Promote the General Welfare – Pass Universal Health Care

Denny Crane!

It’s quite telling that Rush Limbaugh would compare getting quality health care to the relative size of one’s housing.  It’s just another commodity to conservatives, just another business.  If you’re rich, then you get health care, if you’re poor, then you just do us all a favor and slink away and die.

But see, Rush, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen.  Viruses and bacteria don’t care how big your mansion is.  Eventually, sometime, you have to go out among the public, and it benefits you in the short-term and the long-term if that public isn’t sick and dying and spreading their germs and infections to the people you love.

The very first sentence of the document that defines this country, our Founders wrote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I’m educated enough to know that the Founders’ “Welfare” does not equal the modern notion of “welfare”, as in “government assistance payments for food or rent”.  But it does mean “health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being.”  And we willingly accept government regulation and support of myriad organizations that promote the “health, happiness, or prosperity” of the general public, from student loans to public fire departments to meat inspections to small business assistance.  If “general Welfare” of a nation doesn’t include its collective health, then the term is meaningless.

Rush is the cheerleader for the “I gots mine, you gets yours” amorality that infects the modern conservative movement he leads.  It’s a narcissistic myopia that allows them to believe that “no man is an island” is a falsehood, that somehow a taxpayer-funded program to protect the public health is a case of Marxist distribution of wealth, and that funding basic health care for less-fortunate Americans is tantamount to cutting checks to promote laziness.

2010 College Football Championship Playoff was an event to remember! (v1.1)

Wow!  Who would have thought back in late November that we’d see such a dramatic and sudden change in college football! For so long fans of the game, especially Boise State fans like myself, have held the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in contempt for its ridiculous polls-and-computers method for crowning a college football champion.  It was so maddening when every other college sport, including 1-AA, Div II, and Div III football, holds playoffs to determine on the field or court or diamond who is the champion.  We all felt so helpless against a cabal of wealthy interests determined to keep the status quo of riches for the established football factories and crumbs for the “mid majors”.  We knew that almost everyone we knew wanted a playoff and everybody playing the game wanted a playoff, but felt like the BCS was a “Berlin Wall” separating fans and players from fairness, an evil edifice that would never come down in our lifetimes.

So we were all stunned when President Obama declared that he was going to have the Justice Department file an emergency injunction to halt the entire college football bowl season until an anti-trust investigation was completed, unless the university presidents and conferences in Division 1-A football agreed to his demands.  “We’re not going to go through another season where an undefeated 2008 Utah, 2007 Hawaii, or 2006 Boise State has no chance to play for a title,” Mr. Obama sneered angrily.  “Any system that tells us in 2008 that a Texas team that beat Oklahoma is ranked lower than them, or in 2009 has a 2-loss PAC-10 champ in a BCS bowl while the undefeated Boise team that humiliated them goes wanting is fundamentally unfair and unAmerican.  This is a corrupt system designed to maintain the superiority of six football conferences over the other five, and if there’s one thing we have learned in American history is that ’separate but equal’ is never equal.”  (Oh, how I have wished Mr. Obama could find similar backbone to stand up so forcefully for universal health care coverage, but even that’s not as popular as killing the BCS was!)

Mr. Obama’s plan was quite simple.  First, the existing contracts between all the bowls and all the conferences were declared null and void under anti-trust rules.  Second, a 16-team playoff was instituted with the winners from all 11 conferences gaining an automatic berth, plus five more “at-large” selections consisting of the next five highest-ranked teams in the BCS formula.  Third, to appease the bowls, only first and second round games were held on higher-seeded teams’ home field, while the semi-finals and championship were played in two of the current “BCS bowls” (Championship and Rose Bowl, plus the Cotton Bowl.) Continue Reading…

Back to the Blog! And Very Very Important Subjects!

Howdy, Radicals!  It’s been a long time since I posted here.  I took the end of my show pretty hard and every time I thought about posting here again it just made me sad.  Thank you so much for all the emails and comments expressing your love for the show and missing it.  I miss it, too.

Many people have asked if I am returning to the air anytime soon.  Probably not.

Here’s the deal: Not only was I the host of the show, but I also had to produce it, engineer it, record it, write it, sell it, promote it… basically aside from Stevie doing a fantastic job with answering phones and running the live engineering, everything about The Russ Belville Show was done by me.  I won the talk radio contest and they put me on XM with no budget, no staff, no advertising, and no promotions.  In fact, they were going to dump me six months into the deal when I rose a stink about being promised “a year-long contract” for winning the contest.  As it turned out, being on for twenty months was 14 months longer than they expected and 8 months longer than I expected.  Every show I put on the air actually ended up costing me $67 by the time you work through all the income vs. expenses.

