Friday Fish Wrap: January 7. 2010

“OUCH! OW! OW! OH S**T! OWWW!”

“Uh, are you alright, ma’am?”

“Can you get my right ski off? I think that’ll help.”

Engaging in any outdoor sport comes with inherent risks. Skiing is sort of high up there on the list of ‘Ouch’ causing sports as I found out yesterday. Despite the nearly four decades of sliding down mountains in the West, I’ve never really taken a fall that didn’t allow me to ‘ski it off’. And, true to almost every other skier I’ve known, it happened after the great ‘run’, near the bottom on the ‘run out’ approaching the lift. Giddy with sunny blue bird success, going fast and getting goofy.

Oh, and a binding that didn’t release.

But I got a nice ride down on the back of a snowmobile, and spent the next hour with the good looking - and highly professional I might add - ski patrollers of the Mt. Rose ski area. I want to commend them for a rapid response, and delivery of caring, thorough and highly competent services. I was able to swap emergency management/critical incident ‘war stories’ with the patroller that kept me company and filled out the paperwork, while I held a plastic bag of snow packed around my right knee and waited for Shelly to ski back over to the Rose side and get my gear and the car over to the Slide side.

After x-rays at the ER, back down in Reno, it looks like nothing more than a nasty MCL sprain. At least Grade 1, possibly 2. I went home with a Vicoden script and a pair of crutches. Let’s say that I am ‘compliant’ for a week, then I ‘should’ be able to go right back out and hopefully not make the same mistake again.

One of the great benefits of having great friends, is that they bring you dinner and then stay and watch a funny movie. Chicken soup makes everything better. Thanks so much Shelley and Suggi, this a the best sort of ‘payback’ for the ‘death curve’ bicycle incident this summer.

We watched a really good movie on Netflix/BluRay: “City Island”, and indie film with Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies. I had no idea that there was an island comprising a part of the Bronx, resembling a small New England town. Anyhow, it’s a warm, funny story about the Rizzo family. None of the Rizzo’s can manage to tell the truth, and are caught in an almost Shakespearian comedy of errors and identities in their attempts to hide their past, real ambitions, obsessions and foibles. Alan Arkin makes a sweet appearance as an acting instructor.

This is one of those warmly human stories that we can all relate to - reconciling what we think our families expect of us versus what we might want instead. I love movies like this - no car chases, no violence, no brutality and victimization. Humanity with a few laughs.

Humanity with a few laughs isn’t exactly what we’re getting - and I certainly didn’t expect it - with the new Congress. Eric Cantor, R-VA and John Boehner, R-OH are poster children for Panglossianism - where otherwise intelligent people can completely deceive themselves, in this case to pursue asinine and cynical party objectives.

Cantor would have us believe that the Congressional Budget Office is simply wrong, wrong, wrong in it’s analysis of how much the Affordable Health Care Act - or ‘Job-Killing Health Care Law Act’ for those who use language to obfuscate and confuse - would actually save the country. Deficit hawk and House Majority Leader, Cantor likes CBO analysis only when it serves his purposes. Then they’ve managed to go on to blithely ignore the actual costs of such a mis-guided repeal attempt and how much it would add to the deficit they’ve sworn to lower.

Huh? As the New Haven (Connecticut) Advocate says:

“Republicans want to help business grow in order to create jobs.

To help business grow, it wants to repeal the health reform act.

But repealing the health reform act actually hurts business. Insurance companies will be making bank.”

Sheesh. These people continually remind me of the saying attributed to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Actually the repeal of healthcare would be a huge job killer, and you can read more about it on The Center for American Progress website.

You can be sure over the next two years that there is no principle the Republican won’t turn upside down,  no promise they won’t break and no worries that they will happily throw the interests of the American worker under the Wall Street and RepubliCorp bus.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and some of the new members of Congress are going to sleep on the couch in their offices. Now isn’t that just precious. So, pretending that Congress isn’t their real job, not getting a decent nights sleep in order to be effective at ‘work’, is their way of making a childish ‘statement’ about their supposed fiscal conservatism. It reminds me of “I’ll show her, I’ll go out in the living room and sleep on the sofa.”

There’s always still a chance some of these nitwits could grow up and act like adults.

This continued farce that the deficit is the most compelling issue confronting America now is ludicrous, as Robert Kuttner, of The American Prospect and the Economic Policy Institute points out in the following video:

Under what I might headline ‘Arm yourself with facts rather than fear’, I found some great resource materials on the following website - Our Fiscal Security. You can check in here to get facts, rather than hyperbole and propoganda on taxes, deficits and deficit reduction, social security and more.

