Tina Dupuy

The other day I bought allergy medication at a massive national chain drug store. I found the display of everything to ease my hay fever right next to some freshly cut flowers, which just so happens to be what I’m most allergic to. I was in a retail establishment and the treatment was right next to the irritant. Like a strip club that’s also a divorce law firm.

My experience is pretty low level when you consider most pharmacies these days are nestled in the middle of a fully-stocked convenience store. So if you’re say, diabetic you have to pass the candy aisle (twice) to get your insulin. In fact everyone with health issues related to poor diet goes to the pharmacy only to stare at the corn crunches and processed meats offered in close proximity to the appetite suppressants. Not to mention the stop smoking aids adjacent to the cigars. And yes, our commercial mega-drug stores sell cigarettes. So when you’re getting refills on your heap of emphysema treatments, you won’t have to make a second stop to get some smokes.

It’s convenience. It’s what the consumer wants. It’s offering “choices.”

The premise of today’s giant drug stores is one giant conflict of interest. Where would junk food sell better than as an impulse item while you’re standing in line to get your gout medication? Anywhere else this would be called double-dipping. It’s insider trading via Twinkie vice. It’s much like a creditor also investing in credit default swaps: the drugs stores benefit from poor health and the habits that get people there.

Would you feel comfortable at a hospital that also had a booming casket business? Convenience.

We are so used to this business model for pharmaceutical retail, we don’t even notice anymore. It doesn’t even occur to us that this is unscrupulous. Because when something is rampant and wide-spread it becomes normal. We get used to the neon sign flashing, we stop seeing it.

It’s also a metaphor for the health care in this country. The discussion over reform was hijacked by slogans about killing your elderly relatives instead of, well, health, and the caring of health. Our basic pharmacies have been buried by corporate interests spurned on by our own debilitating laziness and demand for kettle chips everywhere we go. So it becomes a chicken or the egg debate. Which came first? Did our health care get this way because we stopped caring about our health or did we stop caring about our health because health care got this way?

Either way we’ve been distracted by shiny objects whispering a promise of momentary happiness right near the shelves of birth control neighboring baby bottles (and in California, booze).We look at our health care insurance like our doctors, our drug store like our pharmacist. They’re not the same thing. One is a health care provider, bound by ethical obligations. The other is a corporation who regardless of what the Supreme Court rules doesn’t have a conscience and its only obligation is to make money for its shareholders. But we trust a component (our doctor) and therefore give the entire system a pass.

This mistake is not making us healthier, just the “health-related” businesses.

Sarah Palin will always be a Hail Mary Pass. She is a last-ditch, slapdash shot for a win. Regardless of facts, faux pas or folly, conservatives will continue to tout her as an asset as long as she continues to act like a battering ram to their opposition. If she still throws jabs, utterly doe-eyed to the implications (i.e. ripping on teleprompters in a prepared speech), the dreaded “elites” of her party will still use her for what she’s worth.

She’ll stay a paid contributor on Fox News and the others on the same payroll will try and gush over how great she is, her best quality being liberals “hate” her. Because everything liberals hate must be good. The enemy of Fox News’ enemy is always good for the country. The bar will continue to be set lower and Palin will sink deeper into self-parody as she becomes even less blinking, more emboldened and more resigned to her belief some divine force (bigger than her PAC even) wants her to be the President of the United States.

Serious conservatives don’t want their voice to be a folksy fibbing bridge to nowhere. They don’t want a tabloid queen who writes snarky half-baked Facebook entries to the White House Chief of Staff to be their nominee in 2012. But their deal with the devil is they enjoy Palin’s swift merciless offense from the sidelines and because of that “talent” she will be given the lectern. And therefore some legitimacy as a “thinker.”

Her enthusiasts mark her media storm as the reason why she’s a leader in the party (some party, whether it be the Tea Party she’s now synonymous with or the RNC which she fits right into). But equating someone’s ability to lead with the ability to get coverage is like saying Britney Spears’ singing voice is the reason she was the object of an extended media frenzy. It’s simply not true.

