Category Archives: Random

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The GOP revisits its views on hate

Look away! Look away!

Look away! Look away! (Photo credit: Norm Walsh)

“If you want the voters to like you, you have to like them first,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

This has been an interesting time to be a Democrat watching the Republican Party.  My experience has always been the adage, Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line was true.  Watching the GOP respond to the results.  In one corner, you have Mitt Romney blaming his loss on President Obama buying votes with gifts and in the other you have just about everyone else.

Let’s start there.  Romney told supporters, “What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked…It’s a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they’ll vote for you. … Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with.”

Now, I should admit that being the savvy operative that I am, I held out for a trip to Paris, you’re not going to get my vote with some free birth control!  I need something real for my vote!  And I live in DC!  Any Democratic candidate will tell you that winning DC is a challenge!

Seriously, how delusional do you have to be to think that President Obama won reelection because he gave people stuff for their vote?  How arrogant are you that you think it is impossible for people to have wanted someone else to win?  How desperate are you to not be at fault for your own failure that you grasp like this? (And how ironic is it that someone who claims to be so pro “personal responsibility” is so incapable of taking any?)

Then you have the “let’s not be the stupid party” wing of the GOP.

For a long time now, I am sure this started before Lee Atwater but I feel like he elevated certain aspects of campaigning, the GOP has been all about “wedge” issues.  This party used fear to elect its candidates.  Now, this last campaign seems to have shown that pitting the country against each other may not be the way to win elections and I say “amen to that!” I also know that we are fickle and what works today may not tomorrow so it may be too soon to get all excited.  But the response of many Republican leaders has given me a lot of hope.

FYI: As a Democrat, I want to see Democrats in office but I also would like to see our political debate be about substance.  We will all benefit from a Republican Party that is more interested in appealing to everyone than one that thinks half of us are to be written off.

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With my medical diagnoses, as in life, the third time really is a charm

Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Résonance magnétique

Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Résonance magnétique (Photo credit: www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca)

When Goldilocks tried that first porridge it was too hot, the second was too cold and the first was just right.  The same can almost be said about my experience talking to neurologists over the course of the last few weeks.

When this all started about a month ago I went to my primary care doctor who sent me to neuro doc number 1.  There are two schools of thought in medicine; paternal where the physician dictates a course of action to a patient who dutifully follows it and fraternal where the physician and patient work together.  Given my huge problem with authority figures (wonder where I got that?) the former just pisses me off.  Neuro doc number 1, was absolutely firmly in the paternal camp.  She told me, “You have had two seizures therefore you have epilepsy.  You will get bracelet, you will wear it.  You will fill this prescription and take it.  You will refrain from driving, biking, swimming, taking baths, climbing trees (seriously, what am I? 10?) or ladders.  Avoid stairs and escalators if you can.  Sleep with a mat next to the bed.  Go directly to epilepsy jail.  Do not pass Go!  Do not collect $200.”  Ok, she didn’t say the last part but you get the gist.  Not only did she talk to me like an errant child but she scared the crap out of me.  I am already scared, I don’t need more fear from my health care provider.

Neuro doc #2 didn’t really see me officially but is someone I know.  He didn’t mean to scare me as much as he did, he just wanted to make sure I went ahead with certain tests that I had been blowing off (but the MRI and MRA are scheduled for next week and I have a host of other tests over the next few weeks.  Yes, I am moonlighting as a guinea pig).  He told me that I had to get the MRI & MRA to rule out certain things one of which scared me so much I am not even going to tell you what it was but I am pretty sure I don’t have it.

Meanwhile, I have been reflecting on my symptoms. Communicating is very important to me and it has been a challenge a lot this year.  Sometimes, I cannot find the right word, a problem I never have, other times I can’t speak at all.  I had thought this was laryngitis — and some was — but when I have that I can whisper, when I have this I cannot.  (Good news on that front, can’t talk for whatever reason?  There’s an app for that!  I have Speak it!  on my iPad now.)  Then I stared having seizures and then headaches and now some strange visual thing that only impacts my left eye.  None of this is good or normal.  Time for another doctor.

Enter Dr. Rhanni Herzfeld.  I told her my history and what’s going on now.  I explained, as best I could, my long health history and told her about all the concussions.  She said there just isn’t enough information to properly diagnose me with epilepsy or anything else.  She said she wants to run the battery of tests that are now all scheduled before doing that.  She is really kind and took all sorts of time to talk with me.  She didn’t lecture me on all the things I shouldn’t do or make me feel like a freak of nature.

I may be back at square one but compared to where I was earlier in the week, square one is not a bad place to be.  I have found porridge that is just right.

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What I would like to see from the GOP (and the Democrats, too)

From the New Yorker

I am a Democrat (not a DINO, I have been working for Democratic campaigns since I was eight) but I  honestly like the idea of having two rational parties.  It behooves us all because we have real issues to tackle; the fiscal cliff, an increasingly unstable world, the Mets.

We need our leaders from both parties to start acting like adults and start working with each other.  We all need to stop demogoguing people who have different views from us.