(You want an idea why progressive talk radio is in the shitter?  Do you think it is the talent of the hosts, or… y’all discuss it; any speculation from me would be seen as ’sour grapes’.)

Now, if someone from a progressive talk radio network called up and said, “Hey, we found your old shows and thought you’d be a hit.  We’ve got a studio for you, a producer, and an engineer.  We’ll begin a big ad campaign and we can start you on five of our network’s stations right off the bat.  Interested?”, I’d be in the air faster than freeway chase in LA.  But doing it all myself?  No, never again.

So, what after three months has inspired me to return to the Radical Writ?  Is it Obama backing away from nearly every campaign pledge?  Is it the not closing Gitmo, not prosecuting torture, bringing in the insurance industry to ruin health care talks, giving money hand over fist to Wall Street thieves, snickering at the marijuana legalization question, not ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and tacitly endorsing every right-wing fraidy-cat terrists-gonna-kill-us FOX talking point?

Yeah, sure.  But first, I want to talk about something REALLY important: the embarrassment that was the selection of Kris Allen as the next American Idol.

Michael Glitz writes at HuffPo:

But for a theory about how Kris pulled an upset over the wildly popular Adam Lambert, the Christian vote is a pretty good one. It’s certainly one factor. (So is talent, Tiger Beat ready looks and viewers who get tired of being told someone is a lock when they haven’t even voted yet.) In fact, look at seasons past and where there’s a clear Christian vs secular showdown, the Christians have been winning handily. Take that, Charles Darwin! Sometimes the survival of the fittest goes to the person with the best telephone prayer chain. Check it out. (And please keep in mind I’m not talking about their personal faith, just our perception of it from what we told on the show at the time they were competing. Someone I describe as worldly might be exceptionally devout while the contestant prominently sporting a cross might be at the juke joint on Saturday and never even make it to church on Sunday.)

Season One featured wholesome Kelly Clarkson vs the worldly, media savvy Justin Guarini. Clarkson won big time and set the standard for Idols to come.

Season Two: Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard both held forth on their faith. Ruben had an edge perhaps from the tight-knit black churches that came out strong for him. But this was a Christian vs Christian finale so you can’t draw any conclusions from this one.

He continues on through the current season, pointing out how the contestant with the most “God cred” wins the Finals.  (However, for Season 2, while both Ruben and Clay had the God card, don’t forget that Clay was “teh gay” for those Christian viewers.)

But I think the true theory is the Southern AT&T Text Messaging theory, only with the Christian vote acting as tiebreaker. In Idol voting, you’re allowed to call or text in ten votes per line. However, calls get you busy signals and you have to keep redialing to get just two votes, much less ten.

Text messaging, though, gets no busy signal and you can send in ten of them in the time it would take to get through one Idol phone call. Now, understand that anyone can call, but only AT&T subscribers can text, and AT&T’s subscriber base is largest in the South.

So when watching Idol Season 9, ask yourself, “Who would a 13-year-old girl in Mobile vote for?”

Evidence?

Allen (Arkansas) vs. Lambert (California)
7) Cook (Missouri) vs. Archuleta (Utah)
6) Sparks (Arizona) vs. Lewis (Washington) (Religion wins tiebreaker)
5) Hicks (Alabama) vs. McPhee (California)
4) Underwood (Oklahoma) vs. Bice (Alabama) (Religion breaks tie)
3) Fantasia (North Carolina) vs. DeGarmo (Georgia) (Religion breaks tie)
2) Studdard (Alabama) vs. Aiken (North Carolina) (”Not gay” breaks tie)
1) Clarkson (Texas) vs. Guarini (Pennsylvania)

What are the chances you’d get three finalists from Alabama and only two from California? Or that ten of sixteen finalists would be from former Confederate States and zero from the Northeast?

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow doesn’t think much of medical marijuana

Rachel Maddow (one of my faves) has a complaint, wondering how could 9 out of 10 marijuana initiatives succeed at the ballot box, while 4 out of 4 anti-gay initiatives succeeded. (Updated with hyperlinks and bumped. — “R”R)

To be fair, I understand Rachel’s point about the anti-gay ballot amendments in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas all passing – it’s despicable that we would treat gays and lesbians any differently under the law than we treat straights. However, that doesn’t mean there is some equivalence between reforming marijuana laws and discrimination against gays.

