The fabulous perks and prestige associated with working at Wal-Mart have been reduced, as the world’s 18th largest public corporation announced on Friday that it was scaling back its employees’ health benefits package:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc will no longer offer health insurance to new part-time U.S. employees who work fewer than 24 hours a week and will charge workers who use tobacco more for coverage as healthcare costs rise.
I’m sure moving foward Wal-Mart would never cynically hire predominately part-time workers and actively keep them below 24 hours a week, and the tobacco penalty probably makes sense — even if it’s a bit shady given Wal-Mart’s relationship with the tobacco industry.
Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer and the nation’s largest private employer, is also slashing the amount that it puts in employees’ healthcare expense accounts by 50 percent.
OK, that’s a lot. However, Wal-Mart’s a struggling small business that only cleared a quarterly profit of $3.4 billion. Still, that wasn’t enough to calm Wal-Mart’s nerves:
The poorer customers who shop at the nation’s biggest retailers are still on tight budgets. They wait inside the store at the end of each month with full shopping carts until the clock strikes midnight. Then, their electronic-benefit transfers from the government go through, and they pay for their groceries and other staples. They buy items in small packages, which cost less than big ones.
See, poor people insist on ruining things for large corporations. If they weren’t so broke, they could buy more cheap crap and make Wal-Mart even richer but they insist on not doing their fair share so Wal-Mart has no choice but to cut costs where it can — not in the DWI bail fund for its billionaire heiress but in the health coverage for its employees.
If I understand trickle-down economics and “job creation” correctly, it is lunacy to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires because they create jobs but it’s a reasonable business practice to effectively reduce the income of the people who are most likely to shop at Wal-Mart. Perhaps they’re gambling on the employees who are no longer covered (because they don’t work enough hours and don’t have much money anyway) playing Russian Roulette with six bullets and going without insurance.
But no one regrets this more than Wal-Mart:
“The current healthcare system is unsustainable for everyone and like other businesses we’ve had to make choices we wish we didn’t have to make,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter. “Our country needs to find a way to reduce the cost of healthcare, particularly in this economy.”
A sound argument backed up by Wal-Mart’s PAC and the Walton family’s choosing to make political contributions predominately to the GOP, which openly states its intentions to repeal President Obama’s health reform legislation and replace it with a brand-spanking new nothing.
No, really:
Hermain Cain is basically only alive now because he’s wealthy and connected. His position is basically you should be, too, silly poor person. Romeny is busy running away from the fact that he ever at one point cared whether U.S. citizens had access to affordable health care, which is kind of depressing if you think about it.
Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke earned $18.7 million in 2010 — basically taking home more in an hour than the average associate makes in a year — but his employees will see their health care diminished during a time when they are least likely to afford it and — strictly coincidentally – least likely to find better options elsewhere. It’s the plantation owner’s market.
Shortly after 5 on Thursday, I enter Les Petit Cafe on Rue Descartes. It’s hard to resist a cafe on a street named after the author of “Discourse on the Method.” Descartes famously stated that thought cannot be separated from a human being. However, he lived centuries prior to the invention of cable television.
The cafe is at the top of the hill that’s Rue De La Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, a few blocks up from the apartment I’m renting. As the day weakens into night, the smell of cheese from the fondue restaurant across the street grows stronger.
The chill in the late October air that sends me inside reminds me of previous Octobers spent in a similar coffeehouses in New York in the days before Starbucks where there were independently owned coffeehouses in New York. There are Starbucks in Paris, as well as in Barcelona and pretty much every major European city I’ve visited. They all look the same as if they are exported in a model kit with easy to follow instructions. The android barista probably has a switch to activate the appropriate language.
When I first moved to New York, in my early 20s when I had all the time in the world and was as overwhelmed by that as anyone else is at that age, I would often leave the office and go to a coffeehouse in Morningside Heights on 107 and Broadway. It was then called the Coffee Lounge — “the uptown coffeehouse with the downtown vibe.” In those days, it was very important for hip things to be downtown or have a downtown feel. It still is, I guess.
Cafes are different here — you can enter one and order an espresso, a good beer on tap, or an excellent French wine. That’s at least three different places in the states with a distinct decor. Somehow a dive bar, coffeehouse, and wine bar all exist simultaneously and harmoniously.
You can also peacefully read, jot in a notebook, or have a quiet conversation, as well. That is difficult to achieve during happy hour at a NY bar. Coffee Lounge expanded shortly before 2000 and became a bar — The Underground Lounge, which still reached to the downtown vibe but the increased volume made reading the paper impossible.
