Smarmoofus Spot

This occurred on Facebook last night:

My Friend: John Locke was freakin’ smart. And sensible.
8 hours ago

*sigh* And that is what’s wrong with America today.  Too many of us go straight for the Lost TV show reference without regard for one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers, whose views are reflected in the American Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…“).

Mind you, I had a good chuckle over the exchange.  But then I felt like crying.

Just under eighteen months ago, we watched as then-Senator Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. It was an historic moment in our nation’s history, but just another step in our path to health care coverage for all Americans. It took longer, and was more fraught with obstacles than I expected. It isn’t the bill that Obama spoke so passionately for in September.  But tonight, Congress passed what is a very promising starting point.

The new legislation offers many protections to consumers who have been subject to unfair practices by their insurance company, and extends coverage to people who have been shut out of the health care system for too long.  As President Obama said, “tonight’s vote is not a victory for any one party.  It’s a victory… for the American people.  And it’s a victory for common sense.”

Click here to see what the bill does for you and your neighbors.

So thank you, President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who attempted to do this in an even less favorable political climate when she was First Lady sixteen years ago), the late Senator Ted Kennedy (who made health care access a major facet of his illustrious career), and everybody who has worked so hard for so long on this important issue.  And congratulations to us all!

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times recently asked “What do we need health insurers for anyway?” Frankly, I’ve been wondering the same thing. (Some of you may have heard me express my lack of sympathy for a multi-billion-dollar-industry-that-produces-nothing before.) Throughout the ongoing debate about health care reform in this country, money seems to be the underlying issue. Who will pay for providing care to those who can’t pay for it themselves? How do we control the costs for people who are facing insurance premium increases? If the government steps in, how will it pay for its intervention? And, seemingly the biggest question among conservatives, Why should I have to pay for the bum down the street?

I formed my opinion on this debate in 1997, shortly after I aged out of being a military dependent and learned what the rest of you already knew: the private healthcare system sucks.  I grew up with socialized healthcare, and I credit my survival to the excellent (and aggressive) care I received.  I have seen a system that works, right here in the U.S., and opponents would be hard pressed to disavow me of my belief that the U.S. Government can manage it.

And, since the government already picks up the slack for the most medically vulnerable (read medically expensive) in our nation (the elderly, disabled, and children in poverty) through programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP, anyway, why not let it take the healthy and robust people on board, as well?  If we diverted all those billions of dollars we pay in insurance premiums every year to the government coffers (well, knowing the Government, perhaps to a special health care program that cannot be pillaged), and eliminate the cap on earnings that is taxed for Social Security, I think we could pretty much pay for the plan.

I wrote this early, and I’m proud of that.  Go me!  (What’s it like in the future?)

Grateful to find an open seat just behind the dividing line, she watched reserved seats fill at the next stop.  The driver noticed them sitting while their ‘betters’ stood.  “Y’all gotta do the right thing,” he said.
Others moved.
“I shouldn’t have to,” she defied.
“I’ll be callin’ the cops, then.”
“You may do that.”

Story behind the story:

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to take her home from her work day at Montgomery Fair department store.  At the time, a city ordinance required the public bus system reserve a number of seat rows at the front of the bus for whites only.  Mrs. Parks took a seat in the first row behind that reserved section.  When the reserved area seats were all taken, additional white passengers boarded and maintained the segregation of races by standing in the forward section of the bus.  The driver saw this and, as was the custom (not law), approached the black passengers and asked them to move back so the driver could expand the “white” section of the bus, effectively giving the black passengers’ seats to white passengers.  Three black gentlemen sitting around Mrs. Parks complied.  However, Mrs. Parks was tired.  Not physically tired from her work, but emotionally drained from the repeated humiliation and subjugation black Americans had endured.  So she refused to move, the police were called, and she was arrested.  This seemingly small act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a major event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Writing about this incident later, Martin Luther King, Jr.  said, “no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’”

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born February 4, 1913 and died October 24, 2005.  Her legacy endures.

