OneMind

My friend and colleague Tony Seton offers an intriguing take on the current political scene in his “Seton Notes” radio commentary today. He suggests that true Liberals and true Conservatives are being shut out of the political process by GOP right-wing demagogues and what he calls “Democratic Ditherers.” Well worth a llsten.

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A significant number of Americans define themselves as “spiritual, not religious,” in various studies that have been conducted in the past decade or so. But one difficulty with those surveys and studies is that they use largely subjective ways of defining the term “spiritual.”

Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in a recent column about the subject and offered a couple of cogent insights. At the conclusion of the piece, he offered his own test of spirituality:

Describe how positively or negatively you react to the following:

*Spiritual advice from Oprah.

*Your child coming home from college and announcing he or she has changed religions.

*Any sentence beginning, “As Jesus, Gandhi and the Buddha would say…”

*John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

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My system feels much less stable now. Firefox, which has been solid for months, crashed three times in the past couple of ours, once so hard that it couldn’t re-open the tabs I had open at the time.

NoteShare still can’t connect to my LAN server even though all other machines on the network can. LATE UPDATE: I got this working. No idea why NoteShare forgot this setting but it was easy enough to re-establish it. Still, I remain frightened and wary as apps continue to crash and misbehave in record numbers.

This is starting to feel like a really huge mistake to have installed this upgrade.

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Yesterday I finally got around to upgrading my main system to the new OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” release. This release was reputed to be relatively insignificant and unimportant and blissfully easy to install so I figured I’d take advantage of a Friday night in which I had social obligations to run the upgrade on auto-pilot. Maybe it was because it was Halloween eve or something, but what a freaking scary experience it turned out to be.

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I got about 10 emails this morning from various political groups to which I belong, all with the same theme: send us money to help us stop Joe Lieberman from killing health insurance reform.

Right.

Lieberman is a monumental ego and a jackass of the first rank. The Democrats made a colossal mistake when he ran as an independent after being defeated in his own party’s primary in the last election. They welcomed him into the party fold despite his despicably disloyal behavior in backing McCain-Palin and several down-ticket GOP candidates. They let him caucus with them. They even gave him a plum chairmanship, that of the Homeland Security Committee.

He repaid them by “mavericky” behavior and now by threatening to blow up his (supposedly) party’s leader’s primary domestic agenda item.

There’s no way to stop him but the Democrats should punish him to the maximum extent. Strip him of his chairmanship.  Bar him from the caucus. Rip away the Groton Submarine depot funding in his home state of Connecticut and any other earmarked funds he’s wangled. He wants to be an independent? Make him function like one. The man’s a disgrace to his party and, in this case at least, to his country and his constituents (68% of whom favor the public option he opposes). He is so deeply in the insurance companies’ pockets, he’ll be there after the lint has been vacuumed out.

Time to go, Joe!

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I am still fairly open-minded on the issue of cap-and-trade, leaning toward favoring it. From an environmental perspective, it seems like a good approach, though the results of early EU experiments seem mixed at best.

But I’ve never considered the question of what, if any, effect of a cap-and-trade policy would have on employment. This piece on one of my favorite sites, FactCheck.org, concludes that it could have a slightly negative effect on employment figures over the course of a decade. While that seems like a fairly negligible consideration, I recognize how easy it is to draw my conclusion if you don’t have to worry about having or keeping a job.

Is this really another case of the old false trade-off between environmental protection and job loss? Or is there something deeper, perhaps more interesting going on here?

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For the past several years, technology news commentators have talked often about the "Yahoo! vs. Google" search wars. Yahoo! started life as the first major Internet search engine company and then along came Google and blew them out of the water.

This weekend, the San Jose Mercury-News carried a short news byte on Yahoo! that was routine and dull but for one thing I noticed. The reporter characterized Yahoo! not as a "major search engine company" as it always has in the past, but as a "content powerhouse." This would appear to be a re-positioning of Yahoo! in which the Merc has become a participant. Not that I have a problem with that, but I find it interesting that Yahoo! could decide it can't compete with Google in the search space (it can't) even with a Microsoft partnership, and announce itself as a content play and the media just appears to go blithely along.

As it happens, i agree with the re-characterization. I've long seen Yahoo! as a better content site than many others who positioned themselves in that space explicitly. Yahoo! has a ton of exclusive content and directly competes with national news and even entertainment outlets in its efforts to be an information source. For me, the power of that hits home when I realize that when I want to check up on the standings in the NFL or in Major League Baseball, I often just go to my browser and type the URL yahoo.sports.com/nfl/standings. From there, though, there is a great deal of content by Yahoo! writers and editors on the league, the games, the teams, insights, predictions, and a lot more.

