Role of Dieties

"Debating" with friends generally helps crystallize my thoughts and clarifies what questions need to be asked or answered to resolve outstanding issues. In a recent discussion about faith I ended up with the following question:

What does God do?

I Might be Back

Hopefully, I'll be back to regular blogging next week. My blogging hiatus was necessitated by a summer course I have been teaching.

Thanks to John McCain: Alaskans

It just occurred to me that the people of Alaska should really be grateful to John McCain for saving them from Sarah Palin. By thrusting her into the national limelight (probably one of the most irresponsible political acts this side of the 2003 Iraq invasion) he raised her profile and afforded her the opportunity to abandon the project of ruining Alaska in order to cash in on her newfound celebrity. The more we learn about her, the more nightmarish it becomes to imagine how much carnage she could have wrought in Alaska.

I still have faith, which I hope is not misplaced, that a plurality of Americans (real Americans) will never elect her to anything. She's punched her ticket as a former half-term governor and that's a great resume for Republicans and nativists. How it plays out for them is their problem. The Alaskan people (and moose) have been spared.

Hypocrisy Thy Name Is ...

I vaguely remember that during the interminable health care debate Republicans keep admonishing the Democrats for pursuing the reform effort in the face of popular opposition (we could parse how popular that opposition really was in terms of those who thought the reforms went too far and those who reckoned it didn't go far enough). This week they're opposing debate on financial regulations in the face of overwhelming public support for the proposed reform measures.

I know we're not a direct democracy (like Switzerland), but whatever happened to the will of the people? A few weeks ago, Republican leaders professed that crafting public policy should be subjugated to the vagaries of public opinion polls (when it benefited the health care industrial complex). This week polling doesn't matter in the interests of the financial industrial complex. Apparently, consistency is for wimps.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Mitch McConnell (and the Republican leadership).

Chicken Care

Senate hopeful Sue Lowden of Nevada came up with an ingenious idea of bartering chickens for health care. I'll suggest she license the idea before freeloaders start profiting from it without just compensation. The idea appears to be catching on and a helpful chicken converter web site has been set up to assist with figuring out how many chickens would be needed for various medical procedures.

Planning ahead, I checked on treatment for prostate cancer. Turns out it'll set me back 3514 chickens, so now I'm left with the trivial challenge of figuring out how to acquire and keep thousands of chickens in the suburbs before I'm stricken with prostate cancer. That should be easier than providing universal health care coverage.

Socialist Institutions & Free Market Solutions

I keep hearing from people who want to run government that government can't run anything. They claim that free market solutions are always preferable. They want to get rid of pesky little regulations that hinder industrial production, although they waffle when you try to pin them down on which areas of government oversight they'll get rid of (making sure our kids' toys are safe, our drinking water is clean, miners have safe working conditions, our food supply is free of contaminants, our prescription drugs are safe and effective, our doctors are certified and qualified).

I keep waiting to hear their proposals for free market alternatives to our socialist police departments, our socialist fire departments and our socialist highway transportation system. Our socialist single payer system ensures that if I call 911 the operator doesn't ask me if I'm covered for EMS, fire or police services, they just dispatch help as soon as they can. Our taxes pay for those vital services and we don't usually begrudge the recipients of such services.

Calling Balls & Strikes

As we prepare for another Supreme Court confirmation drama brace yourself for the endless repetition of the notion (popularized by Chief Justice during his 2005 confirmation hearing) of a judge as a passive umpire mechanically calling balls and strikes. This is annoyingly vapid. Yes, judges do call balls and strikes, but more importantly they define the strike zone. They're able to call balls and strikes precisely because they unilaterally determine what constitutes the strike zone. They have a lot of discretion and latitude in determining the strike zone. Our statutes are like the baseball rule book. They don't have to invent new rules out of whole cloth to have significant impact.

Why is the strike zone so narrow or so wide? How do you maintain consistency given the varying heights and girths of the different ball players? How could the pitch into the dirt be a strike? Those are more interesting questions.