My pseudonymous buddy in Iran now has a blog! Check out the Brooding Persian!
Steal Big, Steal Bigger?
(Here’s the From the Editor page of my magazine this month)
A recent New York Times article, “Fraud Kicks in Months Ahead of Medicare Drug Discount Card,” discussed the practice of con artists going door-to-door selling ‘Medicare-approved’ drug discount cards, despite the fact that the drug discount program has yet to be instituted and enrollment doesn’t begin for a few more months. This con preys on the fears and vulnerabilities of the elderly and the infirm, for whom prescription drugs are an utter necessity. People who perpetrate this scam are base, venal liars who should go to jail.
Who on earth can wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to go out today and defraud desperate, uninformed people’? I mean, besides Congress and the White House. After all, what should be done to the people who pushed the Medicare prescription plan through Congress while lying about its projected cost? There’s fraud, and then there’s $134 billion dollars in costs that were conveniently ignored till the bill was passed.
President Bush, who’s already run budget deficits beyond the wildest dreams of any supply-side economist (please note that I’m referring to massive growth in domestic, discretionary spending, not military spending, which I believe is warranted), contended that he would only promote a plan with a total cost of $400 billion. So the plan was shoe-horned to fit that number and gain approval, but “revised estimates” now show it will reach an estimated $534 billion.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me how much I think the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan would ultimately cost. I facetiously replied, “All the money in Moneyville.” It’s my belief that the plan will never actually come to fruition and has been pushed through Congress as a means to win the votes of senior citizens. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t always been this cynical, but this level of mendacity is maddening, regardless of which political party perpetrates it.
The vote to approve the plan largely fell on partisan lines. I write ‘largely’ because some Republicans did fail to vote for the White House’s program. One of those Representatives, Nick Smith (R-MI), claimed he was offered $100,000 toward his son’s Congressional campaign in exchange for a vote in favor of the plan. As Robert Novak, a right-wing political columnist, wrote last November:
“On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father’s vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, [Rep.] Duke Cunningham [R-CA] and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.”
Why did Rep. Smith stick to his guns and vote against the plan? Because he feared the White House was underestimating (not necessarily lying about) the cost of the plan!
As Bob Dylan once ‘sang,’ “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.”
–Gil Roth
P.S.: In a similar vein, I’m happy that ImClone’s Erbitux received FDA approval for treating advanced metastatic colon cancer, and I hope that the drug helps extend the lives (and the quality of life) for cancer patients and shows effectiveness in treating other types of cancer. The former chief executive officer of ImClone, Samuel Waksal, was also pretty happy about the approval. In a recent statement, he wrote, “My drug is everything I said it was and it would not be here were it not for me.”
The only problem I can find with this remark is this: Dr. Waksal wrote it from jail, where he will spend seven years of his life for trying to illegally dump every last share he owned of ImClone, because he knew the FDA was going to reject the drug’s initial NDA.
Don’t get me wrong; we’re all delusional in our own way, but when your words disconnect that much from your actions, you belong in one of two places: jail or Washington, D.C.
The Geography of Nowhere
Ian Frazier writes about Route 3 in the new issue of the New Yorker:
On long walks through suburbs whose names I sometimes can’t keep straight — Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, Brookside, Nutley, Passaic, Garfield, Lodi, Hasbrouck Heights, Hackensack, Teaneck, Leonia — I’ve encountered the New Jersey miscellany up close. Giant oil tanks cluster below expensive houses surrounded by hedges not far from abandoned factories with high brick smokestacks; a Spanish-speaking store that sells live chickens is near a Polish night club off a teeming eight-lane highway; a Greek church on a festival day roasts goats in fifty-five-gallon drums in its parking lot down the road from tall white Presbyterian churches that were built when everything around was countryside. Neighborhoods go from fancy to industrial to shabby without apparent reason, and you can’t predict what the next corner will be.
Funny thing is, I had the same sensation of unpredictability when I was wandering Paris in October 2002.
As neurotic as I am . . .
. . . I probably shouldn’t read this magazine.
(I swear: sometimes, this blog just writes itself . . .)
Go ape!
I love my town. It may not be NYC, but it’s still got some funny shit going on.