For one thing, I’d note that the only state that had statewide gay and marijuana initiatives was California, the only state where a marijuana initiative (Prop 5) failed. (Arkansas had anti-gay adoption, but Fayetteville, not the whole state, approved cannabis as lowest priority for law enforcement.) It wouldn’t be fair to say the anti-gay amendment also brought out anti-pot voters in California, would it?

I’ll admit, Rachel, that the results seem ironic and sad, though no more sad that Californians approving humane treatment of chickens at the slaughter while also taking away marriage rights from humans that already have those rights. But your casual dismissal of some very important gains by the cannabis community is not in keeping with your usual inclusive and tolerant beliefs.

In dismissing marijuana initiatives with “whatever, dude” and “Funyuns” comments, you are dismissing the thousands of seriously ill and disabled Michiganders who will no longer fear arrest and incarceration for simply using a plant to alleviate severe pain, nausea, spasticity, seizures, or the wasting that comes with chemotherapy treatments and HIV/AIDS. Rachel, didn’t you begin your career as an activist helping those with HIV/AIDS in prisons? You should know this better than most.

You’re also dismissing residents of Massachusetts who’ve chosen to put their law enforcement resources into crimes more serious than busting a college kid for a baggie of weed. Or are you supportive of criminal penalties for marijuana that endanger students’ financial aid, poor people’s housing, and working people’s jobs and professionals’ careers?

Perhaps we just did a better job of mobilizing our base and convincing the voters of our message. Yes, you had the financial might of the Mormon Church fighting to pass Prop 8 in California, but we’ve had the financial and prosecutorial might of law enforcement fighting us from their bully pulpit using our own tax dollars. And while it is a terrible injustice to deny the rights of gay people to marry or adopt, nobody is arresting 872,000 gay people a year for being gay, nobody is testing gay people’s urine for metabolites of homosexuality and declaring them DUIs, and nobody is incarcerating gay people for their “lifestyle”.

Yes, gay people face revolting acts of violence and discrimination most stoners never face, but we can still be arrested for our “lifestyle”. The government has an entire cabinet bureau dedicated to propagandizing against us, lying about us, defeating our ballot propositions, and arresting and convicting us.

We should be natural allies, Rachel. Our struggles are very different, but also quite similar. We need to come out of the closet, too. We need to educate ignorant people about us. While you may think the big difference is that gay is innate and stoner is a choice, don’t be so sure. We all have an innate desire to alter our consciousness, and for medical users, they really don’t have much of a choice.

Now pass the Funyuns!

Was the whole Wassup thing really eight years ago?

John “Keating Five” McCain and the Damned Liberal New York Times!

More than a few listeners have emailed me to say, “Thank you for reporting on John McCain’s history with the Keating Five scandal.”  On the air I put it in my “Under the Radar” segment to note how this completely relevent story is being ignored my the MSM – the last major financial regulatory scandal in our nation’s history, which just happened to involve the GOP presidential nominee!

Seems like the Obama campaign has noticed, too, as per this press release:

Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Number of probing stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about Barack Obama, his life, his religion, his childhood, his politics, his time in the state senate, his time in the U.S. Senate, his family, his religion, his friends, his fundraising and all other manner of associations: more than 40

Number of stories the NY Times has written over the course of the campaign about the last major financial regulatory crisis, resulting in a huge bailout, and which John McCain was centrally involved in with his political godfather Charles Keating: 0

Yeah, poor McSame doesn’t get treated fairly by the media, all right.  His veep nominee, Mrs. Palin, hasn’t given a press conference in the 24 days she’s been a heartbeat away from a American Taliban wet-dream, and ol’ McPOW’s involvement in a deja-vu-times-ten scandal from the 1980’s is ignored.

It’s not just this issue.  Think of any major Palin/McCain development and ask yourself, “How would this play if it were Obama/Biden?”…

• Obama’s oldest teen daughter announces a pregnancy out of wedlock with an African-American boy whose Facebook page describes himself as “proud to be a fuckin’ thug” who lives to “play hoops” and “hang out with the boys, shoot some shit and just chillin’ I guess’” who adds, “Ya fuck with me I’ll kick [your] ass”.
• Obama speaks to reporters and mixes up Sunni & Shia, thinks Czechoslovakia still exists, thinks he can fire the chariman of the SEC, and confuses President Zapatero of Spain with someone in Latin America, and can’t enunciate the Bush Doctrine.
• Obama’s wife had been a member of an African nationalist party that advocated secession from the Union.
• Biden had authored a bill to force women to pay for their own forensic examination “rape kits”.
• Obama ordered his wife and his campaign staff to ignore lawful subpoenas into an investigation of Obama’s abuse of the power of his senatorial office.

