Tea Party Hangover

One of the most fun parts of following the health care debate was the wackiness of the Tea Party movement. Part spontaneous uprising by conservatives against an expansion of the welfare state, part result of careful cultivation by Fox News, and part paranoid delusion by conspiracy nuts and unruly mobs, it was always exciting to follow the twists and turns. Probably the lowest point of the whole thing came when someone caught a few Tea Party activists on tape accosting a Parkinson's victim who was holding a pro health care reform sign:


The video went viral and was even played on cable news. After the identity of one of the protesters - the guy who was throwing dollar bills - became known, a kind of repentance happened. From an interview in a recent article, he seemed to genuinely feel remorse, and in a way none of the conservative leaders who were responsible for working people up into that kind of a frenzy have, he owned up to what he had done:

"I snapped. I absolutely snapped and I can't explain it any other way," said Chris Reichert of Victorian Village, in a Dispatch interview..."He's got every right to do what he did and some may say I did too, but what I did was shameful," Reichert said. "I haven't slept since that day."

Obviously Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or John Boehner aren't going to take responsibility for anything, regardless of how bad things might get, but it will be interesting to see if regular Tea Party activists start to come down from the high of "fighting tyranny" and, once it's clear that health care reform isn't going to lead to Armageddon or the end of freedom, are left with the sort of hangover Mr Reichert appears to be feeling.

Spot me a ronnie

I heard somewhere that there is a Republican proposal to replace Ulysses S. Grant with Ronald Reagan on the American 50 dollar bill. This made me wonder: if you really wanted to piss off Civil War buffs and get rid of Grant, shouldn't you replace him with James Madison, who, after all, wrote the constitution? But apparently Madison already had a bill: the $5000 bill, which according to Wikipedia, when adjusted from 1929 dollars when it was still being printed, would be worth over $63,000 in 2010 dollars.


There was even a $100,000 bill featuring Woodrow Wilson, worth over $1.6 million in today's dollars. I'm not completely clear on how the money supply actually works, but I don't imagine that even pre-computer, it was ever necessary to account for every dollar in bill form. I can't imagine what the point of printing bills that big was.

In any case, I don't think the Reagan proposal is taken very seriously, but I do find the "culture war" angle of it to be interesting. Why replace Grant rather than, say, Hamilton on the $10 bill, or Jackson on the 20? You could even go after Franklin on the 100 who, like Hamilton but unlike Grant, wasn't even a president.

Grant won the Civil War for the north. Reagan scored a victory in the Culture War for the south. It's that eternal struggle: Neil Young vs. Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Andrew Bird

I'm a big fan of Andrew Bird, and this performance is especially wonderful. Around 16 minutes in St. Vincent joins in:

Toxic Asset

Planet Money, the NPR economics blog/podcast, bought a toxic asset and then created a pretty adorable video about it:



The idea was to buy a toxic asset and create an interactive website that allows people to keep track of it, giving a sense for where we are in the financial crises in general. The stunning thing is that the $1000 they spent would have been more like 75,000 before the crises.

Palin in Whitehorse

Apparently Sarah Palin used to sneak her family across the Alaska-Yukon border to take advantage of Canada's health care system in Whitehorse. It must have taken some real courage considering all the death-panels and child killing socialists, but I definitely understand why she chose to take her family to Whitehorse.

My own experience with health care in Whitehorse has been almost too good to believe. When working in the north last summer I got tendinitis. Considering how I was planning on returning south to study jazz piano in the fall, I took it fairly seriously. I went to the hospital, which seems like a newly built facility, and waited for maybe 15 minutes to see a doctor, who seemed generally happy to have a patient to treat. A year before, I accompanied April to the hospital and had pretty much the same experience.

Having mostly lived in Montreal for the past few years, I'm under no illusion that the Canadian system has serious problems, particularly in Montreal where minimum wait-times, in my experience, were 3 hours, and where it's practically impossible to get a family doctor. Quebec, with a language barrier to attracting English speaking North American doctors, has special challenges, but similar problems are everywhere in Canada.

Except in Whitehorse. The 33 thousand people living in the Yukon Territory have really gotten a great deal for themselves, though obviously you don't have to be there very late into the winter before seeing why it takes some extra incentives to get people to stay.

Considering that the Whitehorse system was the one Palin had experience with, you can't help wondering how she was under the impression that single payer was really so bad. In Whitehorse, it's practically utopian. What's more likely: she wasn't. Conservative politics around US health reform has always seemed disingenuous. Palin is just not very good at hiding it.

The Closing Ceremony Debacle

I just finished watching the Olympic closing ceremonies, and I thought it was terrible. It's possible that the closing ceremony is supposed to be over-the-top silly, but even if it is, it was still poorly thought out.

The one highlight was Neil Young's performance, after he was lifted from beneath the floor on some kind of weird trap-door elevator thing. Then came William Shatner and Michael J. Fox. While I consider Michael J. Fox to be a kind of hero, it seemed like the only point behind the speeches he and Shatner gave was to start the kind of "bet you didn't know he was Canadian" conversation Canadians love to have with Americans. The fact is that this sort of thing only makes sense in the North American context, and I can't imagine an international audience caring if Captain Kirk or that guy from Back to the Future are Canadians or not.

