I could present an article on the White House Happy Hour with Gates, Crowley, and the Prez…it would be oh-so-sexy, not mention fun to whine about the fact that the beer fest really need not be the leading headlines when we might actually have better things to discuss. But really, that is all so last week. In fact, I’m not even going to read the 2.874 million articles that will surely be discussing what kind of beer they exchanged sweet nothings over. Hence, I’ll have nothing to talk about on that score.  And, I’m not ignoring just because I’m not of the beer-drinking persuasion.

Instead! There is this really interesting (for real!) Op-Ed piece by Paul Krugman on the Realities of Health Care. He starts off with an amusing anecdote, which is really more tragic than anything else:

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

As Krugman later writes, Americans don’t understand the health care system we are working with now, so how can they be expected to understand the reforms that are needed? This article is worth a read for those wondering how badly can government intervention in health care really mess things up, for that is exactly what the conservatives would like us to believe. What is government already doing right?

Still, most Americans under 65 do have some form of private insurance. The vast majority, however, don’t buy it directly: they get it through their employers. There’s a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to health care aren’t considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.

And it’s thanks to these rules that employment-based insurance more or less works, at least in the sense that horror stories are a lot less common than they are in the individual insurance market.

So here’s the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government.

While we may not be sold on the current plan, as it’s being tweaked half to death, it’s difficult to say that we need no government plan.

The internet is abuzz with the news that a prominent African American professor (from Harvard, no less), Henry Louis Gates, was arrested over the weekend. Apparently, he had returned home from an overseas trip, and was faced with a jammed front door. As he was trying to let himself in, cops came by, asked for identification, did not get any cooperation from Professor Gates, and promptly arrested him. Now, the world is heaping scoops upon scoops of criticism on the police officers, police department, and the neighbor who called the cops, all of us screaming, “Oh my God, racial profiling!”

At first, I was flabbergasted and thought it was a horrible case of racial profiling gone hideously right…right because it’s nice when law enforcement gets caught doing something stupid to someone prominent. There is more accountability, and you know that when they apologize, they really mean it; who wouldn’t be sorry for having wronged a prominent individual?

Then, I got to the end of the first article, and every article I’ve read since, and I can’t help being on the cops’ side. They received a call from the man’s neighbor, who said she saw “two black men with backpacks” trying to enter her neighbors house. I’m sure she knew her neighbor was a black man, and wasn’t attempting to be stupidly racist. My neighbors are Vietnamese; if I see a couple of Vietnamese folks that seem like they are struggling with the door, and they’re not my neighbors, should I assume they are, and just let it go? And then find out the next day that my neighbors had been robbed? Or, should I call the cops and report suspicious activity, as I would want my neighbors to do if they saw, say, Muslim-looking dudes trying to get into my house? I’m going with the latter option every single time. I call the cops over the slightest weird noise I hear coming from my neighbors…because the one time I didn’t, they were robbed. I’m going to err on the side of caution, and so far, nobody is complaining. That’s the neighbor; how about the cops? Did they do something horribly, tragically, stupidly racist?

Maybe they did, to an extent; or maybe they didn’t. The reports are apparently varied as to what happened, and when they arrested Professor Gates, and on what grounds. Some reports say he was arrested at his front door, before he ever got into his house; others say that when his front door was jammed, he went around to the back entrance, got in, and then there were these cops who knocked on his front door; when he opened it, they asked for identification. Here is where people get all up in arms, and I’m thinking, why are you getting ticked off? Clearly, there had been something wrong with his door (maybe because someone at some point had botched up a break-in?!), the cops came to check it out (because they were called, probably validly?!), and now they’re wanting to make sure they are not talking to a big bad robber guy. What’s the problem? If they had just asked, “Do you live here, sir?” He said, “Yes” and they went on their merry way, and it turned out that the dude  at the door who happened to be black hadn’t been Mr. Gates, would that have reflected well on the cops’ job performance?

