Perfect… just the way they are.
Weekend Reading – Why Ask Why
Sunday Paper – Cascading Lines
Midweek Staff Meeting – Reviewing the Reviewer
Jeb Bush Really Trying to Screw Marco Rubio
It feels almost personal.
While he’s not come out of the gates too elegantly, Jeb came out of the gates not to subtly trying to hamstring Rubio.
Jeb came out an immediately seized the one issue Rubio was hoping would set him apart (and also mitigate, for the general election, his radical Tea Party-ism), immigration, and ran with all across the Sunday shows and dominated national coverage in a way that Rubio has failed to do (beyond reaching those Beltway pundits who are only read by other Beltway pundits).
And, he’s tied up all the big Florida fundraisers. This will hamper even Rubio’s ability to raise money for his Senate account, because he can transfer those federal dollars over to a presidential bid, so bundlers won’t want to fill that account either, but where it might really hurt is in those pseudo-outside groups (SuperPACs, 501C4s, etc), who won’t get some of those $25k-250k checks to fund his travel around the country, ostensibly doing something else, but really campaigning, and also to plain old promote his name and attack his enemies.
And all this before Jeb even gets into the game.
I still don’t think Jeb’ll get the nod. I think his time has passed. But he’ll have some of the best knife fighters in the game on his side and they’ll all be looking to take out a piece of Rubio. I suspect that, to some extent, Jeb just plain doesn’t like Rubio rising so high, so fast and stealing his thunder and that he’ll pull a Dick Gephardt (who basically sacrificed his own campaign in 2004 to take down Howard Dean) and just try to see to it that Rubio doesn’t get it (which could take the form of beating up on Rubio for President campaign or just making it too hard for Rubio, so that he stays in the Senate and misses his best/only chance to run).
Weekend Reading – What Worth A Book?
Healthcare Spending
I want to scream and break the tv or tear up the newspaper every time I hear some right wing pundit or simpering politician (I’m looking at you, Paul Ryan) talk about the unaffordability of government healthcare (stuff like Medicare and Medicaid).
You see, when the government cuts back on healthcare spending, that money isn’t saved. It’s still spent on healthcare.
Let me try to explain this. Let’s say I make $500 a month and my wife makes $2000 a month. So we make, as a household, $2500 a month. We have a doctor’s bill this month of $200. I can pay it. She can pay it. We can split it up. It doesn’t matter. It has to be paid.
That’s healthcare. Unless we are prepared to let folks die… we, as a nation, are spending on healthcare. The $2500 is the money available, as it were. My $500 is the government’s income and my wife’s $2000 is the everyone else’s income. One way or another, that money is coming out of our national income.
But here’s the kicker.
I can negotiate with the doctor to pay 10% less. My wife cannot do that, because she doesn’t have the negotiating gene (not true in real life). So if I ask my wife to pay all or part, the total bill will be higher, because I can get the same healthcare for less money.
The government, by virtue of being a far larger player than any individual person, can negotiate with doctors, hospitals, and drug companies over what it will pay for things. As an individuals, we really can’t. So when that healthcare spending is pushed onto us as individuals, it is a guarantee that more money is spent on healthcare and less on everything else. These stupid plans put forward by mathematically challenged children like Paul Ryan will not save the nation any money. Like that household in the example, I can make my wife pay for more of the bill, but it’s all coming out of our household income, so the solution is not to argue over which half of the household pays the bill, but rather to look at how the household as a whole can save money. Paul Ryan and his crew want to push the bill onto us, saying, see, it will save money. Which is just stupid. It just means someone else pays. That someone is us. And we’ll pay more. Ugh.
Essay On Man And Other Poems (New Year’s Resolution, Book Seven)
While I had surely read some snippets of Pope before, this was my first real dive into his writings. The shorter pieces, the lyric poems, were good. Good enough to say that, had Pope written nothing or little else, he would still be remembered as a worthwhile minor poet of his age. Rather like Ralph Waldo Emerson. But like Ralph Waldo Emerson (who was a serviceable poet, but no great), he is better known for his essays.
But Pope’s essays tend to be a little different from the New England mandarin’s.
This really struck me while reading the poem, Essay on Criticism: Alexander Pope is writing a critical essay entirely in verse form. In heroic couplets, to be specific (which are, and I had to look this up, rhymed couplets written in iambic pentameter).
Imagine opening a copy of The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Weekly, or The American Conservative and reading an article on a serious subject, like drone war, that written entirely in rhymed verse form. And written seriously, not as a meta-commentary on something or as a joke (which is why I left out The National Review, because, since Buckley’s death, that rag is more home to a particular brand of youthful idiocy, like Jonah Goldberg’s unreasoned idiocies, than anything serious). Go back further and what if Podhoretz’s editorials for Commentary had all been rhymed sestets or Petrarchan sonnets?
Beggars the mind.
Oh, and the Essay on Criticism includes the line:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Pretty cool, huh?
He gets into a great many localized, time specific references – The Rape of Lock is entirely about a particular scandal du jour – and my edition doesn’t really give the reader an heads up on this stuff.
Though not a long collection, Pope is slow read. To appreciate his rhymes and also the lines of his arguments is not a fast process. I had thought to finish it in well under a week but actually struggled to finish it by today.
Conclusion? I would read Pope again.
Poor Marco Rubio
He just can’t catch a break. After a solid twenty-four hours about his unique, humiliating brand of physical comedy (desperate dives for the water bottle, plus a nationally broadcast flop sweat), the story has switched to, ‘in our frenzy to write about Waterbottlegate, we neglected to point out how awful the actual speech was.’
When this happened to Bobby ‘Kenneth the Page’ Jindal, it got his rising name wiped off the shortlist when Mitt was looking for veep.
A smart consultant might have told him not to deliver the rebuttal, but apparently, Rubio either doesn’t have such consultants right now or he’s not listening to them.
the coffee philosopher 