Insurance. HEY DANNY

I read an interesting article on health insurance recently.  (Health insurance doesn't really work well for its intended pool, the sick or injured, if it's profit based, as in, apparently, only the USA.)   It said that the ACA (Obamacare) is a godsend for the over-50 divorced woman.

I know about that.  I have a relative over 50 with a pre-existing condition who was dropped from her then-hubbie's coverage when he divorced her for a trophy wife and, well, she might as well have adopted the GOP plan (Just Die).

But now she has insurance, and has used it.  An Obamacare success story, although she had travails in getting signed up and it was a good thing she doesn't work currently so she could spend hours at the keyboard and on the phone trying to get signed up.

Hooray for the good guys.  And hey, youngest son, I have the best insurance in America, much better than your Mother's, it's the Federal Government Worker's single payor gold standard insurance (which should be what Obamacare adopted) so if you want to get good health coverage in that window while you're still under age 26 contact me!  (I haven't spoken to this lad in a decade, the divorce you know,  wherein in my opinion his Mother acted reprehensibly and overbore the will of a susceptible minor child in her "care" and put him under her inferior health care plan during the interminable litigation so I wouldn't know when she was taking him to yet another mental health "professional" for the purposes, in my opinion, of potential "recovered memory" testimony in court.)

Where were you when...

Shortly after lunch on Friday, November 22, 1963, I was a seventh grader sitting in study hall when Miss Annapole, Principal of JHS 51, New York City, came on the intercom and announced in an angry, accusatory tone that President Kennedy had been shot, killed, and we would be having auditorium in 15 minutes. After a further harangue about the murder in the auditorium from Miss Annapole (I remember she was shrieking into the mike so much it went on permanent shrill buzz) we were discharged out the doors and sent home, shocked and bewildered.

On Tuesday morning, January 28, 1986, I had awakened from a fitful four hour slumber after returning home from a graveyard shift as a Colorado State Patrolman and I was wondering through the Target store shopping aimlessly in Boulder when my attention was drawn to the active TV sets in the electronics department. They all showed continuous re-runs of the 73-second ill-fated Challenger space shuttle flight which culminated in its fiery destruction in sub orbit with its devestating loss of everyone aboard (I'll always remember the Houston Control announcer saying dryly as the pieces of rocket scattered to smithereens in a huge trail of smoke, "Obviously a major malfunction.").

On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was on a Metro platform going to work when the PA system came on and the announcer informed us that the Pentagon station was closed due to the "terrorist attack" there. My imagination conjured up an image of some zealots boiling out of the station there and assaulting the Pentagon building with some AK-47s. When I arrived at work in downtown DC a few minutes later pandemonium was reigning in the hallways of my workplace as people were running around looking for "shelter" within the building and reports were coming in that more planes were on their way to bomb us and car bombs were going off in the street. Welcome to the world that Osama bin Laden introduced us unsuspecting Americans to on that day.

Late on Sunday evening, May 2, 2011, I was checking my email account on the netbook which was open on my chest as I lay in bed. Automatic news alerts in the account informed me that Osama bin Laden had been "killed" and that President Obama was addressing the nation in a few minutes. I went downstairs to watch his speech wherein he announced the death of this mass-murderer, the result of a completely successful American special operations raid in Pakistan, ordered by the president. When President Obama stated that following a firefight, Osama bin Laden had been shot in the head and killed, I knew right away that this was a euphemism for the fact that the bloodstained polygamous zealot had been summarily executed.

And now, a word from the North

I have a family member whom I respect and admire who left the US to live in Canada. Here is this relative's report on Obamacare, with some non-substantive editing.

I think what was passed is a great start, but I am shocked that the vote was that close. I think it's disgusting those Tea Baggers think health care does not rank alongside the rights they take for granted--like the ability to spew racial epithets and express their hateful beliefs. The view that people without health care are lazy and just need to work harder is ridiculous. Nothing is black and white.

Canadians are mystified why people in the US consider this bill a victory. I have to explain how compared to what Americans have now, it's quite an improvement. But when you compare it to the system here, it still looks rather barbaric. People are also shocked at the level of lobbying that goes on. Here lobbyists are on a shorter leash and no one thinks of the MPs as being in the pocket of some corporation. Until the US elects representatives of the people and not corporations, real change is unlikely, and with the recent Supreme Court decision, things will get worse not better.

