasion are categorized as disutilities—not suitable to be distributed by the market, which gets people what they want.
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On last night’s report, Rachel Maddow defined the two obligations of the Congress: to set policy and to provide oversight. This should be seen in the context of a Congress that has been pretending for several decades that the chief executive sets the agenda and legislators just act like rubber stamps.
It is yet another example of triangulation, whose object is always to deceive. The object of deception is to shirk responsibility. Or is it the other way around?
Democrats made a mistake when they bought into the Obama mistique.

The fuss made over them was actually about something else. Continue reading →

Characteristic behaviors of the person addled brain.

Adulation
Admiration
Gilt by association
Mania
Exuberance
Aggression
Power trip
Distraction
Perseverance
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Stephen Moore used to head up the Club for Growth, which tried to be a sort of king maker and grew out of the abortive John McCain efforts to be something more than a Senator from an arid state.
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Legal does not equal moral behavior.

Worse, for some people, money seems to cancel morality. This is not money’s fault. The substitution of currency for material reality seems to erase moral reasoning. Or is currency a default motivator for people who lack cognitive direction?

Liberty. Fraternity. Equality. This unholy trinity, like the three legged stool, cannot stand on one or two legs alone. Republic and democracy are the entities where the beneficiaries of that trinity, publios and demos (same thing in two languages, Latin and Greek, sort of like apple and pomme in English and French) thrive.
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“Mission Impossible.” The title of the TV series was, of course, ironic because, whatever the improbable mission, on TV it was achieved. This is not the likely outcome of the Glynn County Police “mission,” to “ensure public safety within the community,” (p.8) because that is a real life impossibility.
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Well, this is not a diary and, if I were not a New Yorker subscriber, I would not have bothered to respond to such a sparse come-.on. It is not nice to tease.

That said, the article is informative, not as tedious as many New Yorker pieces and provides a new perspective.

I have long thought that Bernstein was the better reporter and do not trust Woodward. He is a grand stander and a self promoter.

Since Nixon once answered a letter I sent him, I’ve been ambivalent about his fall. Since I learned that both he and McGovern supported a guaranteed family income, I have felt that he was set up because he had to be removed. Had McGovern won, he would not have been able to effect such a program. Nixon could and the financiers, nor Capitol Hill, could put up with that. Formally liberating the dollar from the bands of gold threatened to reduce the currency to a mere utility. All the people gambling with it as a scarce resource could not have that. They could not give up the levers of the economy. Bad enough that the expanded electorate would challenge the established hegemony.

Watergate overshadowed so much else that happened. One might say it was the beginning of a grand deception which has now culminated with deception being all there is.

Segregationists are desperate for some stratagem that will automatically confer special status (like heritage or even material inheritance) without the recipient having to do or accomplish anything. That is because these status seekers are by and large incompetence. So, basing social standing and recognition on education and/or achievement is anathema to them. Segregation and the maintence of exclusive neighborhoods is not about the excluded; it is about people who sense of self-importance is enhanced by shutting other people out. We see evidence of it not just in fancy gated enclaves but also in slum dwellings festooned with KEEP OUT signs. Perhaps it is atavistic, like the redwing blackbird shrieking when someone enters its territory.

While many of us are disgusted by how the Dude seems to have wasted his inheritance in six bankruptcies, his base may well find his status as an heir to a great fortune attractive. And the waste lets them feel superior (as it does Democrats) in arguing they would have done better in life if they’d had his advantages.

Forgot to add that this segregationist desire puts those who hold it in conflict with the Constitution, which directs that all PERSONS within its JURISDICTION are to be given equal treatment. Remember that for slavery to continue within its confines, the slave had to be defined as 3/5 of a person. The word person is super important; more important than citizen. After all, citizenship is a bundle of obligations. Persons have natural rights and their behavior is presumed to be good because their Creator has endowed them with a moral sense. This premise, too, puts the Constitution at odds with the fundamentalist belief that man is evil and must be persuaded or forced to do good.