The 20something Parisian next to me reads his paper while sipping an espresso. A different young woman, each of increasing pulchritude, walks in every few minutes and greets him with a kiss. Later, a blonde lingers past the initial kiss, resting a moment in his lap, then moving to an adjacent chair when her Cotes du Rhone (the 3 Euro house red) arrives. She stretches her leg, which is long enough to reach Burgundy, over his as she chats with the waitress. He leans his head into her chest and she strokes his hair. He seems happy. This never happened to me at Coffee Lounge, presumably because I never ordered the espresso.
The young woman working behind the bar sings along to Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” which plays on the iPod speaker dock behind her — the only words I hear her speak in English the entire time I’m there are “please won’t you stay awhile to share my grief. It’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way. And the time that I will suffer less is when I never have to wake.”
She was probably four or five at the oldest when Portishead’s “Dummy” was released in 1994. I wonder how many iterations of women her age have sung along to these words over the years? One of them was the woman I dated in 2001 — definitely a woman to me then; now, in retrospect, it’s hard to consider her more than a girl right out of college who wanted to avoid law school (she ultimately failed) and who liked to listen to “Dummy” and Bjork’s “Vespertine” in the dark – as did I.
It’s now past six, so I abandon coffee for liquor and the cafe feels just like a wine bar once the whisky is placed in front of me. If I stay until 8, I would find myself in a french bistro — the menu is similar to one of my favorite places in the East Village — but I leave to walk down the hill as the odor of fondue follows me.
The latest polls show Herman Cain beating Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. This is based on a complex, scientific process of predicting how people will vote a year from now (i.e. “guessing”).
This is exciting: Two blacks fighting for the title for the amusement of a mostly white audience and it’s not Ali vs. Frazier. Let’s hope the build-up to the big bout is at least as entertaining.
Unfortunately, if Cain does win, he doesn’t get to be the first black president. Sure, the second black president is sort of impressive — he probably still gets to make a speech, kind of like the salutatorian at high school graduation, but few people listen. This is probably why Cain supporter Laura Ingraham claims that he would in fact be the first black president.
INGRAHAM: And what happened with Obama is that he gets this job that he’s not qualified for… OK, so [Obama is] Constitutionally qualified for but he’s not really qualified for. And guess who pays the price? All of us. Because we had such a yearning for history.
Well I have a question. Herman Cain, if he became president, he would be the first black president, when you measure it by — because he doesn’t — does he have a white mother, white father, grandparents, no, right? So Herman Cain, he could say that he’s — he’s — he’s the first, uh — he could make the claim to be the first — yeah, the first Main Street black Republican to be the president of the United States. Right? He’s historic too.
See, Obama, who was a U.S. Senator, was not qualified to be president and only won because we wanted to have a black president (it was on everyone’s wish list in 2008, along with the iPhone) but Obama has white relatives so isn’t really black in which case, if we act quickly before our warranty expires, we should be able to exchange him for Cain, CEO of a profitable pizza company and thus perfectly qualified to be president, who does not have any white relatives because obviously Ingraham would have researched something like that and not just talk out of her ass.
I’m not sure how far back in the family tree Ingraham is willing to go, but Cain is from Georgia and it was pretty hard for blacks to get through the antebellum South sexually unscathed. Slave masters weren’t that picky. They couldn’t have been because — putting it bluntly — having sex with a slave was probably like having sex with a homeless person. I’m sorry. Hate me all you want but you’ve been watching too many movies with Halle Berry or Jasmine Guy if you think otherwise. Slaves didn’t get access to the quality deodorant, moisturizers, and bath soaps. You think they got to shave their legs? Take all that away from even Beyonce and you’ve got something nasty in a weave. Now take away the weave: Scary, isn’t it?
Even the house slaves were probably legally required to be sufficiently less attractive than the mistress of the house. And the mistresses weren’t Vivien Leigh, either. Look at some paintings from the period. We’re talking about 4s or 5s to be kind, so Mammy is probably a 2 at best and the slave master is still putting on some Rolling Stones and violating her because the guy owns human beings, you expect rationality?
I know this implies that it was predominately Southern men going after slave women. I’m sure some bored antebellum housewives fooled around with male slaves but in a more sexist period, it was certainly risky. If she gives birth to a kid who looks like Obama, maybe she can pass him off as the master’s kid with a suntan and curly hair. If she gives birth to a kid who looks like Cain, it’s her ass unless she then claims that she was assaulted because she wouldn’t willingly have sex with a slave, she’s a good Christian woman, after all. So, her husband rounds up all the male slaves and orders her to identify the guilty one. She goes down the line, winking surreptitiously at the Shemar Moore-looking slave and then points at one of my ancestors, Jebediah Robinson.
