Today in The New York Times, in a story “Republicans Join Vote to Override Water Bill Veto” By CARL HULSE, there is further proof that the horizontal hold on the reality tube appears to be out again. I don’t know if there are many people who remember what that effect did to the picture — it was a TV thing. Part or all of the picture lost the vertical line and turned into a wave pattern. You could watch it, but you couldn’t actually see it. If it was your favorite soap opera and the TV repairman was slow, you could listen to the dialog and just trust where the story was going based on what you heard. Only people who have watched soap operas know how risky that could be. For one thing, you couldn’t tell from the scrambled picture who overheard what was said, how they overheard it, or what their reaction was. In the soaps, as in politics, the dialog was one small level of a story with many hidden nuances, questionable associations, and subplots.
Apparently, the Bush base can accept a war that has lost millions in dollars and quite a few weapons and used borrowed money underwritten by us and our children to pay many times over for what they have not gotten once, but they are mad at Mr. Bush over his exorbitant spending on medical care:
Mr. Bush and Republican leaders are taking a harder line on spending out of a belief that voters in 2006 punished them for allowing federal spending to creep upward in the last six years and creating a costly new Medicare drug benefit.
Anybody up for comparing the cost of the drug benefit to the cost of the Iraq war? Who among Republicans is mad at the Bush II administration for creating a costly Medicare drug benefit? All of the profit goes into the pockets of his “base.” Remember, he let the drug companies make the plan themselves. That is like paying the fox to gather the eggs. The fox is complaining?
I am waiting for one example of the Bush II administration actually funding something that the people in the United States need. We need universal health care, secure retirement, disaster relief, roads and bridges, good schools, a safe food supply, a safe workplace, and energy independence. And we need a plan of action against terrorism that actually reduces the threat, not one that throws grease on the fire.
Life in the Third Layer 