Steve McQueen: tough guy

The New Neo Posted on by

On the Fourth of July, I posted a short clip from the Steve McQueen movie, “The Great Escape.” It got me thinking about the actor, one of the huge crushes of my youth (and not really limited to my youth, either). So I became curious about his life, and what might have made him the singular personality he was.

His Wiki bio tells us quite a few things. The first is that although McQueen was a good actor, he came by that tough-guy exterior honestly. He came up the hard way.

The second is that it’s not always best when a child is raised by a parent. For McQueen, the best thing that ever happened to him when he was growing up was to be rejected by his alcoholic mother and raised by his great uncle. Unfortunately, she kept asking for him back, and whenever he returned to her, trouble ensued. The next best thing that happened to him when he was young was to have been labeled incorrigible as a result of his stepfather’s petition, and placed in California Junior Boys Republic in Chino, California. The third best thing was that McQueen finally decided to get with the program when he was a Marine.

And the fourth best thing was to have discovered acting; if not for that, he probably would have lived a life of petty crime.

A few interesting factoids about McQueen’s career: he was in one film called “Never Love a Stranger” (1958) and another entitled “Love with the Proper Stranger” (1963). The first had the following improbable plot and casting:

The noir film is about Frankie Kane (Barrymore) who is brought up in a Catholic orphanage. He befriends a Jewish law student named Martin Cabell (McQueen) and becomes romantically involved with Cabell’s sister Julie (Milan). Kane learns later that he is also Jewish, and when told he will be removed from the orphanage and moved to a Jewish home he runs away and turns to a life of crime. Later, after joining a major crime syndicate, he reconnects with Julie, finally deciding to join Martin, now a District Attorney in shutting down the syndicate.

McQueen as a Jewish lawyer?

And then there’s this:

McQueen had an unusual reputation for demanding free items in bulk from studios when agreeing to do a film, such as electric razors, jeans and several other products. It was later found out that McQueen requested these things because he was donating them to the Boy’s Republic reformatory school for displaced youth, where he had spent time during his teen years. McQueen made occasional visits to the school to spend time with the students, often to play pool and to speak with them about his experiences.

And this:

McQueen was conservative in his political views and often backed the Republican Party. He did, however, campaign for Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964 before voting for Republican Richard Nixon in 1968. He supported the Vietnam War, was one of the few Hollywood stars who refused numerous requests to back Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy…

Somehow it’s not really surprising that McQueen might have been a political conservative.

[ADDENDUM: How could I have written an entire post about Steve McQueen without including any pictures?

Let’s remedy that:

Obama gets mad

The New Neo Posted on by

This was either an exaggeration of what really happened, a strategically-orchestrated temper tantrum, or the beginning of the breakdown some people have expected from the brittle Obama from the start.

I vote for #2.

The Times—and the White House— tackle the story of his mother’s fight with insurance companies

The New Neo Posted on by

[My previous post on Obama’s misrepresentations about his mother’s health insurance problems can be found here.]

Perhaps the NY Times decided to cover this story because the author of the Ann Dunham biography is a former writer for the newspaper, who took a leave of absence to write the book. But still, it’s a bit surprising that they do so at all, and that their treatment seems relatively fair.

The White House has not denied the facts. Its basic position is that Obama doesn’t know:

“We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” said Nicholas Papas, the spokesman. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”

And of course, even if he was wrong, he was right:

Mr. Papas suggested that even if Ms. Scott was correct, Mr. Obama had not mischaracterized the facts because his mother needed her disability insurance payments to cover unreimbursed medical costs.

“As Ms. Scott’s account makes clear, the president’s mother incurred several hundred dollars in monthly uncovered medical expenses that she was relying on insurance to pay,” Mr. Papas said. “She first could not get a response from the insurance company, then was refused coverage. This personal history of the president’s speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs.”

Gay marriage and religious freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

Although gay marriage was approved by the legislature on New York, opponents are vowing to fight on. They propose a state amendment to ban gay marriage, although my sense is that passage would be an uphill battle—especially since there is no referendum process available in New York.

The original legislation contained an important clause protecting (for now) churches from being forced to perform gay marriages if it violates their beliefs. But it lacked protection for any other group or individual that might have a similar problem. The repercussions could have been predicted, and actions such as that of Laura L. Fotusky, who resigned as town clerk of Barker, NY because performing such marriages would violate her religious beliefs, might be followed by similar actions on the part of others facing the same dilemma.

The result will be that religious people with a traditional belief system such as Ms. Fotusky’s will be effectively barred from serving as town clerks in the state of New York, or they will face the possibility of lawsuits or violating their consciences if they do stay in such positions. Would the same be true of caterers and others who specialize in servicing those who are getting married?

The situation for town clerks is clear:

City and town clerks are in an unusual position, because they are government officials. On Long Island, the Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen M. Rice, sent a sternly worded letter to clerks last week, warning that they could be subject to criminal prosecution if they declined to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“I want to ensure that our local officials appreciate that there will be ramifications in our county for exercising a personal, discriminatory belief, rather than doing their job,” Ms. Rice said Tuesday.

