Me: Frank Lynch

Home
(Current commentary)

These are my mundane daily ramblings.
For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

Email:
frank
dot
lynch2
at
verizon
dot
net

Maybe Sarah Palin can get a gig on Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

Link | | | 8:52 PM | Home

It would be better if Obama were at the GOP's beck and call. John Boehner disagrees with Obama visiting Copenhagen to support Chicago's Olympic bid:

"Listen I think it's a great idea to promote Chicago but he's the president of the United States, not the mayor of Chicago," Boehner said. "And the problems we have here at home affect all Americans and that's where his attention ought to be."

It's not like there are any bills to sign... Immediately after the 2006 midterms, the newly minoritized Republicans in Congress went into obstruction mode, letting nothing the Democrats wanted come to a vote in the Senate. It's stayed that way since 2008, or, so long as they could keep the full complement of Senators down. And now they're peeved that Minnesota and Massachusetts both have two senators again.

If Boehner really wanted to demonstrate the importance of Obama's absence, he'd get out of the way, support health care reform, and get some bills on the President's desk. But that's not really the point, he just hadn't had his prune juice this morning.

Link | | | 7:39 PM | Home

"Uplift, beauty, and contemplation." New York City's last remaining classical music radio station is reformatting, and I'm afraid it's going to a more limited playlist:

A mission statement prepared by WQXR's new programmers said, "There may indeed be times when the more radical and unfamiliar pieces work, but we will not favor them over the work that speaks directly to the needs of uplift, beauty and contemplation."

"Greatness matters," it added. "Bach trumps Telemann."

Less familiar works, more modern music and pieces geared toward a younger audience will be presented on the station's new Internet stream, called Q2. WNYC radio's listenership is more than double that of its stream, the station said. "Radio definitely trumps Internet still," Ms. Walker said.

My reaction, to use the Latin, is "feh." This sounds like a great way to set a grand tradition of music more in stone and sound more stale. "Take your dissonance like a man," said Ives, and this is going in the wrong direction. It's a dumbing down, not an enlightening. WQXR was never much for playing that much Paul Hindemith as it was, but I fear it's getting worse.

To reframe this in a category you may be more familiar with: it's like, we hope you like Ellington, Monk, Miles Davis, Basie, and Lester Young. You're not going to get Sun Ra, fuhgeddabowdit.

Feh.

Link | | | 6:49 PM | Home
 

Back in the go-go days. You remember post-9/11, and how Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq instead of Afghanistan because it had better targets (screw culpability). And how our government adopted torture because of a felt need to do "something" (screw whether it works no better, Mr. President, are you really telling Liz Cheney that under a ticking time-bomb scenario...)

And so it is with health care: the ineffectiveness of treatment doesn't seem to matter, not when the Republicans can scare you by calling it "rationing".

Often, people with generous insurance plans can run up large bills and face life-threatening complications from unnecessary care: back surgeries that result in wound infections, when physical therapy might have been a more effective treatment; imaging scans that expose patients to radiation; medication-caused side effects that must be treated.

As much as $850 billion spent on medical care each year "can be eliminated without reducing the quality of care," according to a 2008 report by the New England Healthcare Institute. That is enough money to extend insurance coverage to more than 30 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

I think the GOP can hang up its pretense to being the responsible party now. It's the teenager run amok with the credit card

Link | | | 7:40 AM | Home

Maybe because it's bigger than the snail darter conservatives will think it's reasonable to care about its potential extinction.

Link | | | 7:21 AM | Home
 

Public health care is a lot more sensible when it's planned for, budgeted, and not run out of emergency rooms. Of course, all the GOP knows that the country has incredibly deep pockets and can afford an over-priced health industry.

Link | | | 10:58 PM | Home
 

Remember Mark Foley, the disgraced Rep? His scandal (and the GOP's willful blind eye) was part of the 2006 GOP handover in Congress. Well, he's now doing talk radio.

Link | | | 11:06 AM | Home
 

Using zero tolerance to block health care reform. You probably know that the GOP is holding its breath until it turns blue to block health care reform, what with outrageoeous claims about death panels and what-not. You probably also know that Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) even went so far as to put forth an amendment applying only to states whose names begin with the letter "U." ALL of them, although I think he could have been more generous and also extended it to those states whose names end in the letter "H."

But some of his efforts are even sneakier Trojan Horses: as a way of forcing compliance with the Obama claim that under the reforms you could keep your current health insurance, Hatch wanted an amendment that insisted that if a million Americans couldn't keep their current coverage, the law would not go into effect.

Seems reasonable enough at first glance, right? Well, it's not. There are over 300 million people in the US, according to the CIA World Fact Book. That means that if the claim was off by less than one-third of 1% the law is a no go. That's right, the claim needs to be more than 99.7% accurate or the law would not go into effect.

Does any law, any goverment program, work that well, that accurately? No, of course not, and Hatch knows it. He just wants to kill it.

Thankfully the amendment was defeated, although on party lines. Still, some fools think that the Democrats' voting against it is "proof" that it's all a lie. Sure, let these fools be 99.7% accurate in what they do. I dare them to try — they probably also claim that malpractice penalties are too strict too.

Link | | | 11:29 PM | Home
 

Are you receiving me? Teleconferencing and justice have evolved further. When a trial in Queens (NYC) needed testimony from a witness in India (India), a judge opted for testimony via Skype over flying the witness in or sending attorneys out for depositions. Pretty cool.

Link | | | 7:52 PM | Home
 

Back to top.