Mistress: Yes, darling, that’s the one! I’ll never forget. It was horrible.
Jebediah: Really? Oh come on! (turns to Shemar Moore-looking slave). Dude, I thought we were friends. Look, when I said I’d be your wingman, I didn’t think I’d wind up in actual wings.
However, let’s say Ingraham’s correct and Cain is 100% black — much like the lady who flipped out on Jeffrey Dahmer in court. This would mean that the United States had gone “all in” on a black president. It’s like the guy who is bisexual in college but when you meet him a few years later, he’s dating men exclusively. If we elect Cain, we’re not pussy-footing around. We’ve gone all the way.
And it’s not even about skintone: As Cain says, Obama’s never been part of the “black experience.” Obama, after all, cowardly chose to not even be born when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, whereas Cain bravely followed his father’s advice to “not start trouble” and sit in the back of the bus.
“…If I had been a college student I probably would have been participating.” (Cain) said that, as a high school student, “it was not prudent” for him to be involved.
“Not prudent”? Well, if Cain’s elected, Dana Carvey can stage a comeback by impersonating him. Apparently, Cain’s father advised him to keep his focus on education and presumably the promising career in janitorial services he would have had without the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement.
“Did you expect every black student and every black college in America to be out there?” Cain said. “…You didn’t know, Lawrence, what I was doing…maybe, just maybe, I had a sick relative!”
If the Civil Rights Movement was the black Vietnam — although blacks fought in Vietnam, as well, but just try to follow me on this — then Cain marched not in Martin Luther King’s path but Dick Cheney‘s and avoided service with, maybe, just maybe, a lame excuse.
But that’s all in the past. Let’s see who winds up king of the U.S. empire when Cain and Obama step in the ring! If my analogy holds, this means that we’ll probably wind up with a brain-damaged president regardless of who wins but we’ve been there before.
I read this piece in the Economic Times, which states that “many see lack of focus in growing Occupy Wall street movement.”
The protests that began on September 17 by a small group of people in Manhattan have snowballed into a movement against the financial institutions, income inequality and corporate bailouts with thousands taking to the streets and courting arrests.
However, the protesters are yet to ask local and federal governments to adopt specific actions to address their grievances.
I suppose the pun (“see” and “lack of focus”) is unintentional. However, the criticism is not new. Bill Clinton mentioned it recently in an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman.
“They need to be for something specific, and not just against something because if you’re just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create.”
I know the protestors have a lot of free time — as many don’t have jobs — but why is the onus on them to fix the problem? And maybe I’ve being even more cynical than usual but wouldn’t any specific policy recommendations be dismissed as uninformed anyway?
I thought widespread protests against “financial institutions, income inequality and corporate bailouts” would be a good place to start, right? That is if politicians genuinely want to resolve these issues. So far, they sound like a really bad boyfriend:
“I don’t get it, baby, why are you leaving me?”
“You slept with my sister and you maxed out my credit cards playing full-tilt poker.”
“Yeah, but all that aside, what specifically is wrong?”
It’s possible to infer from the political realm’s reaction to the movement that it has failed to accomplish more than some front-page media coverage. Let’s look back at the beginnings of the Tea Party movement. Everyone, Democrat and Republican, was in a hurry to either embrace them or not piss them off. Clinton’s position is almost eerily identical:
“I think that, first of all, the tea party insurrection … that you see in these Republican primaries, reflects the feeling of a lot of Americans that they’re getting the shaft,” Clinton said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “That the people who caused these problems …the banks that were responsible for the financial meltdown, they’ve gotten well again. And everybody has got money again who is in that business, but ordinary people don’t.”
“So there is a general revolt against bigness Which in the case of the Republicans is always directed more against the government than the private sector,” Clinton said. “It’s totally understandable.”
The Republicans meanwhile have no concern about giving the movement a united golden shower:
Cantor slammed the movement on Friday in a speech in Washington at the 2011 “Value Voters Summit” intended to energize social conservatives.
“I’m increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and other cities across the country,” said Cantor at the event sponsored by the Family Research Council Action, the American Family Association, and other evangelical Christian groups.
“And believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans,” he said.
Oh no! Americans against Americans! Brother against brother in a vicious blood battle! These agitators are stirring up the otherwise peaceful peasants against their benevolent corporate masters! Where’s J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost when you need him?
Fortunately, presidential candidate Herman Cain was able to make Cantor’s statements seem benign in comparison:
Republican presidential contender Herman Cain amplified his criticism Sunday of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the protesters “jealous’ Americans who “play the victim card” and want to “take somebody else’s” Cadillac.
