Charitable Rendering

Tom Coburn’s hedonistic fix for health care have nots; Outlawing exaggerated product claims will bring about a totalitarian state; My autobiography is faster than yours; AND: Wyatt Cenac on the video ho crash

Grant did it in under a year, Palin did it in four months, and Time’s Joel Stein did his autobiography in a single day. Now that’s progress. | Meat and Potatoes for TIME

Tom Coburn told PBS’s Maria Hinojosa that people who can’t get health care—like a constituent who burst into tears at a public hearing describing to the Oklahoma senator her debilitated husband’s plight—should not expect the government to help. No—that’s their neighbor’s job.

HINOJOSA: You told her to turn to her neighbors for help.

COBURN: No, actually what I said is, that’s unfortunate, but what I made the point was, if she couldn’t afford insurance and if she couldn’t give care, is that the federal government’s responsibility or our responsibility as Oklahomans? It is the people of Oklahoma.

Coburn, who is a medical doctor himself, means the government of Oklahoma, right? Wrong.

COBURN: There’s a role for the federal government in creating opportunities for good allocation of resources, but there’s also a role for individuals. and when we shift it all to the government, we lose something. And here’s what we lose: The way to be really happy is to give some of you away to somebody else.

HINOJOSA: But i’m sure this woman will say, my husband can’t swallow. How is my neighbor, who has no health care training, supposed to help him?

COBURN: I can easily train someone in one hour how to manage a feeding tube.

Never never never should the government provide help to those who can’t afford health care, because it denies the opportunity for individuals to chip in and manage someone’s feeding tube.

What an utterly revolting thing to say. The logic boggles the mind. What other basic social provisions should we ditch to let the family next door get in on the happiness of helping the destitute? Should we see all welfare policies through the eyes of better-off people who are just out to save their own souls?

Self-regulation = self-esteem

If only people could still legally lie about their products or fail to disclose the companies that sponsor their fawning product reviews online. If we can’t be dishonest as vendors and journalists by law, how are the saintly fools who don’t lie going to feel warm and gooey inside about their own righteousness? Besides, the way to be really happy is to give some of you away to somebody else for a reasonable price. That’s what we lose.

Going Rogue in Six Easy Steps

Sarah Palin’s memoir, which was written in a sparse four months, might just live up to Ulysses S. Grant’s standard (and with more shooting wolves from helicopters!).

Grant’s seminal autobiography was published by Mark Twain, lauded for its honesty and writing, and was about a guy who actually had an interesting life and, despite his galling corruption as the 18th president, would still be a better commander-in-chief than Palin. But if Grant, the brilliant general and Civil War hero, could write about his actual accomplishments in under a year while dying of cancer, surely Palin, known for both not doing what she said she did and not doing anything else, could wrap up writing about her pointless career in a matter of days. Yet no. Sarah Barracuda luxuriated over her vacuousness for the whole third of a year since she abruptly quit as governor of Alaska.

Joel Stein can—and did—do better, writing his version of a narcissistic pulp soapbox, with a little help from a ghostwriter, in no time flat. "What took her so long?" Stein writes in Time. "To prove that introspection doesn’t need to be time-consuming, I decided to try to write my memoir in one day."

As soon as I got to [ghostwriter Neil Strauss’s] house in the Hollywood Hills, Strauss told me his first rule of ghostwritten autobiographies was that I would have to be completely honest, revealing things I wouldn’t even tell my wife. I nodded as if I had that kind of secret inner turmoil. Then he said I should think of a turning point in my life. I offered the day I got my mullet cut off. He paused. "Did you ever almost die?" he asked. It turns out your expectations get raised after you’ve been hanging out with Mötley Crüe. "Have you ever had a moment where you thought about giving it all up?" When I didn’t answer for a while, he said, "I’ll just go with the mullet."

Sounds complicated, and it is: The six-part formula is as daunting as it is to make one’s own life look interesting enough for the people who will cough up their loose change at the Salvation Army book table for the hard cover in ten years to get sufficient bang for their literal buck. Here’s how it went for Stein, and how it might work out for Palin:

1) "Childhood Trauma," 2) "Turning Point That Changed My Life," 3) "Rise Against the Odds," 4) "Celebrity Name-Dropping," 5) "Hitting Rock Bottom" and 6) "Redemption and Recovery."

Soon, wide-eyed little girls and boys across the nation will say to themselves, "When I grow up, I want to get someone to write my shallow, self-serving autobiography, too!" Truly, this is the American dream.

BBC

Rebranding injustice via lawsuit

From the BBC:

Joseph Stalin’s grandson has launched a court action claiming a liberal Russian newspaper has defamed the former Soviet dictator by claiming he personally ordered the deaths of Soviet citizens. It is the latest bizarre twist in what many see as a Kremlin-backed campaign to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation.

See, that’s how you shut up the silly little people who don’t know any better: You file a libel suit.

Bling Buyers’ Market

My new favourite Daily Show correspondent, Wyatt Cenac, profiles shit-hopper Slim Thug and helps him downsize, or streamline, or whatever the going term for firing people is today, his crew of hangers-on. No one is immune from the ravages of a global recession—not even gold-toothed, diamond-encrusted rappers with leased Lexuses. (In Canada.)

End.