Today, in honor of our hundredth post, your Wandering Gentile is going to share a DVD-type special feature, explaining how a post becomes a Wandering Gentile post...yay!
Always have a subject in mind. Sometimes your original first paragraph is crap, so expect an alternate plan. This happened today.
At roughly one-tenth of an administration, we have a better picture of where the Obama Administration is going. The President's objectives on the economy, the environment , health care and justice are now coming into focus. He had a task to clear out the Augean Stables before getting to work on his agenda.
Readers like lists. They also like realism. Sarcasm doesn't hurt much, either.
THE ECONOMY.
If one were to consider the economy in terms of a tractor-trailer, this country's was going across the George Washington Bridge toward New York with two flat tires on Election Day. By the time President Obama got to the White House, it was stuck on northbound Jerome Avenue in the Bronx under the El, with eighteen flats, and somebody had boosted the stereo out of the dash for good measure.
For readers unfamiliar with operating a large commercial vehicle, this scenario is as bad as it gets before destroying your rig or accumulating a body count. Commercial drivers will require a crowbar to get the seat from a puckered sphincter.
The Republican answer, keep moving forward and then turn right is not an appropriate solution. Obama's tack of turning left at the first McDonald's is the only solution which will save the vehicle. In a spectacularly suboptimal situation, this takes the fixed overhead obstacle out of the equation.
Turn right once arriving at the faster track of I-87. Obama's rolling, and he's made the turn, but plenty of obstacles await before he gets to the Major Deegan Expressway.
THE ENVIRONMENT.
Compared to the Economy, Obama is out in the back end of North Dakota on this one. Unless he is in imminent danger of freezing to death (He's not), Obama has a long, boring slog in front of him in which nearly everyone wishes him well in the objective of getting to a much greener place with a tree. Obama would do well to hope that the tree is near a Burger King, because nobody wants to be in North Dakota with him.
North Dakota's state tree (envied by South Dakota because they don't have a tree, yet) is in West Fargo, a couple of blocks from the truck stop. There is also a Burger King.
HEALTH CARE REFORM.
Ready or not, it's coming. Nobody in America trusts health insurers as much as they trust Congress, and they don't trust Congress at all. (Hyperbole is always fun. Ask Dave Barry.) In Congress' case the tiebreaker is the fact that it is at least theoretically possible to vote a congressman out of office. When was the last time a health insurance customer had a vote on the direction of the insurer? (Not guaranteed even if holding preferred stock.)
Health insurers are right when they state that they cannot compete. Competition does not exist when a business model is built around a captive market and the fundamental inability of a customer to challenge the providers service without litigation. A publicly subsidized option-not corporate welfare for insurers to serve the entire public, not just the ones they like-is urgently and desperately needed.
We already have de facto rationing in the form of pre-existing condition codicils. Government is already on the hook for half of all health care spending already, shelling out more per capita than the universally covered citizens of the rest of the industrialized world. Freedom of choice should include the ability to fire an inferior or inept health payment provider.
This is the possibility that Obama's plan from the campaign-and ironically the French- make available to non-millionaires. You know, the ability to make a rational decision.
I forgot. We're Americans. We're not supposed to be able to do Rational. (Quips like this are good for annoying conservatives, particularly when mentioning the French.)
JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR.
Get used to saying it. Republicans don't have anything. It isn't even going to be close. Too bad she's not a Red Sox fan.
IMMIGRATION REFORM.
(If I need to rant, this subject is good because I can make fun of Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo. And those two are made for being mocked and harassed, when not taking on the entire G.O.P.)
What do you call a bus going off a cliff with the entire Senate Republican caucus aboard? The waste of a big damn bus, sorry about Collins and Snowe.
Immigration reform is the big bus which will go off a cliff with the Republican party's future aboard. In states which have large numbers of socially-conservative, entrepreneurial latino voters they will wind up with the approximate lifespan of a triple-meat, triple-cheese plain-and-dry Whataburger left in the care of your Wandering Gentile.
Republicans cannot afford to trade Miami, South Texas, and Arizona for a significantly smaller number of Anglo-Saxon bigots in states without enough electoral votes to beat Walter Mondale's '84 performance against Reagan. Immigration reform is a winner for the USA and Mexico.
The US economy wins, gaining ten million people with a pent up demand for homes, automobiles, and durable goods gaining the clout to buy them. We could also anticipate a trillion-dollar shot in the arm for tax revenues over the next ten years. It doesn't hurt that the undocumented population is disproportionately entrepreneurial and disposed to risk taking.
If combined with a workable guest worker program and some mechanism enabling labor to organize without being forced to take anti-labor propaganda before making their decision, ethical businesses would prosper. Border security would improve, owing to the resources not allocated to pursuing people forced into illicit crossings by an overreaching prohibition.
Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs would go broke though, because their support of that same overreaching prohibition is what enriches Mexican organized crime, their true masters. The Kluxers and Neo-Nazis would have to fold up their tents and go back to Idaho.
(Bad quip goes here!!!)
Who da pimp, now?
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