Archie Kobain

The children I raised as my very own, have grown up and forgotten about Margarita Fridays!

Yup.  I’m in New York City this week, but when I get back, I am restocking the bar, getting some proper margarita making supplies…  (What is that stuff in the freezer?)  …and I’m sharpening up the blender baldes.  It’s show time!

...and it makes the best tasting margaritas.

 It’s always show time, here at the end of the stage.

Tuesday was a bit crazy. I flew into JFK around 1:30pm, had a 4pm meeting in the city, then a dinner meeting out in Westbury at 7pm.  You could say that I’m becoming a bit of an expert in LIRR.  Yeah… Not really.

Went to see the taping of David Letterman on Wednesday. My compadre, The Chuckster, had gotten us on the CBS VIP list.  Obviously no one at CBS security reads my stuff. Wednesday’s show turned out be quite a score… The celebrity guest was Emma Stone. The other scheduled guests this week were James Franco, Ricky Gevais, and Collin Farrell.  I think you can see where I’m going with this…

The other guest, on Wednesday, was Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Company.  I know.  Now you understand why CBS security needed to be concerned.  Just in case there was trouble, I even wore my “Don’t taze me bro” T-shirt.  But he turned out to be a great guest on the show. After 37 years of running things at Boeing, he decided to come turn Ford around, after getting a phone call from Bill Ford, himself.

The story is that in just a few years, he’s done it.  They got lean and mean, they are now building American cars in America – I didn’t get to ask him about the new plant they just built in Mexico, they are building fully electric, as well as hybrid cars, making money and they did it all without any goverment bailout money.

I think my next card could be a Ford.

But enough about  Dave & Alan… 
Today’s musical guest on my show is one of my faves, Rosi Golan.
She has a new album, “Lead Balloon”, coming out on August 30th.  Buy it! 
Meanwhile, here’s “Seeing Ghosts” (from the new album),
performed here with co-writer,  Iain Archer.

So, all this NYC stuff is plenty of fun, but the last few weeks really reminded me why I stopped watching the news (including no reading of newspapers or news websites) in June of 2008 and never really went back. I can’t stand the news. I hate that every story has a slant.  Also, thanks to a brief political discussion with a few friends, I was also reminded of all the things that I don’t like about the way American politics operate.

Let’s start with the political party system as a whole…  I don’t like it.  I don’t like that, in general, people pick their political party in much the same way that they pick their favorite sports team. Some people become republicans because their parents were republicans.  Other people become democrats because their parents were republicans. That was probably the only that when I originally registered to vote, I was a registered democrat.  And this is exactly where the derailment begins. Very few people join a political party with an in-depth understanding of the party or with free thinking thoughts of leading their party into becoming America’s party.  Instead, they join a party for some arbitrary reason and then let the party direct their minds. It’s as if you have to follow the party platform and can no longer think for yourself.

In continuing my sports team example, I’ve noticed New York City has a lot of Yankee’s fans and a lot of Met’s fans.  But you’ll hardly ever find someone who likes them both.  No one thinks of both as, their home team. And if you ask why they prefer one team over the other, the answers are never substantial.  The party system works much the same way…  Everyone is either a democrat or a republican, and they think everyone else has to be too.  You almost don’t get a choice. If you’re not one or the other, then you’re just some kind of a hippie and not to be taken seriously. Many people want that designation on everyone.  Are you  a democrat or a republican? They need it.  It tells them something about you. When it comes to politics, they need to know, are you with me or are you against me?

Not me. I understand that you almost have to choose one of the other, but I’m not for either one. I’m for America and the political system will, unfortunately, dictate that we can never have a president (or any other elected official) who will always do what’s best for America. Sooner or later, they’ll have to do something either stupid or against what they believe to be the right course of action, in order to follow their party platform.  Because of this bipartisan system, every major and/or important decision will always be a compromise, and that sucks.

So you wanna know where I stand on some of the dumb issues?  I’ll tell you.  And I’ll tell you that I call them the dumb issues because we shouldn’t even be debating them, ever. It’s a waste of time and money and, at the end of the day, I don’t care…and you shouldn’t either.

