Lucubrations, Presidents Day Edition

Speaking of the ocean, the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is still covered in oil from the BP oil gusher, and is basically dead.

One thing I've never understood about this virulent opposition to health care reform is what kind of health insurance do those folks have? Don't they have the same experiences that just about everyone else does with this insane system? If they need more evidence, how about the experience of this woman who was denied health insurance because of a corn on her toe.

The battle goes on in Wisconsin, and Paul Krugman succinctly describes the stakes in terms of political power and the class war.

The Rabid Right takeover of the House resulted in the most absurd budget cuts in the nation's history. It is unlikely that all will stand, but enough will to wound this country and its people. Meanwhile, this insane view of government and the commonweal allows shit like this: "Of the nation’s 85,000 dams, more than 4,400 are considered susceptible to failure, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials."

None of this is new, of course. We're still being swept away by the currents that began to dominate in the regime of Ronald Reagan, who on this Presidents Day has won the poll for the greatest President ever. It was deep in the 1980s that Kurt Vonnegut wrote this:

"If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall?

Here's this old poop's suggestion:

WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD.

We might well add this:

AND TOO DAMN CHEAP."