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Political Rantings

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Oy Vey! Ahmadinejad is Jewish!

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

According to today’s Daily News, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born to practicing, Iranian Jewish parents who changed their name from Sabourjian to Ahmadinejad when they converted to Islam just after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Ahmadinejad’s hometown of Aradan. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior, [the London Daily Telegraph] says.

Experts told the Telegraph his vitriolic attacks against Jews could be an attempt to hide his past.

“This aspect of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him,” said Ali Nourizadeh, of the Center for Arab and Iranian Studies. “Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

“By making anti-Israeli statements, he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections.”

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that the “jian” ending to the Sabour name shows that the family had been practicing Jews.

How embarrassing, huh? Although, if he can deny the Holocaust ever happened, it shouldn’t be much of a stretch for him to deny all of this as well. Look for Ahmadinejad to claim that he was born at the age of eighteen any day now…

Categories: Political Rantings, Random Acts of Blogging | 2 Comments »

A Quick Shot of Healthcare, Part 4 – Deconstructing Sarah Palin . . . Again

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

On the eve of President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress regarding healthcare reform, the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, has written an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. What follows is an object lesson both in how news media must be consumed these days, and some enlightening facts (enlightening to me, at least) about the current healthcare debate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories: Political Rantings | 24 Comments »

Obama’s Speech – Reaction from the Constituency

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Since President Obama’s speech today was directed at the nation’s school children, I took an informal poll in my house (sample size: two)

Brandon (age 6), before the speech: The President is speaking at 12 noon? What about kids on the west coast? Will they still be asleep?

Brandon, after the speech: If the President asks for help all the time, then we can too.

Avery (age 9), after the speech: If the kids with all those challenges accomplished their goals, then we should accomplish our goals more easily than them. Not easily, but more easily.

Avery, when asked if Barack Obama should visit his elementary school one day: I’d rather he wait until next year and visit our middle school, because when you’re the youngest in the school, you get to sit closest to the stage during an assembly, and then I’d be the first one to shake his hand when the speech is over. If he visited our elementary school this year, I’d be way in the back.

Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 2 Comments »

Respect the Office

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Four years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I wrote this about the way the nation was treating President George W. Bush:

This is a bad sign for our country. Much as Watergate lifted the

Categories: Political Rantings | 32 Comments »

Kennedy’s Death Provides a Lesson in Bad Partisan Politics

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

The recent death of Senator Edward Kennedy marks the end of a tremendous political career, steeped heavily in accomplishments that benefited average, “working class” Americans across his almost forty-seven years in the Senate. The “Lion of the Senate” would even occasionally cross traditional political lines to accomplish his goals, as he did in 2002, working with Republican President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act.

So it is more than a little bit ironic that the aftermath of his death is about to demonstrate to us all how petty, partisan politicking can significantly and negatively impact the American people.

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Categories: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »

A Quick Shot of Healthcare, Part 3 – The Deep End of the Pool

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

I

Categories: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »

A Quick Shot of Healthcare, Part 2 – When Morals Meet Medicine

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I’ve been watching the current healthcare debate with great interest, and have a lot of opinions on various aspects of the matter, but can’t seem to consolidate them all into a single blog post. Instead, I’m queuing up a list of “quick shots” – thoughts on particular aspects of the debate – which I hope will spur some discussion

Remember, back in the early 1980’s, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic burst upon the scene? Without full information about what caused the disease or how it was transmitted, there was quite a bit of misinformation floating around. Specifically, I remember a burst of homophobia spewing forth – terms like “the gay plague,” claims that AIDS was God’s revenge on homosexuals, and so forth.

The whole thing kicked off a more fundamental debate. On one side was the radical, religious right who used the medical crisis to demonize the homosexual community. On the other side was the homosexual community and a host of more liberal social groups who’s message was basically “what two people do together in the privacy of their own home is none of your business.” And while this debate isn’t completely resolved (there will always be bigots in the world), I think that we’ve made tremendous progress in our society in accepting not only homosexuals, but a wide variety of groups who share some characteristic that makes them different from the majority.

Now, imagine the early 1980’s with a federal program of significant size providing healthcare to tens of millions of Americans (single payer or otherwise – doesn’t matter for our purposes here). Suddenly, the “what two people do together in the privacy of their own home is none of your business” argument has a massive hole in it. With one group (homosexuals in this case) consuming a disproportionate amount of health care expense, the live-and-let-live crowd would certainly lose some percentage of its members. After all, if your private activities are costing me some of my hard-earned tax dollars, then it very well might be my business after all. It makes me wonder, had the debate taken that tack, whether we would have made the kind of progress we’ve made today with regard to tolerance and equal rights.