Being just super and awesome is not what makes the media obsessed with you. It’s actually the opposite. Being horribly flawed and recklessly stupid gives people something to use all those “barrelsful of ink” on. If Palin were competent we’d be bored with her by now. There would be no story. It’s her incompetence coupled with this brazen lust for power and the lack of any self-irony or doubt that sparks the press. It’s certainly not her ideas, because they are not hers or ideas. They’re overly-digested Republican platitudes. And candidly, fact-checking Palin is like critiquing a squirrel on his algebra.

Senator John McCain’s choosing the then Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was a myopic gamble to get a bump in the polls. He got it for a couple of days, until Palin was vetted in press. Because of this staggering snafu, there were moments in the campaign where Palin appeared more like a wife than a running mate. After the McCain campaign got to know her “challenges” (ethical and otherwise), the team covered for her as she galvanized voters to elect Barack Obama in a landslide.

But as Donald Rumsfeld once said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. The right-wing picking up the pieces found Palin. She’s clearly lacking, but she’s the best they have at the moment. There’s a degree of pessimism in conservative groups like News Max and others buying her book in bulk to inflate the sale numbers. It shows they didn’t think it could do well on its merits. Moreover letting Palin in on what softball questions you are going lob at her in front of an adoring crowd (as indicated by her writing the answers on her palm) shows Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation didn’t think Palin could do well on merits either.

The more she’s excused, rationalized and hyped by the right-wing, the more she’ll become a symbol of cynicism for conservatives. If they’re peddling Palin, it shows they’ve given up. Or to quote the source, “How’s that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?”

This piece appeared originally at True/Slant

The knee-jerk “government is bad” argument against health care reform, the jobs bill or banking regulations is always “it creates more bureaucracy.” This is mainly from Republicans who want to be called lawmakers. Yes, there are people working in the government – gladly cashing their government paychecks – whose default is always that the government is incompetent. And admitting government can’t do anything right actually, sometimes, gets them elected.Which is like hiring a mechanic who prefers not do anything that requires wearing overalls, using power tools or knowing what a car looks like – but he knows a guy…

Bureaucracy is always bad, you see. It’s slow, deliberate and full of well – bureaucrats. People who thrive on rules and checks and balances. A bunch of hall monitors. Form filling bed-wetters.

The alternative to bureaucracy? Privatization. Yes, the private sector is the cure-all for all the cumbersome, slow-witted, pencil pushers in the government. The sexy private sector is full of innovators we’re told – entrepreneurs. People who are moving and shaking and forward thinking. The private sector is shaping our future.

So the next time you have to call AT&T about a mistake on your bill, or your Internet going out or why your cell phone works perfectly on the Inca Trail but not in your living room, think of how much better the private sector works. Yes, after you’ve been transferred to the fifth person who also isn’t accountable, knowledgeable or responsible for how poorly the mega-corporation is performing think of how horrible it would be to have more bureaucracy. And when they tell you the call is being recorded for quality assurance because after an hour of being transferred to three continents you still need assurance, smile inside that this is a preferred alternative to your tax dollars being wasted.

And to anyone who’s ever been harassed for years by a billing department mix-up only to have the charge show up as unpaid on your credit report take heed, at least it’s not the anal-retentive IRS with all that red tape. And when Capitol One just arbitrarily decides your APR should be north of 33%, feel pride that at least there’s not a government bureaucrat between you and your banker. And the next time Bank of America charges you unlimited overdraft fees and you’re left with absolutely no recourse look up at that shiny red, white and blue sign and feel the glow of patriotism because it’s not the dreaded government interfering in your life.

From a consumer vantage point – privatized bureaucracy seems an awful lot like regular bureaucracy.

Waiting in line at the court house to clear up a parking ticket is the same hour spent in line at your cable company to switch out your defective DVR. All tedious, de-humanizing, time-sucking authoritative bodies are the same to their victims. The only difference is politics. No wonder people are afraid of the government taking over Medicare (psst it’s a government program). It’s one giant soulless entity being confused with another giant soulless entity. The right would have us believe it’s the government that’s the problem and the left would have us believe it’s the unregulated corporations. A privatized world is no utopia – not anymore than a government run one is. It would be nice to have a healthy pool of both, however.

