Crazy Mike Huckabee: Did You Know He Grew Up in Mauritania?

The past week has made one thing very clear: the man who has the answers to America's biggest problems is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. He is the only politician with the courage and moral clarity to cut through all the clutter and get at what's really ailing America: Natalie Portman's pregnancy. By putting the unwed actresses's pregnancy where it belongs -- on the front pages of every major and minor news outlet in the nation -- Huckabee, who just happens to be flogging his new book, "The Hope of Audacity: My Childhood as a Peul Tribesman in Mauritania," also managed to take the heat off another floundering politician who made a major gaffe last week when he claimed, falsely, that President Obama grew up in Kenya -- a politician named Mike Huckabee. This is all part of a clever P.R. campaign, of course, because now everyone is wondering what ridiculous thing Mike Huckabee will say next and is paying unusually close attention to a man whose most notable accomplishment in recent years has been losing 110 pounds. Can you tell which of these photos was before and which was after? (No, that is not W.C. Fields in the top photo.)

The person who has to be most frustrated with the sudden interest in crazy Mike Huckabee is Half Baked Alaska. The former governor of Alaska hasn't been in the news for two or three days, which seems like an eternity given how her every inanity is typically given saturation coverage. It looks like the GOP presidential race is going to boil down to who can say the craziest things and generate the most controversy over issues that have nothing to do with making life better for average Americans. It used to be you had to watch Art Linkletter interviewing a half dozen 7 and 8-year-olds in his "Kids Say the Darndest Things" to get laughs like this. Now you just have to watch FOX News.

Hypocrite of the Week: Mitt Romney

Last night, Mitt Romney, the former governor of crankyjewishguy's (CJG) adopted home state of Massachusetts, who rolls like a tumbleweed through America (i.e. whichever way he thinks the political wind is blowing), once again blasted President Obama on the economy. Apparently, Mitt was at one of his vacation homes outside the solar system when Bush was president because since Obama took office the stock market has nearly doubled, the 800,000 jobs a month we were losing at the end of Bush's second term has been turned into job creation, most recently 190,000 new jobs last month, and unemployment, while still high, is the lowest it's been in two years.

Mitt Romney in New Hampshire turning right.

CJG didn't see last night's event, but if Mitt was true to form he was tying himself in rhetorical knots trying to explain to the right wing zealots he's now courting that the universal health care plan with a public option he put in place as governor doesn't preclude his being a fierce critic of the Obama plan, which is quite similar to the Massachusetts plan except that it doesn't have a public option because that, of course, would be like turning the United States into the Soviet Union with its gulags, death panels and Siberian work camps.

This Ken doll's constant shape-shifting is embarrassing to everyone except himself because Mitt's only bedrock conviction is that he deserves to be president. CJG will give him this, however: he stands one great head of hair above the other obvious contenders for the GOP nomination, but CJG is waiting to see how answers the three inevitable question that will determine whether he has what it takes to appeal to today's modern Republican voter: (1) which country, outside the United States, did Barack Obama grow up in; (2) on what day in history did God put human beings, fully formed, on Earth, and (3) why did God make the Earth flat when round would have been so much more practical?

From the Profound Irony Department

In what has to be one of the worst P.R. debacles of all time, two days ago the 575-pound spokesman for a Phoenix-area restaurant called the "Heart Attack Grill" died at the age of 29. Word is they are negotiating for the services of a new spokesman, Charlie Sheen, and plan to rename the restaurant the "Crack Attack Grill." Crankyjewishguy (CJG) wishes them well in their new endeavor.

Blair River, former spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill. Remarkably,
 he didn't die of a heart attack, but from pneumonia.

You Call this Health Insurance?

If you pay for your own health insurance, as crankyjewishguy (CJG) does, you probably get really cranky once a month when your health insurance premium is due; it's a bill that could easily be confused with the bill for your mortgage payment. CJG pays $1,600 a month for a plan that has $50 co-pays for office visits and a $500 family deductible for prescriptions, but, mercifully, all diagnostic tests are covered at 100%.

If the doctor doesn't charge you for an office visit,
Tufts Health Plan says your $50 office visit co-pay still applies. Huh?

Now, generally, CJG has been pretty happy with his health plan, which is provided by a company that shares a name with a small liberal arts college in Medford, Massachusetts that happens to be where his wife, and two of her siblings went to college, and whose mascot is a stuffed elephant. Oh, OK, it's Tufts Health Plan. But yesterday CJG got into it with Tufts over a reimbursement claim he filed for services rendered to his son, the one who is a sophomore at Harvard on St. Charles, otherwise known as Tulane University. CJG's son is covered for "urgent" care while away at school since no one within a thousand miles of New Orleans is an approved Tufts provider. Urgent care is care that could not be foreseen before the patient left the Tufts coverage area, and so far there's been no problem there. But in early December, CJG's son went to Student Health Services with a bad sore throat and three lab tests were performed and they determined he had strep. The total for the three lab tests was $85.

When CJG got the bill from Tulane, he sent it in with a claim form to Tufts to get reimbursed. The bill listed the three tests and the prices and also included a line that said "Regular Physician Appointment $0." You see, included in tuition are office visits to doctors at the Student Health Center, so CJG had, in effect, already paid that.

