Teabags, Food and Drugs

OK, I blew it. The Constitution, indeed, has a preamble, but that's not what John Boehner thought he was quoting the other day. I was pressed for time because I was behind in my emails due to the fact I was in a conference all day Thursday (and Friday) and no longer have a BlackBerry, since I am no longer employed at the National Institutes of Health.

Although I hate to jinx things until I get a desk and a BlackBerry on Nov. 23, I have been formally notified that I have been hired to join the public affairs staff of the Food and Drug Administration. I will have now worked in the private, nonprofit, academic and public sectors.

Ever since I left journalism near the end of the Reagan adminstration, I have worked in media relations and public information in organizations that did very little media and had very little public impact. This will be different.

FDA regulates at least 25 percent of the U.S. economy and, under this administration, it is hiring more people (yay!) and starting to actually enforce the laws and regulations necessitated by the predations of corporate bastards a hundred years ago. This is an agency that today's teabaggers would have opposed. Of course, they wouldn't be here today because their ancestors would have been killed by infection, chronic disease, poisoned food or industrial accidents that are the price conservatives believe is worth the fight against "socialism."

I don't know exactly what my duties will be, but I am pretty sure I will be on call 24/7 for responses to news inquiries about the latest drug or food recall and other crises. And that could either be the most energing job I have held since leaving the White House beat, or it could kill me.

It will cut the time I have for blogging, and I have a sneaking suspicion this blog may have to take on an entirely different tone, dammit!

When I was a kid, most adults I knew who didn't own their own business had a job that lasted for their entire career, and then they retired. Well, retirement now is in our hands -- my pension from UPI is paid by the federal government at a grand total of $199 a month after 18 years service -- and this will be my ninth job; 12 if I count college summer jobs and 13 if I count the 10 years of teaching once a week.

That's a lot of jobs, but luckily it is no longer stigmatic to move around.

I just got my annual Social Security Statement, and it was bracing for two reasons: I began earning money before Medicare existed! And I have earned since age 17 just a shade over $1.5 million. Which seems like a lot, but isn't that much when you average it out over the decades. Still, it is above the average salary for most Americans, and I consider myself not deserving of good economic fortune but lucky. And proud to pay taxes so that others can have a chance to share in what is good about this country by having the same educational and health opportunities that I had.

But that's not the America the all-white, Jew-hating ruminants that rallied at the Capitol on Thursday want. They want the country run by Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Jon "Midnight Cowboy" Voigt and John "artificial-coloring-added" Boehner. They support people who hold signs like the one posted in this space yesterday and they support terrorists like Greg Evensen whose views circulated through the right-wing blogosphere are summarized as "the choice is simple, the ballot box or the bullet box."

By the way, it was reported that during that teabag protest against government-run health care, five people apparently the least fit of the species, including one heart attack victim, were treated free by government-run health care.

Virginia is for Haters II

I wonder when assistant House minority leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, the only Republican Jew in the "people's house," will condemn this strain of hate dominating the teabagger movement that he is part of.


Probably he will only condemn the misspelling. If you don't know the import of this placard, imagine the holder wearing a white hood emblazoned with a swastika.

This sign, along with one depicting concentration camp corpses with health care reform, was part of a Capitol hate rally at which the buffoon minority leader, John Boehner (Cantor's superior), whipped out a pocket copy of the Constitution and read from its "preamble."

JohnBoy, the Constitution doesn't have a preamble. The Declaration of Independence does, and that's what you were reading.

Virginia is for Haters

Twenty years ago was 1989, not exactly the Dark Ages. Back then a law student at Pat Robert’s citadel of lower learning (Christian Broadcasting Network University now called Regent University) wrote a thesis called “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade.” It seems the decade in question was not the 1980s but the 1480s.

In the thesis, judged good enough to award the author both a master’s degree and a law degree, he opposed the Supreme Court ruling legalizing use of contraception by unmarried couples, said working women are detrimental to the family and that the government should make policy that favors married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”

He also advocated in the paper making it more difficult to divorce, imposing character education in public schools to teach Judeo-Christian values, and repealing federal tax credits for child care expenses because they encourage women to work. Oh, and the graduate income tax, in place since 1916, this scholar wrote is “socialist.”

Now, I wrote a bunch of stuff when I was in college that might not stand up today, but I was 22. The man I have quoted, was 34 years old with experience in the military and in the business world.

Today, he is the governor-elect of Virginia, a state (actually a commonwealth) that was the capital of the Confederacy, closed its public schools rather than integrate, made black/white marriages illegal and where I learned the N word and what the Stars and Bars were when I lived there as a child.

The progressive area of Virginia, home to many federal workers and contractors, is choked by traffic due to Republican refusal to do anything about transportation. The rest of the state is populated by country-club rednecks, militarists and ignoramuses.

After 12 years of moderate Democrats holding the governorship, the party lost today because it nominated a conservative who ran away from President Obama, holds generally Republican views, ran an unbelievably incompetent campaign and gave the liberals and blacks who gave Virginia to Obama last year absolutely nothing to vote for.

Too good to be true

An axiom often heard in a newsroom is, "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."

With that in mind, I offer up for amusement a Web site called "Overheard in the Newsroom." The title should be self-explanatory. These one-liners, never attributed by name of course, could form the basis of a retro sitcom about newspapers -- y'know, those things that used to have classified ads and movie listings.

While these bon mots are unverifiable, they sound real, which truthily is all you can ask for these days.

Congressional action

So, Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida is condemned for calling an aide to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke “ a K Street whore.” In Washington, that is a distinction from your run-of-the-mill “Logan Circle whore,” whose currency is actually measured in dollars per minute.

Apparently, the “W” word, which is used routinely in both politics and casual conversations to connote dishonesty, can be used now only when applied to a male.

Which brings me to Joe Lieberman, for whom “whore” is too kind a word. That he won the vice presidency in 2000 but was denied office is the only part of Gore v Bush that has any merit.

This filthy little lowlife who rose in politics by virtue of his being a Democrat, then turned against Al Gore, who had made little Joe a national figure, then refused to accept the fact that his home state Democrats voted to oust him from office, then got elected as an independent who promised to align himself with the Democrats so that they wouldn’t strip him of his committee chairmanships, then lusted after John McCain, now says he will personally block health care reform.

Now, a man is entitled to his opinions, but wouldn’t it be of general interest to know that the health care reform bill he can single-handedly block by joining a Republigoon filibuster, would create competition for the very industries he takes money from in exchange for his votes, even though by doing so he denies his own political heritage?

Where does Joe Lieberman come from? Connecticut. What is the insurance capital of the country? Hartford. What is the capital of Connecticut? Hartford. How much money has Joe Lieberman collected in his Senate career from doctors, insurance company and Big Pharma? Only $2.7 million.

You could get a whole of action at Logan Circle for one-1,000^th of that amount.