 
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Sometimes I scan the headlines at Google News and nothing new or terribly interesting jumps out at me.  But this weekend has been unusually newsworthy, so here is my commentary on a very few of the items that caught my attention:

Study: 1 in 110 U.S. Children Had Autism in 2006 – CNN.com

Highlights:

• CDC: One child in 110 had autism in 2006, a jump of 57 percent from 2002
• One in 70 boys were diagnosed with disorder, compared with one in 315 girls
• Experts: More awareness of symptoms needed so children can be diagnosed earlier
• Earlier intervention means more malleable behavior patterns, experts say

First, this is alarming, even to me — and I’d already read several articles that hinted at an increase in prevalence, so it isn’t exactly new news.  But the increase is far more dramatic than I had realized.  Before seeing these figures, I could dismiss the idea that the number of kids with autism spectrum disorder was on the rise as anecdotal.  More and more friends who had kids were telling me of their irregular development, but it seemed plausible to me that maybe the phenomenon I thought I was observing was just a matter of reaching that life stage where we have kids who would be old enough to identify as “normal” or somewhere on the spectrum.  Perhaps.  But this article quantifies it.  The numbers make it real — hard, indisputable data.  And it’s alarming.

But then we move on to why?  I have hypotheses.  I would love to explore them, and I am sure there are researchers out there who are exploring them.  One of my ideas has to do with maternal diet while the fetus is developing.  As I look at the typical American diet, I am seeing less public concern for actual nutrients as we instead focus on the caloric, fat, and sugar content of foods.  We could all be well-fed but malnourished.  Another idea has to do with the increased age at which we are starting families these days (according to the CDC, we have seen an increase of 3.6 years to an average first-birth maternal age of 25 years, and the proportion of first births to women aged 35 years and over increased nearly eight times since the 1970s).  One article I read suggested that advanced maternal age may play a part in the development of an autism spectrum disorder.  Then there is the whole “fragile X syndrome” explanation, which has considerable weight because it is verifiable through genetic testing (though it accounts for a relatively small proportion of people with an autism spectrum disorder).

But none of that is likely to matter, because I also read this in the news:

Global Warming Hike May Be Steeper: Research

Highlights:

• Global temperatures could rise substantially more because of increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study by US and Chinese scientists released Sunday.
• Calculations for man-made global warming may be underestimated by between 30 and 50 percent.
• “Since there is no indication that the future will behave differently than the past, we should expect a couple of degrees of continued warming even if we held CO2 concentrations at the current level,” said lead researcher Mark Pagani of Yale.

If you own land in Florida, sell now.  And say goodbye to Tuvalu.  I dunno.   All we can do is wait and see.  It’s not like we can change the minds of all those politicians and business people who are making money while denying this issue.  And maybe they’re right… maybe the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.  I mean, scientists are just average people with decades of training and research under their belts.  It’s completely likely that the lay politicians know better.

The thing is, I don’t really care about the rise in ocean levels.  Or even the poor polar bears (*sob*  Yes, I do!).  What I care about is the loss of fresh water and the reduction in arable land.  Global climate change is going to make it difficult to feed and supply fresh water to… what are we up to now? Almost seven billion humans?  Time to administer the anti-virals.  Poor Earth.

And finally…

Eurostar Suspends Service for Third Day

Highlights:

• Severe snowy conditions in northern France had caused snow to be ingested into trains in a way never seen before, shorting electrical systems and stalling trains.
• Thousands of passengers were trapped on five trains in the Channel Tunnel on Friday and Saturday in wintry weather.
• The company is transporting 500 of its “most vulnerable” passengers to France.

To this I say, only, I was nowhere near the Chunnel!  I didn’t touch it!  This one was not my fault.  That’s really all I have to say.  Except maybe I should add that I think it would be utterly cool to be a passenger on one of those trains!  Put my take-it-all-in-stride-itude to the test, along with my resourceful packing skills.  I would be warm and cozy, because I always carry a blanket with me.  I would likely have snacks.  Maybe even some soda (which provides water and calories, empty though they may be).  As long as the lavatories were available, I would’ve managed just fine.  Because I am Super Smarmoofus.  I shall prevail!

