The Nature of Things

This time of year in the northern hemisphere is especially difficult for the poor, the homeless, the sick. Many religious traditions take note of this by making special appeals at this time to their adherents to provide assistance to those in need. It is a time when people of conscience must be particularly aware of those who are less fortunate than they and wish to reach out to them and help them. Having been raised in the Christian tradition, I always associate this desire to help with Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats as related in the Book of Matthew in the New Testament. The relevant section of the parable from the New International Version of the Bible begins with Matthew 25:34. 34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.   35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stra...

Their big weekend summit in Washington is over and the "values voters" have spoken.  The next president of the United States will be ... Ron Paul! Which, frankly, brings to mind a quote I read recently from the late and sadly missed Molly Ivins.  About ten years ago Molly said, “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.”  If Molly were still here to advise us, I feel absolutely certain that she would not be endorsing either Ron Paul or that other Texan who is in the race. Nevertheless, the voters with values, as they bill themselves, indicating that other people are without values, really, really liked Mr. Paul and gave him 37% of their votes .  The other Texan got 8%.  Obviously, these voters were not at all convinced about his "values." The straw poll vote was only one of the headlines coming out of this summit and probably not the most interesting one at that.  It was revealed, for e...

Serial adulterer and perpetual hypocrite Newt Gingrich is making noises about possibly running for president again. I don't think he will. I don't think he even wants to really. I think he just wants the notoriety that comes from having his name mentioned as a possible candidate and the financial benefits that accrue to one who claims to be considering the race. But if he did run, it would be particularly ugly because all that nasty stuff about his sexual history would become a hot topic once again. Newt is on his third marriage and his method for finding new wives has been nothing if not consistent. He cheated on his first wife and divorced her while she was recovering from cancer surgery. He then married his mistress. He cheated on her with a young staffer as the second wife was being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He divorced her* and married his mistress who is now his third wife. So how does he justify all that? Well, you see, it was just because he is so pas...

Our new Republican Congress keeps telling us that their number one priority is jobs, but their every action gives the lie to that claim. First, it was revisiting the Affordable Health Care Law. Now they are pursuing their true first priority - seeking to reverse every gain towards equality that women have made in the last hundred years. While Republicans say all the right things, offering empty platitudes about women's equality, their agenda is to legislate women into second-class citizenship. This is true not only at the national level but in state legislatures all across the country. Republicans are seeking to reverse, through legislative action, the protections of the Equal Pay Act. They insist that the law is no longer needed because the pay gap has all but been eradicated. This is blatantly false, but when were these bozos ever guided by facts? The big guns of this Republican war against women, though, are trained at women's health issues, specifically reproductive i...

This story is just too deliciously ironic to ignore. Remember Ayn Rand, heroine of the conservative/tea partier cause? She believed in individual self-sufficiency. Individuals should stand or fall on their own, based on their own efforts. It is a philosophy that essentially extolls survival of the fittest - or the richest and most ruthless. There is no social contract in Rand-world. We do not owe anything to our neighbors. Most importantly, we should not accept any assistance from the government and government, in its truest and most righteous form, should not offer any. But if you happen to contract lung cancer, all that philosophy apparently goes out the window, because, you see, Ayn Rand - yes, Mrs. John Galt, herself - applied for and received Social Security and Medicare when she became ill with lung cancer. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she ...

For days now, the Republicans have been trumpeting their intention of reading the Constitution aloud on their first day in charge of the new Congress. They have also been on all the news outlets talking about their "New Rule" that any bill considered by the House must have a statement about its Constitutional authority. They tout this as something entirely different. It isn't. The old rules of the House already required a statement about the section of the Constitution which covered each bill it considered. But these are the people who revere the Constitution so much that they consider it Holy Writ, handed down by God directly to the Founders, unchanged and unchangeable. ( Just ask Antonin Scalia. But that's another rant .) So, of course, they - and we - were really, really excited about the prospect of actually hearing this sacred text read aloud in the People's House. We waited with bated breath. We're still waiting. They didn't read the Consti...