I love how the Tea Baggers call health care Socialism but forget about all the other socialized services that make their lives better. They don't listen when you talk to them but just spew talking points prepared by the propagandists at Fox News. When disputed, they just raise their voice and try to drown you out. Or they become silly and say, "Move to Canada," which is easy to say but hard to do (I know!).

Anyway, I hope this means real change for you all and that it hasn't doomed Obama's presidency.

You go, relative! The viewpoint from the Northlands. Who doesn't think that Canadians aren't great? Elsewhere, the industrialized world apparently thinks the US has finally been dragged into the 20th century (not the 21st century yet). I can't wait for November to see the Americans reveal their true selves.

Despoiling the Bill of Rights

I have friends who are unabashed liberals (as am I) who suffer from paralysis of analysis, in my estimation.

It is said that a liberal is someone who tries to see so many sides of an issue that he can’t even agree with himself.

Some of my friends feel that no one should be denied the right to engage in any "legal" course of action, even brandishing guns at presidential rallies. This overly-tolerant attitude is a definite disadvantage in a dogfight. Savage infighting, in my opinion, is what is going on in the current health care "debate."

Nut-jobs are showing up openly carrying guns a block away from where our president is speaking on the issue. Common sense is giving way to a mania for niceties when these nut cases are allowed to congregate in public with small arsenals within a block of the president.

Bullying prevails until it is called out for what it is–an attempt at intimidation--and stood up to.

They carry signs saying the tree of liberty should be watered. Anyone who reads books instead of endlessly blathering text messages on their I-phones would know that this is a "clever" reference to Thomas Jefferson’s famous saying that the tree of liberty should be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants and patriots. (If you’re unfamiliar with it, look up the quote on the Internet and gain some more shallow knowledge.) (Right: The scene in NH.)

Is that a threat to kill the president? Maybe. Is this intimidation? Absolutely. It is also menacing, and disturbing the peace in my opinion.

It is ridiculous to countenance such jackbooted behavior as a paean to the First Amendment. I don’t care what those crazy "open carry" laws allow. You don’t bring guns to a political debate.

I was a cop once. I know about rousting people. Cops maintain the public order for the benefit of the good and genteel people of the middle class by moving along the crazy, the agitated, the homeless. These idiots carrying weapons on street corners near the president should be rousted by the Secret Service.

We don’t need insecure little men walking around with civilian versions of assault rifles slung over their shoulders near where our president is . I wish I had been there to personally congratulate these armed losers for finally having something long and hard attached to their bodies. (Left: The scene in AZ.)

I commend the democratic congressman who coolly stared at a fruitcake holding up a placard depicting our president wearing a little Hitler mustache and asked, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?"

This Massachusetts representative properly described such behavior as "vile, contemptible nonsense."

Leave the guns, and the scurrilous untrue hate-mongering bombast about proposed health care mandates, at home.

Inauguration Blues

A week ago The One was inaugurated, and the Decider flew back to his well-deserved retirement in Texas. The Great Bird Hunter, looking much shrunken with his lopsided smirk not so smug anymore, was pushed out of town in a wheelchair, his 8-year deal with the devil apparently due and payable on that very day.

Although I was in the area, I was not in town penned into the Mall with the other 200 million people who are going to someday claim they were there on that magical but frigid day. Those masses watched the president's extraordinary speech on Jumbotrons set up around the Mall while I watched it on my TV in my dining room, perhaps the last substantive thing I will ever see on it before it goes permanently fuzzy soon in the big switch-over to digital. (I won't miss it much.)

I was in the DC area only because I had been driven out of eastern North Carolina by the weather. My college roommate Jimmy recently retired to what they call the Inner Banks down there, moving into a house on stilts by the water's edge on the Pimlico Sound in a town called Vandemere. It's not on the map.

I went down to visit with him so I could escape the Obama-Rama craziness that was engulfing DC as the Inauguration approached. I drove down, 370 miles, on the Thursday before Tuesday's Inauguration, arriving after dark. We ate a marinated steak he cooked and discussed small towns in rural Carolina, two recently divorced men in their mid-50s feeling much cast aside by the great gender movements of our times.