Yes, the protestors do want to “take somebody else’s Cadillac” — so they can sleep in it. Wow, Cain sounds about as rational as two angry ladies at a beauty salon in the Bronx.
“Girl, did you hear what those Occupy Wall Street protestors are saying about you?”
“Oh, Laquita, they just jealous. Just jealous of how fine I am and how nice my Cadillac is.”
On CBS, Cain suggested that the rallies had been organized by labor unions to serve as a “distraction so that many people won’t focus on the failed policies of the Obama administration.”
Huh? Labor unions organized this? How many of the demonstrators were actually members of unions? Wouldn’t they possibly still have jobs if they were? The biggest union presence at the protests is arguably the police — the guys with the solid health insurance and retirement plans.
The banking and financial services industries aren’t responsible for those policies, Cain said.
OK, so the Obama administration forced Bank of America to screw its customers? I guess it is Obama’s fault that the economy is sputtering along so that banks can only make jillions instead of gajilions. They have no choice to charge fees that would shame your average loan shark — though a loan shark actually loans you money, rather than charging you for the burden of using yours to play a riskier version of full-tilt poker.
And if the labor unions are pulling the protestors’ poverty-stricken strings, then we all know who is the ultimate puppet master.
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who appeared on the program with Cain, offered a more measured response, but blamed the White House for the discord.
“There a lot of people in America who are angry,” Gingrich said. “This is the natural product of President Obama’s class warfare.”
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, also pointed a finger at the president, whom he accused of fear-mongering.
“He’s preying on the emotions of fear, envy and anger. And that is not constructive to unifying America,” Ryan said. “I think he’s broken his promise as a uniter, and now he’s dividing people. And to me, that’s very unproductive.”
I’m sure privately Republicans are shaking in their boots over Obama’s Army of the Destitute. They will collectively knock down the pillars of our economic system with their massive student loan debt.
So what if companies openly discriminate against the unemployed during a period of record unemployment? It’s unproductive and divisive to get upset. Stay home and come up with some specific policy positions that your elected officials can ignore. Better yet, watch some bad reality TV instead and let Wall Street continue to steer the country in the swell direction it’s currently going. These are busy people. They don’t need your jealous whining.
Cain later conclusively proved the Occupy Wall Street movement’s threat to national security:
“To protest Wall Street and the bankers is basically saying you’re anti-capitalism,” he said.
I sort of thought that this was a protest of Wall Street excess, which did play a part in leveling the economy, rather than an outright broadside against capitalism as a whole, but unlike Cain, I never ran a pizza chain named after a mafia figure.
Wait a minute: If you’re anti-capitalist, aren’t you essentially a communist? And the terrorists also attacked Wall Street, so maybe these demonstrators are communist terrorists or, depending on whether you’re a Northern or Southern Smurf, terrorist communists!
In fairness, Cain was equally protective of Muslims as even though a small minority of extremists were threats to U.S. security, he realized that they weren’t reflective of Islam as a whole and to protest Islam is basically saying you’re anti-religious freedom.
(Yeah, you see where I’m going here: To the YouTube Mobile!:)
The Huffington Post thought it necessary to publish the following:
After widespread allegations that Ashton Kutcher strayed from his six-year marriage to Demi Moore, his alleged temptress, Sara Leal, is speaking out to Us Weekly, saying that she and Kutcher did have unprotected sex. Leal claims that she slept with Kutcher on September 24th after a night of partying — including a naked hot tub jaunt — in the actor’s Hard Rock hotel suite in San Diego.
Is there any public interest in this? OK, I should rephrase that: Is whatever public interest in the tawdry lives of celebrities necessarily something that the media should enable?
“Widespread allegations” that Kutcher cheated on his wife? Is this Iran Contra? Is Kutcher going to have to suspend taping of “Two and a Half Men” to testify before a Senate subcommittee? Why does anyone need to know about this?
Although Kutcher has not outright denied a relationship with Leal, he has taken to twitter to urge the public and his fans to not put any weight into the things that they read as well as to continue to support his wife via the 140 characters or less venue.
The latest? Kutcher tweeted a link to a pair of cufflinks with the abbreviated words “Cntrl” and “Esc” on them writing, “if we are not looking for one we are looking for the other Ctrl Esc.” Could this be Kutcher’s way of saying he lost control and now cannot escape or might it be his wishful thinking that he can control or escape the media?
Really? So-called journalists are now deciphering a TV star’s tweets as if they are complex passages from James Joyce?