Let me take a crack at this.  1. I’m pro-choice. I think a woman should have the right to make any decision she’d like regarding anything that is going on in her body.  It’s not your body, so why do you care?  Shame on you for wanting to legislate what someone else can or can’t do to themselves. You think the unborn fetus is a person… great, don’t have an abortion yourself.  Case closed. Don’t tell me it’s a religious thing because I’m going to insist on the separation of church and state on this one. So, don’t force your religion on me. Maybe my religion says that a fetus isn’t a person until they are old enough to buy you a shot of tequila. E’nuff said.

2. Gay marriage. I really couldn’t care less. Most straight people who get married can’t make it work, if gay folks want to give it a shot, go for it.  My problem is, the church and state thing.  Marriage wasn’t invented by government, it was taken from religion. So why is the government involved in this?  Are you talking about a legal domestic partnership between two people?  OK.  Why not?  Go for it.  Who determined that a woman has to be a man’s companion…  Oh that’s right, The Bible. I say that if your church allows it, then call it a marriage.  If your church doesn’t allow it, then call it a legal union.  There are many advantages to marriage including tax breaks, joint custody of assets, etc., etc. why are we denying these things to people because they are different from you and me, and in a way that completely doesn’t affect us.

3. While I’m big on this separation of church and state, I really couldn’t care less about how you decorate the courtyard or lobby area of a courthouse.  You want to put a 6-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments out there, great.  Keep the church out of the courtroom.  Who cares how you decorate the lobby?  Oh, I know who cares…  Nutty ACLU attorneys looking to make a name for themselves while wasting countless tax payer dollars.  Thank you very much, nut bags. Let’s move on.

4. I’m a big believer in personal responsibility. But that doesn’t mean turning the country back into the Wild West and/or abolish the EPA and saying screw the environment, but we’d better see a measurable return on our EPA investment…or heads will need to roll. I am for smaller government, but it is obvious that we can’t depend on the average person to police themselves when it comes to certain issues.  You know damn well that if we didn’t have littering laws, you’d ocassionally pitch that Dasani bottle right out your Prius window.

To me personal responsibility means that people need to take more responsibility for their own actions and not always look to point fingers and decide that someone else made you do it.  If you are driving home drunk and you drive off a cliff, you shouldn’t be able to sue the city for not putting a guard rail there.  You were driving drunk. You should have to finance the guardrail for future drunk drivers. You can’t always point fingers and accept no responsibility for things. And you can’t let attorneys talk you into suing everyone for every little thing. If you did something, you did it. Hurting yourself shouldn’t always be a chance at lottery winnings, where, in the end, mostly the attorneys get rich.

And finally, for now, let me make a few comments on government run healthcare. 

Good luck with that!

I think government run healthcare could be awesome…it’ll just never, ever, never, ever never happen in a wealthy, capitalistic society, such as ours.  No one wanted their son to become a doctor so that they could help people.  They wanted their son to be a doctor for the prestige and the (assumed) money that went with the title.  Government run healthcare would have to be about doing what’s best for every patient. How are you going to do that?  Currently, every hospital’s mission is to figure out how to extract money from the insurance companies, the government, the doctors, the patient, whoever. Taking really good care of the patient, at the end of the day, is really just necessary inconvenience. Healthacre is all about the money, always….like it or not.  Good luck on helping someone with cancer.  If they don’t have insurance and you don’t offer to pay for the treatment yourself, then who is paying for it?  That’s always the first question asked…

You can have anyone you’d like as president, you’re not changing that.

Just imagine doctors as government employees.  You know, so that they care deeply, like the yo-yo’s at the passport office. Here’s your guaranteed salary, it’s not a lot but you make a decent living.  Show up every day and perform these surgeries.  Really?  It’ll never happen.  Not unless we just contract the whole thing out to Wal-Mart.  If they can’t do it, no one can.

Well, that’s enough ranting and raving for one day.

I raise my  glass to all those with whom I’ve made connections.
And those who get out of my way while trying to make connecting flights.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya… 
After all, you’re reading my dumb ranting & raving.

–  AK