They apparently go to church a lot down there because on any Sunday that he doesn't, he gets a friendly call from a church member asking him how things are going. It's their way of trying to make him feel at home there. He keeps a list of handy excuses by the phone because for him, as for me, a little church goes a long way.

He retired there so he could go sailing, his passion. The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway passes by near his home and at the end of his dock is water deep enough and calm enough to take him, so long as he pays proper attention to weather forecasts, safely all the way to Florida or Maine in a small craft.

Even though it was January, I had this fantasy that it would be warm along the water in North Carolina. Not so. They were in the midst of the coldest snap they'd had there in seven years. Friday when we woke up it was 15 degrees out. Jimmy had drained his water the night before because down there, with the houses built on stilts or cinder blocks to raise them above storm (or more properly, wind) surges, the pipes are often outside and exposed.

Jimmy is a cheap guy (he would be beaming to read this) so he keeps his water heater shut off except for the twenty minutes before he takes a shower, and as for heat in the house, well, what are coats, hats and gloves for? Saturday morning when we woke up prior to embarking on a two-day car trip to the Outer Banks, it had warmed up outside to 19 degrees, but it was only 49 degrees in the house.

Then on Monday the local newsstations started talking about a seven-year record snowfall due to start later that night at around midnight, supposed to be very localized due to the unusual cold conditions. Something about eight inches or more of snow possible on Tuesday, primarily along my exact route out of there.

We got back to Jimmy's house from the Outer Banks at 8 pm on Monday. Twenty minutes later I had said goodbye and was driving pell-mell west and then north. Exactly at midnight I hit snow at the Virginia border and for twenty five minutes I drove into a blinding panorama of big fat snowflakes coming horizontally into the cone of light cast out by my headlights. But then I drove out of the storm and the way was clear.

At 1:20 am as I drove through Richmond on Interstate 95, 100 miles from DC, I passed a highway sign announcing that due to the Inauguration later that day, I-95 would be closed down at 3 am. I had 100 minutes to go 100 miles.

I joined a mad horde of truckers barreling northbound in a convoy at, well, a considerable speed in order to get past the bottleneck of DC before the authorities pinched off the highway there. Fast as this Mad Max moving phalanx was going, several State Trooper cruisers passed us enroute to their Inauguration posts throughout DC.

I made it home with a few minutes to spare. It did snow down in eastern Carolina most of Tuesday. Jimmy sent me this picture he took of his dock in the snow.

Yes We Did

Keepers of our own legacy again. Yea. Thank the Lord that the long dark winter is over. Yes we can. Yes we will.

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more." President Obama

The One or That One

I could tell it was gone as I drove up in the dark tonight, shivering in the thirty-degree weather. My headlights shone across the large pile of leaves at his curbside.

I have been hoping that the cutting-knife icy wind that has been blowing all day today dies down before my eight-mile run with my training group tomorrow morning. But it hadn't disturbed the roundness of the leaf pile at his curb.

Leaf collection must be this week, I thought when I saw it. I was glad my headlights hadn't swept over my disordered leaf-littered yard to remind me of my slackard ways. Actually, I think fallen leaves are a good nutrient for the soil, which gives me an excuse not to rake.

I'm a terrible suburbanite. Not being a slave to my yard nor my kids and adhering to no woman's directives, I only still live here in the 'burbs because my back yard lot line abuts the 40-mile W&OD running trail at MP 7. The W&OD Trail is the premiere blacktop running path in the country. Let's see you top that!

Earlier this month, my neighbor raked his leaves into five large ordered piles in his back yard, spelling O B A M A. He restored the piles' integrity every morning. He was showboating for the W&OD Trail runners behind our houses. Runners are all democrats and believe in diversity, right?

He's from South America and is a fabulous guy. Previously I thought he spoke better English than he did, and he thought I spoke better Spanish then I did, and now we pantomime a lot. So much for worldwide high school language classes. But he was pleased to confirm for me that his piles said, "Obama."

I hate change. I liked his piles. When I drove into my driveway tonight , I could see that his orderly piles had been dragged to his curb and lumped into a single large refuse mound. Did The One become "that one?"

I should rake my lawn before all my leaves blow over to his place. Or maybe I won't.

An election-morning harbinger

A blizzard of blowing leaves was cascading to the sidewalk, courtesy of a gentle November wind loosening a torrent of dried leaves from the overhead branches of a stand of trees. This was Tuesday morning.