I get that Mr. Gates at this point began to get irate and ask for their badge numbers and names…but I don’t get why. So, they asked for your ID, you provided it (maybe immediately, maybe after a little bit of shock at being asked to provide ID in your own home), and now they’re leaving; what’s to get mad about? This is where my sympathy for Mr. Gates begins to ebb. I also don’t get why the cops didn’t just give him their badge numbers, although I reckon it would not have been all that difficult for Professor Gates to obtain their names: law enforcement officers wear name plates right on their uniforms. I get that this might have happened a ton of times without reason at all…but this really doesn’t sound like a situation without reason. To top it all, the cop who arrested Professor Gates for “disorderly conduct” seems to have pretty solid race-related credentials. If anything, this sounds like it was a power struggle between a “wronged” home owner and a cop, and a cop is going to win a power struggle every single time, even if the skin colors of the protagonist and antagonist had been reversed.

There’s a time for crying racism, and there’s a time for crying boo. Yes, there are cops who go way over the line, many many cops…but punishing the ones who just might have good reasons for their actions is the fastest way to weed out the good cops and leave behind nothing but bad apples. And to me, that is kind of what this situation is beginning to feel like.

Check this out. The Washington Post has an uber-interesting article,  Fixing the Economy is Women’s Work, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman on the role women could have played in preventing the magnitude of catastrophe we are currently seeing with the economy:

Accounting giant Ernst & Young pulled out charts and graphs at a recent power lunch in Washington with female lawmakers to argue a provocative bottom line: Companies with more women in senior management roles make more money. The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine sweepingly predicts the “death of macho.” Economists at Davos this year speculated that the presence of more women on Wall Street might have averted the downturn. Adding to this debate is the fact that the laid-off victims of this recession are overwhelmingly men.

The above sounds promising, but the part down below is kind of where I went, “Huh?”

Pepperdine found that the Fortune 500 firms with the best records of putting women at the top were 18 to 69 percent more profitable than the median companies in their industries.

I don’t know…I think 18-69 percent more profitability is such a wide margin that it doesn’t really demonstrate the effectiveness of women as leaders in business rather than men. Perhaps the numbers work when you take a closer look at the study and it’s variables…but from an outsider’s look, it doesn’t really clinch it for me, although the minimum of 18% more profitability at a consistent rate is doubtlessly very impressive.

To add to the above-cited study, they talk about another study illustrating the differences between how men and women handle money:

According to a 30-year study of fund managers released last month by the National Council for Research on Women, female investors and professional money managers used more measured strategies. They didn’t take huge risks, but they also didn’t lose big. Their returns were consistent. Men took larger risks and wound up with results that varied more widely. A study by the French Fund association found that funds managed by women had more consistent results over one-year, three-year and five-year measurements. Female-managed funds weren’t usually top performers, but they were never at the bottom.

And then there’s this:

Scott Page, an economist at the University of Michigan, uses mathematical models to demonstrate that a diverse group will solve a complicated business problem better than a homogeneous group. In fact, diversity is even more important than expertise. In other words, a bunch of white male brainiacs won’t usually reach the best conclusions.

This is all very well and good, very promising for the future of working women. But, as we all know, women, particularly those with growing children, have many burdens to bear. As such,

[p]rofessional women have been leaving the workplace in droves, and we need to stop the brain drain. Recent studies show that almost a third of professional women opt out at some point in their careers and, strikingly, that MBAs are more likely than lawyers or doctors to choose to stay home with their children.

When I read the above, my eyebrows rose a little, because I was thinking, “But, they’ve got kids, and their families are their priorities.” And then I was reminded why exactly women with MBAs tend to bail from the world of business: the lack of flexibility in business culture in accommodating the needs of working women with families:

[W]e can’t afford to have women take themselves out of the running for top slots. And the only way to prevent that is changing the workplace to allow us the freedom to fit in our personal lives.

Luckily, that freedom makes economic sense, too. That’s why companies such as Wal-Mart, Capital One, Best Buy, Sun Microsystems and Sara Lee, to name just a few, say they have glimpsed the future of work and have decided it’s an extremely manageable place. They’ve discovered that allowing people to work the way they want — from home; at night; from the sidelines of the soccer field — actually increases productivity. Best Buy found that changing the work rules boosted productivity by an average of 40 percent.

