A Plethora of Good News

You remember "plethora".  It's the incongruous word used by the chief bad guy in "The Three Amigos",  one of the outstanding movies of the "silly" genre.  El Guapo asks his assistant bad guy Jefe, "Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?"

Well, kiddoes, I don't know how we are fixed for pinatas right now, but we sure have a plethora of good news, just in time for the ho ho ho season.  It's bullet point time!

-  The health care website is working.  I told you it would be.  But, by contrast, the NY Times sales shop site still doesn't work.  It hasn't whenever I've tried it over the past several years.  And Fox News had to cancel some twit program gizmo recently because of a "computer glitch."  Oh, media, heal thyself!  The media would be ridiculous if it wasn't so dangerous.  Because of the irresponsible way it blathered the GOP line about the rollout, some people may believe the insurance program is as bad as the website was, not get insurance, and then die for lack of medical care.

-  A woman has been named to run General Motors.  Yes, a woman.  In this commerce driven, business dominated country, that's as big a step forward for equality as Obama being elected in 2008.

-  A woman has been named to head the Federal Reserve.  In this old-boy, money crazed world of ours, that's as big a step forward as Sally Ride getting in the space capsule.  (Actually a Russian woman went into space earlier.)

-  Scientists announced they have developed a gene therapy for curing cancer.  This is huge!  And partisan.  The GOP has and will cut cancer research funds, and its government shutdown caused some labs to close, thus harming or imperiling ongoing research experiments.  But this research achievement not only made it through the maze of cutting and closing but showed the high value of the programs the GOP is out to squash.

-  The Congress got something done!  It approved a judge for the D.C. appeals court, filling an EIGHT-YEAR vacancy.  This was possible because Harry Reid finally stopped shadow-boxing and led the Democrats to kill the filibustering of judicial and administrative appointments.

-  The Volker Rule was adopted by the five fed agencies that oversee the banking industry.  Oh, you say quietly, whoop-de-doo and what do I care?  But you do care. The Volker Rule, had it been in place earlier, would have prevented the greedy and risky insanity that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

-  A businessman got a four-year jail sentence for putting a defective product on the market, in this case a breast implant that was filled with a cheaper grade of silicon not approved for such use.  Thousands of women suffered horribly.  Four years doesn't sound like an adequate length of time in the pokey for his crime until you realize that we Americans virtually NEVER send business criminals to jail, unless they are women, e.g. Leona Helmsley for tax stuff, and Martha Stewart, who should have been jailed for bad recipes but instead did time for insider trading.  Anyway, the jailing is in France so we Americans still have an unblemished record of not treating wicked business crime as actual crime.  Note that the French s.o.b was fined only $103,000 by the French court.  In the USA he would have been fined a great deal more, apparently because we feel that taking a man's money hurts him more than going to jail.  Maybe it does.  In America.

There's more good news, but I'm exhausted enough already from being happy.   All that cheering and dancing and lifting of toasts  -  wears a person out!  Anyway, if I had a Christmas tree these lovely items of good news would be the presents under it.  And since I'll be alone on Christmas Day I'll try to find a TV showing of "The Three Amigos".  It should never be allowed to be off the air.  
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