Obama: he’s not heavy, he’s my half-brother

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about Obama’s somewhat-lookalike half-brother. Here’s a postscript:

Mark Obama Ndesandjo said he was surprised to hear his half-brother President Barack Obama say they had only recently met for the first time.

“I was floored by it ”” I don’t know why he said it,” Ndesandjo said to Laura Ingraham, adding that he had met the president several times over the years and still isn’t sure what his motivation was for making the claim. “I think he was being president and was not being my brother,” Ndesandjo said.

Maybe there was no motivation at all. Maybe Obama just didn’t find his half-brother important enough to remember. I don’t mean that sarcastically; I mean it literally. Obama doesn’t impress me as being a guy who’s much interested in his rather extended family.

Half-brother Ndesandjo is also too uncomfortably similar to Obama (youngish, similar-looking but somewhat more handsome, smart, and very well-educated) and yet uncomfortably different (non-narcissistic, self-effacing) from the guy who considers himself unique and uniquely wonderful. Ndesandjo is also of no particular political use to Obama or his myth, so why bother with him? He’s just a guy who doesn’t live in Obama’s neighborhood.

By the way, in case you were wondering…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this is the rule in California about illegal immigrants and Medicaid (known as “Medi-Cal” in that state):

For Medi-Cal, immigration status only affects the scope of service. The services that Medi-Cal provides to undocumented immigrants include, but are not limited to, emergency medical services, prenatal care, pregnancy-related services, nursing home care, and limited breast and cervical cancer treatment.

Of course, in other states, “undocumented immigrants” can get medical treatment via emergency rooms and what’s known as “emergency Medicaid.” But the California policy seems far more comprehensive, more planned and less reactive to circumstances. And what does that “not limited to” clause mean? Are there any limits to the coverage for illegal immigrants who qualify financially?

I confess to being stumped when it comes to the issue of Medicaid for illegal immigrants. The solution, of course, is to have prevented large numbers of illegals from coming here in the first place. But that horse is very much out of the barn. So now what do we do now? If so many millions of people can’t be deported (or if we lack the will to do so, which is pretty much the same thing), how can we allow them to die for want of treatment, especially the very many children among them?

It’s a huge dilemma, because the more services that are provided the more it entices new illegal immigrants to enter. And the more who enter, the more pressure there is to give them more services on humanitarian grounds.

You can see from the list of covered services in California that a significant number of them are geared to mothers and children (pregnancy and prenatal services, and breast and cervical cancer), as well as emergencies. Emergency services are the bottom line and there should probably be some provision for them, but what of nursing home care? Why should that be provided? And how is it possible to avoid the overuse of emergency services by illegal immigrants who might have coverage for emergencies but not for regular doctor visits?

Thanks for your Amazon purchases

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that the holidays are officially over I’d like to thank everyone who used my blog to order from Amazon during Christmas and Chanukah. You may have been buying gifts for your family and friends, but you also gave a gift to me.

And if you keep using neo-neocon to order from Amazon, it will be the gift that keeps on giving. Thanks so much!

The NY Times pleads Snowden’s case

The New Neo Posted on by

With its usual respect for details and logic (which means, “very little”), the New York Times says Edward Snowden should be given clemency and allowed back into the country. The title of the editorial, “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower,” sets the tone for inaccuracy, because the term is not applicable to Snowden whether you support him or not.

I’m not going to rehash the many many thousands of words I’ve already written on the subject of Snowden, but if you care to refresh your memory on that score, here they are.

It is no surprise at all that the Times wants to encourage the leaking of government secrets by insiders to newspapers rather than using the usual whistle-blower route that bypasses them. The Times still considers one of its finest hours and biggest triumphs to have been the publication of the Pentagon Papers (the WaPo was part of this as well) and the court case they won against Nixon’s effort to stop them.

Many of you may think the Times was heroic back then. But I call your attention to this and this:

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the [Pentagon Papers] documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.

But back to Edward Snowden. I have long contended that he used the method most damaging to the interests of the US and most self-aggrandizing, and that he showed either dangerous naivete or dangerous stupidity about the motives and agenda of the Chinese and the Russians. He should pay the price for stealing and then dumping classified information, and it doesn’t matter if you believe his intentions were good (I have grave doubts) and are glad we have the information about the NSA program (I am glad).

