theCLog

For this baby boomer pop culture fan, the most important thing happening today is the 50^th anniversary of the first episode of animator Jay Ward’s Rocky & Bullwinkle. For a show with so-so ratings at the time, produced on a shoestring by a small group of smartasses, Rocky & Bullwinkle had an enormous impact, if only for its influence on Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. An irreverent, mocking tone in a cartoon? Taking on current issues and pop culture fads? Talking directly to the viewers? Arguing with the narrator? Spoofing other shows? All stuff we take for granted today, all those things started — and that’s no exaggeration — with R&B.

Cartoons on television were a bland wasteland in the medium’s early years, when, out of the blue, here came a flying squirrel and a dimwitted talking moose who wisecracked, were silly for silly’s sake, and treated kids as if they were smart enough to get all the jokes. (Although, at times, the jokes were for grown-ups’ enjoyment, such as the intro for an episode of Fractured Fairy Tales that started, ”Once upon a time there was a little village on a hill, called Daniels on the Rocks.”)

Rocky and Bullwinkle’s adventures, largely spent fighting two Cold-War-spoof Russian spies, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were matched by other segments that became as popular as the title duo. Peabody’s Improbable History, in which Peabody, a bespectacled, talking dog, and his young adopted human son, Sherman, traveled in the “Way-Back Machine” to famous historical events, is still hilarious; the pair even showed up in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons. Many boomers, though, claim that the stories and exquisitely awful puns in Fractured Fairy Tales were a highlight of their childhood. In any case, here’s the show’s opening sequence.

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Yesterday’s disclosure by the Associated Press regarding Charlotte law firm Moore & Van Allen and its behind-the-scenes work against health care reform was a stunner. There’s nothing illegal going on, but the law firm’s activities have a bad smell nonetheless. The story revealed that MVA is engaged in advocacy against a public option, and in favor of requiring Americans to buy health insurance. Although MVA wouldn’t identify the clients, it’s pretty obvious that a group of health insurance companies are paying the law firm to conduct anonymous campaigning for them. Note that MVA isn’t doing legal work here, but rather things such as enlisting trade groups to oppose government-run health coverage, or helping anti-reform advocates get on the radio or post opinions on conservative blogs.

One big problem with MVA’s activities is that the clients they’re working for are anonymous and are paying others to conduct their political action for them. As MVA spokesperson Matthew French told the AP, “They want to stay in the background and off the front page. They want the message to be the important thing.” In other words, they’re trying to evade responsibility. Not to mention that in a democracy, issues should be openly discussed in debate that makes it clear who, or what corporate entity, is standing for what.

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Many conservatives like to see themselves as rugged, no-nonsense defenders of freedom, clear-thinking patriots, ready to slap down America’s enemies at the drop of a hat. Too bad, then, that they’re actually cowards.

The right’s current collective nervous breakdown over plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York for his role in planning the 9-11 attacks confirms once again something we wrote about last year: the American right wing is scared stupid. When Attorney General Holder announced the forthcoming KSM trial, conservative members of Congress, columnists, TV newscasters, and bloggers just, there’s no better way to put it, completely freaked the hell out. “Dangerous!” “Irresponsible!” “What if he’s acquitted?!” “It invites more attacks!” Yesterday on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson seemed genuinely terrified, practically on the verge of a stroke over the prospect of KSM’s trial.

Here’s what the stalwart patriots of the right can’t seem to understand: the whole point of terrorism is to make a country’s population walk around in fear every day. Conservatives, as far as I can see, threw in that towel a long time ago. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes the conservative position as, “We’re too scared to have real trials in our country,” which, as he points out, “is the textbook definition of ’surrendering to terrorists.’”

Spain held open trials for the terrorists who bombed trains in Madrid in 2004. The Brits tried the London subway terrorists in, you guessed it, London. The terrorists who bombed a nightclub in Bali? A regular trial in a regular courtroom. The 2008 massacres in Mumbai? Same thing. More to the point, we’ve already tried terrorists in America: remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? Zacarias Moussaoui? Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who launched the World Trade Center bombings in 1993? Will you Fox-Rush folks please get a damned grip?

