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As Christmas Day nears, those of you who have been following this recent topic of Congressional perks are already aware that for our federal legislators, the spirit of giving and receiving is a year 'round reality..Even beyond the availability of [the] many Congressional perks such as paid daycare for legislators’ children and deep discounts for health club memberships (did I fail to mention those before?), perhaps the greatest amount of personal benefits that come from being a member of Congress are those that are derived from the traditional...
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
It's Good To Be The King...Or Maybe A Congressman: Part 3
Continued from Part 2: http://beyond-the-political-spectrum.blogspot.com/search/label/Congressional%20PerksWhen it comes to the benefits of power, the elected federal lawmakers who make up the House of Representatives and the Senate—Congress—are without par; even former United States presidents cannot hope to match the level of excess, greed, sense of entitlement, and what I like to call the residual effects of public office that Congress offers...
Friday, November 27, 2009
It's Good To Be The King...Or Maybe A Congressman: Part 2
Continued Part 1 (http://beyond-the-political-spectrum.blogspot.com/2009/11/its-good-to-be-kingor-maybe-congressman.html)Whenever I think of the level and extent of the various non-compensatory benefits that our Congressional representatives receive—especially in relation to the week-to-week struggles that the rest of us must endure in these lean economic times—I am reminded of a now-famous line from Mel Brooks’ 1981 “History of The World, Part 1.” In one segment of the comedy classic, Brooks portrays King Louis XVI, lampooning the French Monarch’s...
It's Good To Be The King...Or Maybe A Congressman: Part 1
It’s Black Friday, the shopping debacle that marks the day immediately after Thanksgiving. And unless you’re one of the federal lawmakers we vote into Congress to represent us every 2-to-4 years, you’re probably one among the besieged masses of this current economic climate struggling to not only find the money to even buy your loved ones a present, but to—at the same time—maintain the necessities of a marginally decent livelihood. But if you are a member of Congress, these are great times. Despite being the authorities who determine how much...
Monday, November 23, 2009
Death & Taxes...OK, Just Death Then.
So I’m watching CBS’s 60 Minutes last night, and right off the bat, the very first story catches my attention; “The Cost of Dying.”
The piece was about how the average American is willing to incur tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical fees and costs in the hope that medical science can (vainly) stem the one immutable universal fact of existence—eventual death—despite being irreparably ill in many of the cases. On last night’s broadcast, the producers focused on the cases of two older individuals who were suffering from different...
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
A Hollywood Solution to Crime (or, “I Have a Dream”)
Being a big science fiction buff as well as a Generation Xer, one of my favorite movies of all time is a cult-classic among my kind…director John Carpenter’s 1981 “Escape From New York.”For the culturally-deprived among you, this classic flick is set in the then-future of 1997, a time when the crime rate in the US had reached 400%, and drastic measures were called for to address the ballooning level of nationwide lawlessness. In the dark world in which the movie takes place, the proposed solution to the runaway crime rate was to transform the island...
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time To Rethink The Death Penalty
Earlier this week as I watched various newscasts, I took note of two related stories—both about the subject of the death penalty—which forced me to write a long overdue perspective on the subject.In the first story, syndicated morning radio host Tom Joyner was at the center of an extraordinary story. Two of Joyner’s distant relatives were posthumously exonerated after having been tried, convicted, and executed by the state of South Carolina in 1915 for killing a Confederate Civil War veteran. Almost immediately, the case was riddled with doubt,...
Friday, October 9, 2009
Obama's New Tool: The Nobel Peace Prize
It’s Friday, October 9th. I had originally intended to post on another topic, I awoke this morning to the surprise announcement that America’s very own sitting president, Barack Obama, has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for what I imagine to be the promise that his administration—behind his rhetoric—holds in the area of global diplomacy. Actually, surprise is something of a criminal understatement; the assembled reporters covering the announcement...
Monday, September 21, 2009
Citizen Protesters, or Ideological Spin Doctors? Part 2
Continued from Part 1"It is not the state that orders us. It is we who order the state."With regard to the anti-tax & spending protests of last weekend in Washington D.C., that quote could just as easily be assumed to be the mantra of those who participated in the protests. However, those are not the words of some famous American patriot who uttered them in defiance of presumed government tyranny, and whom we are so proud of that we immortalized...
