Life in the Third Layer

Thanks to Not Larry Sabato for the link to the video of Mike Huckabee encouraging voter suppression at a Bob McDonnell rally:

Now, I suppose that since there was laughter we are supposed to think that the comments were intended to be a joke. But I grew up in a church where pastors and evangelists told and re-told a story about a church that was upset by a bar that was operating nearby. They met daily and prayed that the bar would cease operation, and after a few days it burned to the ground. The prayer group met the day after the fire to thank God for the answer to their prayers, and one elderly member was particularly joyful. She explained, “I was here every day to pray, but praise God yesterday I put some legs on my prayers.” This story was always greeted with “Amen” and appreciative chuckles, and nobody ever pointed out that arson is a crime.
So I am less inclined to laugh.

So I got e-mail today asking me to donate to AARP. It was a personal e-mail from Bill Novelli, the CEO. It said:
(No link. It’s my e-mail. But trust me, I think he sent it to more than one person…)

We want to break through partisan gridlock to create real and meaningful change. Because ensuring the health and financial security of all Americans is too big a task for one party to handle on its own ? this problem requires the ideas and support of both sides of the aisle.
The time for action is now. As health care costs continue to escalate at an alarming rate, coupled with an ailing economy, millions of Americans are facing growing holes in their retirement security.

Now during the Bush administration the AARP became a health insurance company. It supported the prescription drug plan designed by the drug manufacturers and left seniors falling into the doughnut hole and scrambling for new plans when their plan dropped their medication. Then it started a non-profit foundation so it could collect more donations.
Sure, I am going to donate now to a health insurance company. I am going to donate this:
Anybody who is a worker or an employer or a retiree or a disabled person or a parent or a child of adult parents has to be an idiot NOT to support national health care. If they donate money to a for-profit health care provider — even their non-profit advocacy arm — they are twice an idiot. Taking with your right hand and giving with your left doesn’t make you Robin Hood, and advocacy groups that expand into the arena they should be advocating against are just wrong.
And I also remember that one side of the aisle shoved us so close to the edge of the financial cliff with incompetence, cronyism, deregulation, wrong-headed flag-waving, and misguided so-called free-market ideology that a lot of people have lost their footing entirely. I am so impressed that now you see how we need a bipartisan effort to drag the survivors back before the rest of the shelf collapses.

In an entry titled “Ponzi Democracy,” Rory O’Connor, writing on his blog Media is a Plural, gives a brief history of the original Ponzi Scheme and asks ” Is it possible, I wonder, that there may be a connection between the deregulation of the media and the fact that the same media never warned us of the dangers of financial deregulation?”
If you are paying attention to the financial crisis (and who isn’t?) or to the Bernie Madoff story, this article is worth reading, as are the comments it is drawing.

It appears that the closest thing we have in the United States to a socialist state is Alaska.