It’s actually the right and their fear-mongering leaders who are being irresponsible by their public displays of terror. Again, as Greenwald put it, “It’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.” Frankly, these sunny day patriots’ ongoing surrender to terrorism would be kind of pitiful if they weren’t so damned cocky about being scared to death.

Gretchen Carlson: Help – the terrorists will kill us all!

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“When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases.” According to the New York Times, that’s how Stephen Schondelmeyer, a pharmaceutical economics expert at the University of Minnesota reacted to the news that drug companies have raised prices an average of 9 percent in the face of upcoming health care reform. In other words, Schondelmeyer is saying, that’s just the way these guys work. When there’s a chance the government could cut into the industry’s obscenely high profits, up go the prices. Researchers at Harvard found the same kind of price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare earlier this decade.

Oh, and the “agreement” the drug industry had with the White House to cut $8 billion per year from America’s drug bill via rebates to seniors and the government? You guessed it — this year’s 9 percent price increases cancel out the agreement’s first year savings.

Writer  Timothy Egan wrote a piece last week in which he noted that more and more Americans are angry because they now feel that our system – our social contract, if you will – is rigged against them, to the benefit of large corporations. Personally, I wonder what’s taken folks so long to make the connections, but with drug companies and health insurance companies gouging consumers for all they’re worth and more – not to mention taxpayer-rescued financial giants giving out $30 billion in new bonuses – the illusion that corporate honchos give a flying damn about average Americans is fading faster than a Wal-Mart shirt.

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The latest bad news about Memorial Stadium should – it probably won’t, but it should – move the county to reconsider its stadium and baseball park plans. As we’ve written before, an opportunity to solve two problems at once is at hand. Lots of people want the Charlotte Knights to move to a new ballpark downtown, but lawsuits over the complicated land-swaps proposed to facilitate putting the park in Third Ward — and gripes about using land previously designated for a large uptown park — have kept the Knights in Fort Mill. Meanwhile, the county is sitting on the Memorial Stadium land, the stadium is a wreck, and will cost nearly a million dollars to repair. It was a fine stadium for a long time, and is a great historical relic, but it’s not worth the price it’ll take to fix it.  At one point, the county considered using Memorial Stadium’s land for the baseball park, until someone figured out a way for Uptown big wheels to make more money. But the deal cobbled together by Center City Partners is going nowhere, and Memorial Stadium is in limbo. It’s time now to reconsider the Memorial Stadium option for baseball. Now, will someone on the commission please put 2 and 2 together? Maybe county manager Harry Jones could claim he thought of a great way to save the county money and bring baseball downtown, and incidentally save his skin after his recent controversies.

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God knows there were plenty of events and people to choose from for the weekly Stupid Thing of the Week. Locally, the school board went along with Supt. Gorman’s idea to gut one of CMS’ most successful programs – and did it at the last meeting of the board’s current line-up; needless to say, the new board will start reconsidering the moves at their first meeting. Nationally, Carrie Prejean got all pissy on Larry King Live; singer Fergie let everyone know she’s bi but her husband is well-endowed; Lou Dobbs quit his job at CNN and said he’d been hounded by a mob mentality, “similar to what we saw in Italy in the 1930s” (you might want to re-read your history, Lou, and maybe stop the pity party); a beaver on CBS’ The Early Show peed in the announcer’s face; Sarah Palin went on Oprah and dissed the people who’d chosen her to run for VP in the first place; and Sammy Sosa revealed he’s been using a skin lightener for some damned reason.