Ms. Rice’s characterization of their attitude as “personal” and “discriminatory” is personal and discriminatory itself, because beliefs founded in a religion that’s been a going concern for two thousand years are more of a group/institutional thing than some personal idiosyncrasy. Plus—at least until the NY legislation was passed less than three weeks ago—the belief that marriage remained the province of man and woman was considered mainstream and nondiscriminatory.

No doubt Ms. Rice, who is a DA, chose her words carefully in order to downplay and/or ignore the real issue here, which is religious freedom, a supposedly protected right. It is the same issue involved in protecting hospital and health care workers who refuse on religious grounds to participate in abortions that run counter to their belief system.

McConnell’s proposal: it’s not kabuki, it’s harakiri

The New Neo Posted on by

The Wall Street Journal explains Mitch McConnell’s strategy in saying Republicans should let Obama raise the debt limit himself:

Mr. McConnell would then let the President propose three debt-limit increases adding up to $2.5 trillion over the coming months. Senate Republicans (with Majority Leader Harry Reid’s cooperation) would use a convoluted procedure to vote for three resolutions of disapproval on the bills. Mr. Obama could veto the resolutions and 34 Democrats could vote to sustain. The President would get his debt-limit increase, but without Republicans serving as his political wingmen.

The hotter precincts of the blogosphere were calling this a sellout yesterday, though they might want to think before they shout. The debt ceiling is going to be increased one way or another, and the only question has been what if anything Republicans could get in return. If Mr. Obama insists on a tax increase, and Republicans won’t vote for one, then what’s the alternative to Mr. McConnell’s maneuver?

Republicans who say they can use the debt limit to force Democrats to agree to a balanced budget amendment are dreaming. Such an amendment won’t get the two-thirds vote to pass the Senate, but it would give every Democrat running for re-election next year a chance to vote for it and claim to be a fiscal conservative.

Here’s the downside as described by Stephen F. Hayes, and it’s considerable:

The plan isolates House Republicans, it undercuts their (tentative) plan to offer an aggressive debt limit proposal of their own, it turns their principled intransigence from a possible strength to a certain liability, and it virtually ensures that, in the event of default, Republicans ”“ not the White House ”“ will be blamed…

An alternative strategy sounds as though it would have been better, although still fraught with peril:

The chances the White House would have been blamed could well have increased if House Republicans had decided to move forward with their own aggressive proposal ”“ in effect, daring Harry Reid and President Obama to choose to reject it. While this option was discussed at length, there were two main concerns: 1) an aggressive and specific plan puts Republicans once again on the record voting for things that can be easily demagogued by Democrats; and, 2) the opposition to voting to increase the debt limit in the House is strong enough that coming up with a plan that would pass the House and tempt Democrats would have been difficult, if not impossible. Had House Republicans been able to craft such a plan they would have forced a choice on Senate Democrats and the White House: austerity or default. In such a scenario, President Obama, having warned repeatedly about the catastrophic consequences of default, would have had to defend that choice if he refused to accept the House GOP plan. A high-risk strategy, to be sure, but one with at least the possibility of succeeding.

The McConnell plan may be moot, anyway, because it doesn’t have much support from other Republicans:

As one might expect, the House Republican reaction to the McConnell plan was almost uniformly negative. “The rank-and-file were ripping him today,” says one House Republican.

It seems to me that Obama has Congressional Republicans over a barrel. But I can’t say they ever had a lot of great alternatives, although I think the more aggressive approach outlined by Hayes would have been the best open to them. The Wall Street Journal piece describes the impediments to Republican goals quite succinctly:

…[B]ut the truth is that Mr. Obama has more cards to play.

The entitlement state can’t be reformed by one house of Congress in one year against a determined President and Senate held by the other party. It requires more than one election.

So I’m not sure what all those Japanese metaphors are about. A card game metaphor, as in the quote above, seems much more apt.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away and know when to run
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealing’s done

You know that story about Obama’s mother’s health insurance? Well…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it turns out that Obama’s story of his mother’s health insurance woes was misleading—to put the nicest spin on it. The facts have come out in a new biography of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the relatively young age of 52.

I have no doubt that it was a sad and horrific experience for both Dunham and her entire family. But Obama’s narrative about it—which he’s offered in many addresses about the perils of health care insurance in this country—is that, in addition to struggling with the illness itself, his mother had to wrestle with insurance companies determined to deny her health coverage due to their assertion of a pre-existing condition:

“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.

“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.

Dunham’s biographer Janny Scott was not writing a hit job on Obama or his mother. The book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, is basically admiring. But Ms. Scott’s research inadvertently revealed facts about Dunham’s final illness that elucidate her son’s story:

Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment,” Scott writes. “Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, “filed a separate claim under her employer’s disability insurance policy.” It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham’s condition was known before she was covered by the policy.

What’s the difference? Well, if Obama is using the story to illustrate the problems with health insurance coverage and it actually involves a job-related disability insurance policy, that’s a very different animal. What’s more, if a person is refused coverage for cancer treatment as a whole, this involves a huge amount of money and yes, it could easily bankrupt even a working person. But being refused coverage for the deductible and uncovered expenses, which apparently came to a couple of thousand dollars a year, is hardly the sort of story that’s required if the goal is to alarm people. So, best to imply that things were even worse.