The difference between the government and the private sector is you don’t have people pulling a paycheck in the private sector championing for more money and power to go into the government.

The only reason the government is preferable is because it doesn’t turn a profit. Its motives are not to make money and it is at least successful at that. Plus in the government you and I are the shareholders. We have ownership of our government, ideally. We have a say. It’s for the people, by the people. If bureaucracy is an inevitable evil, a symptom of civilization, between the private sector and government, between the DMV or Etna, I’ll choose indifference over monetization.

Every horrendous thing one could possibly say about President Barack Obama has been said. It’s been said, repeated, blogged, taped, printed, e-mailed, syndicated, broadcasted and most likely spray painted somewhere. Some of the verbal grenades are slightly off-base. For example: you know who’s really offended by Obama being called a Nazi? Nazis. Whoa are they irked by the comparison.

You want to cheese off Hitler, call him an Obama.

So the half-Caucasian half-African leader of the free world – he’s racist. That’s why you lost your job when the plant closed in 2007. He’s a socialist, because that sounds really bad. Tyrant. Everything pejorative, dangerous and un-American – he’s that. He’ll kill us all.

George W. Bush couldn’t be challenged in the press for nearly five years. Was it deference for the office? No. He didn’t get this grace period because he was a great man. The press was scared of him. He was surrounded by a crew of thugs happy to take the low road and never above being petty. He bullied the press, cut off access, shut down communication and outed a dissenter’s wife. “Liberal” was a swear word synonymous with “retard.” It was scorched earth. Nothing was left. He bought off columnists, produced phony news stories, planted faux journalists and fabricated evidence. Anyone who questioned anything was unpatriotic. A terrorist sympathizer. Treasonous. French. Or worse, liberal. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” explained Bush.

What’s “changed” is now former Vice President Dick Cheney goes on television to warn the nation the current president, of a different party than Cheney, is going to harm America, simply because he’s of a different party than Cheney. A new low for Cheney. A new low for partisan rancor.

The current storm was birthed during the Clinton years, enhanced ten-fold by the Internet and sired enthusiastically by the Bush Administration. And then comes, by a landslide victory over a year ago, a politician who promised to bring Americans together. So in part America voted for an armistice in the war at home. We’ve yet to get it.

At his first official State of the Union Address, Obama spoke to the mood in the country. “Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith. The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away. No wonder there’s so much cynicism out there. No wonder there’s so much disappointment.”

Then immediately after, right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin described the speech as “snitty.” Clearly she’s the expert. Other side-obsessives followed suit. Rudy Giuliani, The Mayor of 9/11 who recently mind-bogglingly claimed there was never a terrorist attack under Bush (err, 9/11?), said on Fox and Friends Obama never once mentioned the word “war” in the SOTU. Obama said it seven times according to the transcript, the millions of witnesses and the video.

Criticism used to be a fine art. Now it’s a carefully framed generic broad-stroked mass-reproduction that matches your chosen color scheme: Talking points. Reactions.

Two days after the SOTU a question and answer session was televised from a GOP retreat in Baltimore. There was the president, no teleprompter, answering questions, addressing issues and stating some obvious. “If there’s uniform opposition because the Republican caucus doesn’t get 100 percent or 80 percent of what you want, then it’s going to be difficult to get a deal done, because that’s not how democracy works,” said the president in a candid tone. With a smile he called out the GOP for characterizing his health care agenda as a Bolshevik plot.

It was a riveting hour of television, stunning in its openness. It was civil civic discourse – on television, for an hour. What was most shocking was when Obama stated, “And the irony, I think, of our political climate right now is that, compared to other countries, the differences between the two major parties on most issues is not as big as it’s represented.” That’s like eating disorders in Hollywood, it’s an open secret no one wants to talk about but everyone knows. The major political parties aren’t as different as we’re told, it’s true. Sad common ground isn’t more common.

The arena has been scorched and salted over the previous decades. Can this reluctant flame war president lead us out of it? Does your answer depend on if you believe in “climate change?” Perhaps.

This story originated at True/Slant