Here’s a handy-dandy tutorial you can print out, read, absorb and pass along - Understanding the National Deficit and Debt:

Understanding the National Deficit and Debt  

Well, I’ve sure had enough of this freezing fog. It’s starting to remind me of Salt Lake City aound here. the damn stuff doesn’t burn off until around noon, making it tough to ‘greet’ the day with a chirpy demeanor.

I’m gonna go put the old battered knee up for a while and watch some trash tee-vee - probably cooking shows. I don’t do well with this sort of thing - always seeing the dust and debris on the floor that really ‘should’ be dusted and vacuumed. I was hobbling around this morning folding and stowing until Mr. Maven caught me and told me to knock it off.

I’ll try to file some posts under Health regarding ways to recover from such an injury, including ways I’ve found to cope with pain without meds - although medicine is just fine, but there are ways of reducing the need for them.

Take care, be a bit more cautious than moi. Stay warm.

I’ll let myself out. Well, not … you’ll have to open the door.

-maven

Charlie Rose show expands discussion on deficit commission to include Progressives

I just got the following email from FAIR:

Charlie Rose Opens Up the Deficit Debate

11/19/10

Tonight’s broadcast of the Charlie Rose Show will feature a discussion of the budget deficit with progressive economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

As FAIR’s recent action alert noted (11/16/10), the Rose show’s discussion of the White House deficit commission has been dominated by right-leaning guests who were supportive of the plan put forward by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. FAIR pointed out that experts including Baker have argued that the co-chairs’ report is fundamentally flawed. And Schakowsky, who is a member of the deficit commission, has put forth her own progressive plan for deficit reduction.

FAIR thanks those who wrote to the Charlie Rose Show and encouraged them to expand their guest list. And the Charlie Rose show should be commended for taking these criticisms seriously.

The fact that the program is broadening its discussion is a testament to the power of media activism.

Should we be listening to the deficit hawks?

It’s the drum beat from all the so-called ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Libertarians’ out there grabbing a microphone to sway anxious voters into supporting them based on fear.

“Pay down the deficit!” “Balance the budget!”

“Our grandchildren will be paying off our debts!”

It sounds good, but it’s simply false election cycle sloganeering.

From all I’ve been reading lately, from notable, prize winning economists, the answer is a resounding “No!”  Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, both of whom I read almost daily, are saying we need a huge dose of fiscal realism right now, or we risk a return to the same sort of unhappy worsening of a grave situation that America experienced in 1937 - as scare tactics by deficit hawks then, pushed FDR into trying to balance the budget. The net result was to prolong the agony of the Great Depression.

What are deficits, vis a vis the national economy?

Here’s what I found in Wikipedia:

Following John Maynard Keynes, many economists recommend deficit spending to moderate or end a recession, especially a severe one. When the economy has high unemployment, an increase in government purchases creates a market for business output, creating income and encouraging increases in consumer spending, which creates further increases in the demand for business output. (This is the multiplier effect). This raises the real gross domestic product (GDP) and the employment of labour, and if all else is constant, lowers the unemployment rate. (The connection between demand for GDP and unemployment is called Okun’s Law.) Cutting personal taxes and/or raising transfer payments can have similar expansionary effects, though which method has a better stimulative economic effect is a matter of debate.

The increased size of the market

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Monday Musings: December 28, 2009

The kids left for home in the Bay Area early this morning, and we’ve spent the day picking up, putting away and trying to use up leftovers from parties and dinners. I really do feel like after several days of non-stop eating,  I could easily never eat again. Maybe just tea and the occasional bowl of cereal. Ugh. But we really had a wonderful time together.

I emailed foster dog Mom, Joy, about ‘Slick’. It’s a no go. I was wiping tears away while writing the email. But here’s the deal, I’m sad because he’s so damn perfect … the perfect dog for me/us … except that he doesn’t cotton to cats and isn’t likely to change.

Joy said that he’d be relentless with Ladybird and we just can’t do that to her. We both adore that furry neck warmer.

That said, I’m mounting a campaign to get Slick adopted by the right person/s who don’t have a cat. I will post additional information - Joy was incredibly forthcoming with me about him - so that hopefully the word gets out. This very special guy deserves a wonderful home for the new year.

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Don't pee on my shoes and tell me it's raining: No new taxes?

For once the Reno Gazette-Journal got it right in todays’ op-ed page piece “Don’t believe the anti-tax talk”. The money has to come from somewhere, taxes or fees or something. Like my late boss and advertising man, Chris Demaris, used to say, “you can’t sell from an empty cart.”

According to the Gazette-Journal: ” No one should accept the governor’s rhetoric about not raising taxes on Nevadans, however. There may be no increase in sales or property taxes in Gibbons’ budget; there may be no new business taxes either. But Nevadans will be taxed.”

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