But for sheer tone-deaf cluelessness – which is always a plus when you’re vying for Stupid Thing of the Week – you can’t beat our winner, Ian Campbell, a re-enactor and tour guide at Latta Plantation Park. Campbell, an African-American history buff who has devoted a lot of time to bringing history to life at the park, was giving a tour to about 60 fifth-graders from Rea View Elementary in Waxhaw when who did he pick to represent plantation slaves? Why, the only three African American students in the group, of course! Kids were humiliated (and in fifth grade, that’s huge), parents were enraged, and school administrators vowed never to send their kids back to Latta. It doesn’t appear that Campbell meant any harm, but again, a history buff being that clueless about race relations is kind of mind-boggling.

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Former President George Dubya Bush is giving a speech today at Southern Methodist University (SMU). He and his wife Laura will be on the Dallas campus to unveil the programs to be offered at the George W. Bush Institute at SMU. Please, no tired coloring book jokes. Groundbreaking for the Dubster’s big, shiny institute won’t take place until a year from now, but plans are underway to flesh out programs for the scholarly forum’s “four core principles.” So far, though, no one seems to agree on what the four principles are. One report says they are democratic freedom, opportunity, responsibility and compassion. Another source says no, the core principles are education, global health, human freedom, and economic growth. It’s already starting to sound like the early planning for the Iraq war. No one asked me, nor are they going to, but I think the four principles should be making rich people richer, bungling disaster assistance, prideful arrogance in foreign policy, and how to kill young Americans through bad decision-making and sheer incompetence. Whatever principles the institute settles on, it’s nice of Dubya to take some time away from writing his memoirs; it can be pretty tedious work looking up how to spell “pretzel,” “bike ride,” or “rendition.”

Dubya tries out one of those newfangled computers

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A lot of liberals in North Carolina are mightily pissed off at Rep. Larry Kissell, but the new congressman doesn’t seem to care. N.C. progressives are furious, not to mention feeling duped, over Kissell’s vote against the House healthcare reform bill. N.C. liberals put in a lot of hours, effort and money to get Kissell elected and now feel deceived and angry. What’s making them doubly mad is that neither Kissell nor anyone on his staff is returning calls or messages from riled up former supporters. One progressive activist put it this way, on the BlueNC Web site: “As of last night not a single person I know had heard back related to his health care vote or anything else, for that matter. It is one thing to make a vote that one national analyst described as the second most confusing vote against the bill. It is another to not have the common courtesy to at least explain that vote to people who have given his campaign money in the past.” James Protzman, one of the founders of BlueNC, describes the disillusioned former Kissell supporters as “People who listened to his happy talk and bought it hook, line and sinker.” More to come, I’m sure.

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OK, first the state told employees who are part of the State Health Plan (SHP) they’d have to pay higher prices unless they quit smoking. Apparently not satisfied with minding their employees’ personal business, the SHP has now thought up ways to punish employees who lied about their smoking habits. The SHP is contracting with a company to, as NC Policy Watch puts it, “travel around the state shoving swabs in the mouths of workers.” If you fail the test, or refuse to take it, you’ll be moved from the 80/20 plan to the 70/30 plan for at least one year; and not only you, but also other family members who are covered, whether they smoke or not. Sometimes it seems this country’s puritanical background, and our fellow citizens’ busybody habits, will never let go.

Bad state employee! Bad!

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Today is Veterans Day, and the nation is having its annual festival of hurrahs and heart-tugging nods toward the flag. And then, if the past is any indication, the country will go back to giving veterans about 2 seconds’ worth of thought each day.

Hopefully, though, the past won’t be a guide this year — not with the recent massacre at Ft. Hood still fresh in our minds. Nor with reminders from VA Secretary Shinseki that veterans “lead the nation in homelessness, depression, substance abuse and suicides.” Nor with a new study revealing that more than 2,200 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance. The Obama administration deserves credit for its array of efforts to improve the lot of veterans, but there’s still much more to be done.

One important thing the President can do is establish policies that would drastically cut the number of wounded vets coming home from some Third World hellhole, starting with getting American soldiers out of the hopeless, never-ending mess that is Afghanistan.

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