Obama-rama

I have a problem with Barak Obama, and it has nothing to do with his African father or his Caucasian grandmother. My problem is that since his election to the Senate, Obama has been running for president. He has no senatorial record to attack because he has done little, so, people may begin looking at his record in Illinois, or they will continue to spin their wheels about what his pastor said and what his pastor meant when he said what he said. In the end, the issue of race may trump everything else, you know, the failing economy and the increasingly expensive colonization of Iraq. With his very liberal voting record in Illinois, I, for one, am not convinced that Obama can gain important non-partisan support for issues that will challenge the next administration. I am not moved by Obama's politics of joy. My fear is that Hillary Clinton cannot beat a Republican candidate in the fall and I don't think we can stand four more years with business as usual. Once again, I feel backed into a wall with all the exits blocked. I think we deserve better, but barring a sudden resurrection of Al Gore, I don't know what that could be.

Maybe hated cousin Angela has a point

I have a cousin who I call Hated Cousin Angela. Maybe the reason why I dislike her has more to do with the fact that she might be right, instead of the ungrateful, shiftless, lazy, grasping bitch I have always thought her to be.

Thirty-five years ago, Angela shocked everyone in our little corner of the world by presenting us with our very first illegitimate (gasp) off-spring. Although most of the principles are now dead, the rift remains and occasionally rears its ugly head. Anyway, in addition to that, Angela has provided me with years of hysterically stupid anecdotes and cooking tips. She has yet to trump my cancer with an illness of her own, but not for want of trying, although now that I have a bionic knee, she wants one of her own.

But let's get to the point. From her surprise, surprise motherhood on, Angela has avoided gainful employment, living off her parents and the State. Then, to prove she was smarter than everyone else, Angela went back to school in her 40s and received a degree in Anthropology. But shocked and appalled to discover that those government loans had to be repaid, she quit her job in the university's registration office, applied for social security claiming her fibromyalgia made it impossible for her to work, and she moved in with (again) her aging father when the government turned her down for assistance. Now, he's gone, and she's stills squatting in his home, making it impossible for her siblings to either sell or rent the place. But her retirement plan is in full force, which was to live off her dad until his death and then live off her daughter, which is coming down the line. Meanwhile, she has become an expert on Jane Austin (you know, the stuff we loved as teens) and tiresome on that most tiresome of all authors, Charles Dickinson (so many words, so little reason).

Meanwhile, I scramble like a demented chipmonk trying to get writing gigs, or receptionist gigs or whatever gig I can get that will pay me cash money. Yes, the dreaded day arrived, I'm out of unemployment compensation and into my pitiful 401K. But, had I the forethought to eschew birth control and produced a retirement plan of my own, I would have been saved. While I meet my monthly health insurance premium and pay my mortgage and generally scrimp along, Angela lives off the state. Am I annoyed? You bet I am. She was right all along. One does not have to work or be self-supporting when a whole world of people are out there willing to give me their tax dollars. So, who's the chump in this scenario.

Meanwhile, allow me to share with you the latest, and maybe best, of the Hated Cousin Angela stories. In his later years, my uncle's health was dicey at best and Angela, because she is a scientist (and has the degree to prove it), decided that her dad would be best served by a sodium free diet (sodium was the least of his problems). One day, another cousin brings a pot of freshly made spaghetti sauce (chicken soup to an Italian's soul). Angela never made sauce, preferring bottled, because, she maintained, her father didn't know the difference. Anyway, all she had to do was boil the water for the spaghetti. "You're putting pepper in the water," the cousin observed, thinking Angela had mistaken the pepper for salt.

"Yes," said Angela. "My dad can't have salt, and I need to put something in the water or it won't boil."

That's right, Angela said that water will not boil unless there is something in it, and as a scientist, she said, she knows these things.

Pointless as it was, the other cousin tried to explain about salt and water and boiling points and the stupidity of pepper, which rendered the entire meal impossible to eat (even with liberal amounts of very salty cheese).

Everyone has a hated cousin Angela, but honestly, I think ours is the best.

Meanwhile, hack writer needs work, gives good phone and can be receptionist, an old receptionist, but a receptionist nevertheless.

Spitzer lives and dies by the embarrassing press conference

Elliott Spitzer has covered himself with glory with his no holds barred evisceration of various Wall Street insiders, banks, and insurance companies. He was the law and it was his way or the highway.  There were no mitigating circumstances when Spitzer was on the case. And now, Spitzer seems hoist on his own petard.  New York Republicans, who smell blood in the water, have threatened to impeach the New York governor if he doesn't step down after being linked to a prostitution ring. What I want to know is why law enforcement was interested in a "suspicious money trail" that lead to that specific bank. Could it be that Spitzer has so annoyed any number of high powered people and institutions that they went looking for something with his name on it? I'm not one for conspiracy  theories but traders reportedly cheered when CNBC broke the story. The problem with holding one's self out as holier  than thou, is that one must be holier than thou and hiring high priced hookers just doesn't cut it. I'm sure that even as I type this, Spitzer is writing his comfortable ticket to a low-key resignation. It's a sorry end to a career that held such promise and did so much good for the rest of us. Maybe Spitzer's greatest sin had nothing to do with a hooker, but in having so mightily pissed off white collar criminals who are used to having it their way.

The spare goes to war

CNN's Chris Cuomo did not win any friends over the water recently when he referred to Britain's Prince Harry as the expendable spare. Poor Prince Harry fought for and won the right to serve his country in Afghanistan. He was there for only a few weeks, when the media blackout, designed to protect him and the men with whom he served, was broken by an Australian women's magazine. Not that the initial squib garnered any notice--it took Matt Drudge's reprint of the news to blow Harry's cover, which resulted in his early removal from the front lines.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. After an initial flurry of hailing Harry as a hero, the British tabs are back at it, today publishing a front page photo of Harry at a pub with his girlfriend. That segment of the British publish that lives to comment on the lives of others are now decrying the fact that Harry remains Harry. The "darling Diana" group, who have all but canonized the dead Princess of Wales, want a pristine icon are furious that Harry has returned to his life rather than beginning a life of prayer and contemplation.

My cynical take on the whole mess is that the military used Harry's honest desire to serve as a publicity stunt to drum up support for an increasingly unpopular war. But  these things have a way of backfiring with everything from negative comments from the parents of soldiers who died there to a public who expected Harry to return home a changed man.

Well, war, even a brief encounter with war, does change people and it also makes them yearn to return to life as they knew it, away from the heat, the dust, and gunfire aimed in their direction. Harry has done what all returning soldiers have done when they arrive home in one piece: He took his best girl out for a drink. 

Given recent history, one assumes the British government is aware that spares have a way of becoming heirs. King George V and King George VI were both spares. So, maybe the issue is not one of expendable spare, as suggested by Chris Cuomo, but one of expendable young men sent off to do fight on foreign lands. If we think that spare Harry is expendable, aren't we actually saying that all troops everywhere are made up of equally expendable young men?

Apparently, young Harry served with distinction and enjoyed the brief anonymaty in the process and that should have been enough. Now he's back in the world, which persists in the blood sport of comparing him to his dead mother, who also did her job with distinction right up to the moment that her arranged marriage crashed and burned. I don't know where Harry goes from here, and I feel confident to say  that he probably doesn't either, but I'm pretty sure that wherever he goes it will not be in the direction ordained by a public that creates icon just so they can whittle them down to size and then is dissatisfied with what they find. And the tabloids will be there to record every moment.