I noticed that HuffPost offers readers the chance to “contribute to the story” — send in corrections and tips. I know unemployment is high but should people really spend their free time serving as unpaid and mostly unreliable Deep Throats? Do I at least get college credit? Sure, it would probably be community college credit, as it’s meaningless celebrity gossip, but what if I write an especially compelling essay explicating Kutcher’s tweets from his gothic period?
Forget those amateurs Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: Comedy Central should devote an hour to Gov. Rick Perry’s wife, Anita. What she lacks in lucidity, she makes up for in insanity. It’s enough to cause Michele Bachmann to stand back and say, “Damn girl!”
She’d previously stated that God had wanted her husband to run for president:
“It’s been a rough month. We have been brutalized and beaten up and chewed up in the press to where I need this today,” she said. “We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith. He is the only true conservative – well, there are some true conservatives. And they’re there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose.”
You might think this sounds like paranoid, delusional ramblings with no bearing in reality and you’d be correct.
Perry later topped herself when she blamed President Obama for her son’s voluntary unemployment:
Rick Perry’s wife Anita said Friday that she could sympathize with the plight of the unemployed because her son was forced to resign his job to take a more active role on his father’s presidential campaign.
Anita Perry blamed the Obama administration for her son having to resign his position.
“My son had to resign his job because of federal regulations that Washington has put on us,” Mrs. Perry said while campaigning for her husband in South Carolina, after a voter shared the story of losing his job.
“He resigned his job two weeks ago because he can’t go out and campaign with his father because of SEC regulations,” she continued, referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission. “He has a wife… he’s trying to start a business. So I can empathize.”
“My son lost his job because of this administration,” she said a few minutes later.
I don’t think that’s empathy. I’m not sure what that is. Her son chose to resign his job at Deutsche Bank in an effort to help his father win the highest office in the land, which might come with some perks for him down the road.
I can understand her blaming Obama for the lousy economy. That’s sort of how the game works but does she really think that Obama should make it easy for her son to actively campaign to remove him from office? Does she also expect Obama to spend his free time calling prospective GOP primary voters on Perry’s behalf?
Full disclosure: Both of these statements were made while in South Carolina. I should warn Perry that despite her time in Texas, she should ease herself into the Southern diet: The sweet tea, which is 98 percent sugar and 2 percent tea, and the chicken-fried steak fingers can go to your head.
The House just passed the Protect Life Act, which true to its name ensures that all U.S. citizens have access to affordable health care, nutritious meals, and safe housing. It also eliminates capital punishment and reduces our military presence abroad. No, wait, I confused the U.S. with a first world country; the bill actually does the following:
Limitation on Abortion Funding-
‘(1) IN GENERAL- No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), including credits applied toward qualified health plans under section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 or cost-sharing reductions under section 1402 of this Act, may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion…
So, what’s the point of this? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says it’s to “ensure that no taxpayer dollars flow to health care plans that cover abortion and no health care worker has to participate in abortions against their will.”
Cantor must think we live in some sci-fi movie in which everyone, after their birth from a futuristic gestation matrix, is assigned a career with no option to choose something else — such as the vegan who got randomly assigned to the slaughterhouse that specializes in cute animals. If you are distinctly anti-abortion, it might behoove you to consider a career in which it will never come up. It’s not that hard. I have friends who are real estate agents and accountants. To my knowledge, they’ve never had to participate in an abortion — even when the market was at its worst.
The bill does make the usual exceptions for “rape or incest,” so apparently the life is less worthy of protection if the father is a bastard and the mother did not actually enjoy the sex that led to conception. There’s also an allowance if the woman might die. However, that only gets her through Level 1 of the government-approved misogyny video game. Level 2 is still the potential refusal of the service if it offends the sensibility of medical provider.
OPTION TO PURCHASE SEPARATE COVERAGE OR PLAN- Nothing in this subsection shall be construed as prohibiting any non-Federal entity (including an individual or a State or local government) from purchasing separate coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this subsection, or a qualified health plan that includes such abortions, so long as–
‘(A) such coverage or plan is paid for entirely using only funds not authorized or appropriated by this Act; and
‘(B) such coverage or plan is not purchased using–
‘(i) individual premium payments required for a qualified health plan offered through an Exchange towards which a credit is applied under section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986; or
‘(ii) other non-Federal funds required to receive a Federal payment, including a State’s or locality’s contribution of Medicaid matching funds.
I’m not a lawyer but basically, if you’re rich, you can still have an abortion — just have your butler hand over some gold bars to the doctor. This seems to put abortion on the same medical footing as a nose job and breast enlargement.
