And now, Dr. Hightower offers this advice for improving your mental health: Don’t fume about the GOP’s lunatic effort to kill health care reform – just laugh at their farcical show.

Take Sen. Ted Cruz’s 21-hour blabathon, which he said would stop Obamacare in its tracks. Not only did he fail spectacularly, but senators voted 100 to zero against his crazy ploy. Yes, that means even he voted against it! What a hoot he is. A shameful hypocrite, too. While going to extremes to keep millions of Americans from getting vitally needed health coverage, Cruz repeatedly refused to answer whether taxpayers covered his health care. Finally, he piously responded that he was eligible for taxpayer coverage, but had nobly declined.

Such slapstick! It turns out that Ted was fibbing, for he’s covered by his wife’s policy. As a millionaire top executive at Goldman Sachs, she and her family are given gold-plated Cadillac coverage by the Wall Street giant. Goldman pays some $40,000 a year for her and Ted’s policy – a benefit-cost that the firm passes on to us taxpayers by deducting it from its corporate tax bill. Hilarious, huh?

Then there’s the comic twist that’s included in Congress’ current government shutdown. While more than a million regular government workers are going without a paycheck, the congress critters who forced the furlough continue to collect their $174,000 in annual pay. Some lawmakers are donating their checks to charity, but four out of five are happily pocketing theirs. “Dang straight,” barked Rep. Lee Terry. “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college,” the Nebraska Republican said. “Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly,” Terry told his constituents.

And that’s your Congress at work. Laugh ‘til it hurts.

“Ted Cruz’s really sweet health insurance deal,” www.dailykos.com, September 26, 2013.

“Lee Terry Needs His Salary During Government Shutdown To Pay For His ‘Nice House,’” www.huffingtonpost.com, October 4, 2013.

“Lee Terry says he ‘cannot handle’ giving up own paycheck during shutdown,” www.omaha.com, October 4, 2013.

“GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer Won’t Give Up Salary During Shutdown Because It’s ‘What I Earn,’” www.huffingtonpost.com, October 3, 2013.


Monsanto buys a food prize

As Lily Tomlin has noted, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

For example, imagine if a prestigious group announced that this year’s “World Environmental Prize” will be awarded to BP for its unique contribution to the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. Too absurd, you say?

Right, but try this one: An Iowa group announces that the “World Food Prize” will go to Monsanto for pushing its patented, pricey, genetically-tampered Frankenseeds on impoverished lands as an “answer” to global hunger. This would be so morally perverse that the “cyn” in cynical would be spelled S.I.N. Yet, it’s actually happening.

Rather than encouraging sustainable farming and self-sufficiency in impoverished communities as a way to alleviate poverty and malnutrition, the World Food Prize has been “won” by a profiteering, biotech, seed-and-chemical monopolist that’s the freakish opposite of sustainability. Monsanto is globally infamous for bullying family farmers, bribing and corrupting governments, stiffing independent scientific inquiries into its hokum, running false ads and fraudulent PR campaigns, and going all out to keep consumers from knowing that the crops produced by its seeds contain alien, bioengineered DNA and have not been tested for longterm health and environmental problems.

Why would this avaricious outfit get any sort of award, much less one that can give it a false legitimacy as a corporate “savior” for the world’s poor? Perhaps because Monsanto is a major funder of the World Food Prize. Indeed, the foundation that hands out the award is headquartered in downtown Des Moines in a historic building that recently got a spiffy remodeling, thanks to a $5 million donation from – you guessed it – Monsanto.
How cynical is that? Even Lily Tomlin wouldn’t have imagined it.

“Basu: Food Prize goes too far in honoring Monsanto,” www.desmoinesregister.com, June 29, 2013.

“The World Food Prize, Brought to You by Monsanto,” www.motherjones.com, June 19, 2013.

“Welcome to the Hall of Laureates,” www.worldfoodprize.org, 2013.

What’s in your closet, Warren?

Are you one of those people who simply has too much stuff?

You know who you are, so don’t try to deny it. Yeah, you – your closets are jammed floor to ceiling, there’s not an inch of empty space on your shelves, you’ve stuffed all the stuff you can under the bed and couch, and you’ve already filled two rental spaces at the U-Store-It Barn. In fact, you’ve tucked away stuff that you don’t even remember you had – like those two railroad lines you forgot you’d bought.

Say what? Yes, choo-choos. I’m not talking about model trains, but actual railroads, with locomotives, freight cars, steel tracks, and engineers. Who has so much stuff that they could forget they’ve got a couple of real-life, multiple-ton railroads somewhere in their pile?

Billionaire Warren Buffett, for one. The avuncular investment guru, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his financial acumen, owns some 80 corporations with more than 2,000 subsidiaries, including everything from jewelry companies to utilities. In 2010, his sprawling Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate picked up another bauble, paying $43 billion for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. To get the okay of the Transportation Department for taking over the BNSF, he had to disclose whether he owned any other rail companies. “No,” was his unequivocal answer.

But – oops! – a few months ago, Buffett discovered that, actually, he does own a short-line railroad in Iowa and yet another one in Oregon. My bad, he told the regulators, explaining that his closet is so packed with corporate things that he didn’t know he had two trains tucked in there.

Okay, people, the lesson here is clear: Stop stashing, and start disgorging! And here’s a fun website to help you – or even Warren Buffett – say no to our culture of stuff: www.StoryOfStuff.org.

“Berkshire Hathaway sells two railroads,” Austin American Statesman, December 27, 2012.

“Berkshire Hathaway Sells Two Railroads The Company Didn’t Know It Owned,” www.huffingtonpost.com, December 26, 2012.

“STB Orders Berkshire Hathaway to Divest Two Railroads,” www.joc.com, September 27, 2013.