I’m going to take a chance here and write about something important, in the hopes that the person I’m about to talk about does not read this blog.  (I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.)

Like many of you, I have an account on Facebook.  Have had since before I had this blog, in fact.  If you are on Facebook, you may have occasionally seen “viral” status updates.  You know, where someone changes their status to some kind of social or political statement, and then their friends copy it, and then the friends of their friends copy it, until half of the membership all have the same status.  On September 3 this year, one such status went ’round:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

I agreed with that message, but I tend to check my politics at the door when it comes to social media.  If it were a political forum, I’d be all about it.  But that’s not what Facebook is to me.  (To give you an idea of what I do with Facebook, my current status is “[Smarmoofus] dreamt she had a special cricket that got into her brother’s fish tank, and he killed one of his fish retrieving her cricket for her. But she didn’t care about the fish. All she cared about was that her cricket was alive.”)  So I did not change my status to echo the sentiment regarding health care access.

Later in the day, I discovered that one of my “Facebook friends” did change his status in reference to health care.  But not the way you’d think.  He put:

[Acquaintance] thinks people should get their head out of their collective asses and realize that people die, period. Stop whinging about it and making vacuous FB statuses about health care to the contrary. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

I didn’t respond to that one, just as I didn’t respond to the first one.  But it did make me twitch.  And I dwelled on it.  And I almost, almost unfriended him.  I mean, this is the same guy who criticized Obama for “ignoring” the Somali pirate situation when we had six Navy warships on their way to the region.  So this was not my first political run-in with the guy.  But I’ve managed to suppress my rage and interact with him civilly in the last two months.

Really, when he’s not being a right-wing political nut (that was unfair, and I acknowledge that… he’s a libertarian, not a neo-con), he’s a nice guy to know.  Loyal and supportive to the ends of the earth for his friends.  But mention government–especially the Obama and/or Clinton administrations–and he completely shuts down the compassionate part of his brain.

Anyway, on Thursday, I logged on to Facebook to find this status and comment thread:

[acquaintance] just signed up for COBRA. *sigh*

[friend 1] Sorry to hear about the job, good luck in the search, I’m sure you find a good one! :)

[friend 2] Cobra??

[acquaintance] COBRA is the extension of the health insurance plan that you have with your employer. Usually you lose your insurance when you leave your employer but COBRA allows you to pay the total premiums for the insurance. In effect, the company still pays for the insurance but you pay the company back for the amount. It lasts for 18 months or until you get covered elsewhere.

[friend 3] Remember when COBRA was the enemy of G. I. Joe and not an expensive health insurance option.

[acquaintance] Oh, it’s still the enemy… :P

This guy has been a “friend” for going on four years, now.  We’ve shared a lot.  I refer to him as an acquaintance, but really, he is my friend.  I just have a hard time accepting that my friend could feel the way he does about so many issues that are so important to me.  So I verbally push him away by calling him an acquaintance.  And today, when I saw that Mr. People-Die-So-Get-Over-It was taking advantage of a government benefit to continue his much-needed health coverage (he lives with a serious condition that requires constant treatment), I had an immediate negative emotional response.  I completely ignored the news that he was involuntarily out of work.  Instead, I felt annoyance that he would dare benefit from the government that he rants against at every turn.

So, instead of expressing my sympathy… *ashamed*… I let my exasperation show.  And I feel like a cad.  My contribution to his comment thread was to tell him about ARRA, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed by Barack Obama, which includes a 65% subsidy to employees for COBRA-enabled insurance for up to 9 months after an involuntary termination.  And I did it, not to help him when he might need help most, but to force him to choose between his pompous conservative idealism and making ends meet.

But he volleyed it right back to me.  His response was,”true, but there *is* a caveat. If you earned more than $125k you will be required to pay back all of the reduction as increase in income taxes. As a result, certain individuals might wish to elect to decline the option.”  Wow.  I had no idea he was doing so well.  Any semblance of sympathy I might’ve had for him just flew out the window.