There is a section the prevents “nondiscrimination on abortion,” but that actually is intended to protect medical providers who are anti-abortion and don’t wish to perform them (sort of like the dentists who don’t like root canals):
‘(1) NONDISCRIMINATION- A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), may not subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, or require any health plan created or regulated under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) to subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, on the basis that the health care entity refuses to–
‘(A) undergo training in the performance of induced abortions;
‘(B) require or provide such training;
‘(C) perform, participate in, provide coverage of, or pay for induced abortions; or
‘(D) provide referrals for such training or such abortions
I think this is how you ban abortion while people are too busy watching primetime TV to notice. Who needs to bother with Roe v. Wade? Reading this bill, it seems a woman has a better chance blowing up the Death Star than getting an abortion.
Laura Bassett from the Huffington Post reports further:
H.R. 358, introduced by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), goes beyond the issue of taxpayer dollars to place actual limits on the way a woman spends her own money. The bill would prevent a woman from buying a private insurance plan that includes abortion coverage through a state health care exchange, even though most insurance plans currently cover abortion.
An even more controversial aspect of the bill would allow hospitals that are morally opposed to abortion, such as Catholic institutions, to do nothing for a woman who requires an emergency abortion procedure to save her life. Current law requires that hospitals give patients in life-threatening situations whatever care they need, regardless of the patient’s financial situation, but the Protect Life Act would make a hospital’s obligation to provide care in medical emergencies secondary to its refusal to provide abortions.
I suppose the bill is appropriately named after all: Its stated desire to “protect life” certainly is an act.
Johnny Depp’s recent foot-in-mouth incident was not as egregious and did not have the immediate repercussions as country music singer Hank Williams Jr’s comparison of President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
In an appearance on last week’s “FOX and Friends,” Williams said that Obama golfing with House Speaker John Boehner was “like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu.”
OK, let’s go to the dictionary.
Definition of Hitler:
1. An Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party:
2. Most commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust:
3. Gained support by promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda.
4. Probably not someone you would compare to a U.S. president who represents everything he would have detested.
Thanks to FOX and the Tea Party, Obama is probably the president who has been compared the most to Hitler even though — with the possible exception of wheelchair-bound FDR — he’s the only one who would have been shipped off to Dachau.
It’s interesting because historically speaking previous presidents have done worst things than passing health care reform. There’s Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the Trail of Tears. And 12 U.S. presidents owned slaves (eight of them did so while in office). Can you imagine the trouble Obama would get into if he owned slaves?
Surely, you ask, Williams did not mean to compare Obama to Hitler? Unlike Depp, the nice people at “FOX and Friends” gave Williams the “Idiot Retraction Option.” This is preemptive to the “Apology Due to Public Outcry.”
Williams declined this option and further embraced the “Sinking Ship Statement.” He stated that “they’re the enemy” and clarified that by “they” he meant Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
I don’t believe that comparisons to Hitler should be off-limits, as many commentators seem to think, but they just need to make sense and be grounded in reality. Too often they reflect the sad reality that the speaker is unaware of any other appropriate bogeyman aside from Hitler. If you want to ignore body counts but at least have an internally consistent position, compare Obama (godless socialist, per FOX) to Stalin (godless communist, per his MySpace page).
Williams later issued the “Half-Assed and Too Little Too Late” Apology:
“The thought of the leaders of both parties jukin and high fiven on a golf course, while so many families are struggling to get by simply made me boil over and make a dumb statement… I am very sorry if it offended anyone.”
This is similar to Newt Gingrich’s claim that he cheated on his wife because he loved his country so much. Williams made his “dumb statement” out of righteous anger.
ESPN reacted to this by pulling Williams’s intro from Monday Night Football. The song’s title “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” was also the text of the telegram Hitler sent Poland prior to invading. This later prompted a sermon from Sarah Palin on her FOX show “Strawman Arguments with Sarah.”
“Hank Williams and what he is going through now, I think it’s a very clear illustration of a greater societal problem and that is the hypocrisy on the left — the liberals who can throw these stones at a conservative and they knowing that they’re not going to be held accountable… It’s a one way street and we’re always walking on eggshells, aren’t we? … you know, like, oh geez, if I say that is somebody going to misinterpret it or spin it as something that is quote unquote racist or sexist or anything else? But the other side … they can say whatever they want and nobody calls them out on it. I think it’s pretty disgusting.”
The “nobody” in this case would be FOX News, which calls them out on a daily basis. Shirley Sherrod was fired for statements taken out of context that FOX and conservative bloggers made a stink over.