Yahoo! has a dozen or more beat writers in baseball alone. Their main sports page rivals that of many of its more established rivals in print and broadcast journalism. Plus they have a wider and better variety of blogs than the other guys as well, in large part, I suspect, because Y! gets the Web in ways that its competitors with roots in the traditional media still don't.

Start thinking of Yahoo! as a content site. Explore it a bit. You may be surprised at what you find and at its ultimate greater value than raw search.

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I’ve wondered on and off for years about the frequent combination of words like “spiritual” with words like “warrior.” Aren’t those two distinctly incompatible ideas? This question came back up again last week after the now-infamous sweat lodge incident involving James Ray and a group of spiritual warriors-in-training in which three people died and several others were injured. Rhonda McFarland-Schultz of Phoenix questioned the use of the idea that these people were being trained to be spiritual warriors.

At the conclusion of her column, she said, “I feel strongly that a Spiritual Warrior has no place in spirituality. Spirituality and war are not a reasonable combination.” I absolutely agree.

I was talking this morning with two of my colleagues in the peace-through-spirituality movement and the subject came up there as well. How can you be “fighting for peace?” we wondered together. I was reminded that when Mother Theresa was alive, she is reported to have turned down any attempt to engage her in anti-war activities. “If you have a pro-peace event, I’ll be there,” she is reported to have said, “but anti-war just perpetuates war.” Indeed it does. Words are things. They contain and convey emotion. They perpetuate ideas. Someone who is a “peaceful warrior” is nonethless a warrior, is he not?

I don’t know. The whole thing just seems wrong-headed to me. Let’s find better ways to describe ourselves. Advocate? Fan? Spirit? Other ideas?

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I don’t care if you’re a Republican, Democrat or independent. I don’t care if you’re rich or poor. I don’t care where you stand on health care reform. I don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in history or are a high school dropout. How could *anyone* vote for Bush in the current FaceBook poll asking whether Obama is a better President than W? Sorry, but for my money anyone who honestly feels that way is woefully ill-informed or deliberately not paying attention.

One person I read said, “Bush wasn’t perfect but at least we had less debt.” Yeah, and an economy in the toilet, the correction of which generated the debt! In eight years, W’s “accomplishments” (according to him and his apologists) comes down to one item: keeping America safe for 6+ years. Of course, that conveniently overlooks the fact that it was on *his watch* that the first major terrorist attack on our soil happened. But even if I give him credit for that — which I don’t — what else can he point to?

He started two wars, neither of which could he win or even describe victory in.
He destroyed our environment with horrible pro-business, anti-people rules, regulations and legislation.
He widened the gap between the haves and the have nots more than it had been in the preceding two generations with a horrific tax policy.
He brought America to shame in the world community by proudly and loudly endorsing the war crime of torture.
He staffed his Administration with the worst array of criminals and greed-mongers since the Teapot Dome scandal.
He took away more Americans’ rights in his years in office than all the gains of the civil rights movement in the previous 40 years and bragged about it.

There was a reason — these and dozens more, actually — his support among the American people was at a record low when he left office all but disgraced. And now, 10 months into the first year of his first term, you’re going to try to convince me that Bush was better than Obama has been already?

Gimme a break. Pay attention. If W doesn’t go down in history as the worst president we ever had, I’ll be stunned.

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Congressional Democrats are moving toward including a provision in the upcoming health care reform bill that would eliminate a horrible public policy that allows insurance companies to escape federal regulation. But I predict it's a clever tactic that will not succeed on its own yet.

Since 1946, life insurance companies in the U.S. have been regulated not at the federal level where they ought to be but at the state level where they play divide-and-conquer and divvy-up-the-spoils with one another. As a result, a huge proportion of the states are dominated by one or two insurance carriers who can use their often laughable state regulations to effectively squash competition. Health insurance has fallen under this antitrust exemption umbrella and that has inured primarily to the benefit of the mega-insurers.

Now Democrats, who have tried to have this rule changed before, are in a good position to make it happen. But I think they see the public option on health care as being far more important. So here's my prediction. During negotiations, Dems will agree to take the antitrust exemption off the table in return for GOP promises not to filibuster the public option or something stronger. The insurance companies will almost certainly lobby harder to prevent the antitrust exemption's disappearance than about any provision of the current bills and may provide Republicans cover for switching their vocal opposition to the public option.

Or maybe that's too subtle a strategy. But it seems like it would be an interesting and potentially viable approach.

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