CatherineRhodes.com

The glass ceiling is a myth

Anyone who doubts the success of feminism hasn’t been paying attention to California politics. Currently, the two senators are women (Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein), my Congressperson in the 33rd District is a woman: Diane Watson, and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, resides in my home state.

It’s an election year, and the challenger for governor is Meg Whitman, the nominee to fill Watson’s seat when she retires is Karen Bass, and there’s Janice Hahn running for Leutenant Govenor. Holly Mitchell wants to replace the speaker in the state Assembly. In the 36th district, it’s Jane Harman against Marcy Winograd.

On and on,  you get the picture. It’s such a girl’s club in California politics these days, makes you wonder what happened to the boys.

My trophy wife upholds family values

Conservative radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, 59, is taking a fourth stab at marriage with a weekend wedding to Kathryn Rogers, 33, an events coordinator 26 years his junior… and will presumably continue to crusade against gay marriage in defense of the sanctity of traditional marriage without even sensing the irony

This brilliant piece of writing from Joe Klein over at Time.com.

Sean Hannity called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” but it was actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster.

The Bush Administration’s petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling. Indeed, the MMS soon emerged as a caricature of bureaucratic lassitude and corruption. A 2008 report found that the agency’s regulators were taking gifts from, and having sex with the employees of, the companies they were supposed to be monitoring.

Another report, about MMS activities from 2005 to 2007, will show, among many other things, that MMS staffers allowed oil companies to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil, which were then committed to ink by stenographic MMS regulators. Other studies found that the MMS was remarkably, perhaps criminally, lax in collecting the royalties due the government for the right to extract oil from public lands, nor was it fulfilling its rig-inspection responsibilities. The encyclopedic catalog of the agency’s sleaziness boggles the mind.

They have 131,427 followers

Faced with a travesty of these proportions, the best volley back is always a satirical Twitter page. Behold, the power of 140 characters. Sample posts from @BPGlobal_PR:

Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.

Words can not express how sorry we are. So we are going to stop apologizing and just give our investors 10 billion dollars. 

At least these people didn't crash the economy

The problem with immigration is that there are factions for it and factions against it within each party. The Dems support diversity and civil rights so they are accepting of Latino immigrants, but they also support unions and know cheap labor undercuts bargaining power. The Repubs have a similar conflict. The Tea Party types want to preserve the dominant culture and feel threatened by the onslaught of Spanish-speakers. Then there’s the business wing of the party that knows low-wage workers add to the bottom line.

“This Week” had a spirited debate during the Roundtable discussion, in which Bill Maher smugly insinuated the Arizona law is motivated by racism. George Will asked which provisions of the federal immigration law Maher actually agreed with, and Maher said, “I’ll take a pass.” Which is one thing I hate — when people speak passionately against a problem without having any possible solutions. If you have a better way, go ahead and advocate as strongly as possible. But if you don’t, shut up.

The left talks about the need for “comprehensive immigration reform,” but what exactly does that mean? No one has specifics. The right talks about “securing the borders” — as if that’s even possible.

I loved a snippet from Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday:

In New York, legal and illegal immigrants keep the city running. They work hard jobs with brutal hours, rip off no one on Wall Street, and do not crash the economy. They are generally considered among the good guys.

Let’s remember who the real criminals are, the pigs in wingtips at AIG recklessly betting your retirement savings like so many casino chips.

There’s a buzz surrounding Ms Elizabeth Warren as a possible Supreme Court nominee, to which I emphatically say, NO! We need the smartest woman in the country managing the communal bankbook.

Meanwhile, over in the “real America” Caribou Barbie just won’t shut up. She uses her folksy charm as a way to hide the fact that she knows NOTHING. Here’s what she said to Hannity regarding nukes in Iran.

No administration in America’s history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out  President Obama is supporting today. It’s kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I’m not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.’

Striking the perfect note, POTUS responded in the media with a smash to the net that was witty yet classy. Here is President Obama in an interview with ABC News:

The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues …  if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.

This was the same week that POTUS signed a nuclear ban with Russia. Meanwhile, back in wingnut land, Ms. Palin has found her soulmate.  From the Wall Street Journal, on meeting Rep. Michele Bachmann, part of the lunatic fringe from Minnesota.

I knew that we’d be buddies when I met her when she said, ‘Drill here, drill now.’ And then I replied, ‘Drill, baby, drill’ and then we both said, ‘You betcha!’

Ray Kroc had to be convinced by the marketing dept that people would go for this

In this section of Omnivore’s Dilemma, author Michael Pollan discusses the supersize-ing and big gulp-ing of the American diet, which is one reason why 35 percent of the people in this country are obese.

One might think that people would stop eating and drinking these gargantuan portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn’t work that way. Researchers have found that people presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. Human appetite, it turns  out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evoluntionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.

Obesity researchers call this the “thrifty gene.” And while the gene represents a useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability, it’s a disaster in an environment of fast-food abundance, when the opportunity to feast presents itself 24/7.

Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.

Tough enough to take on Wall Street?

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard economics professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, is a leading advocate for accountability and transparency. As such, she advocates creation of new consumer financial protection agency, which of course is getting resistance from the Republicans. Here’s what she said:

My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.

Here’s Ms. Warren’s op-ed from Politico entitled “Banking on Hypocrisy.”

Go Liz!

I love high fructose corn syrup!

Reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is a disturbing account of the prevalence of corn in the food supply. Corn is now a “welfare queen” because it is heavily subsidized by the government. Farmers have financial incentive to grow corn, which gets fed to cattle whose stomachs are designed for grass. When the bovines get sick because they cannot tolerate their corn diet, they are shot full of antibiotics. This follows being doped up with hormones to make them bulk up faster or produce more milk. The problem is complex, but what author Michael Pollan concludes is that a McDonald’s hamburger is only cheap because the true cost of growing that pound of beef is not accounted for.

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost — to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne ilnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution) …. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does.

1854 Pres. Pierce vetoes a national health bill saying it would be unconstitutional to regard health as anything but a private matter.

1912 Teddy Roosevelt campaigns on a platform calling for a single national health service. He is defeated.

The Brits have had universal healthcare since the 1930s

1939 A proposal by Pres. Franklin Roosevelt for national health insurance fails as Southern Democrats align with Republicans.

1948 Pres. Truman’s plan for government-run healthcare fails after the AMA criticizes it and Republicans compare it to communism.

1954 Pres. Eisenhower proposes a $25M plan to provide healthcare to uninsured Americans. Congress rejects it.

1971 Sen. Edward Kennedy offers his national health insurance plan calling for a single payer.

1974 Pres. Nixon’s proposal for universal coverage dies in Congress.

1979 Pres. Carter proposes expansion of health insurance for the poor and a “public option.” It dies in Congress.

1993 Pres. Clinton proposes healthcare overhaul. It dies in Congress.

2009 President Obama proposes universal healthcare, setting off more than a year of debate, with Republicans universally resistant.

March 21, 2010 Yes we can!

I’ve always admired Kucinich for his stand on universal coverage, but now he realizes it’s “crunch time” for Obama’s healthcare reform plan and the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good. In other words, he’s become a pragmatist.  God, let’s get the votes and get ‘er done.

Yes, that's really his wife