This was an interesting read, and if business culture takes a turn to be more accommodating of the needs of women, without making us feel like a) they’re doing us a huge favor and so b) we should feel guilty for such magnanimous and unreasonable accommodations, then it sounds like a promising leap forward for women who want to contribute to the good of society while not sacrificing their families in the process. On the other hand, it could just be that the men want us to do all the work, and this is their way of buttering us up! (Only teasing, gents. Relax.)

Who was not shocked when they heard that Michael Jackson had died? I know I certainly didn’t believe it until I read it for myself. My sister informed us, “Hey, Michael Jackson is dead!” and I thought it was a hoax, maybe someone’s wishful thinking, because let’s face it: it certainly seemed like the man had no friends who would care to have him stick around. Upon checking every news outlet and confirming that indeed he had passed on, that feeling of blind-sided shock that accompanies a car accident in which you are the main star promptly overcame me. It was that same feeling of shock that came when we all heard of Princess Diana’s death.

Between that day and today, the media has been filled with all kinds of stories. Forget who will get the money of his surprisingly vast estate (I mean, weren’t we all led to believe that the man was completely and utterly broke? Turns out he could have cashed in that Beatles catalog for a cool billion dollars) and who will get the kids. Those kinds of stories are about par for the course. The kinds of stories that grabbed my attention were the ones discussing an entirely different facet of Michael Jackson. Normally, when a person dies, the media rehashes everything that we already know about the person. With this death, we’re seeing new depths.

For example, I had no idea that Mr. Jackson was something of a bookworm. I found myself, when reading this article, becoming slightly outraged that we were always given the impression that the man was a bit, shall we say, dim-witted. According to this article,

Largely an autodidact, Jackson was quite well read, according to Jackson’s longtime lawyer. “We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues,” Bob Sanger told the LA Weekly after the singer’s death. “But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature . . . Freud and Jung — go down the street and try and find five people who can talk about Freud and Jung.”

For a man who could read Freud and Jung (for God’s sake, how many of us have done so?!), one of the greatest tragedies must be that he was taken for an idiot. Why did his handlers never make the media focus on his more intellectual side? I can’t imagine how they could have thought that would hurt his image.

While I couldn’t care less about either his moon-walk (ok, that’s a lie–I just saw his moon-walk on YouTube, and it was crazy good) or the tabloid sensationalism of his legal quagmires, I find it an incredible shame that we are being allowed, by the media, to admire him death. In a just world, we would have been allowed to admire more than his moon-walk in life as well. And something tells me that this newfound respect from the media has everything to do with money.

Roger Federer has the worst luck with the French Open. He is caught between losing it to Nadal, or potentially, losing it to the man who eliminated Nadal. Last weekend, he must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when Robin Soderling (like, who?) defeated Rafael Nadal in the fourth round. This weekend, he’s up against the very same Soderling in the final. In addition to that, he’s up against the challenge of tying Pete Sampras’s 14 Grand Slam wins. Talk about pressure, eh?!

We can only hope that this match yields tears of joy of Roger.

Last night, Bill Moyers aired a gripping one hour show on the tactics we’ve been using as a nation. He featured a documentary film called “Torturing Democracy.” It contained interviewed with civilian and military lawyers, and showed segments on torture that were re-enactments of descriptions from declassified documents. Let me say, I’m sure it’s the tamer stuff that has been declassified, and yet it’s disturbing. I’d say that I don’t want to know what else we’ve done…but if it’s been done in our name, for our safety, with our own money, then we have duty to know. We owe it to ourselves to know who we, as a nation, are.

You can watch the documentary film online. And one final note: it really should have been called “Torturing Humanity,” because an inanimate construct couldn’t care less if it’s being tortured. But humanity, humanity is very much an animate construct. And it’s time we got close to the uncomfortable truth: we are torturing people, and in the process, we are torturing our humanity out of existence. No amount of voting in free elections can make up for that. Democracy will recover a hell of a lot faster than souls…ours and theirs.