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air deals with the whistle-blower issue quite effectively:

The editorial presents a false binary choice ”” NSA officers or going on the lam. There are other channels, including presenting the evidence of wrongdoing to members of Congress. Snowden shrugged that off as well in his interview last month with the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, claiming that Congressional intel chairs’ “softball questions” to NSA and other intel leaders showed they wouldn’t do anything with the evidence if he provided it. That’s a dodge, though, especially since Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers aren’t the only two members of Congress. Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul were well-known opponents of domestic surveillance; why not go to them, or anyone else first before taking the cache elsewhere, especially to China and then Russia? The fact that the Times’ editors never even address that channel shows how weak their argument is ”” which is why they don’t really try to make the amnesty argument in the end.

The precedent that would be set by giving Snowden either amnesty or a reduced sentence would encourage future wannabees to do exactly what Snowden did. The security of our intelligence data—bad as it seems to be now—would become laughable.

Snowden is one of those topics that causes a firestorm of controversy whenever I tackle it, because he has many on the right and the left who defend him and consider him a hero. I have made it clear that I most definitely am not one of them.

[NOTE: See also this for some historical background about the Pentagon Papers.]

Dave Barry looks back at the year 2013…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and it’s not pretty.

But some of it is pretty funny:

…In a shocking interview, Lance Armstrong, after years of denial, admits to Oprah Winfrey that he took illegal drugs in all seven of his Tour de France victories, as well as using a motorcycle for certain stages of the race and “occasionally” shooting opponents with poison-tipped darts. Also he played “a small role” in the JFK assassination…

Washington faces another crisis in the form of a “sequester” that will happen automatically unless Congress can agree on a budget, which seems unlikely inasmuch as Congress cannot agree on what planet this is. If the sequester goes into effect, federal spending will continue to rise, but not quite as fast as it would have risen without the sequester. To a normal human, this means government spending is still increasing, but to Washington, the sequester means “draconian cuts” and is a looming disaster of epic proportions. Panic grips the city, as grim-faced former student council presidents write talking points far into the night…

…Kerry, continuing to stress the dire urgency of the [Syria] situation, compares Assad to Hitler, only to declare a few days later ”” moments before his aides are able to fell him with a tranquilizer dart ”” that any strike against Assad will be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” President Obama clarifies this by stating that “the United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.”

Just when it seems as if there is no good way out of the Syria mess, help miraculously arrives in the form of our generous old friends the Russians, who, despite being longtime allies of Syria, are willing to lend us a helping hand without any thought of benefiting themselves. Under their plan, Assad gets to remain in power but must give up his chemical weapons and go back to killing people in a more humane, less Hitlerish way. With the crisis averted, everybody in Washington heaves a sigh of relief, and that is the last we hear about the crisis in Syria…

…In other foreign-affairs news, Dennis Rodman travels to North Korea for a loon-to-loon meeting with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, who presents the former NBA star with a commemorative set of 50 political prisoners…

Diana Nyad completes an unprecedented swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat made all the more difficult by the fact that she had a family of five clinging to her back…

…[T]he federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park ”” ALL of it ”” is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

By day 17, the situation has become so dire that Congress, resorting to desperate measures, decides to actually do something. It passes, and the president signs, a law raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring that the federal government can continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have until the next major totally unforeseeable government financial crisis, scheduled for February 2014.

Things do not go nearly as smoothly with the rollout of Obamacare , which turns out to have a lot of problems despite being conceived of by super-smart people with extensive experience in the field of being former student council presidents. The federal Web site, Healthcare.gov, is riddled with glitches, resulting in people being unable to log in, people getting cut off, people being electrocuted by their keyboards, people having their sensitive financial information suddenly appear on millions of TV screens during episodes of “Duck Dynasty,” etc.

