Musings on an early Monday Morning

Molly Ivins

Went to see Kathleen Turner play Molly Ivins in the play about her life, Red Hot Patriot.  Because she had such a way with words I was really looking forward to a few good laughs from a fellow liberal.  I left the Arena Theater with misty eyes instead.  Molly died in 2007, and all her career railed against  the political system that we have learned to live with.

"We don’t need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it."

"Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system or we lose the democracy."

Turner as Ivins

I left misty-eyed because I feel so powerless. 

How can a country that believes so much in democracy, and that wants others to take up our form of government --"a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system"-- have come to the place where our nominees turn down the public money from the people in order to raise money from corporations and special interest groups without the regulations of the public funds?

And what can one retired, non-confrontational American citizen do about it? 

And another thing.  Ivins died in 2007.  In the play, Turner as Ivins  says that insurance companies would only pay for a mastectomy of one breast.  I'm not sure if the quote in the play was from her writings.  Recently, a friend blamed this same issue on "Obamacare."  I didn't know enough about the Affordable Health Care Act to address the issue one way or the other, and I don't like confrontation.  How is it that everything is so difficult to understand that the spin-meisters can spin it any way they want to spin and that most of us don't know enough about the programs to counter what's being said?  Am I just too lazy to learn all of the facts?  What about the rest of our citizens?

We just lost our one week old baby panda, too.  His or her birth was an uplifting moment for all Washingtonians.  

Maybe I'm just being emotional this morning, but my eyes are misting again.