But for those recently unemployed mere mortals among my readership who were not making $125k a year (or even those who were but have families to support), ARRA is there.  And if you did make so much that you would have to repay the benefit later, it’s not going to be a lump-sum bill due at tax time.  “If the employee has an adjusted gross income in 2009 over $125,000 if filing as single ($250,000 if filing jointly), then the subsidy will be recaptured in a phased manner from the employee through the tax system.”  So if you need it now, take it and make ends meet.  And good luck to you.

Thanks for the reminder, G-man!

“Ms. Taylor?”
“Yes…?”
“I am John Grapple with Slant News. I’m calling to tell you you won our sweepstakes!”
Red flags went up.  “Okay,” she responded, discouragingly, waiting for the ‘catch’.
“Yeah… so… do you want to know what you’ve won?”
“Oh, sure,” she replied, sarcastically.
‘How did this go wrong?’ he wondered.

Story behind the story:

Back in 2002, I was working at a job that offered more prestige than pay. That’s irrelevant.  The important part is that I subscribed to an eNewsletter from a certain conservative cable news network.  The reason I initially subscribed escapes me.  But I kind of enjoyed playing a little weekly trivia contest contained in it.  The first five people to respond with the “correct” answer to a question posted in the newsletter would receive the week’s prize; usually a copy of whatever book the network was promoting that week, or some kind of Network gear (umbrella, ball cap, etc.).  I quickly noticed that their email server put out the newsletter at the same time each week, so I planned my day around it when I could.  And I received quite a few packages in the mail from that network.

But one week there was a banner ad at the top of the newsletter: “Click here to enter the Showdown in Motown Contest”.  Intrigued, I clicked and I filled out the submission form.  Then I looked at the rules to find out exactly what the prize entailed: 42″ plasma TV, a trip for two to Detroit (airfare, hotel, and ground transportation), and $500 in spending money.  Naturally, I forgot all about it as soon as I clicked “Submit”.

That is, until I got the phone call.  The problem is, I’m skeptical.  Highly skeptical.  So I got the call from the producer telling me I was a winner, and I doubted him.  I assumed he was going to ask for my social security number, or my credit card number (“to cover shipping fees,” of course).  I kept waiting for the catch to reveal itself.  Only it didn’t.  So as he listed my prize package, I interrupted him, “I’m sorry, who did you say you are?”  I could feel his relief when my tone opened up, and I felt bad for how coolly I’d treated him.

I took my sister with me.  And that’s a whole different story…

 
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For my fifty-sixth 55 (Ohmigosh, did she just say “55″?!  You mean there will be one?!) is really just a conversation I had with someone.  It made me giggle…

“The Navy has six warships on their way.  How is that nothing?”
“Well, Obama personally isn’t out there fighting the pirates.”
“While proclaiming ‘Mission Accomplished’?”
“Well, you know what they say about W… he can barrel-roll with the best of them.”
“I think you mean keg-stand.”
“I just knew some kind of barrel was involved.”

Story behind the story:

Some Somali pirates boarded a US-flagged cargo ship off the coast of Africa earlier this week.  The ship’s crew regained control of their vessel, but not before the pirates kidnapped the captain, and are now holding him hostage on a lifeboat which is apparently dead in the water.  Somali reinforcements are on their way to help out their pirate comrades.  Meanwhile, a US Navy destroyer, the USS Bainbridge, is on location, with additional US “assets” on their way (*waves*  Hi, asset!). But a diehard conservative I know is dissatisfied with Obama’s response, and wrote “[Diehard Conservative] is thinking Obama should learn his history lesson about the Muslim pirates before doing nothing about it:  link.”  The above exchange is where I was blowing off steam with another friend… it is not an exchange with the diehard conservative.

Click here to read more about this story in the news.

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I’m interrupting “Defining Friends” again, but I promise, promise, promise I will get back to it.  I can’t leave you guys (or my characters) hanging forever.  I just wanted to write something a little different tonight.  This is my fifty-third 55.  (Oh, and I’m so sorry about last week.  Things have been a little bit off for me the last few weeks.  I guess I’m just not in the mood… if you can believe that.)  Anyway, enjoy…

She clicked to the “news” (she always said that word with derision anymore) to see what lies they were telling today.  She seethed with her impotence.  Ignorance had been bliss…

Her data-comm chirped; she received the faceless caller. “Yes?”