Boise State Broncos 37 – #17 Oregon Ducks 32

ESPN – Boise State Broncos vs. Oregon Ducks Photos, September 20 2008 – NCAA College Football

My alma mater gets its first road win ever against a PAC-10 team.  We’ve beaten Oregon State twice in Boise.  (Yes, I know, I live in Oregon now, I’m married to a Duck, and I call myself “the Red State Refugee”, but football has its own rules of loyalty.)  I attended BSU (where the BS comes before U) 1985-89 and during that time we were 1-AA and getting whipped for 13 years straight by the hated Idaho Vandals (where Sarah Palin had just recently graduated) in the season-ending instate rivalry game.  For the 1985 season, I was the alternate for the school mascot, Buster Bronco, which is a job kinda like vice president – you only work if the main guy gets sick or dies.  So these last few years of Bronco football, with top 25 rankings and WAC dominance and mentions on EPSN and undefeated seasons and winning the greatest college football bowl game ever, is a sweet sweet time for me, not unlike growing up a Packers fan in the 1980s and then enjoying Green Bay in the Super Bowl.

Some people mock those of us into football or other inferior sports.  And, honestly, it can be rather mockworthy.  We’re really rooting for colored laundry.  It’s not like I personally know any Broncos or Packers.  Yeah, the players in orange and blue go to the same school I went to, but that campus today doesn’t hardly resemble any Boise State that I ever attended.  And, whoo, the guys from my school won, which means that my school is… what, exactly?

However, sports is often the only place a person can really get emotional.  I bounced around like a six-year-old on Red Bull last week as the Packers rolled it up on the Lions.  Today I’m shouting “Yes!” as I get the latest update on the Broncos game on my BlackBerry.

Sports give you a cultural connection in this incredibly diverse country.  I flew around the country in the 90s and everywhere I landed I could find some group of fans enjoying the game I wanted to see.  A shared experience that can bring out strong opinions and emotions and release a few of our inhibitions and reveal our personalities, with complete strangers in a brand new city, with no risk of any serious disagreements.

And sports is one of those few things where we can believe in right and wrong, that the talented, hard-working, and deserving will win, where controversies will be reviewed by an impartial judge, and even in those cases where refs are biased and instant replays are blown, we at least get to see seven replays in slo-mo hi-def and the public knows the indisputable truth.

Sports give us – give me – three hours where George Bush doesn’t exist and people don’t just ignore subpoenas and trillions aren’t bled away in an orgy of greed and the planet isn’t melting away, and I can just feel the joy of cheering for young men in plastic armor carrying an oblate spheroid over a chalk line.

Sarah Palin’s Popularity

Just a couple of quick thoughts regarding “Sarah Palin is the most popular governor in the nation!  She has an 80% approval rating!”

Alaska has no income tax, no sales tax, and the government mails free $1,300 checks to every Alaskan from the oil company royalties.  I’d be pretty happy about the governor, too.

Alaska is 75% male, and let’s just say a whole lot of those males aren’t paying real close attention to politics.  Fisherman, loggers, oil rig dudes, spending a lot of time in the wilderness seeing few women, and the governor is naughty librarian hot.  “Do you approve of the job Governor Palin is doing?”  You mean the hottest governor in the coolest state who just sent me $1,300?  Yeah, she’s great!

BTW, Tina Fey was awesome on SNL as Palin last night.  ”I can see Russia from my house!”  Priceless.  This could do as much to puncture Palin’s persona as Chevy Chase’s remaking Gerald Ford’s public image.

Don’t worry about the polls

For those of you worried about the 270-268 electoral lead for McCain noted recently on electoral-vote.com, may I remind you of electoral-vote.com from Election Day, 11/2/2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041102092512/http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Kerry 298
Bush 231

After McCain’s disastrous grilling by the hard-nosed investigative journalists at The View, watch for the idiot white female vote to drop a few points.  (Note to actual journalists: please watch Jon Stewart, Joy Behar, and Bill Maher, so you can learn how to actually question a politician and call him out on LIES.)  As the Palin scandal faucet moves from drip-drip to a roar and McCain is forced to debate Obama onstage, this thing will be over.

John W. McCain, is Sarah Palin qualified to be President?

After all, she was a mayor for a short period of time and a governor for a short period of time…