Fortunately, as the initial rush of applicants tapers off, the system starts to work a little better, and by the end of the second week U.S. Secretary of Blame Kathleen Sebelius is able to announce that the program has amassed a total enrollment, nationwide, of nearly two people, one of whom later turns out to be imaginary. But this is not good enough for a visibly angry and frustrated and, of course, surprised President Obama, who promises to get the Web site fixed just as soon as somebody answers the Technical Support hotline, which has had the White House on hold for 73 hours…

On the Obamacare front, the administration declares that the federal Web site has been significantly improved, although there are still occasional glitches, such as one that enables a Milwaukee woman seeking to compare dental plans to accidentally launch a tactical nuclear strike against Guatemala. But as Secretary of Blame Sebelius notes, “This kind of thing happens all the time with Orbitz.”

Imperfect Polly

The New Neo Posted on by

Today in the wee hours of the morning I saw an ad for this on TV (warning: autoplay video at the link). It is being marketed as the perfect pet—no upkeep and no bother, and yet reactive to your presence: a mechanical parakeet that moves its head and tail and sings its not-especially-mellifluous parakeet song when you look at it.

“Head & Tail Feathers Move Realistically!” “Sits on its Perch…Or Your Finger!” Has it come to this? Apparently.

Perfect Polly’s promoters might consider it flawless (or would certainly like you to think so), but Amazon customers who’ve ordered it seem to consider it a piece of bird excrement. It’s not the concept they have trouble with (after all, they liked it enough to have purchased it), it’s the execution. Apparently the bird is shoddily made and doesn’t quite work, and the its voice is very faint.

But for me the toy conjures up Hans Christian Anderson’s cautionary tale “The Nightingale”:

Then the artificial bird had to sing alone. It was just as great a success as the real one, and then it was so much prettier to look at; it glittered like bracelets and breast-pins.

It sang the same tune three and thirty times over, and yet it was not tired; people would willingly have heard it from the beginning again, but the emperor said that the real one must have a turn now-but where was it? No one had noticed that it had flown out of the open window, back to its own green woods.

That’s not the end of the story, of course.

nightingale

Roman aqueducts weren’t built in a day

The New Neo Posted on by

We all know those Roman aqueducts, the arched wonders of the ancient world. But did you ever wonder what happened afterward, on the way to Rome (where all roads led, as well)?

For example, I had not known until I read this article that the bulk of the famed Roman aqueduct system was underground:

“The famous arched, over-ground aqueducts we see today are just the tip of the iceberg; 95% of the network ran underground,” says Marco Placidi, head of the speleologists group [engaged in mapping the system], which is sharing its results with Italy’s culture ministry.

Slaking the thirst of the fast-growing imperial capital meant linking it to springs many miles from the city. The ancient Roman engineers were equal to the task, supplying a quantity of water that modern engineers didn’t manage to match until the 1930s.

One of the aqueducts is still in use today. Now, that’s infrastructure! And others might have survived as well, had not the German tribes dealt them some parting blows back in the fall-of-the-empire days. The system was built with incredible solidity.

Welcoming 2014

The New Neo Posted on by

I like the look of the year so much better: “2014” is prettier than “2013.” And yes, that’s very numberist of me.

Fresh start. Clean slate. Even rather than odd. And right now I’m doing the two huge loads of laundry I’ve put off for a while.

And since I don’t drink, I don’t even have a hangover.

How about you?

The no-politics post

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got hundreds (literally) of drafts for posts on the blog ready and waiting to be polished and put up (about half of them seem to be on the subject of Obamacare). But no matter; I’m not doing it today.

For one thing, I lost the prime time for writing earlier, when my host went down for several hours. But maybe it was a blessing in disguise, because do we really have to have more politics today? It’s New Year’s Eve, after all.

So I’m going to be wild and frivolous. Or what passes for wild and frivolous in my life these days, which is to can politics for the rest of the day/evening and go out to eat.

Hope you have something very fun to do. Or, if you just want to spend a quiet evening at home with those you like and/or those you love or even alone, that’s fine too. New Year’s Eve is a strange holiday, a cross between the raucous and the solemn, and you can go either way or just keep it low-key.

My resolution? Same as always, and some day I might even keep it: go to bed earlier.

Happy New Year!

Separated at birth

The New Neo Posted on by

They didn’t look the least bit alike when they were young.

But in their declining/mature/twilight/golden years, they rather do (except for the ‘stache and some extra eyebrow bushiness):

m2

s2