So I’m reading a British blog I like for its perspective on our weird country, and come across a basketball video with a headline I don’t understand: “clinton vs obama 2008.” It featured a basketball player named Clark Kellogg I’ve never heard of, which isn’t surprising because I’ve never heard of most basketball players; and he’s playing Obama in a game called HORSE I’ve also never heard of; and so I decided I’d better watch it and figure some things out.
Turns out it’s very interesting. Obama starts out losing, so badly that it seems the game will be over before he even scores a basket; and then something visibly happens to him: he starts making impossible shots, and finally wins. It is like Obama/Clinton 2008, but it’s also like getting healthcare reform passed. Something changes in him when he’s the underdog.
But the other fascinating thing is how perceptive he is. You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean – it happens right near the end.
Obama got healthcare reform and a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty agreement with Russia, both in the same week. That, in my opinion, is a really really big F$!#&*@!!!g Deal.
And meanwhile Sarah Palin and John McCain are best friends again, but what’s with the weird black leather motorcycle jacket with all the zippers? It nearly eclipses poor McCain, fumbling with his notes in the background, shifting from foot to foot and pasting on his wind-up smile every so often; Cindy McCain, looking like she really doesn’t want to be there; and of course Todd, the ubiquitous wife-minder. How we’ve missed them all!
But sorry – giving you a link would just be taking it too far.
Think back to January 20, when we thought healthcare reform was dead because Scott Brown got elected.
In retrospect, I think it galvanized the Democrats, especially Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
The President deserved Joe Biden’s encomium, though it was embarrassingly long, but it’s unconscionable that Biden didn’t even mention Pelosi. Looking at her face here though, she didn’t seem to mind. She’ll be 70 on Friday, but the neck Norah Ephron must be drooling over shows no signs of all her heavy lifting.
Okay, you have to take out a few elements here to see why I’m addicted to Body Pump, like the way-too-motivated, too-loud-yelling instructor; and her toned legs and short shorts; and whatever platform she’s standing on in front of some car repair shop; and while you’re at it take out the pine trees and the whole outdoor scene. And no one in my class yells like someone at a tea party.
But this is my favorite track, as they call it (there are back and chest and shoulder and lunge and bicep and tricep and abs tracks, all set to very loud cool music). The clean and press shown here is my favorite move, and for some reason I could listen to this particular music track all day.
It’s difficult to let a day go by without talking about healthcare reform, but never fear: there’s a woman in my class who is such a fanatic about health care she makes Howard Hughes look germy. There’s a little dispenser on the wall of the gym filled with those supposedly anti-bacterial wipes, and before class starts, and even after class starts because it takes her so long, she proceeds to wipe down every single piece of her equipment: the bar, each of the six round weights, her dumbbells and body bar, her mat, and her entire step.
May she and the bottoms of her shoes be forever protected.
Senior policy advisers I spoke with for my book told me how Obama would come into meetings and tell them that instead of thinking about tomorrow’s poll numbers or headlines, they should think about what sort of a country they wanted to live in twenty years down the road, then think about what institutions and policies had to exist ten years from now to put America on the road to that sort of change; then think about what it would have to look like five years, and finally one year from now to get there.
After I read this today I ordered the book: Inside Obama’s Brain, by Sasha Abramsky.
He thinks differently from you and me, not to mention most Washington politicians.
First things first: If Nancy Pelosi read my blog, she would have known that Friday was plain old St. Joseph’s Day, not St. Joseph the Worker’s Day, and she wouldn’t have given some opinion writer on Catholic Online the chance to slander her by writing “She is not being a faithful Catholic; she is being a deceitful dissident.” (And I’m not going to link to this, because the writer herself is being a deceitful dissident repeating the lies about the healthcare reform plan and abortion. But I will link to Maureen Dowd’s column today, where she explains why, if you’re Catholic, you should listen to the nuns, not the bishops.)
But maybe Nancy Pelosi will try again, since today is an even more auspicious day for healthcare reform: it’s Human Rights Day in South Africa, Harmony Day in Australia, and World Down Syndrome Day (or should we call it Sarah Palin Day?).
Or, if she felt she had to go Catholic, she could invoke the blessing of quirky Nicholas of Flüe, who had a vision of a horse eating a lily, which, as visions go, is pretty pedestrian, but Nicholas was immediately left his wife and ten children to become a hermit, subsisting for nineteen years eating only Eucharists (because lilies are poisonous?).
But all of this is diversion, as I can barely stand to find out what’s happening today. I’m taking refuge in numbers again (Intrade’s at 84 this morning), and maybe I’ll just calm myself with Bach, in honor of his 325th birthday.
Why is healthcare reform so important to me? Because I believe Obama is one of the few people capable of dealing with the multiple morasses Bush left him; because I believe this is pivotal for and will revitalize his presidency; because I believe he can both leverage this and deflate the inevitable backlash by attacking financial reform, and, in the process, show the country where Republicans’ true interests are.
Most of all, this is so important to me because I am and have always been a Democrat. And, as Obama said yesterday in his address to the Democratic Congressional Caucus, “I believe in an America where we just don’t look out for ourselves.”
“We are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles,” according to the Texas Board of Education, and their textbooks are going to make sure everyone knows it.
Priests have been seen outside Nancy Pelosi’s office, and are said to be willing to grant dispensations to pro-life House members who vote for healthcare reform.
Now, these are people trying to force the Church into the State. But what are we to make of the Census Bureau sending out a helpful little packet of material for “Census Sermon Weekend”? You could argue it serves the purpose of social justice, Glenn Beck notwithstanding, but isn’t this the State forcing itself into the Church?
And did you know that “In God we trust” is the official motto of our Church/State?
It’s just too agonizing to pay attention to what’s happening with healthcare reform this week – it’s in, it’s out; the public option is back, no it’s not. . . so I’ve taken refuge in numbers.
I discovered Intrade sometime during the bleak years of the Bush administration. It didn’t help me much with John Kerry, but it was quite cheerful about the prospects of taking back the House in 2006.
Intrade is like legalized political gambling – you bet on stuff either happening or not happening, and when whatever happens happens, you make money on the spread between what you bet and 100% (got that?). It’s like a big stock market of opinion.
So if more people think healthcare reform is going to pass, for example, the price goes up. If something happens to make them think it won’t, the price goes down.
I just wish I’d decided to take my refuge yesterday, when the price hit 70. I don’t know what happened overnight, but it’s now at 35!
So let’s just move on to the next contract in Intrade, to the next most important thing in the world: the chances of Chrystal Bowersox winning American Idol. Now I have to confess I’ve never ever seen American Idol, but if I bet right now, and she wins, I win 61 cents for every contract I buy.
I’m going to have to start watching to see what my chances are. It’s got to be better than the other stuff on Fox.
It’s a good thing I stopped writing about the ancient Roman calendar and historical events that supposedly happened on each date but really didn’t, of course, because of the Gregorian calendar change among other things – because otherwise, yesterday, I would have been keeping company with Trent Lott and Mark Sanford, warning everyone about the Ides of March. But tell me: how does the assassination of Julius Caesar equate to healthcare reform? And what are they trying to say, exactly?
I wonder when Sarah Palin is going to join all the apocalyptic rhetoric.