And isn’t this the example of free-market capitalism that conservatives love so much? The big corporation (ESPN) decided that an individual (Williams) was a liability and parted ways with him. This is business. And his first amendment right to free speech protected him in that the government didn’t arrest him for comparing the president to a genocidal maniac.
I don’t get the priorities here: I should lose my job in the military because I’m gay. I should go bankrupt because I’m uninsured. But I should be able to say stupid things on TV with no repercussions? Well, I guess, the latter freedom does ensure that Sarah Palin remains employed.
When Steve Jobs died on October 5, there was a flood of condolesences online. “Online” here generally defined as Facebook and Twitter. According to the people Twitter hires to measure such things, its users commented on the Apple co-founder and former CEO’s death at a rate of 6,049 tweets per second. That’s more that the Twitter-verse cared about the death of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden (around 5,000 tweets per second) but significantly less than the comments on Beyonce Knowles’s pregnancy during the MTV Video Music Awards (8,868).
It’s hard to imagine any other CEO’s passing receiving such attention. Warren Buffett might but only if you factored in the people on Facebook and Twitter who confused him with the “Margaritaville” singer.
Jobs was practically as popular as Barack Obama once was and even the president’s fame took a nosedive when he actually became the country’s chief executive. However, the iPad was arguably a more successful product launch than health care reform.
It would probably not offend Jobs to state that he himself was a product, perhaps Apple’s most effective. In his death, he’s been repackaged as a “visionary” and “innovator,” which are nice ways of saying he was more than just an extremely competent businessman. After all, the executives we don’t like wear suits not turtlenecks and jeans. It’s safe to assume the protestors at “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations took time to mourn Jobs.
Maryann Johanson of Flick Filosopher stated how hearing Jobs say in the unaired 1997 “Crazy Ones” commercial that “the people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do” makes her cry now. That’s quite an impact. And the morning of his death, my Facebook feed was filled with inspirational quotes from Jobs. He was not merely a guy who made a hell of a lot of money (reported net worth of 8.3 billion). He was one of the “crazy ones.” Keep in mind that the commercials featured artists (John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Maria Callas, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, and Jim Henson), trailblazers (Muhammad Ali, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King, Jr), and true geniuses (Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison). The only businessmen featured were Richard Branson and Ted Turner — the latter perhaps because they wanted to include at least one figure who was not just metaphorically “crazy.”
Upon reflection, this commercial makes me want to cry, as well, but for different reasons. It’s all rather cynical name dropping for a commercial whose ultimate aim to get you to buy something that most likely would not figure prominently in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Did Jobs really “change the world”? Everyone seems to think so, including President Obama, who said that Jobs “was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”
It would deny logic to claim Jobs did not alter our society, but this did not occur on a philanthropic level. According to Fortune, Jobs had “had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.” No, Jobs’s true legacy would be what Bud Tribble at Apple referred to as his “Reality Distortion Field” or what I consider his ability to crank up the public’s conspicuous consumption volume to 11. (The RDF might also explain why Jobs’s replacement Tim Cook came off during his first product launch like Doug Henning to his David Copperfield.)
Middle school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron wrote on the Huffington Post that she told her students that Job’s death was as if “Willy Wonka has died.” I consider this a not-unreasonable comparison: Wonka was not a farmer who used his factory to revolutionize means of feeding the population. He sold junk food to children and later punished a select few of them for demonstrating the very same gluttony that made him a wealthy man.
We buy a new phone every year. When I was a kid, there was one phone in the house and it was only replaced when it broke — not when Wonka showed up with a new, cooler one a few months later.
The question was posed recently as to whether the U.S., which barely has two nickels to rub together, can afford to provide aid to Somalia — a country that ranks low on iPod penetration but high on famine penetration. It’s an astounding cognitive dissonance that anyone would ask that question during a time when Apple has revenue approaching $10 billion (although, apparently the company was not profitable enough for Jobs to resume its philanthropy programs).
But no one knows who Bob McDonald is and no one cares about the “hot, new” toothpaste, even if it might help prevent gingivitis. We all want to be able to make a phone call while posting to Facebook that we’re making a phone call while posting to Facebook.
So, Johnny Depp’s in a bit of trouble for saying the following to describe having his photo taken in an interview with Vanity Fair:
“Well, you just feel like you’re being raped somehow. Raped… it feels like a kind of weird — just weird, man.”
OK, let’s go to the dictionary:
Definition of Rape:
1. An act or instance of robbing or despoiling or carrying away a person by force.
2. Unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent — compare sexual assault, statutory rape.
3. An outrageous violation.
4. Probably not something you would describe as “kind of weird – just weird, man.”
Depp will take photos with fans but “…whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it’s like — you just feel dumb. It’s just so stupid.”