Monday, September 14, 2009
Citizen Protesters, or Ideological Spin Doctors? Part 1
It’s been said that the road to hell is paved with great intentions. This caveat is true, whether we choose to ignore it with regard to the decisions we make as the heads of our households, or with consideration to the social and political policies we choose to follow. Perhaps no single recent policy decision illustrates this better than our choice to go to war in Iraq, a decision which has run up a tab of some $700 billion dollars to date, a death...
Monday, August 31, 2009
Guns & Fear, Part 2
Continued from Part 1 (http://beyond-the-political-spectrum.blogspot.com/search/label/White%20Males)Yes…I am still talking only to the white males.With regard to the current health care reform debate and the fear of a loss of “civil liberties” associated with reform proposals, why do white males feel the need to display guns at otherwise “peaceful”—admittedly a loosely-used term given the often raucous nature of the debate—town hall meetings and rallies? It’s not as if health care reform is a rational slippery-slope toward a totalitarian regime...
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Guns & Fear, Part 1
When I write about the problems that America has in relation to certain socio-political policies, the words of Bill Maher reflect my own thoughts: I love America…its Americans I can’t stand!As such, I’d like to address just the white American males—particularly those who consider themselves political conservatives—for a few moments. I will pause now to give those who don’t fit that particular demographic time to navigate away from this page, or power-down...
Monday, August 17, 2009
"Socialized Medicine"--Innovation By Any Other Name
As someone who would love to see every American covered by some form of substantive and affordable health care insurance--one that doesn't result in the majority of personal bankruptcies year-to-year--I often ask myself What good is having "the best health care system in the world," when its priced out of reach for most people?We love telling ourselves that we Americans are the "best" at innovation. Yet, when it comes to innovating a new way to cover all Americans, it's in this area that we suddenly "recognize" our apparent limitations. All of...
Saturday, August 15, 2009
What Happened To The Lessons of Childhood? (Or, “What the **** Is Wrong With People?”), Conclusion
Continued from Part 2 (http://beyond-the-political-spectrum.blogspot.com/search/label/Religion).With the Christian Church being the foundation for many of the life lessons that we learned as children, and given that it’s leadership and spiritual advisors are as every bit as susceptible to the insanity to which has infected all other aspect’s of America’s secular institutions, it’s should come as no surprise that it’s supposed adherents have come epitomize a distortion of its values. Take the current debate over health care reform.As children, we...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
What Happened To The Lessons of Childhood? (Or, “What the **** Is Wrong With People?”), Part 2
Continued from Part 1 (http://beyond-the-political-spectrum.blogspot.com/search/label/Adults)Whenever we think about the life lessons that we were given in our childhoods, perhaps no institution comes to mind more than the Church. But what happens when the Church itself ignores the same advice it gave us? What happens when those we look up to the most, who are supposed to represent themselves as agents of all things decent and spiritual, allow themselves to fall prey to material pursuits and all-too worldly behavior? We get a dose of painful reality…an...
Monday, August 10, 2009
The Canadian Health Care System...Myth vs. Fact
During this current debate on health care reform, there are tons of aspersions, tidbits misinformation, and now television ads, both pro and con, being hurled to and fro in the politically-charged atmosphere. Probably the most commonly used comparison with regards to the health care debate is that of the current system in America to that of the Canadian health care system.Well, finally one of the country’s news outlets—National Public Radio—decided to bypass the sound bites, rhetoric, industry spin, and political dogma to actually travel to Canada...
Saturday, August 8, 2009
What Happened To The Lessons of Childhood? (Or, “What the **** Is Wrong With People?”), Part 1
As I watched, listened, and read the various news items of the past week, I found myself asking the same question that many others are probably asking; What the **** is wrong with people?No doubt, the same people asking this same question had imparted on them during their childhoods the same lessons for life that and I had imparted into me: Treat others as you would have them treat you; go to school, study hard, work hard, and you will prosper, it’s not what you look like, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts, a penny saved is a penny earned,...
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