Steal This Commentary

June 25, 2009

How Mark Sanford and the Gnats Helped Me Find a Hose Nozzle

After watching the Mark Sanford press conference, I tried taking a shower, but it didn’t help.  So I decided to try and pull myself out of my gender funk by going to the Gnats/Red Sox game and cheering at least half the time for the Shame of Our Nation’s Capitol.  It didn’t help much, they still lost 6-4.  But I did discover the best way to enjoy a game at Nationals Park is to get there well before 7:05 and watch a real professional team at work.  And I think I finally found a hose nozzle that will last an entire gardening season. (More)

June 15, 2009

Love Notes for Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm

Would that we could end the UNITE HERE de-merger brawl just by saying, “A pox on both your houses.”  Trouble is, the pox is on the House of Labor, and at a time when we need extreme solidarity in order to complete Phase One of the Obama Revolution.  Remember the freedom to join a union for every worker?  A fair economy for every family?  Health care for every woman, man and child?  What’s this about?  It’s about two 1960s boy radicals who’ve grown older, but not wiser. John Wilhelm and Bruce Raynor can’t stop drawing lines in the sand.  And it’s time we said, “Enough, already.” (More)

June 10, 2009

Run, Newt, Run

First he joined the Limbaugh/Tancredo chorus and called Judge Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist” (redundancy his).  Then he recanted, only to re-accuse her of making racist comments.  This week he elbowed out Sarah Palin and spoke to the GOP’s giant fundraiser in Washington, declaring, “I am not a citizen of the world,” distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Thomas Jefferson.  His boneheaded behavior gives me an inspired thought: we should nurture Newt’s no longer nascent longing to run for President.  He’s the only politician on the national stage who consistently represents the whole of the back-asswards, bankrupt philosophies of the Republican party and he deserves a shot at the top slot.  Likewise, most of us have been long denied a moment with Newt in a voting booth, and we deserve a crack at him. (More)

June 5, 2009

Kirstin Downey/Frances Perkins

Check out my review of Kirstin Downey’s  The Woman Behind the New Deal; The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and his Moral Conscience at www.brooklynrail.org/2009/06/books/tokens-jun-o9

June 3, 2009

Obama in Cairo

In recognition of President Obama’s historic trip to, and speech in Cairo, I offer this little short story, which was just named one of 10 runnersup in the annual Potomac Review fiction competition.  Good deeds can change history, don’t you think?

                                 Behold, the Raisin!

                                    by Ray Abernathy

Cairo.  Everything is moving.  Small, square Russian cars, junkers all, speeding down the broad boulevard next to the Nile, slowing neither for traffic circles nor for pedestrians dodging in and out of lanes.  Young men riding cranky bicycles past crumbling French, Soviet and Italianate buildings, right hands gripping handlebars, left hands  balancing wide wooden trays of precious flatbread.  A bus careens wildly around a tiny girl riding side-saddle astride a donkey, the donkey piled 20 feet high with used tires, the girl furiously beating the slow-moving animal with a stick. Two black armored personnel carriers with no windows, only slits for rifles, lumber off the boulevard into the Garden City district, crawl up narrow streets and come to a stop at the back entrance to the Embassy of Saudi Arabia just as two identical vehicles leave.  A boy of  twelve skips down the walk of an apartment building, crosses the street, pulls himself up by the gun slits on one of the carriers, sticks his tongue out at the soldiers inside and greets them with the refrain from his favorite cartoon show: “Yabba-dabba-do.”   The soldiers, most of them little older than children themselves laugh and reply, “da-da-da-da …. da-da-da-da ….dadadadadadadooo.” (More)

May 26, 2009

Ham Jordan: One Year Since

Hamilton Jordan, who died far too young about a year ago at the age of 63, was a political wunderkind who steered Jimmy Carter first to an up-from-the-bottom victory in the 1970 race for Governor of Georgia and then to a wholly improbable win in the 1976 presidential race.  He became the youngest White House Chief of Staff in history, and was the ballast that kept Carter from capsizing our ship of state for four floundering years. But Jordan almost didn’t get the chance to direct the winning gubernatorial campaign that first pushed the former peanut farmer onto the national scene: Carter thought Jordan too young for the job at 26, caught Kennedy fever and  picked someone as campaign director. (More)

May 17, 2009

The Gnats: Private Profits, Public Funds

How is it the Washington Gnats have the worst record in major league baseball and the second-lowest fan attendance and yet will probably make a big profit again this year?   When I tried to explain it last month, my friend David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, wrote me a well-deserved snippy note saying that if I’d read his book Free Lunch (Portfolio/The Penguin Group 2007) I’d understand how.  So I read the book. And now I do.  And it’s preposterous. (More)

Just Don’t Ask CBO to Score It

“The White House is signaling that it will back health care reform legislation that does not contain stringent cost containment measures.”

Cross posted from www.gooznews.com/node/2915

By Merrill Goozner

 

I, too, join in praising the medical-industrial complex’s pledge to hold down costs. Today’s White House announcement — already carried in every major paper and telegraphed to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with a personal phone call on Saturday — greatly increases the likelihood that some kind of health care reform bill will pass this year.

The groups that will gather around the president today include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (devices), the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Service Employees International Union (which represents more health sector workers than any other labor organization). Their pledge: holding health care spending to a growth rate that’s 1.5 percentage points less than the projected trend, which would save $2 trillion over ten years. (More)

Next Page »


Any newspaper, newsletter, blog or individual may reprint or publish this commentary without compensating me. Just make sure it carries my byline, by Ray Abernathy, and my website address, www.rayabernathy.com.