Sunday, June 21, 2009

Sunday Evening

Statistician-analyst Nate Silver looks at the polls regarding health care and concludes the following...

The bottom line is that the health care debate is not really being played out in the court of public opinion. If it were, Congress would pass a robust plan with a public option that was funded by raising taxes on cigarettes, booze, and people making over $250,000, and we'd live happily ever after (or not). Rather, this is a behind-the-scenes fight at the committee level, where certain senators who have ample financial incentives to please the insurance industry have a disproportionate amount of control over the process.

I'm generally not one to carp about special interest money — seeing politics through that lens is often an overly reductive formulation that serves as a catch-all excuse any time Congress does something you don't like. But on something like the public option, which has broad public support and which would probably reduce — not increase — the long-run bill to the taxpayers, it is just about the only way to explain what's going on in Washington.

I'm quoting this because I agree with it. I don't always agree with everything I quote but I agree with this.

• Posted at 7:30 PM · LINK

Go Listen!

Fans of Spinal Tap will want to scurry to this BBC Radio link and hear this interview with the band and preview of their new CD. [Caution: May start playing immediately.]

• Posted at 12:10 PM · LINK

Health Careless

According to this new poll in The New York Times, 72% of Americans favor the idea of a "public option" for health care. The question even wins (50% to 39%) among Republicans. A majority is even willing to pay some unspecified amount of higher taxes to ensure that all Americans have health care.

Of special interest is that "85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt, [while] 77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care." I take all this to mean that most of us are rather happy with our doctors...and rather unhappy that certain friends and relatives don't have what we have.

So what we have here is a situation where a substantial majority of Americans believe something is important...and a lot of senators and congresspeople are resisting because they're in bed with lobbyists and the medical industry. It would be nice if the public dialogue on all this were framed a bit more in those terms.

• Posted at 10:33 AM · LINK

Daddy's Day

Yeah, that's him and me. I believe this is just before I hosted my first convention panel.

Noticing what today is, it occurs to me that while I often mention my mother here, I don't write a lot about my father. I guess that's because she's still (happily) here and he (unhappily) passed away in 1991.

A lot of people say "My father is/was the nicest man in the world" but mine really was. In all the years we were together, he lost his temper at me about six times...and in two of those instances, he later realized he was in the wrong and he came to me to apologize. I'd go to friends' homes to play and I'd literally hear more yelling between parents and children in one afternoon than I endured in my entire childhood. My friends' fathers were mostly the kind who would never, ever humble themselves to apologize to their kids. They thought it was a sign of weakness. In Bernie Evanier, it meant nothing but strength.

We hear a lot about dysfunctional families...so much so that I sometimes feel like I came from one of the last functional ones. There was almost no drinking. There was absolutely no hitting. There was, as I said, minimal shouting. At times, my father fretted he wasn't doing his job as a parent because I never got in trouble: Nothing to scold me about, no reason to administer spankings to try and put me on the right path. I was already there...in large part because of the example he set. He was also very, very encouraging without ever trying to force me into any career of his choosing.

My father didn't like at all what he had to do for a living, which was to work for the Internal Revenue. Didn't like it one bit. Because of that, he encouraged me to find and pursue something I wanted to do — anything so long as I could get up each morning and look forward to my job. There are times when I don't like what I have to write or who I'm writing it for...but I've only had this one profession and I've never yearned to do anything else. I have my father to thank for that.

He was a very compassionate man. Like most Depression-era kids, he was enormously frugal with regard to his own needs but generous to others. His forced occupation didn't yield much of a paycheck but there was nothing my mother or I ever required or ever really wanted that we didn't get. When in my late teen years I started making decent bucks, I tried to use some of them to give my folks a little luxury. This usually made both uncomfortable at first but especially my father. "I don't want you spending your money on me" was a phrase I heard constantly. A couple times, I had to fib to him, understating what something cost to get him to accept it or permit him to enjoy it.

He didn't hate very many or very much. Richard Nixon is the only subject that comes to mind, and some of that was personal because as an Internal Revenue officer, my father saw firsthand what the White House was doing while Nixon was in it. They wanted, my father said, to consciously and deliberately nail the poorer taxpayers for every cent possible while letting rich people — especially rich people who'd donated to the Nixon campaign — get away without paying what the law expected. Picking on the little, helpless guy...that was the kind of thing that got my father mad. If you didn't do that, he liked you. Which meant he liked most people.

He loved the Dodgers and the Lakers and was half-convinced that they couldn't win a televised game without him yelling at the screen. He loved my mother's cooking (and everything else she did) and the family cat and a great joke and...well, darn near everything except his job, Nixon and the kinds of things that any decent person abhors like prejudice and cruelty. He loved his friends, his family and all parts of his life that did not involve tax collection.

I lost him in '91 with only the normal regrets. After a parent passes, you often hear the child say, "Oh, if only we'd done this" or "If only we'd talked about that." I had none of those "if only"s. We got along great. There were no lingering, unresolved issues. He left this world, content that I could and would see that my mother always had everything she required. In a sense, I think he willed himself to go then...not that he didn't love life and want to stick around. Trouble was, if he'd left that hospital, he would have needed nurses and constant care and someone to help him dress. Perhaps worst of all, he wouldn't have been able to drive, which was something he loved — chauffeuring friends and family around. It wasn't that he liked cars. He just liked doing things for people.

I was so sorry to see him go but so glad he didn't have to live his last years like that. A close neighbor had and that was my father's worst nightmare: To be a crippling burden to his loved ones. Since I was an only child, he only left a couple of loved ones — essentially just my mother and me — but we miss him...and not just on Father's Day. We miss him every day. Father's Day is just a good excuse to say it in front of everyone and it feels so good to write this that I don't know why I had to wait for a holiday to do it.

• Posted at 3:15 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Oh, goodie! Another of those JibJab videos where the concepts, animation and production values are terrific and the words in the song parody don't rhyme very well...

• Posted at 1:11 AM · LINK