A couple of days ago, I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition and one of the hosts was interviewing a Republican congressman. I don't even know which one it was, but it really doesn't make any difference. They all speak from the same script and say exactly the same thing. Exactly! If the word of the day is "uncertainity", you can count on every Republican to use it at least fifteen times in any conversation or interview with the press throughout the day. Anyway, the interviewer was asking the man about his vote against the extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. He mentioned that virtually every economist - except possibly ones employed by the Republican Party or Fox News - states unequivocally that one of the most stimulative things that you can do for the economy is to provide unemployment benefits, because the recipients of those benefits are certain to spend them almost as soon as they receive them. They have to in order to pay...

Remember back a couple of months ago when the right wing was all up in arms over having an Islamic Community Center built in the middle of Manhattan? They were so concerned about the sensitive feelings of survivors and kin of the victims of the Twin Towers tragedy. It would hurt their feelings to have an Islamic place of worship a few blocks from the site of the towers. Never mind the fact that a significant number of the innocent victims of that attack were Muslims who worked in the Towers and never mind that there had been an Islamic prayer room in the Towers which was destroyed by the attack of the fanactics along with everything else that awful day. Those were just inconvenient facts and these people don't have a very close relationship with facts. But, of course, another of their big concerns about the project was the question of where the money to build the structure was coming from. Was it from foreign sources? Was it "dirty Muslim money"? They spent weeks...

Newt Gingrich gives sleazeballs a bad name. If there is any more hypocritical, narcissistic, arrogant, and completely un-self-aware individual on the public scene today, I don't want to know about him. Even Sarah Palin pales in comparison. I've known this and I guess most of the sentient world has known it since at least the 1990s, but it has just been confirmed for us again by his second wife . You remember his second wife, don't you? She was the woman that he was having an affair with while his first wife suffered from cancer. He asked that first wife for a divorce while she was in a hospital bed being treated for the disease. This behavior was occurring during the time that Gingrich was excoriating President Clinton for his affair with an intern and leading the charge for his impeachment over that affair. He was on the television news every night talking about "family values" and how important it was for political leaders to uphold them and be a moral e...

In Hamlet , Shakespeare has Gertrude say in regard to a character in a play, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Like so much else that the Bard wrote, this quote has come to address a particular circumstance in life. When one is guilty of something which he/she does not want known, he/she may strive to give the appearance of being and doing the opposite of that thing. And so the dishonest woman proclaims her honesty - "I would never lie to you!" The thief professes his innocence - "I've never stolen anything in my life!" The false lover vows, "Of course I'll still respect you in the morning!" We've seen this play so often in recent years that we should be able to write its ending every time. Nowhere is the ending to the play more obvious than in the political arena with those politicians who wrap themselves in the blanket of family values and excoriate anyone who is deviant from what they define as the path of righteousn...

It's funny how one's perspective changes with time and circumstances . For example, when George Bush nominated Harriet Miers, who had zero judicial experience and little other experience except for being a Bush sycophant, for the Supreme Court back in 2005, our own Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison thought it was a great nomination. Hutchison said Miers was a "wonderful choice" in 2005, but today she "has some concerns over Elena Kagan's lack of judicial experience." Likewise, Texas' other esteemed senator, John Cornyn, said of the Miers nomination, "One reason I felt so strongly about Harriet Miers' qualifications is I thought she would fill some very important gaps in the Supreme Court. Because right now you have people who've been federal judges, circuit judges most of their lives, or academicians." But that was then. This is now. Cornyn says of Kagan, "Ms. Kagan is a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience. Most ...

So, have you heard about the urologist in Florida who is refusing to treat anyone who voted for Barack Obama? He posted a notice on his office door which reads: If you voted for Obama... seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years. Moreover, he has stocked his office waiting room with anti-Obama and anti-health care reform pamphlets. I'm not sure what section of the Hippocratic Oath admonishes fledgling doctors to screen their prospective patients for their political beliefs or to seek to impose their own political beliefs on their patients by plastering their offices with political pamphlets. I've just reread the oath and I didn't see anything about this in it, but perhaps I'm just too naive to correctly interpret the ancient oath. Remember last summer amid all the tea party screaming about health care reform when some of the crazies were complaining that, under this reform, health care would be rationed and that R...