In contrast to Mr. George Carlin, I don’t intend for this post to be funny.  I’m not very good at doing funny.  While Mr. Carlin was adept at poking fun at many things and certainly used a more flowery vocabulary, the only thing I’ll do in his memory is to steal his title.  I recently learned that titles can’t be copyrighted, so, authors out there, go for it.  (My novel, Full Medical, for example, is often seen as some POD self-help non-fiction work.  Unless you’re one of the villains, there’s not much about self-help in it.  But I didn’t steal that title.  Well, just a wee bit, in tribute to Frederik Pohl and his sci-fi classic Gateway.)

We visited the D.C. area this weekend.  Usually a city trying to revert back to the swamp that it was, the humidity was low enough that the heat was tolerable.  A good day for demonstrations, I thought.  No, I didn’t go see Professor Mouth, Mr. Glen Beck, lead his mostly white crowd in their push to establish an American theocracy.  I also didn’t mingle with the mostly black crowd in their nostalgia fix of celebrating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I thought that was going to be on the Mall too, but I couldn’t find it.  Just kidding.  I wasn’t looking for either one.  But the drive from New Jersey gave me time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

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While the illegal drug war is like a pit bull that takes big, random bites out of American citizens and their wealth, there is a legal drug war going on that is more like a vicious little dachshund continuously nipping at those same heels.  Drug companies, home grown or otherwise, are at war with the American consumer.  It is an insidious war of greed, privilege, and exploitation, and the innocent victims in this war are legion.

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To end the week, it is appropriate to follow-up on some of my recent posts.

First, with respect to California’s Prop 8, the judge has opened the door to gay marriage, starting August 18.  He is giving time to the Prop 8 defenders to gather together arguments on how to deny rights to a group of people.  Given his carefully constructed decision, they will need all the time they can get.

It’s hard to argue for giving rights to one class of citizens and not to others.  Yet it seems we, as a society, always have this debate, probably because there’s always a new crop of fundamentalist bigots out there that want to impose their way of life on everyone else.  The Pilgrims and Puritans brought this kind of bigotry with them to America.  We celebrate it each Thanksgiving.  I suppose they would be happy that the tradition continues.

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The health care debate is now playing out like a bad Hollywood horror movie.  Perhaps Armageddon will really arrive as the lawyers do battle and we are all caught in the middle.  There are two basic battlefields, the one involving the tactical nuclear weapons like constitutionality, amendments, and repeal, efforts that will undoubtedly be supported by the insurance company lobbyists, and the one involving insurance companies directly as their teams of lawyers go over the fine print to find anything they can wiggle out of.

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Proponents of health care reform are justified in celebrating a small victory over the dark forces lined up against the Middle Class.  The politicians (read Democrats, since not one Republican voted for the bill) have no reason to celebrate.  Something has been lost in American politics and our nation will suffer from it.

Social Security and Medicare were passed with Republican participation.  It was not overwhelming Republican participation but there was enough participation by moderate members of the GOP to call these programs bipartisan.  This is no longer true about the present bill, primarily because there are no moderate Republicans left!  The health care debate was primarily between progressive and middle-of-the-road Democrats.  The far right Republicans opted out by saying no, uniformly, in lock step, as the storm troops against progress.

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The wide spectrum of political thought in this country is astonishing.  I’m talking about Main Street political thought.  Most elected representatives by the time they get to Congress have migrated towards the gray middle because they represent the average over their district-the averaging process will eliminate the extremes in any statistical distribution of human behavior.  The district averages have their own distribution, of course (so when the average is taken over them you get Senator Bla from the great state of BlaBla.)  Thus it is understandable that in the House we still have Democratic representatives like Mr. Kucinich on one hand and the anti-abortion faction on the other, both holding health care reform hostage.

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I’ve been hitting on health care reform for some time and applaud Mr. Obama’s recent decision to plow ahead, come hell or high water.  Unfortunately both may come to pass because Dems in Congress can’t stop bickering over minutia and the Republicans don’t want to touch anything with the big O’s name on it.  In general, this Congress has become a do-nothing Congress, or, at least a do-nothing Senate (many bills, passed by the House, die in the Senate or go into lengthy hibernation).  What do we do about this?

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Last week’s health care summit completely confirmed that the GOP will say no to any Obama administration / Dem proposals on health care reform (the GOP standard line translates as “let’s start all over again so we can drag it out even more”).  Moreover, a recent poll shows that fifty-eight per cent of the American public expects and wants the Dems to do something.  Conclusion: it’s time for Mr. Obama to put on his FDR sweatshirt and ram a health care bill through Congress using reconciliation.

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Even in the presidential campaign, it was apparent that Mr. Obama, the Republicans, and not a few Democrats, all had different meanings for the word bipartisan.  Whereas Mr. Obama favors a “classical definition” and wants it to mean that there is a serious give-and-take in discussions of policy where each side gives up something to get something from the other side, too many in Congress give it a “newspeak definition” where the other side has to completely agree with them and then they’ll talk, or, even worse, that all sides have to disagree with Mr. Obama, that socialist and Harvard educated revolutionary trying to overturn all that’s near and dear to the special interests.  While his Harvard education might be an obstacle in general (I believe Harvard doesn’t educate, they indoctrinate), I opine that Mr. Obama wants to negotiate in good faith.  Mr. Boehner and his cronies and Ms. Pelosi and hers would rather wage the verbal war and have gridlock than to agree with anyone that doesn’t agree with them.

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The election of Mr. Scott Brown in Massachusetts has emboldened Republicans to tell President Obama and his administration to start over on health care reform.  No matter that everyone agrees with about sixty or seventy per cent of the House and Senate bills.  No matter that the Senate bill is basically the same as the Massachusetts plan, which Mr. Brown voted for.  This is typical stonewalling by the party of “Just Say No.”  Down on Main Street it shows that a lot of people are willing to vote against their own interests if, as they say, they support the Republicans in dragging their feet.

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