Partying Down...and Down...and Down

The nightly cable news outrage mills have been full of the lavish GSA convention in Las Vegas and the not-so-lavish carousing by Secret Service agents in Cartagena. Generally speaking, to land a supervisory job in either agency, you have to have a brain – so we’re left with the proverbial question, “What were they thinking?”

Many may be shocked at the notion that Secret Service agents, who have the reputation of being the best of the best when it comes to law enforcement, would be caught partying with prostitutes (apparently legal in parts of Colombia). But what exactly gave it all away? It wasn’t about lust – it was about being cheap: one of the agents, or so the story goes, refused to pay one of the women the agreed-on fee. He had been drunk, he said, when he agreed to it earlier.

So now we have members of Congress on TV railing about whether the “culture” in the Secret Service allows all this behavior (we could easily discuss pots calling kettles black at this point, but I won’t go there).

From what little I know of law enforcement, some of these folks party pretty hard, and considering the stresses of those jobs, who would begrudge them a little fun? But it’s a minority who take it to extremes, and it’s usually off the clock. Most Secret Service agents are pretty close to what we expect them to be. At the very, very least, what happened in Cartagena should have been “secret service!”

I don’t have a problem with the concept of GSA people having a convention at a resort. Fox News can complain all day about why they didn’t just sit around a table at a Motel 6. Such events, in the private sector, are part education, part team-building, part reward and part winding down for “mental health.” But $800,000-plus?

Maybe it’s about, “What WEREN’T they thinking?” It’s really about proportion and balance, and asking the question, “How would the folks out there feel if they knew about this?”

Campaign Tip: Hands Off the Wife

Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen's remark that Ann Romney has no standing to talk about women’s concerns about the economy because she “hasn’t worked a day in her life” was a singularly unproductive comment. It brought the expected response from Mrs. Romney – that raising five children is real work, and that women should learn to respect each other’s choices, both of which are fair.

This all reminds me of a dust-up in a campaign for Congress a while back in the district I used to live in. The incumbent Republican congressman was considered vulnerable to a strong challenge from a celebrity Democrat (an actor in a popular long-running TV series). The Democrat’s campaign leveled a charge that the Republican incumbent’s wife got favorable terms on a bank loan because of her husband’s membership on a banking committee in Congress.

The actor’s campaign stepped on a land mine with that one. The incumbent’s wife, as it happened,  ran a multimillion-dollar business that had been in her family long before she married the congressman, who was not nearly as wealthy as she. She responded that if she had ever wanted a favorable bank loan, she hardly needed her husband’s help to get it. The charge blew up in the Democratic challenger’s face and very likely cost him the election.

As for not having a “day job,” well, I suspect there are quite a few folks of both sexes who would be just thrilled not to have to work a day in their lives, right?

Picking Your Poison

Well, it’s starting. A prominent physician at UCSF, Dr. Robert Lustig,  has declared refined sugar to be toxic (you can learn more about that here). I submit this is just the beginning, and predict that before I check out of Hotel Earth (I hope it’s not Express Check Out), the following substances will be designated as controlled or outright illegal:

• Meat, including poultry
• Dairy products
• White bread
• Potato chips, French fries
• Alcohol (illegal)
• Tobacco (illegal)
• Caffeine
• Table salt
• Most soft drinks
• Refined sugar

I can hear some of you cheering and wondering why these things haven’t already happened. Patience, patience. Just give it time.

Actually, time is a big issue, because if you take the long view, things that were once essential to our health are no longer considered so (leeches), while those experts who issued warnings years ago were not always listened to.

When I was growing up in New York, there was a guy on the radio named Dr. Carlton Fredericks, who lectured every Sunday on his show about the evils of cholesterol. He favored a low-carbohydrate diet and promoted the use of vitamins because he said most essential nutrients were lost in food processing. Were he alive today, he would have been elevated to sainthood, bur at the time, more than a few people thought he was a bit of a nut.

I used to drink a popular Coca-Cola product called Tab, the production of which was drastically decreased after its principal sweetener, saccharin, was found to be a carcinogen. Years later, saccharin was un-found to be cancerous, so at least in that regard, Tab is OK. It’s still produced in some areas and has millions of fans, even though not a single word of advertising has appeared for it in decades. I don’t drink it now because it’s hard to find and rather expensive.

As for the evils of meat, poultry and dairy, my solution would be to allow continued consumption of these things on the grounds that consumers produce their own – which means doing their own slaughtering. How many of us would wring the necks of chickens or butcher our own pigs or cows? Speaking of cows, would the average American enjoy getting up in the wee hours and milking one? If stays on farms were mandatory, it would do wonders for the vegan movement (which, as you have probably guessed, I haven’t yet joined).

There is one thing likely to happen relatively soon that will cheer many folks up: something coming OFF the no-no list. MARIJUANA! The only problem is, when you get the munchies, what will your choices be?