In that spirit, I have some suggestions for the Republican Party:

1.  Stop proclaiming that compromise is horrible; it’s what made our country possible.  And special note to people like Congressman Ron Paul, we cannot fix problems of the past but we can try to deal with what’s going on now (he said recently that we have “already gone over the cliff” and warned against compromise).  Note to Speaker John Boehner: Thank you for showing some willingness to work with the White House.  I think you are reasonable but you cannot expect to please every member of your caucus if you want to get enough Democrats on board.)

2.  Vet your candidates better!  Seriously, listen to Stephen Colbert — anytime any of them want to talk about rape (unless it’s about stopping it) they should follow the advice and stab themselves in the eye with a pencil.   I say this not just because I know women can get pregnant from rape or that I don’t think a baby conceived this way is a “gift from God.”  It’s because these comments shift the focus from things that matter to things that don’t.

3.  Vet your surrogates better!  The ridiculous caricature that is Donald Trump has no place in the public discourse.  And concocting conspiracy theories to demonize the president makes reasonable people think you are anything but and then even if you have cogent points on other issues; we don’t notice because we’re too astounded by your claims that President Obama is a Kenyan born, Marxist, wanna-be-Hitler whose presidency has ushered in the end of days from the bible.

4. Remember that our Constitution was written to protect our rights from the government, not restrict them.  When you continue to oppose same sex marriage and try to demonize the LGBT community you show just how on the wrong side of history you are on.  A friend of mine calls this the civil rights issue of our time.  It is.  I cannot wait until everyone has the same rights and we can stop talking about this and get back to dealing with real issues.

5.  Try to remember, this is 2012, not 1955.

The part of me that writes satire and comedy loved the circus that was Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann et al (if Jon Huntsman had been nominated, and he was more conservative that the rest of them, you would have had a better chance) but the part of me that cares about the country was deeply saddened by the missed opportunity to get people thinking about real solutions to our problems.

I don’t think the Democrats are blameless.  I hate negative political ads and our side ran a ton.  They make everyone jaded about a process that should excite and inspire people.  Politics is also supposed to be “the art of the possible.”

Lest you think I only think Republicans field bad candidates remember, I refer you to– John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner.  Neither side is perfect but that doesn’t mean they are evil either.

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Can someone explain this to me?

English: In January 2009, President of the Uni...

English: In January 2009, President of the United States of America, George W. Bush invited then President-Elect Barack Obama and former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter for a Meeting and Lunch at The White House. Photo taken in the Oval Office at The White House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Color me super confused.  President Obama won reelection this week (yay!) and the GOP is running around claiming things like voter suppression, trickery and basic malfeasance.  This after he won most swing states.  This is coming from the party of George W. Bush.

Let me see if I get this right.  Republicans win and it is democracy while if Democrats win, it’s blasphemy.  They didn’t “win an election” they ushered in the “end of days” from the bible. (Can I point out the wins for same sex marriage? Kind of proves the point that the electorate wants Barack Obama to be in the White House.)

Good lord this is tiring.  And I am not kidding about that bible stuff.  I know people who think that.  And none of them are Donald “I cannot let the birth certificate thing go” Trump.  Nor are they Ben “JFK stole the 1960 election” Stein.  And no, they aren’t even Karl “Megyn Kelly has to school me on my crappy math and remind me that the president won because I just hate that maybe I suck” Rove.  Yeah, Karl, you do kind of suck.  Good luck with the super pac, how’d that work for you this year?

In 2000, I worked on the Gore campaign.  By the time election day rolled around, I had been on it for nearly two years.  In my life I have called my mother crying once.  It was when the initial reports were that Gore had conceded and I called sobbing, How did people vote for him?  

I was, in a word, devastated.  DEVASTATED.  Yet, irony alert her — Karl Rove talked about Teddy Roosevelt‘s comments about getting into the arena.  The thing about getting in to that arena is sometimes you lose.  It sucks.  It sucks a lot.  My one consolation was that this is what happened.  I worked for Gore but the country wanted W.  It was years before I would even entertain the idea that the election was stolen and I am not convinced either way.  I never, not for a moment, questioned George W. Bush’s legitimacy as president.  Even if Al Gore should have fought harder with the recount, at the end of the day, he didn’t.  Oh, while I am at it, I didn’t protest the beginning of the Iraq war, which I think was a terrible thing for our country to do (fight the war, I mean). But I didn’t because I don’t believe a, a decision like that should be dependent on current public opinion (Twilight remains popular, do we want that mentality deciding our military decisions?), b, the president has access to more info than me so if he thinks we need to go to war, we do (think FDR in WWII, that wasn’t popular either) and c, I support the president of the United States.  (No, I am not a DINO.)

Note to GOP:  It’s just an election.  There will be another one in four years — though I wish we could wait until after the holidays to talk about it.  You need to focus on better candidate recruitment, get that we are no longer a “Mad Men” country (we are so much more “Modern Family”), and deal with the fact that pissing off big parts of the electorate (women, Latinos, gays) is bad for winning elections.  You lost because you didn’t think that, not because of random conspiracies or anything else.