Puffin’s Place

I always knew Cheney to be dangerous. Now I know him to be a poor loser and a despicable member of the national community. And, of course, unable to recall that during the GWB administration, anyone who criticized wither Cheney or Bush was loudly called unAmerican.

Dick, you are a toad unworthy of any headline you are ever given.

Spammers think the rest of us are idiots. Every day I clear out spam from folks around the world introducing a new site, praising me while embedding a vendor url in the message, or telling me the secret of finding nude pictures of the Statue of Liberty.

Grow up, guys. They ain’t getting through, and your half-assed attempt to be folksey and hot for this site does not work.

Gee, according to HuffPo, Angeline says fidelity is not essential, and the US Senate passes a Mona Lisa bill to the insurance industry. I wonder which is more important. Hard to tell these days as our most revered and hardest nosed journalist spend more time on Hollywood and Celebrity Tobacco Road than on real news.

The Senate bill is clearly crap. If the House does not move in and insist on at least token concern for the taxpayer, we can consign Obama to the same alter of industry as Nixon, GW Bush, et al. Without an alternative to the insurance conglomerates and, as they say, Big Pharma, we have nothing. Why no import of drugs from Canada? Does Congress find it offensive that the Canadians have not yet falled to the lure of election support?

And another Muslim nutcase–not to be confused with real life Muslims who actually follow the imperatives of their religion–sets his pants on fire because we neglected to check him out at his point of departure. And he is on the terrorist list! So do we punish those who allowed him to purchase a ticket and board the plane with firecrackers in his pants? Naw, we penalize passengers with no bathroom breaks for an hour before landing. Hmmmm, has Al Queda indicated that planes may only be blown up on landing?

What the fiery hell is going on with the USA? And how weird am I for wondering?

The best overview I’ve seen on the health care issue can be found hereat the Pro Publica journalism site.

In addition to a clear outline of the legislative process, one can find various scenarios and what they mean in relation to the proposed legislation—e.g., how will this bill impact the uninsured, underinsured, already-insured, and so forth.

I do not know where the Obama I voted for has gone.

Thanks to today’s Daily Beast for alerting me to yet another incursion into personal rights: a university that may not graduate students it deems too fat.

A Different Kind of Test
November 20, 2009

More than two dozen seniors at Lincoln University, in Oxford, Pa., are in danger of not being able to graduate this spring — not because they’re under disciplinary probation or haven’t fulfilled the requirements of their majors, but because they were obese as freshmen.

All had body mass index (BMI) scores above 30 — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ threshold for obesity — when they arrived on campus in the fall of 2006, but none have taken college-sanctioned steps to show they’ve lost weight or at least tried. They’re in the historically black university’s first graduating class required to either have a BMI below 30 or to take “Fitness for Life,” a one semester class that mixes exercise, nutritional instruction and discussion of the risks of obesity.

It might sound like a joke, or a violation of individual rights, but James L. DeBoy, chair of Lincoln’s health, physical education and recreation department, said he sees it as his “professional responsibility to be honest and tell students they’re not healthy.”

How do you like that? Without doubt this same university at least occasionally hands a diploma to a drunk or drug user, to a woman who cheats on her partner or a guy that beats his wife, not to mention the number of undergraduate degrees that go annually to the minimally literate. But Lincoln University has taken upon itself to deny earned degrees to those whose BMI displeases the university. Morality clearly is of less importance than physical geography.

It’s pretty nifty to see at least one US university has its eye on what is really important. I surely hope its donors are aware of this policy. Especially the heavy ones.

Am I the only one who finds it interesting that the Fort Hood shooter was immediately identified as a Muslim but the religion of the Florida shooter has yet to be identified? Recall assorted other outbursts of violence recently and try to remember when the religion of the presumed guilty has been a prominent part of the story. Remember any headlines that said, Christian Timothy McVeigh blows up Oklahoma building? Christian Jeffrey Dahmer boils victims?

But let a Muslim commit an atrocity and two things happen: his/her religion becomes a major part of the story, including soulful interviews with Mosque-mates, and all parts of his or her name are used repeatedly lest we miss a “Mohammad” a “Nidal.”

Yet the same folk in and out of the media who find only the religion of Muslims news and noteworthy would be horrified to see Christian, Jewish, etc. attached to other crimes.

Remember, by the way, how Madeline Murray was always “atheist Madeline Murray”?

Apparently the American way is to identify conspicuously that which we fear and loathe.

There is not much hopeful or good that can be said about the right wingers in the U.S. They are without vision, without humanity, without ethics, without a sense of history, without an interest in the present and the future, and wholly absorbed by themselves, their own wallets and tight-assed convictions, and frightened to death of any one or any thing or idea that reflects joy, determination, responsibility, and concern.

The pathetic hash-slinger in Temple Georgia who greets patrons at the front door with a sign calling President Obama’s health care plan “nigger” rigged is repulsive and startling. It does, however, make manifest the paucity of taste, thought, and humanity of what so many now call wingnuts. Between the rampant racism that Obama’s election has unleashed, a racism orchestrated by some very intentional, clever, and loathsome public figures, and the violent underpinnings by much of the right’s actions and speech, a US citizen can no longer pretend the situation is not threatening. And revolting.

If the reasonable people in this country—those who turn away from politics or trash all politicians fretfully or nod off over local gossip on the assumption that a single moron in Georgia is not the world—the US will become a nightmare for any of us not out to destroy someone else. It IS possible for the nasty and the vile to consume the good and well-intentioned.

Just look the other way and see what will happen.

I just saw the newish (?) documentary on Dalton Trumbo, the 40’s and 50’s Hollywood screen writer who chose defending the First Amendment over ratting out friends who joined the Communist party in the 30’s when no one else was doing squat to confront the fascists.

We will come back to Trumbo’s intellectual excellence in a minute, but first enjoy Nathan Lane’s reading of a letter Trumbo wrote to his adult son:

With a flavor of the man’s mind, wit, and facility with the language, now listed to his testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the massive red hunt that led to the Hollywood black list:

In a post, GW Bush era when we are only hesitantly emerging from the notion that everyone not with Bush/Cheyney in their absurd and illegal and life-costing antics, it is important that we remember such men as Dalton Trumbo and the narrow-brained and coercive suits that tried in vain to stifle opinions not their own. If you are too young to remember America in its red-baiting politics of the thirties and forties and fifties, you absolutely must take a look back. We are getting closer and closer to repeating it, and who knows what may lie beyond the civility and intelligence of our current president.

Good for Obama and the Nobel Committee. He has not yet done all I hope for, but he has totally fulfilled my grinding desire to have a president in whom I can be proud and of whom I can say that he represents the best that is in the US.