DNR

J, do you get it? Monday's post was titled, 'R and D', and today's is DNR. As in, 'Do Not Resuscitate', which is the Republican response to health care reform, especially after last night's SOTU. [What is with all of these abbreviations lately: SOTU, SCOTUS. Oh, they scot'us alright; we're totally scot'ed.]
re Obama's message: nice speechifying! J, don't we know another charismatic African-American who is not President but also a gifted public speaker? Natural born leaders? Well he's got oration, now we just need action to back it up.

R and D

Thom Hartmann is very good. Paraphrasing and oversimplifying from this morning's brief commute: [R]epublicans claim government is the problem; but 'vote for us anyway so we can go clean it up via transfer of power to the private sector's biggest for-profit companies; if you don't vote for us, you'll die'. [D]emocrats claim only government can help solve some of our worst problems; but 'we don't often explain clearly why that is, or how that works; vote for us because we're not Republicans; even though we take a lot of the same money, we want to get better at social justice and make a difference'. Our shining example is now health care reform.
Lots of blurbs are asking (demanding?) that Obama lead on his signature issue. Obama had a D next to his name on the 2008 ballot. Will he show some fight with his actions, not just his words? Or will he give a State of the F.U.? We'll know in 2 days.

SCOTUS HHH - why s%*t matters

I am no clairvoyant, but I guaran-frikkin-tee that the Founding Fathers would never, EVER, have assigned businesses the same rights and freedoms as individual persons, as the Court just did in Citizens United. Doesn't anyone who takes an oath of office -- to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic -- actually fulfill that oath anymore? 4 of the worst, most HIGHpocritical judges ever appointed to the Supreme Court (+ Kennedy) just flushed that document down the toilet. If you thought corporations had too much control over this country before, just wait another 10 months. Un-be-frikkin-lievable.

UPDATE: Wow, Keith: "our Dred Scott". Happen to agree; a company is not a person. But Roberts has officially sanctioned the cliff dive that began in Iraq. The only Supreme thing here is the irony that if W hadn't been elected by his daddy's court in 2000, Roberts (and Alito) might never have been there to finish us off.

Follow-up: F me!

Yikes, he's wicked fast. And he seems to echo how I feel, which goes a long way to refining some of my language that may be inconsistent or meandering. I've hit the leadership thing already. But a couple of follow-up points anyway, for some attempt at closure --

1st, voters are morons. And not just in MA. From all I've read so far, Senator-elect Brown seems like a douche, a hard-working, duplicitous, say anything for a vote, empty-suit political douche. He'll be on the Highpocrisy radar for as long as he can stay in his seat (which hopefully won't be past 2012). He's already on record as saying that health care reform will burden the middle class and raise taxes. He's Republican, right? Geez, for a nobody who came from nowhere, why does he already seem a less-Mormony Mitt Romney?

2nd, if this country's screwed anyway, it won't matter who is or was ultimately responsible. A former colleague from many years ago held the view that in all of human history, only a handful of actual humans made enough of a difference in affecting other people's lives. And I thought I was glass half-empty [keep reading]

So we resolve this year to get back to some basic Highpocrisy and ease up on the venting / lamenting. But before that, let us have a fresh plate of perspective. Here's but 1 recipe:
- Haiti
- my friend's mom. She passed away last month after a very brief but too late in detecting bout w/ cancer. Her husband has now lost 2 wives to cancer.
Death is part of the deal. We all want to live happily ever after. The ever after happens anyway, but the human struggle is for the happily part. More hugs, kids eating ice cream or staying up a little later, or laughing at farts. Adults can do these too, by the way. Our capacity to love and to laugh is our best big ticket item!

And thus, we pivot to Highpocrisy's current target, the MSM. Some doof wrote in the NYTimes this morning about all the problems Obama and the Dems now face from the MA results. Whatever. But if the 4th estate had done its job 10 years ago, we might not have had 2 terms of the last moron elected by moron voters (beer buddy is never a legit criterion for elected office). And by extension, maybe we would not have been lied to or sold a war that no one but pond scum sub-human profiteers wanted. $1 trillion saved would have paid for health care instead. Maybe had the MSM called out Wall St.'s greedy, heartless bastards, the economy might not have tanked. That's a lot, OK, so we ask a familiar mantra, how bad Bush must've been for the same morons to vote in the commie-fascist to replace him? So MSM, you Highpocrisy-loving corporate shills, welcome to 2010!

no MLK

We can be respectful enough of the process to wait our turn, but now that the vote's over in MA, after the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, it's time to draw our impudent conclusion: Obama may yet be a great President, but he's no MLK, and sadly too, he is no Jackie Robinson. I don't think many people voted for him expecting him to be a combination of both. But I'd have settled for some sign that he might or could have been a bit of either. He's also not yet even Reagan in terms of transformational.

'Oh that's not fair, progressives are piling on, he's only had a year to right the horrors of the past 8, the Repos can't get back in power or it will only get worse' ... Maybe all of that is true. But focusing only on Obama as leader of the free world, he doesn't get a break. America is full of fat, drunk, and stupid so I don't care how hard he asked us to work. He has to lead too! We're naive, so what? He has to fight for what we the People want, if not for what he wants. Or at the very least, he has to create the perception that he's fighting. And the perception that I see out there right now is that because he's not fighting, progressives have soured on him or he's selling out to his corporate masters... And we get to vent about it here on this silly little blog.

Remember when Obama referred to the Senate's health care bill as the most important social legislation in 70 years? I don't recall him saying the same thing about the House bill... [please pass along the link if he did; I'm spent]. Let Pharma walk, that deal should not have been made in the 1st place. There might be reform, and it might actually work in the longer-term. But anything that passes, if it passes, could have been so much more if only the President had made the case for the moral necessity to take care of this country's sick. Meaning, we'll never know what he could have accomplished on this front because the perception is he never tried.

Speaking of never trying, how bad do you have to be as the D candidate to lose Ted Kennedy's seat in blue Mass., to some pick-up driving, nude-posing tea party wannabe? As bad as W was in setting the stage for Obama's rise, because this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. Still, tasty pick up there boneheads.

By the way, if only the Senate version matters, why take civics or government or history in school? The answer (via my daily baseball trivia calendar for 2010) -- because Dr. King was quoted in a book about Jackie Robinson saying this:

"Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place. Without him, I
would never have been able to do what I did".

So what's our take-away here? Is it to engage in the blame game? If so, we kinda already did a little, especially with Mr. Buck-stopper himself. No, I would rather read as much as I can, e.g., from this guy, or to TPM's Josh Marshall in his hastily-cobbled but pretty accurate post-script, to then arrive at a more informed decision as to how best to proceed.

We could end up at the Full Cynical, game over, man. Game over. [And we mean that in the 'America's empire is already on the decline' sense; it won't take much more to bankrupt us all. If China doesn't foreclose, climate change should take care of the rest, maybe in 200-300 years if we're lucky?]

But maybe, just maybe, someone in a position of power, say the President (?) could rally the base, the troops and a whole mess in between, and get the $%^ done that we voted him to do. Most humans want the basics in life: health, the pursuit of happiness. Dr. King never took his eyes off the prize; we sometimes do. 40 years later and we're still not there yet. Amazing.

HH, early 2010 'roids edition

So, Mark McGwire admits he cheated, but could not admit he cheated at the time he may or may not have lied to Congress? We're not just about politics here; we're also about baseball and politics, especially when they converge.