Government Intrusion: Its Necessary Dichotomy

I was watching the local news on television the other night, and heard two consecutive news stories that had me taking a deeper look into personal politics.

The first news story was about the Republicans and their most recent attempt at overturning the Health Care Reform legislation (Please, for the love of God, don't refer to it as ObamaCare because the only thing that means is that you're either a buzzword-spouting sycophant or an intentionally misleading malcontent). It noted how the most common objection by politicians regarding the health care bill is that, by allowing the government to take a greater stake in how health care is paid for, our level of quality health care will decrease and, ultimately, the cost of our health care will rise.

Hit the break for more.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Three: 30-21

NUMBER THIRTY

I have not been quiet about my distaste for the last two Arcade Fire records relative to their debut masterpiece Funeral. Like Neon Bible before it, 2010's AF release The Suburbs was too mid-tempo, too quiet, too slow, too ho-hum for me to really connect with it in a meaningful way. More troubling are the songs, littered across both Bible and Suburbs, that call to mind Funeral's towering highs. "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is one of those tracks. Though only carrying a little more shuffle than most of the humdrum album, "Sprawl II"'s engaging synth lines and vivacious Regine Chassagne vocal painted the suburban escape as somehow epic, where looking past the retail mountains beyond mountains was a glance through the looking glass.

Go beyond the click for numbers twenty-nine through twenty-one.

Congress? We don't want no Congress! We don't need no stinkin' Congress!

The title of this blog post is not true.

Sometimes it just feels like it.

It becomes really disheartening to watch this group of publicly elected officials fumble and stammer their way through getting absolutely nothing done. When you see things like that, it's enough to make you want to throw your hands up on the air and say, "Can we just tear this whole damn thing down and start over with something else? Please."

(Maybe British Parliament? It's easily one of the top 10 most entertaining things on TV. They're smarmy and sarcastic, condescending and comfortable. They all get behind the people asking the questions with soccer gang-like cheers of assent and, most importantly, they actually ask pertinent questions and give pertinent answers. It's like watching a politically-themed music video for LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge".)