By John Ballard
There's no use pretending. I want to be optimistic about the midterm elections but I'm bracing for an egregious display of public ignorance the likes of which have not been seen in decades. A Republican/Tea Party/Paleo-Conservative landslide is my prediction. And I so hope to be wrong.
Meantime, the best we can do -- those of us clinging to sanity -- is remain calm and stay informed.[/screed]
?Rick Scott and the Florida Gubernatorial Race: �Nurses Are for Sink; Doctors Are for Scott; Voters Still on Mars� Part 1 by Maggie Mahar.
Rick Scott, the former CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain that was raided by the FBI in 1997, is now in the running to become governor of Florida. (See links below to earlier HealthBeat posts.) As the election approaches, it appears that Scott might well win. Even the Florida Medical Association (FMA) is endorsing him.Why would Florida�s physicians back someone associated with the largest case of Medicare fraud in U.S. history? Perhaps because Scott was never forced to testify, and thus there is no evidence that he knew what was going on in the company that he oversaw. (Though if he was, in fact, unaware of pervasive fraud in his own company, this might be another reason why he wouldn�t be an ideal chief executive for the state of Florida.)
Nevertheless, Florida�s doctors support Scott, in large part because he agrees with them on the issue that they put first: tort reform. Meanwhile, nurses have lined up behind Scott�s opponent, Alex Sink. While the FMA is focused on a single issue, nurses are concerned about a wider range of problems. Meanwhile, Sink and Scott run neck-to-neck. It seems that voters don�t know what to think, or as Flaglerlive.com puts it, they�re �still on Mars.�
I just returned from a five-day stay at one of Florida's beautiful Gulf Coast resorts. Constant comfortable breeze, no clouds, perfect beaches and service people everywhere bending overe backward to insure a good time. But the TV ads were as viscious there as anywhere in the country. Having read Money Driven Medicine I already knew about Rick Scott and couldn't bring myself to watch. As CEO of Hospital Corporation of America he set out to do with medicine what Walmart did with retailing and McDonald's did with food. This is a stinking mess but compared with the rest of the national political landscape it's not remarkable.(Readers are reminded that all hospitals in Amerida were not-for-profit until the Sixties and HCA's acquisitions took place in the Nineties.)
?Upton Sinclair and the Modern Media Campaign is an eight-minute interview of author Greg Mitchell about The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, a timely reprint of his book, first published in 1992.
Many today believe Hollywood was always "liberal." Not so, but how did it get that way? It all started when author and ex-socialist Upton Sinclair swept the Democratic primary for governor of California in 1934... Hollywood's response, including the creation of the first "attack ads" for the screen by none other than Irving Thalberg... destroyed Sinclair but also led to the rise of the "liberal" movie industry we see today.The Hollywood moguls, led by Louis B. Mayer, responded to Sinclair's upset victory--he had inspired one of the greatest mass movements in U.S. history--by threatening to move the entire industry to Florida. Nearly all of the studios docked employees, including top actors, one day's pay, to go to Sinclair's GOP challenger (some, such as Jimmy Cagney, rebelled, but Katharine Hepburn and others went along with it). Finally, MGM produced three fake newsreels, using shots from old movies and Hollywood actors, that sparked riots in theaters. Thalberg (left) later admitted producing the newsreels. "Nothing is unfair in politics," he explained. Sinclair supporters, including Charlie Chaplin and Dorothy Parker, vowed revenge. LINK here to Mitchel's blog entry.
Today's national political scene looks like that of California in 1934. As one commenter noted, "Before FOX News and Rupert Murdoch there was MGM and Louis B. Mayer."
Fun video clips from the past at the links.
I find it appropriate that the Trick-or-treat theme falls so close to November 2.
?What Obama Can Learn From Lady Gaga (And Progressives From The Tea Party) is Evert Cillier's latest. Regular readers may recall previous links to this man's volcanic commentaries on politics and society.
Advisory: crude language at the link. Prudes skip this section and move on the your next topic.
My name is Obama. But call me Icarus.I soared on the wings of an angel. I was the biggest star the planet had ever seen, without having to go near a guitar. I was dancing on the moon, when suddenly, the moon gathered its bowels and dropped me like a turd back on earth.
Plop!
And here I sit, in my redecorated Oval Office, surrounded by all these clever Ph.D people, and by my pointillist-picture-perfect family, and I'm gobsmacked and paddywhacked and privately pissed and publicly petulant.
People scorn me. Left and right. They treat me like a dog.
After all I've done. What a record of legislation! How did I legislate? Let me count the bills.
�
Instead of studying Bill Clinton's history for clues about what to do if you get stuck with a Republican House, you should be studying Lady Gaga.
There's a lady who knows the first thing about staying popular.
It's not jobs, jobs, jobs.
It's base, base, base.
When that chick started out, queers said to themselves: hey, she's just the perfect fag hag.
So they jumped on her: heck, she was the best thing since Judy Garland.
And little girls -- those who felt trapped in their families -- said to themselves, she's got the independent outrageousness that secretly defines the inner me. Lady Gaga became the personification of how sassy a young girl could be and not only get away with it, but become popular and noted for it.
Every girl has a sass inside her wanting to come out.
Plus, Lady Gaga backed up her persona with the goods. She wrote great club dance tunes, maddeningly catchy, so both out-on-the-town dancing-queen queers and private-dancing-in-front-of-their-bedroom-mirrors princess girls, had a soundtrack to adore her by.