After that there was a bizarre display of super-sized Canada stereotypes. Giant beavers, massive floating moose, lumberjacks, mounties, women dressed as maple leaves, and whatever other stereotype you can think of. Even the TV announcer said: "it's like if someone put together a Las Vegas show around Canadian cultural stereotypes," and "it's like a gift shop at Niagara Falls."

I know I'm being curmudgeonly, but maybe pointing out that Vancouver is a majority minority city, or Toronto is 50 percent foreign born and is among the most ethnically diverse places in the world, would be more interesting and revealing to an international audience than that William Shatner happened to have been born in Montreal before leaving for Hollywood.

I'm not even going to start on the choice of music.

Sports

A follow up to the last post:

As someone who generally doesn't follow sports, I've often wondered why people seem to take it so very seriously when I find watching any sports game to be insufferably boring. (I recently heard about a "coming out of the closet" movement for people who are not interested in sports). It obviously doesn't have to do with how exciting the specific sport is, considering how there are people as invested in the relatively slow game of baseball, or completely dull curling, as to fast paced hockey, where there's always a good chance of seeing a fight.

I used to explain it by saying that what makes the difference is that you care who wins. In this way, a game of rock-scissors-paper can be as exciting as a game of football, as long as it matters to you who wins. I'm not a very patriotic person, so I've never been able to say that I much care if, say, Montreal wins the game vs. any other place. After this hockey game, I feel like what is important isn't just that it matters to you personally, but that it matters generally. I'm sort of interested in the outcome of a baseball game simply because my grandmother really really wants the Red Sox to win. And, since I can hear people yelling in the streets and honking horns from where I'm sitting in Halifax, I couldn't help but find that last hockey game entertaining.

Canada wins

I've never been able to get myself very interested in hockey, but the Canada-US gold medal game was impossible to ignore. For better or worse, it's clear that this game was more important to Canadians than the election was, or any future election will be. Hard not to be swept up by it. And it was a pretty damn exciting game.

Again with the blogging...

After a long hiatus, I'm going to start updating this blog again. Not sure how often I'll be able to update, especially after I head to the north for another season, but we'll see. I'm also encouraging Munir and Ari to start posting their thoughts again as well. Go...blogging!

Tales from Abroad, Pasadena Edition - Part 6: Burgers burgers burgers

California is the self-professed home of the hamburger, and it's only fair that I take a second or two to comment on this.

First, the famous In-N-Out Burger, a made-in-America combination of drive-thurs (the "through" way of spelling through seems to have been lost, along with night and light...) and burgers. I mean, many places have drive-thrus, but how many places are primarily a drive-thru?

Being not from 'roud these parts, I walked around the small box where a half-dozen or so part-times furiously fried, stacked, and served these legendary burgers. Not noticing a place to walk in have a seat, I figured I'd get in line - in the drive through. Luckily the woman who was taking orders informed me that I'd have better luck at the walk-up counter around the side, so I didn't have to put my life in jeoparty over a couple patties with cheese and fries.

The service, I dare say, was excellent. You could see your burger being made "fresh" as you watched, and despite my paying and forgetting my change when I went to the bathroom, when I came back, my 7 cents were handed to me with a smile. Now that's service!

The burger itself, consumed back at my hotel room, was pretty decent. I orderd a "Doubtle Doubtle", not to be confused with a way to serve coffee - two patties, two pieces of cheese, and two days off your life. The fries were made the "old fashioned way", which I would actually described as the "less flavourful" way. Burger: 4/5. Fries: 1/5.

Tops, on the other hand, served up a huge burger with half a head of lettuce stuffed in it. As far as I can tell, there's only one Tops - it's not a chain - and it lives up to its name. It's burger was huge, dripping with all kinds of sauce, and stuffed full of the usual fixins. I don't recall the beef patty being very thick, but it was good, and as their magical sauce dribbled down my hand I was, for a moment, in heaven, though too many of these burgers'll undoubtedly send you there for good. The Greek-style potato salad I ordered was alright, but nothing special. Burger: 4/5. Potato salad: 3/5.

Now that leaves Carl's Jr. This joint, with its smiling star didn't attract me at first. To be honest, the name put me off - Carl's Jr.? I thought it was Carl Jr's, and I couldn't understand what belonged to Carl that was Jr about the place. Still, I was draw inside by a sign: proclaiming the seemingly impossible: A "Big Burger" for 99 cents.

99 cents? Seriously? You can't get a pack of gum for that back home. I ventured inside, my curiosity peaked.

The service at Carl Jr's was pretty slow - people seemed to take forever before they acknowledged my existence at the counter, but in the end, slow and steady gets the burger.

"Can I get the 99 cents burger?" I inquired.

"Which kind?"

Which kind? For a dollar I get a choice? Yes indeed. You can get the "Big Hamburger", which has a thin patty but is kind of wide, the "Spicy Chicken" burger, or some other kind, ranch something, I forget.

Over a series of days I tried all thre. Then came back for two of them (the Big Burger and the Spicy Chicken). I mean, serioulsy - for $1.08 per burger what do you want?

I found out later that this same meal was $1.29 per sandwich other places in California, like downtown LA and the OC. Burgers: 3/5 average. Value: 5/5.

And now I go on a diet...

Incidentally, tomorrow (Sunday, May 24th) is Free Burger Day at Harvey's. Sometimes it does pay to live in Canada...