Oh my God, look! It’s a ten eight page article on Bill Clinton. I guess the New York Times needed to a) fill up space, and b) get the salesnumbers up or something. Because what sells faster than a Clinton piece? Well, an Obama or a Princess Diana piece might…but only barely. The article starts off by following Mr. Clinton on a trip through Lima, Peru, while he is shopping for souvenirs for family and friends, and I particularly liked this couple of sentences:

Clinton selected one he thought would be great for his friend, Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining mogul, to give to Giustra’s girlfriend. Clinton said he likes picking out gifts for his friends’ wives and girlfriends.

Wink, wink; nudge, nudge. Clinton…women…get it?! Of course you get it. And if you don’t, you’re probably way too young, or completely out of the loop when it comes to American political drama.

If you’re interested in the dynamics of a former President living life while his First Lady is heading up the State Department, this article has a few insights. So you can read on without any further mention of Clintonian tendencies to inadvertently charm women.

I came across this article called The Six Secrets of Sneezing, and found an interesting blog-friendly passage:

How we sneeze could say something about us.
Of all the characteristics that potentially reveal our inner selves, I never thought sneezing could be one of them. However, body language expert Patti Wood says otherwise. She did Benadryl-sponsored study of 547 people and their sneeze habits, coming up with four types of sneezes that she believes are personality indicators.

• The “Correct” carries Kleenex and is careful to cover her mouth when sneezing, meaning she’s respectful of others and likes to maintain a dignified disposition.
• The “Supporter” tends to hold in sneezes rather than risk sneezing on someone, which indicates a quiet and caring character.
• The “Expressive” makes a big production out of sneezing and often sneezes multiple times at once, possibly making her a showy and dominating person.
• The “Driver” sneezes loudly but quickly, making her direct and forward-thinking.

Hmmmmmm….I used to be the second type, the Supporter: I’d hold back a sneeze or a cough till I’m practically choking, just so that I don’t disturb people around me. I don’t know when I had enough of torturing myself, but I’m now more of a “loud but quick” sneezer. The thing is, it’s still kind of embarrassing, no matter how quick I try to wrap it up. How stupid, right, to be embarrassed over an entirely physiological action? Well, anyway, what kind of sneezer are you? Or are you in a category of your own making?

Remember back in the day when we snickered at Bill Clinton for asking the lawyerly question, “But what is is?” Well, today, I wish President Obama would just get it over with and do the same thing with regard to torture. Instead, he is hemming and hawing over, “Was that torture? And if it was, why should we do anything about it?” Is he trying to make us think he’s actually putting some deep thought into this? What deep thought is necessary? When even a Fox News anchor is saying, “We’re America! We’re not supposed to torture!” isn’t it all pretty self-evident ? Meanwhile, our Senate Democratice “leadership” is actually coming out and saying that they are directly opposed to the idea of a torture commision.

Oh, and mad props to Nancy Pelosi for actually wanting an independent Torture Commission. I know, how low have I sunk to actually give a politician props for doing her job? Maybe we could call it the Commission on Harsh Interrogation Techniques that Even Some Soldiers Dislike, for all those squeamish about the T word.

According to an article from CNN, right wing extremism might be something to be worried about, amidst other concerns of economy, global warming, and the war on terror that is claiming lives as we speak. Ordinarily, this article would be kind of a curiosity, as in, “Hmmmm let’s wait and see what pans out.” Today, however, I am reading it in a different context. As soon I saw the title of the article, I thought to myself “No kidding!” and my mind flashed back to a couple billboards we saw last week while driving through Nevada.

Now, Nevada itself is a pretty forbidding place, but these billboards were a whole different species of frightening. This huge billboard had the words “Try One!” written in big bold letters across the top, and underneath was a picture of what they want you to try: this gigantinormous machine gun (or is it called automatic gun?…whatever). And then off to the side somewhere, which you only notice when your eyes flinch away from the menace of what they’re exhorting you to try, is the name of the merchant advertising. The emphasis was so barely on the advertiser and so blatantly on the product, almost like they don’t care where you get the thing from…just get one, and try it! Like, you know, tasting a new cuisine…just try it! You’ll like it, they promise!

When I read about right-wing wackos, I will forever associate them with this cavalier attitude. It was quite jarring to the senses, to put it mildly. Honestly, it scared the daylights out of me, and made me want to disappear into the desert of Nevada where no person will be around to try one of those things on me.