Lady Gaga also played to the dressing-up aesthetic of the little girls and the big queens by wearing crazy clothes. A veritable Carmen Miranda, who wore a fruit basket on her head because poor women in Brazil carried fruit home on their heads from the market. Lady Gaga wears a dress made of meat -- same story, different time and place. Pretentious people call it performance art, because these two gestures make statements that go beyond mere fashion.
Now here's the point about Lady Gaga and popularity. Lady Gaga wields Facebook and MTV and the media for one purpose only: to stay close to her base.
You don't, which is why you're dumb and she isn't.
The president has a good sense of humor, but I doubt he would find much here to chuckle about. Besides, if he did, the First Lady would slap him in the face for grinning.
And speaking of First Ladies, Obama's only chance for a second term is to run with Hillary Clinton as Vice-President.
?NDM-1 is the latest addition to the growing number of infections not responsive to common antibiotics. A Tweet from Crawford Killian brought it to my attention.
For the first time, an Israeli patient has been diagnosed with a "superbug" - one that is resistant to antibiotics.The 50-year-old woman was involved in a traffic accident in India and hospitalized in New Delhi for five days before being transferred to the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. There, she was found to have an intestinal bacteria containing the enzyme New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1, better known as NDM-1. The enzyme, which is found in a variety of intestinal bacteria, breaks down antibiotics, thereby rendering the carrier bacteria immune to them.
The woman was immediately quarantined to prevent her from infecting anyone else. Sheba also tested all the staff who had treated her and the other patients in the ward, but did not find any who had been infected with the bug. The hospital said the woman is due to be released in a few days, once it confirms that the bug has left her system. (LINK to Haaretz article.)
Medical tourism is part of the problem, of course, and Western medical communities are eager to point fingers, hence the name "New Delhi" something or other...
���
Finally, for no particular reason, here is a video to brighten your day.
You wrote: And speaking of First Ladies, Obama's only chance for a second term is to run with Hillary Clinton as Vice-President.
ReplyDelete*sigh*
Surely you are not so stupid as to believe that any statement made NOW about what happens in the next presidential election should be taken seriously.
Or maybe you are.
I guess I'm that stupid.
ReplyDeleteNext week's results are written on the wall. Unless I'm way off, there will be a GOP/Tea Party landslide which (I hope) wipes out the Blue Dogs and kick-starts the Democrats into a serious ideological focus.
It's a mistake to think a simple majority cannot do as much as a filibuster-proof super-majority.
This impresses me.
A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of �Democratic infighting� would also diminish.)
Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans� incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama�s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It�s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney�s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.
Republicans have become obsessed with ideological purity, and as a consequence they will likely squander a few winnable races in places like Delaware. But Democrats aren�t ideological enough. Their conservative contingent has so blurred what it means to be a Democrat that the party itself can barely find its way. Polls show that, despite their best efforts to distance themselves from Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, a number of Blue Dog Democrats are likely to be defeated this November. Their conservative voting records have deflated Democratic activists but have done nothing to win Republican support.
Far from hastening the dawn of a post-partisan utopia, President Obama�s election has led to near-absolute polarization. If Democrats alter their political strategy accordingly, they�ll be more united and more productive.
The cool part of blogging is when you say something stupid it sinks in the archives, never again to see the light of day. But when you get something right, far in advance, you get to feel kinda smug about it.
I think the dems are generating - maybe - enough energy to block out the republicans from taking over the house, let alone the senate. This energy of course has nothing to do with what the party is doing but has everything to do with a developing realization that things will go from bad to worse should the dumb and dumber's get the steering wheel again. It'll be close, but not a rout.
ReplyDeleteOn your Sinclair Lewis/Hollywood political schizophrenia theme, Ill pass on this tid-bit on "rogue" (lower class) actress Clara Bow:
ReplyDeleteIn 1927, Bow reached the heights of her popularity with the film It; the film was based on a story written by Elinor Glyn, and upon the film's release, Bow became known as "The It Girl". In Glyn's story, It, a character explains what "It" really is: "It...that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes... [e]ntirely unself-conscious...full of self-confidence... [i]ndifferent to the effect... [s]he is producing and uninfluenced by others."
Many Hollywood insiders considered her socially undesirable. Bow was not liked by other women in Hollywood, and her presence at social functions was taboo, including her own premieres.[citation needed] Bow's bohemian lifestyle, thick Brooklyn accent and "dreadful" manners were considered reminders of the Hollywood Elite's uneasy position in high society, and they shunned her for it.[57] Budd Schulberg wrote in his memoir, Moving Pictures, "Hollywood was a cultural schizophrene: The anti-movie Old Guard with their chamber music and their religious pageants fighting a losing battle against the more dynamic culture of the Ad Schulbergs who flaunted the bohemianism of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the socialism of Upton Sinclair. But there was one subject on which the staid old Hollywood establishment and the members of the new culture circle would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low life and a disgrace to the community."[58]
However, Bow was praised by critics for her beauty, vitality and enthusiasm � Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount, said that "She danced even when her feet weren't moving. Some part of her was always in motion, if only her great, rolling eyes. It was an elemental magnetism, an animal vitality, that made her the center of attraction in any company."[59]
Wings (1927)
In 1927, Bow starred in Wings, a war picture largely rewritten to accommodate her, as she was Paramount's biggest star at the time. The film went on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture.
[same old class war]
seems i got a sinclair dyslexia problem.
ReplyDeleteupton sinclair, not sinclair lewis is what i meant.
not that they were so different really.
[Natural mistake. After all, we're not exactly contemporaries, are we? JB]