Leaves blowing by on the breeze are hard to snatch, they move so unpredictably on the changing air currents as they drop. In eight years of running, I can only remember catching two of them before, even though I make a game of it as I run each fall. One of them I caught during a race because it happened to lodge between my bib and shirt somehow as it swirled by. The other I actually snatched with one hand as I ran along, and I was so proud of the feat that I keep this pressed leaf atop my dresser. I consider it a good luck charm.

Yesterday morning I caught a falling leaf as it went by. I considered this a good omen, a harbinger of Change. My belief and faith in the positive nature of this symbol was fulfilled last night when the left coast presidential election returns came in and the 44th President was declared.

Soon afterwards, a true American Hero issued a gracious, conciliatory concession speech, reinforcing the positive image he had created when he corrected an ignorant follower of his on the campaign trail by saying that Barack Obama was a decent American like the rest of us, not a foreigner as she had just claimed that he was.

I am hopeful for the future.

Arlington's Ridge Road

Arlington Ridge Road is as it sounds, a long hilly road that offers a magnificent view of the District stretching out underneath it to the east, past the Potomac. We ran along it a lot in the recently-concluded DCRRC 10K/10M Group Training Program, for which I was a roving coach. I loved going up there because I like to do hills on 6-10 mile runs; it throws variety and difficulty into the workout.

The houses up there are magnificent, in the million dollar range, I imagine. Even now after the meltdown. They're big, usually white and columned, and nicely spaced out. Between the imposing structures you can see snatches of the Washington Monument, the Capitol, and the Lincoln as you run past.

Lately, practically each front yard up there has been festooned with campaign signs. And guess what they all say? McCain/Palin. Even though Northern Virginia is not the real America because it's going to deliver Virginia into the blue column for the first time since 1964.

As we ran by each week, I joked with other runners that a midnight sign-gathering foray might be in order. (Just kidding! I wouldn't do that.) Practically anywhere else in Arlington, Obama signs pre-dominate. It's clear up there, though, what wealth does to political preference. (Right: This is part of the Not-Real America, the District as seen from Northern Virginia.)

But there is one funky house up there that sports an Obama sign. Just one. That house is a little different from the rest, sort of angled into its large lot, so it affords passerbys a better view of the vista below. It's more ramshackle than the rest too, and has vans and old VW buses out front instead of sleek long black sedans with tinted windows. I call it the hippie house. Maybe they grew up in the 60s and made their money in a dot.com instead of in the 80s and making their money managing or mis-managing other people's money.

I wonder if the occupants of the hippie house have to replace their Obama signs each morning in that little blue island in the sea of red up there.

I been hashing

It's been awhile. And I been runnin', finally. And bikin' (SmartBiking). My girlfriend says I've changed since I got back from the Grand Canyon. "People die," she assures me. "Life goes on. What's the matter with you?"

I dunno. She never liked my running anyway. It's always been between us. How could that be?

I raced a 5K on Saturday, the 7th annual Arlington 9/11 Memorial 5K at the Pentagon. It was my fifth running of it, and I brought it home in 24:15 (7:48). My right hammie seized up at MP 2 and I wondered if I could bring it in without walking. Since a former running student of mine was also running, I ran the whole way and dragged myself in a few seconds ahead of her. But now both hammies are on fire all the time. I dunno what's going on. I had even assiduously stretched beforehand.

I did a track W.O. yesterday (9X600, at 3:00 time). My hammies didn't get "warm" till about the fifth sequence.

This Palin thing has bothered me, a lot. I can see that she as governor (in my opinion) got into somebody else's custodial dispute in a big way, bringing that august office down hard upon the father of her nieces and nephews. Being a father who hasn't spoken meaningfully to any of my children in over five years, and whose three self-absorbed children haven't talked to a single relative of mine in over five years, thanks to American Domestic Law (which screws fathers), I am distraught that this vengeance seeking, anti woman's choice, celibacy espousing, gun toting, God-invoking former beauty queen lightweight has gained credence in America as a model for anything. Oh that's right, she wears lipstick and that's what differentiates her from a pit bull. But you could put lipstick on a pig and it'd still be a pig. Hey wait, suddenly you can't utter that venerable good ol' boy saying?

I been hashing, too.