born live love die

Paul Giamatti is an actor in a play, “Uncle Vanya” and he is have a hard time getting the character.  His agent points him toward an article in The New Yorker about a company that removes a person’s soul and puts it in storage.  The rationale is that it won’t get in the way of living a full life.  Giamatti does it but the result is less than he hoped for.  With no soul, he has no emotional ballast or inertia and he is all over place in the play.  This is part of the set up.  There is more.

This movie was fiendishly funny.  I took Bookzilla and JMan.  There were a couple of lines of profanity and a nude model in drawing class viewed briefly, but I think it was okay.  Bookzilla got more of the humor than JMan, but he seemed to like it also.

I got some good laughs out of this movie.  I heartily recommend it.

Bookzilla got her braces off today.  It has been just about two years.  She was stellar in the way she handled them.  She brushed well, she made sure she had the rubber bands on when they were supposed to be on, she didn’t complain when they hurt.  She is a great kid.

Thank you, TBogg

Dick Cheney is all, “you do not want to go there, girlfriend“  about his torturing past, calling any investigation “outrageous”. Phillip Garrido feels the same way about the police digging up his back yard.

I’m watching the Ted Kennedy funeral and some things pop out:

The number of the Kennedy family that can be recognized by facial features – I don’t know them but they look like Kennedys.

Ethel Kennedy helps Ted’s widow, Vickie, and sister, Jean, unfold a cloth over the casket – the sorrow she has known.

Kara Kennedy, 49, sure has a lot of lines on her face.

The ‘net is rife with stories about Ted encounters.  Pat Lang:

I knew him slightly.  I briefed him several times in the eighties.  I would go over to his office in the forenoon.  He was usually so hung over that it was difficult to know how much he actually heard or comprehended.  He would occasionally ask questions, good questions.  I liked the man.  I liked his humanity.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan said “what’s the good of being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart?”  I always felt that the world had broken Ted Kennedy’s heart and that he drank to dull the pain.  He was not a puritan.  I liked that too.  You could sense that he cared about ordinary people.  He did not much like men like me, but I understood that.  I never reminded him in the course of those briefing meetings that he had met me once before, in Vietnam under terribly difficult conditions.  This had been during a trip he made out there to see the war for himself.

I remember him getting off an Air America Huey in the midst of something terrible, the aftermath of a VC attack on a Montagnard re-settlement village.  He wept after he looked around.  I began to think I might like him.

I did not agree with him about a lot of things politically, but he “was a man for all that,” a man with a warm heart.

I think Ted knew something about sorrow and it allowed him to feel what he felt that day in Vietnam.

As much as I want Obama to light up the Republicans about the health care issue, I think that it would have diminishing returns. Obama got elected because people a change from politics as usual. Too bad that politics as usual didn’t get the message.

The MSM adds inertia to the status quo by repeating verbatim everything that is said by either side of an issue. They do this because they are searching for a narrative thread that can be used to sell advertising. They use the language of narrative to pitch stories about events. This is commonly heard on television before a break for a commercial: “Is Obama losing the message war on health care? Stay with us as we discuss the issues.” The issue is reduced to a narrative arc about Obama and his goals, i.e., to reform health care, not about the health care plan itself. The voyeuristic nature of the narrative plot point keeps viewers watching during the commercial.

But that’s the way it is. Obama needs to turn some other people loose to light up the Republicans though.

It is all about sex, or at least relationships.  I think that is true when I read about Muslim countries in the Middle East.  I read an article in the near past about a small town in Tunisia that was turning out lots of young men who wanted to go to Iraq and kill Americans.  I don’t have a link for it, but I’ll try to find it.

The reason these young men were willing to go is that economic conditions in their area were very bad.  They couldn’t work and if they couldn’t work, they pay the dowry for a wife.  So they played video games all day until they drifted into a radical mosque, became radicalized and then went to Iraq.

Baida is a young woman who was trained as a suicide bomber but intercepted.  She was interviewed in an Iraqi prison.

When Baida was 17, her mother died, and a few months later, at her father’s behest, Baida married. Almost immediately she knew she had made a mistake. A week after her wedding, according to Baida, her husband threw a cup of cream at her head; soon, beatings became regular. She smiled sweetly and shrugged: “His hand got used to beating me.”

Ater her father died, things changed.

Baida told me she felt much more helpless after her father died. Until then, when she was unhappy with her husband, she would go to visit her family, although they had moved by then to Husayba, the Syrian border town. Sometimes she was so upset at home that she would call one of her brothers or cousins to come to Baquba and drive her to her father’s. “You see, when my father was alive, he loved us a lot,” she said wistfully. “So when I quarreled with my husband, I felt safe because I had my father.”

A young woman trapped in a hopeless marriage.  Divorce is not an option.  Suicide is, and you can get glory when you do it.

Colonial New England was one of the first places where it was accepted that romantic love had a place in marriage.  Before that, it seems that most marriages in the Western world were for many things other than romantic love.  Officers in the French Army, stationed in New England during the Revolutionary War, wrote home about the way the couples seemed to love each other, even in their old age.  But after several centuries, we still don’t understand how to maintain romantic love in a marriage or re-foster it if goes away.

And religion is of little help:

One of the district’s villages is Makhisa, which was home to at least three women who became suicide bombers. A settlement on the edge of Makhisa was for many years the home of Baida’s cellmate, Ranya Ibrahim. It had the dubious distinction of being the town favored by the notorious Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Police told me that he married a woman from Makhisa and sometimes stayed in the village until he was killed on June 7, 2006.