If you go back and look at the Obama quotes above, you’ll note an interesting phenomenon: he never actually says that it was his mother’s health insurance company that denied coverage—although he’s using the argument in the health care coverage debate, and he has to know that almost every listener will assume that’s what he meant. Instead, he carefully uses the words “insurance” and the word “medical bills.”

Technically, it was insurance that was involved—but it was disability insurance. And technically, there were indeed uncovered medical bills—but they only involved a deductible and incidental and relatively minor payments. The bulk of the bills were paid, and by Dunham’s health insurance.

Ah, but maybe Obama just didn’t know the details. That might be true, except for one little thing—Scott reports that, after the disability payments were denied, Ann Dunham wrote the company (CIGNA) a letter saying that “she was turning over the case to ‘my son and attorney, Barack Obama.'” So we can assume that Obama was well aware of the facts. And technically, he’s not actually lying when he says she was trying to get money from insurance to pay for medical expenses. But to use the story to imply that she was denied health insurance coverage is purposely misleading—but being misleading is Obama’s specialty.

[NOTE: As far as bankrupting the family goes—in the 90s Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago, as well as an attorney at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He was already married but he and Michelle had no children, and she was gainfully employed as well. Of course, it’s not required that Obama pay his mother’s health care cost overrun, but to claim that health care expenses of a few hundred dollars a month threatened to bankrupt “our family,” as Obama stated, seems ludicrous.]

So, is it kabuki theater?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I used the phrase “kabuki theater” to describe the debt ceiling machinations between the president and Congress. I didn’t exactly think I was making a unique observation, but apparently I was stepping into one of the most overused memes in the blogosphere; I’ve been surprised how very many articles about the debt ceiling negotiations use the very same phrase to describe them (see this, for example).

In that context, “kabuki theater” means something like this: a tale of smoke and mirrors, full of sound and fury, and signifying almost nothing. A big production, mostly for show, utilizing stylized movement, while the real action goes on behind the scenes.

Is kabuki really like that? Well, kind of. It’s certainly not naturalistic, and it features a great deal of elaborate disguise and stage machinery. And in kabuki, only men can participate.

Decide for yourself whether the analogy holds—but I think you’ll agree that kabuki has a great deal more grandeur and grace than politics:

Will Obama and his base kiss and make up?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed that Obama’s base has become pretty much fed up with him by now. Although the right (and I include myself here) thinks he’s far to the left, and that any conciliatory gestures he makes are just a pose to garner votes in 2012, the left is furious at what they see as his betrayal and regards him as little better than Bush.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the comments section here. Former Obama supporters are alienated, big time.

Not atypical is this cri de coeur:

I just hung up on an Obama fundraiser. I’m done. It’s long past time to slam the door on this Republican-lite loser, the worst leader I’ve seen in the White House in my lifetime.

Alcoholics and drug abusers often have to hit bottom before they can truly accept their conditions and begin to recover. I think the US has to do the same. Why else would we continue to vote for””as George Carlin put it”””rich assholes who don’t care about you” in both parties, voting against our own interests, unless we are in deep, deep denial as a people? I think it’s going to take the shock of the loss of millions of votes to make the Democrats wake up and realize they can’t govern by being just slightly less bad than the Tea Party. If they want our support, then it’s time to man up, lead based on the values that we progressives have ascribed to them, and keep their fucking campaign promises.

But as long as they think they have the votes because the Republicans are so much worse, why lead at all? Why not elect a fifth columnist like Obama, who’s clearly the leader of the only political party in the country, The Corporate Party (TM)? I submit the only way to wake up the millions of voters in this country anesthetized by the media and their own apathy is to show them just how BAD things can get under Republican leadership. It would be worth 4 years of President Bachmann to get that kind of kick in the ass.

Does this strike a familiar note? To me, it’s the mirror image of what I see on the right from people who are angry at RINOs and who don’t want a relative moderate such as Romney as nominee, threatening to declare a plague-on-both-your-houses if such a thing were to happen.

I’ve never believed in that sort of scorched earth policy. And it’s an especially bad idea with an Obama second term likely as a result. Make no mistake about it: if those who say Obama is a man of the far left are correct, and he is elected to a second term, he will no longer have to worry about re-election and currying favor with moderate voters. His entire four year second term can then be devoted to doing whatever he can to further a far left program, much of which could be difficult if not impossible to undo.

It would certainly make his base happy, too.

Obama’s debt ceiling presser

The New Neo Posted on by

Just now I happened to listen to President Obama’s press conference on the debt ceiling negotiations. He talked an unsurprising “each side must compromise” line and made himself out to be the great conciliator.

I find the entire process at this point to be so much kabuki theater. My prediction is that the debt ceiling will be raised at the last possible minute before the deadline, and that we have no idea which side will end up blinking first and most often.

In the meantime, uncertainty breeds financial jitters; note a stock market drop today.