“What are you waiting for? Why not do something?”

“What can I — we — do?  Tell me!”

Story behind the story:

This is based on thoughts I had during a conversation with my father several days ago.  It might not make much sense to you.  Or maybe you get it.  I don’t know.  What I do know is this follows my Wordless Wednesday post very nicely.  I am pleased.

 
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WHY does nobody get it?  Okay, first let me go on the record as saying I was against the mortgage bailout.  From the beginning.  My gut reaction was “they made the bed, let them lay in it.”  But on a deeper level, I didn’t see how throwing a bunch of money at a few investment firms was going to do anything about keeping people in their homes.  It was just going to be a handout… a reward to people whose job it is to make wise investments, for making bad investments.  That made absolutely no sense to me.

If I were in charge, I might have approved the $700bn, or whatever amount was necessary, but I wouldn’t have made it a blank check to the banking industry.  No…  I would have set it up as a fund to which troubled homeowners could apply.  If approved, a portion of that fund would be allocated to that homeowner to buy down the principal on their mortgage, reducing their burden, guaranteeing the loan, and reassuring the entire banking industry.  This way, the assets are solid, people keep their homes, and the economy keeps moving in its merry little consumer-driven way.  As much as this disgusts me.

So, mortgage crisis addressed, let’s move on to the auto industry.  I am not a geologist.  I do not have extensive formal training in geopolitical  matters (though I am self-taught, and perhaps that does mean something).  But even I knew five years ago that we were headed for tough energy-economy times.

I remember a conversation with my younger sister in the summer of 2005… she was trying to decide whether it would be more financially sound to continue living at home and commuting 50 miles each way to go to school, or move into student housing.  Gas was hovering just under $2 per gallon at the time, and I told her to calculate as if it was $3 a gallon.  She did, and she decided to move into student housing (which didn’t work out, but that’s another matter altogether).  At the end of August, Katrina hit and the price of gas skyrocketed, never looking back.  (Until now, that is, because the economy is broken.)

But throughout all this, the Domestic Three (I don’t know what They are calling Ford, GM, and Chrysler, collectively, anymore, but “Big Three” certainly no longer applies, so I’ll go with the “Domestic Three”) inexplicably continued to churn out and heavily market their large, fuel-inefficient vehicles.  In fact, GM made headlines this year for finally closing four SUV and truck plants to focus on more fuel efficient models.  My response at that announcement was, “About time!”

The result of this slow-to-catch-on business decision-making is that sales of domestic automobiles have plummeted.  Meanwhile, Toyota and Honda sales have been increasing until the last month or two, when the bad economy and credit crisis finally hurt even efficient car sales.  Poor sales means significant losses to the manufacturers, to the extent that they’re talking about  not meeting payroll and bankruptcy.  This would have wide-reaching impact in our economy.  This would be bigger than any fallout from the mortgage crisis.  This would mean massive layoffs across the country.  Not just layoffs of automotive workers, but workers at plants that supply the automotive industry, support services, even service-industry jobs in towns supported by automotive dollars.

So, before looking at the news today, I emailed a friend and told him how I thought Congress should respond to the Domestic Three’s pleas for aid and why.  Unlike the Wall Street Bailout, I told him that I supported this aid.  GM et al. should get the money they’re asking for, contingent on a commitment to much higher fuel economy standards.  They can have the money if they can demonstrate a productline-wide average minimum fuel economy of 40mpg within five years.  Understandably, some work-oriented vehicles will necessarily achieve less than 40mpg.  This is acceptable provided the remaining product offerings offset this lower efficiency by bringing the company’s overall average up to or above 40mpg. People will not trade in their gas guzzlers to take on new debt unless they see an immediate return in their day-to-day budget, and we need people to buy things to keep our consumer-driven economy going, so 40+ miles per gallon must be made a reality.

Having said that, Congress denied assistance to the Domestic Three today and economic turmoil ensued as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to just under 8000.  I seem to be disagreeing with Congress a lot, lately.  Maybe I should run for office.

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