As expected when celebrities wander off from their handlers and say something unfortunate, Depp quickly apologized:
“It was a poor choice of words on my part in an effort to explain a feeling… I understand there is no comparison and I am very regretful. In an effort to correct my lack of judgment, please accept my heartfelt apology.”
Depp’s demonstrated eloquence does reinforce just how painful his participation in these stupid photo shoots must be for someone who lives with his French model girlfriend Vanessa Paradis in homes in Los Angeles, New York, the Paris suburb of Meudon, and a village in the south of France. He also has an island in the Bahamas — to get away from it all.
In Depp’s defense, it’s possible the arrangement he made with Satan on the set of 21 Jump Street in 1988 requires that he periodically submit himself to the demon Naberius. His only warning of an impending visit is someone taking his picture. Thus, the more famous he becomes, the more often Naberius ravishes him and Naberius is a notoriously selfish lover. Perhaps this was just Depp’s way of crying out for help, but as God Himself would say, “Go home to your island with your model and stop whining.”
serhasacomplaint 
Espresso and Whisky at Les Petit Cafe…
Shortly after 5 on Thursday, I enter Les Petit Cafe on Rue Descartes. It’s hard to resist a cafe on a street named after the author of “Discourse on the Method.” Descartes famously stated that thought cannot be separated from a human being. However, he lived centuries prior to the invention of cable television.
The cafe is at the top of the hill that’s Rue De La Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, a few blocks up from the apartment I’m renting. As the day weakens into night, the smell of cheese from the fondue restaurant across the street grows stronger.
The chill in the late October air that sends me inside reminds me of previous Octobers spent in a similar coffeehouses in New York in the days before Starbucks where there were independently owned coffeehouses in New York. There are Starbucks in Paris, as well as in Barcelona and pretty much every major European city I’ve visited. They all look the same as if they are exported in a model kit with easy to follow instructions. The android barista probably has a switch to activate the appropriate language.
When I first moved to New York, in my early 20s when I had all the time in the world and was as overwhelmed by that as anyone else is at that age, I would often leave the office and go to a coffeehouse in Morningside Heights on 107 and Broadway. It was then called the Coffee Lounge — “the uptown coffeehouse with the downtown vibe.” In those days, it was very important for hip things to be downtown or have a downtown feel. It still is, I guess.
Cafes are different here — you can enter one and order an espresso, a good beer on tap, or an excellent French wine. That’s at least three different places in the states with a distinct decor. Somehow a dive bar, coffeehouse, and wine bar all exist simultaneously and harmoniously.
You can also peacefully read, jot in a notebook, or have a quiet conversation, as well. That is difficult to achieve during happy hour at a NY bar. Coffee Lounge expanded shortly before 2000 and became a bar — The Underground Lounge, which still reached to the downtown vibe but the increased volume made reading the paper impossible.
The 20something Parisian next to me reads his paper while sipping an espresso. A different young woman, each of increasing pulchritude, walks in every few minutes and greets him with a kiss. Later, a blonde lingers past the initial kiss, resting a moment in his lap, then moving to an adjacent chair when her Cotes du Rhone (the 3 Euro house red) arrives. She stretches her leg, which is long enough to reach Burgundy, over his as she chats with the waitress. He leans his head into her chest and she strokes his hair. He seems happy. This never happened to me at Coffee Lounge, presumably because I never ordered the espresso.
The young woman working behind the bar sings along to Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” which plays on the iPod speaker dock behind her — the only words I hear her speak in English the entire time I’m there are “please won’t you stay awhile to share my grief. It’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way. And the time that I will suffer less is when I never have to wake.”
She was probably four or five at the oldest when Portishead’s “Dummy” was released in 1994. I wonder how many iterations of women her age have sung along to these words over the years? One of them was the woman I dated in 2001 — definitely a woman to me then; now, in retrospect, it’s hard to consider her more than a girl right out of college who wanted to avoid law school (she ultimately failed) and who liked to listen to “Dummy” and Bjork’s “Vespertine” in the dark – as did I.
It’s now past six, so I abandon coffee for liquor and the cafe feels just like a wine bar once the whisky is placed in front of me. If I stay until 8, I would find myself in a french bistro — the menu is similar to one of my favorite places in the East Village — but I leave to walk down the hill as the odor of fondue follows me.
Posted by Stephen Robinson on October 20, 2011 in Social Commentary
Tags: France, Paris, Portishead