You Are Not a Beautiful, Unique Snowflake
Alexandra Wolfe on the deleterious effects of TMPR (Too Much Positive Reinforcement):
We’ve become so inured to the idea that a person’s self-assessment need not be changed by a little thing like repeated and utter failure that no one was the least surprised when Joe Lieberman took so long to throw in the towel. Before New Hampshire, he said, “The people of New Hampshire put me in the ring, and that’s where we’re going to stay.” Jon Stewart on The Daily Show put it best: “When did our elections become the Special Olympics? You’re not all winners. Not everybody gets a hug. You guys got crushed.”
Sorry I haven’t posted anything in 10 days. I’ve been busy at work, traveling for a conference, and doing a lot of formulating for longer essayistic VM entries (pop music, foreign policy, translations of love, and the white whale I call Gold/Stopwatch).
Also, I’ve been battling a mini-depression, but I like to pretend I’ve overcome it (of course, if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this sort of thing at 12:30am on Sunday/Monday, but hey).
Happy Anniversary
I want to write about writing today. Today marks the one-year anniversary of Virtual Memories, a mark I’m proud of. The very first entry was just a silly note to see how this whole Blogger-setup worked. Since then, I’ve written about a ton of subjects, and sometimes I’ve done written pretty well.
I want to thank everyone who’s read my entries, even those of you who only ended up here because of the vagaries of search engines. (Who knew that there are only nine pages in the Internet that Google will refer you to if you enter “Michael Imperioli goatee,” and that VM is one of them?)
Burst
Neat article at BusinessWeek about how Dean’s collapse mirrors the dot-com bubble. Compare and contrast with this Washington Post article about how Dean’s campaign sidestepped the traditional organizational structure of the Democratic party. I guess you could substitute “sidestepped the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail structure” for that part, if you want to feel like it’s 1999 all over again.
“The Parkers” and the WMD question
Here’s a transcript of a GREAT interview with Mo’Nique.
However, to get to it, you’ll have to read a conversation with Christopher Hitchens about the invasion of Iraq, faulty intelligence, Mel Gibson’s historical anti-semitism, Bloomberg’s attempt at Disney-fying NYC, and more. Here’s a piece from Hitchens:
My allegiances have changed in the sense that I now find the noises made on the left–which are basically to the effect that we shouldn’t have intervened in Serbia, we shouldn’t have intervened in Afghanistan, we shouldn’t have intervened in Iraq–would have left us with Slobodan Milosevic in power, Bosnia ethnically cleansed, Kosovo part of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iraq the property of a psychopathic crime family. Now, I’m sorry to say, I’ve no patience with that leftist mentality anymore.
And here’s a piece from Mo’Nique:
And I love people. Yeah. You know why, though? Because for so long, we’ve been taught that big girls can’t be. We can’t be sexy, and we can’t be glamorous and gorgeous. We’ve been trained that we can’t do that. So, when Mo’Nique came and God said, “I need you to change it. I need to use you as a vessel and change it…” I know that I’m beautiful. So because I know it, you can’t help but to think it. When I walk in a room, I know you go, “Damn.” There it is. Right. Oh, Tavis, don’t do it, ’cause you know. Mm-hmm. In a minute. But I know that. So when people say, “How did you do that?” I don’t take any of the credit. You know, I just say thank God for using me for the vessel.
I keep meaning to write about the panel/debate on “Iraq & Beyond” that I attended last Friday evening, which featured Hitchens, Susan Powers, David Frum and Mark Danner. But I’ve been too lazy/tired during the evenings. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll find some time this weekend.
Rock the House
From the NY Observer‘s new article on Chris Rock:
A lot of Mr. Rock�s show is dedicated to the U.S. as he knows it in 2004. Saying that he loves rap but has grown tired of defending it, Mr. Rock said that “even the United States government hates rap. You know why I say that? Because they won’t arrest anybody that kills rappers.” After contending that more people saw Tupac Shakur’s killing — which took place on the Las Vegas Strip after a Mike Tyson fight — “than the last episode of Seinfeld,” he said: “You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fucking hole, but you can’t tell me who shot Tupac?”