I took a spin down memory lane yesterday as I recalled that Smith-Barney commercial where the old guy with the impeccable English accent says, “We make money the old-fashioned way-we earn it!”  In spite of my love for the old TV series “Paper Chase,” which I believe starred the same old guy (he’ll forgive me for not remembering his name, because now I’m an old guy), I always found that commercial laughable, coming from Wall Street, which never makes money the old-fashioned way.  In fact, they now have a new source to legally steal money from, the Federal Government (aka us, which is the old source, of course).

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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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It’s nice to take a breather.  As the Republicans in the Senate send the health care reform bill back to the House and Dems receive death threats, I need to catch my breath and force myself to think of other things.  The problem with the death threats, of course, is that there are wackos out there who can and will carry them out.  Just take the millions that soak up all the vitriol from the far right, in particular, from Fox News (if they weren’t there, folks, Fox News wouldn’t exist), go to the tail of the statistical hate distribution, and you will find psychopaths willing to murder abortion doctors, torture and murder gays, and possibly attempt the murder of some Dems that voted for the bill.

So I thought today I’d take a breath and write about something less controversial.  While the Texas School Board is busy reforming the teaching of social studies, I thought it was my duty to proselytize for changes in science teaching.

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The health care debate is winding down a wee bit, except for vindictive Republicans looking for any way they can to deny health coverage to Americans and continue their destruction of the middle class (that retrograde moving line in the sand I talked about yesterday).  So maybe it’s time for our Robin Hood, Mr. Obama, to turn his band of merry men and women to other pressing problems.  If the GOP is right and the next midterm and presidential elections go their way (are they smart enough to keep Ms. Palin off the ticket?), time is wasting, Mr. Obama.  There may be only a small window to enact progressive policy before the Republicans continue leading the U.S. back to the Dark Ages.

On the domestic front, a partial list contains jobs, restrictions on the banking industry, and immigration, all of which affect the economy.  On the international front, the partial list is removing troops from Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Israeli problem, nuclear proliferation and Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, and finally Russia and China, the first two and last two also having an influence on the economy.

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(D. M. Annechino, They Never Die Quietly , Amazon Encore, 2010, ISBN 978-098255503-3)

D. M. Annechino’s They Never Die Quietly is a suspenseful thriller with all the right ingredients: Simon, a serial killer who is convinced he is doing God’s work; Rizzo, a police detective and single mother who is unsure about a lot of things, even her job; Diaz, who is a recovering alcoholic and secretly in love with his partner Rizzo; and Davison, their Captain, who is caught between the two detectives trying to do their jobs and the politicians that make his life miserable.  The author blends all these ingredients into a story that keeps you turning the page but at the end doesn’t quite work for me.

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(Tempest O’Rourke, The Breath of Allah , Synergy Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9823140-3-6)

Tempest O’Rourke’s The Breath of Allah offers an interesting twist on suspense novels or thrillers that involve terrorists.  The wellspring of terrorism is fundamentalism and the latter is often associated with religion.  Indeed, for this reviewer it is both disconcerting and curious that religious fundamentalism is often associated with violent terrorist acts while most religions generally preach non-violence.  Sure, the Old Testament has its battles where the Almighty’s chosen ones smite their enemies; the Book of Revelations certainly has nightmarish scenes akin to the worst LSD dreams; and the Koran contains sections that sound like a call to arms.  But on a whole, the Torah, the Bible and the Koran contain non-violent morality lessons that most of us applaud in principle if not in detail.

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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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Tea Party members and Libertarian-leaning folks in general have the following conundrum, one that is almost universal among people that let their political lives be guided by emotions, not logic: they want low taxes and minimalist government but they are not willing to backtrack on services.  They are not the only ones with this problem and certainly not the only emotional voters.

The problem modern democracies face is almost a law of nature: the more the state gets organized and improves the standard of living of its citizens, the more services those same citizens demand.  Unfortunately more services imply more government expenditures (TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein put it in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”).  Both the U.S. and Europe have reached the point where a lot of their citizens don’t want to pay any more, but these same people still want the same or more services.

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The title quote is by George Bernard Shaw.  Today is St. Patrick’s Day so I thought it was a perfect day to set the record straight: a lot of the great writers in the English language that you may have heard about are not English but Irish.

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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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