Anyone who thinks I’m being an alarmist about this need only look at the current rumblings about obesity floating around the Internet (and, to some extent, Congress) these days. For now, we’re kicking around taxes on cheeseburgers. Are federal laws denying healthcare to those who’s BMI is over a certain threshold that far behind? How tenuous does the link between an activity and healthcare costs have to be before the government is allowed to legislate against it? Skydiving? Motorcycle riding? Hunting? Belonging to a college fraternity or sorority? Each of these activities presents known risks, and potentially raises the average cost of healthcare above the costs for those who don’t participate. Does that give us, the taxpayers, a vested interest in regulating them? And, more to the point, what of those people who will claim a vested interest, even when none truly exists?

It seems clear that some degree of additional government involvement in healthcare is inevitable at this point, and perhaps even warranted. However, I don’t think the implications of this involvement have been fully considered…

Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »

A Quick Shot of Healthcare, Part 1 – When Progress Hurts

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I’ve been watching the current healthcare debate with great interest, and have a lot of opinions on various aspects of the matter, but can’t seem to consolidate them all into a single blog post. Instead, I’m queuing up a list of “quick shots” – thoughts on particular aspects of the debate – which I hope will spur some discussion

Remember, when Barack Obama first took office, how he vastly expanded federal spending for stem cell research? As he did, he spoke inspirationally about the potential benefits from this kind of research – possible treatments or cures to everything from Alzheimer’s Disease to heart disease to neural/muscular disorders. There was even some talk about growing replacement organs in patients where the originals were failing.

Now that we’re talking about healthcare reform and ways to keep healthcare costs under control, it occurs to me – what happens if this stem cell research succeeds? To be sure, medical breakthroughs can sometimes reduce overall costs. I don’t know what the polio vaccine costs per patient, for instance, but I’m guessing it’s cheaper than the series of wheelchairs, braces, and physical therapy sessions that once guided a polio patient through many painful years until the disease overtook them.

But then there are diseases like cancer. Certain types of cancer used to be death sentences – if you contracted them, your life expectancy could be no more than a few months. Today, while there are still no cures, there are surgeries, preventative drugs and monitoring techniques that can remove the cancer, minimize the risk of recurrence, and catch it if it does come back early enough to effectively treat it again. Lacking the actual data, I can only imagine that the total cost of these treatments far outweighs the costs we used to pay for end-of-life care for these cancer patients.

So what of stem-cell research? Surely we’re all rooting for the kind of success that the President and others have boldly predicted. But what if the resulting therapies, drug treatments, or surgeries far outweigh the costs of treating these diseases today? And even if not, we should consider that people who don’t die from heart disease, ALS, or the like will live long enough to die of something else. So even if the cost of treatments were a wash, overall health care costs would still go up.

My point is this: the President’s recent claims that health care reform will be cost neutral seem like disturbingly short-term thinking. His own initiatives seem to be (rightly) shooting for new, innovative treatments that will likely increase the cost of healthcare, along with the benefits it provides.

It seems to me that our true goal isn’t cost control at all, but rather the reduction or elimination of inefficiency and fraud, so that we provide the highest possible benefit at the lowest possible cost. As the benefits increase (through technological advancement, for example) costs should go up, just not excessively.

I don’t hear anyone talking about this concept these days…

Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »

Not Surprising, but Sooner than Expected

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Two things in the news today that I fully expected to happen, but not as early as mid-July.

First, the Yankees have past the Red Sox in the American League East:

This usually doesn’t happen until some time in mid-September. And before anyone jumps all over me, yes, I know – it ain’t over until it’s over. I’m not declaring victory; I’m just saying it’s rare that the Red Sox choke relinquish first place so early in the year.

Second, President Obama has gone from “The One” to “The One Half”:

On inauguration day, 65% of the country approved of President Obama (44% of whom strongly approved) and only 35% disapproved (only 16% strongly disapproved). Today, those numbers are quite different. Only half of Americans approve of the President’s performance (51% approve, 47% disapprove), and among those who feel strongly, the numbers have passed the 50/50 tipping point, with just 29% strongly approving and 35% strongly disapproving.

This is, of course, the “campaign in poetry, govern in prose” phenomenon at work. On January 21, all President Obama had done was win an historic election and give a good inauguration speech. Today, we have auto bailouts, stimulus packages, healthcare proposals and more to consider – much more meat on the bones, so to speak. No one expected him to carry a 65% approval rating through his first term, but his aggressive approach to his first six months in office is certainly eating away at that “rock star” popularity he once enjoyed. It will be interesting to see if these numbers stabilize, or if the trend continues through to the midterm elections.

Categories: Political Rantings, Sports Talk | 2 Comments »

Sarah Palin: Crazy as a Clinton?

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Like many Americans, I was confused about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin

Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 5 Comments »

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