From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen
Three weeks on the road was a welcome break from the silliness of American politics but back home in the U. S. of A. and time to begin to catch up.
Good to see our old friend Joe “LOOK AT ME!†Lieberman once again finding a way to suck himself onto the national stage. While it is difficult to imagine his doing more damage than his unbridled support of the unnecessary and ultimately failed war in Iraq, his fighting to deny health care insurance to 36 million Americans is a pretty good start. Coming from the state that is home to 72 insurance headquarters, with three times the U.S. average of insurance jobs as a percent of total state employment I suppose it should not be surprising. Nor should we be surprised by his pompous, pontifical commitment to self-interest.
Also good to see the state of Maine – population 1.3 million (or ca. .004% of U. S. population) finding itself one of the chief arbiters of health care reform through its Senator Olympia Snow. Having watered down the stimulus package to satisfy Maine’s other Senator, Susan Collins, Senate Democrats seem to be doing all they can to emasculate the health care bill to satisfy Senator Snow. All in the name of a kind of faux bipartisanship.
Then there is the Catholic Church hierarchy and its willingness to threaten the fires of hell on any Catholic senator ignoring its health care reform abortion edicts. This from the church that discriminates against women, forces celibacy on its priests, facilitated thousands of pedophiliac rapes, seems to believe that condoms increase the risk of HIV infection, and actually still believes birth control to be a sin.
One highlight of our recent travels: sitting in a Munich apartment watching CNN’s Wolf Blitzer spend an entire hour interviewing the balloon boy and his family about the great fabricated adventure that managed to suck Wolf into a kind of parallel universe where truth is irrelevant and a family’s bizarre hope for attention is satisfied by a lazy, gullible press, willing to track an empty balloon for hours on end only to learn that they were the victims of a fraud. This turned out to be perhaps the funniest TV show of the year. Can’t wait for the Emmys.