The town, set among thick date-palm and pomegranate orchards, consists of little more than a few streets lined with low slung, mostly rickety houses, many with simple palm-thatch porches. On the outskirts, one in every four vehicles is a wooden horse-drawn wagon. The animals pull canisters filled with gas used for cooking, transport wood and serve as an informal bus service for local women and children. The most recent suicide bombing near here occurred this spring. It killed at least 47 people, many of them Iranian Shiite pilgrims.

Until 2007, it was too dangerous for the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police to enter the area. When they finally did, they found a strange community. “When we entered Makhisa we didn’t find a TV because it’s forbidden,” Col. Khalid Mohammed al-Ameri, who was in the army under Saddam Hussein and has served all over the country, told me. “And no ice, no cigarettes and no tomatoes and cucumbers mixed together at the same shop.”

The strictest Sunni extremists believe that people should not have anything that did not exist in the early days of Islam. Since there was no electricity in the seventh century, there could be neither refrigeration nor ice and no television. The aversion to mixing tomatoes and cucumbers is because cucumbers are viewed as a male vegetable and tomatoes are female, and mixing them in a box is seen as lascivious, Colonel Khalid said, shaking his head.

Cucumbers and tomatoes.  I can see the cucumber, but a tomato?  Because it is squishy?  Red juice? That is too weird.

A young woman in Baida’s situation may look longingly toward an end of her strife-filled life.  And that is sad.

Some college student got the mic at a town hall of President Obama and challenged him to a debate.  This act of bravado was lauded on Fox News.  Note that this never happened during a Bush town hall as all those attendees were prescreened Republicans.  Whatever.  Like the President has time to take on each 22 year old chump who comes along.  Grow up, kid.

On Fox News, the kid was deriding the President for drawing parallels between the role of the US Postal Service, UPS and FedEx.  Kid says, “There’s no way that UPS can delliver a letter to Podunk, Alaska for 42 cents!”  This was followed by both the kid and the Fox hairpiece tripping over themselves to not be caught bad mouthing Alaska. (“I love Sarah Palin.”)   Kid says, “They are taking a loss but they are okay with it.”, talking about the government.

We have a postal service because it is a service that the government chooses to provide.  Private mail carriers were not up to the task so the government does it for a flat fee.  Yes, if private enterprise tried to deliver the mail, a letter to Pudunk, Alaska would cost the same as a parcel, around $20.

Why do we have a fire department?  Because private fire fighting companies were so bad at it.

Firefighting used to be a private for-profit industry. In the 1800′s, the early days of urbanization, in cities like New York and Baltimore, there were private “clubs” or “gangs” who were in charge of putting out fires. The infamous Boss Tweed started his illustrious political career at a volunteer fire company. The way it functioned was the first club at the scene got money from the insurance company. So, they had an incentive to get there fast. They also had an incentive to sabotage competition. They also often ended up getting in fights over territory and many times buildings would burn down before the issue was resolved. They were glorified looters. It was corrupt, bloated and expensive — but at least it wasn’t the much maligned “government controlled.”

President Obama’s point is that there are things that the government can do more cheaply than private enterprise and providing low cost health care is one of them.  Before the French Revolution, the Crown sold franchises for a variety of things.  One franchise what was highly prized was the license to collect saltpeter.  Saltpeter was used in the production of gunpowder, so this was a defense issue.  It grew on the walls of basements and cellars, so the collectors had the right to enter buildings to collect it.  But they made most of their money by extortion.  They would threaten homeowners with coming in and doing whatever was required to get the saltpeter.  The homeowners would pay them off rather than have their cellars ransacked.  Conservatives are asking for the same kind of franchise for health care.  They want to get paid off indirectly by the government.

When conservatives say that it is not about the money, it is about  principles, it’s about the money.

Nate Silver is new to the public arena, but he has clarity.

The fundamental accomplishments of a public option-less bill would be to (1) ensure that no American could be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition or because they became sick; (2) subsidize health insurance coverage for millions of poor and middle-class Americans.

These are major, major accomplishments. Arguably, they are accomplished at too great a cost. But let’s look at it like this. The CBO estimates that the public option would save about $150 billion over the next ten years — that’s roughly $1,100 for every taxpayer. I’m certainly not thrilled to have to pay an additional $1,100 in taxes because some Blue Dog Democrats want to placate their friends in the insurance industry. But I think the good in this health care bill — the move toward universal-ish coverage, the cost-control provisions — is worth a heck of a lot more than $1,100.

Nate may be right, but I’m tired of all of these industrial relief acts.  My concern is that this health care reform will turn into a Health Insurance Company Relief Act.

Seen on Talking Points Memo:

Obama isn’t saying the right thing. He should be saying, “Stop lying.” Or maybe he should send Biden out to say it. That’s probably the best thing.

I’m not basing this on some misguided sense that being aggressive is what’s required. Rather, I’m basing it on how the MSM works. They report what politicians say. And they don’t fact check them. That’s the system — maybe you don’t like it. I don’t like it either. But it’s not changing any time soon.

That’s a key point, so I’m going to repeat it. All the broadcast MSM does is report what politicians say. They don’t fact check them. Afterwards, they have blowhards sit around in panels and have disingenuous spin-meister discussions about whether or not what was said is playing well with the general public.

On the Sunday talkers yesterday, I heard, “Is Obama losing the message war.”  It isn’t about policy anymore, it is just about public relations.

Some people clearly have too much time on their hands.  Via Balloon Juice:

On the other hand, these people aren’t shooting up health clubs, so maybe it’s better this way.