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Aug 04 2010
by ML Kennedy
Click below to catch up if you’ve just joined.
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, & Chapter 11
If you’ve been here all along…
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Jul 01 2010
Preemptive Ingredients:
2 bloodied handfuls of WMD seeds
2 Congressional chambers locked-and-loaded with free-range Chickenhawks
1 Military Industrial Complex armed with a blank check (and no balances)
1 slightly tattered Constitution
Ingredients*:
120,000 to 170,000 homegrown pounds of American flesh** (flak jackets not included)
2 million stockpiled missiles marinade in benzene-based napalm
1 demonic dash of despotism
Several vats of patriotic zeal
A liberal supply of recyclable right-wing propaganda
1 bottomless well of fear
A limited supply of hope
* Feel free to improvise ingredients to satisfy any shifts in political winds
**To feed larger blood-lust appetites, add more Faustian flesh as needed
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Apr 06 2010
Health insurance is not something that should ever be taken for granted in a society. Even in enlightened countries like Sweden or Canada, the limits of socialized healthcare are always monitored and within sight. Funding a healthcare system isn’t something that governments take lightly. Most industrialized countries in the world have some type of publicly-funded healthcare system in place, with the ultimate goal being to have universal coverage for all citizens. Because the United States is one of the only industrialized and wealthy nations that has no real universal healthcare system in place, it is often the target of political issues concerning government mandated coverage.
While waiting for the health care bill to enact our sweeping government-funded healthcare system, many states have taken it upon themselves to enact their own healthcare legislation for their citizens. California, for example, has recently formulated a plan to ensure that every citizen of the state has comprehensive, affordable health benefits available to them, including their own choice of doctors and hospitals. And it couldn’t come at a better time; Affordable Health Insurance, a consumer quote site found that 45 million Americans – approximately one in every seven citizens – remains uninsured.
Healthcare costs grow three times faster than the rise in wages, creating an endless cycle of healthcare cost shortages for average citizens to deal with. It’s estimated that healthcare spending will double over the next decade, meaning that in ten years time healthcare alone will eat up twenty percent of the nation’s budget. A Harvard University study found that half of all bankruptcies in the United States are due primarily to high medical costs, with many employers trying to eliminate as many benefits as they can in order to cut health insurance costs.
Without some form of control over healthcare costs, it can be assured that the future duties of state and federal legislators will be almost entirely taken up trying to sort out how they’ll be able to assign any sort of budget to pay for the rapidly-rising healthcare system for their citizens.
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Mar 25 2010
If this poll is to be believed, large pluralities and sometimes majorities of Republican voters have extremist views. Almost a quarter of them think Obama may be the Antichrist and their state should secede from the Union. More than a third of them think Obama is a foreign-born pretender to the throne that ought to be impeached. Nearly two thirds are confident that he’s a socialist. A whopping 77% believe Genesis should be taught in lieu of the big bang, a scientific theory on about the same foundation as the theory of gravity.
These numbers don’t suggest that every Republican is an extremist, but they are more evidence that moderates face stiff odds in Republican primaries. Maybe the demise of the Rockefeller Republican has been inevitable since the elder Bush ran unsuccessfully as a moderate against Reagan. Or maybe the end came later, when that same Bush lost the support of the Republican base over taxes and his lack of religious fervor. Whatever the case, take a good hard look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Olympia Snowe, because someday you can tell your kids you saw the political equivalent of a dodo bird. As is always the case in an extinction, we can’t yet know how their absence will affect the wider system.
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Mar 19 2010
What’s in a name? That which we call a war
By any other name would smell of death, destruction –
And a democratic resurrection
Of burning flesh dipped in oil
Buried deep in foreign soil…
FADE IN:
Uncle Sam’s hot-shot marketing machine (sponsored by the Military Industrial Complex: Where one soldier’s misery is another man’s bottom-line prophecy…), armed with the monumental task of re-branding the war in Iraq. Which begs the question:
How does one sell repackaged rotten meat
To an electorate that’s fast asleep?
That is precisely what Obama’s marketing machine intends to find out when it re-brands the war in Iraq in September with “Operation New Dawn.” A little too close to the 1984 film “Red Dawn” for my taste. That film has already branded itself into the nostalgic catacombs of my memory. Not only can I not make this marketing leap of faith, but the thought of imagining a bunch of high school students, hopped up on Molotov hormonal cocktails, running around the hills flanking Baghdad and shouting “Wolverines!” will only serve to undermine the objectives of the current mission — whatever the hell that is supposed to be.
"Red Dawn": The last line of defense standing between Capitalism and Communism (note the "Star Wars" product placement; George Lucas = merchandising genius)
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