Now, two days ago CJG got a check in the mail from Tufts for $35 calculated by taking the $85 in lab work, which is covered in full under CJG's plan, and subtracting $50, the office visit co-pay. So, CJG called Tufts and spoke to a customer representative and a supervisor who insisted that even though the office visit was "billed" at zero, it was still "billed" and the $50 office visit co-pay therefore applied. When CJG pointed out that a "co-pay" means that the insurer, in this case Tufts, has also paid something -- hence the term co-pay -- and in this case they had not because there was no charge for the office visit, they said that's not the way they do it. If it's on the statement, even at $0, the co-pay applies. But on the statement Tufts sent with the check they actually subtracted the $50 on the lines for the lab tests. "That's the way the system works" and "that's they way we have to do it," they said, as if "the system" was set up by some foreign being that has since left the galaxy leaving Tufts with this system they have no choice but to live with exactly as is from now 'till eternity.

Well, bullshit, said CJG. You set up the system and you didn't "have to" set it up that way. You can set it up so that you honor your contractual commitment to pay 100% of all diagnostic tests. If they'd billed $25 for the office visit and done no lab work, by Tufts reasoning CJG would owe Tufts another $25.

Then CJG asked, what if he'd whited out the line for the office visit and sent the bill in, would Tufts have then paid the full $85 for lab work? Yes, they replied. OK, then, CJG will call Tulane and get a bill for the lab work only -- one that doesn't show an office visit billed at zero dollars -- and resubmit the claim which will probably cost you more to process (especially when you include the time we're arguing about this on the phone) than the amount you're trying keep from paying. So, CJG called Tulane and with ten minutes he had a revised bill by e-mail for the lab work only and today he's sending it to Tufts. It'll be interesting to see what happens. This is the kind of bullshit that can drive a cranky jewish guy over the edge, in which case Tufts will be paying for his mental health services.

Perhaps it should say, "no one does more to try and keep your money."

P.S. CJG is on the road again for the next week, this time to California. He can't promise he'll be posting every day. If this causes you anguish or distress, or makes you feel ill in any way, call Tufts Health Plan at 800-462-0224.

The Most Brilliant Idea Ever

While shvitzing heavily on his spin bike yesterday, crankyjewishguy (CJG) had an idea...and idea so brilliant it might just solve all of the world's problems (except for Rush Limbaugh) in one fell swoop. This brainstorm, which hit CJG while in third position (you spinners will know what CJG is talking about) and listening to The Who's Pinball Wizard at full volume, may make the invention of the personal computer look like the first Frisbee. Ready? Here it is. This guy...

...should become the new star of Two and a Half Men, and this lunatic...

...should become the next president of Libya. If you've been listening to these two rant the past couple of days it's a real toss-up trying to decide which one is crazier. Is it Quaddafi (there are so many spellings of this guy's name CJG just chose one, but it can also be Gaddafi, Ghadaffi. Khaddafi, Kaddafi, or Hanukah, among others), the man who travels with a buxom Ukrainian nurse and a cadre of stunning, uniformed female "bodyguards," who insists, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that his people love him, or is it Charlie Sheen who has two "goddesses" who both sleep in his bedroom but in different beds and he gets to choose each night which one to sleep with and, by the way, these two women, one a former porn star, help take care of Sheen's two kids who, by the way, were removed from the Sheen home by police yesterday after which Sheen told the kids' mother that "this is not responsible parenting." CJG guesses he would know. Despite his very public complete crack-up, Sheen insists CBS should come on its hands and knees to get him back on his show and, by the way, he so fucking great they should kiss his feet and up his pay from a million to three million an episode. Frankly, just watching this asshole self-destruct on shows that don't have to pay him to appear is far more economical than watching him play a normal guy for half an hour a week at a million per.

Now that CJG thinks about, maybe his idea won't solve anything at all. It might even make matters worse.

A Groovy New VW Microbus? Not So Fast

O.K., fellow baby boomers and aging hippies: don't get too excited about this because there's no guarantee that Volkswagen is going to put this vehicle into production, but at the Geneva Auto Show this week (one presumes that's Geneva, Switzerland, not Geneva, New York), VW is showing off a new version of its much revered Microbus, the vehicle that moved more pot around the United States in the 1960s than a fleet of 727s belonging to a Colombian drug cartel. The new Microbus is electric powered and gets up to 186 miles on a single charge; about what the average hippie got on a single charge of whatever substance he or she was using for fuel in 1968. And instead of a bunsen burner for heat, the new version has a state-of-the-art climate control system which begs the question: why can't we deploy one for the entire Earth to head off global warming? There's also no need to hook up a turntable, receiver and a set of large Advent speakers in the new Microbus because the "entertainment system" is controlled by an iPad. It used to be that the entertainment system in a VW Microbus was a radio controlled by your friend Paul who was so stoned he kept hitting AM instead of FM and was always really bummed when they played the short version of "Light My Fire."

But crankyjewishguy's (CJG) beef with the new Microbus has less to do with the fact that it has all these fancy amenities that the old spartan Microbus lacked, and more to do with the fact that it would look very much at home in a circular driveway in Greenwich, Connecticut while the old version looked totally at home in a vacant lot in Oakland. Really. Compare this:

With these:

Seriously, are we talking about the same vehicle here? CJG thinks not and given the choice he'd pick the Groovy version over the Greenwich version any day.

Beware the Return of The Blob

Maybe you’ve heard enough about global warming already, but there’s one thing you probably haven’t heard: the massive hurricanes, inundated coastal cities, severe drought, epidemics and disruptions to the food supply that will result may be the least of our worries. Something else more ominous lurks out there. But, we’ll come to that in a moment.

With global temperatures at an all time high and huge ice shelves breaking free in the Arctic, CJG started to wonder: who was it, exactly, that first sounded the alarm on global warming? CJG’s exhaustive research revealed something surprising. It wasn’t Al Gore, the Sierra Club, or Rachel Carson. It was Steve McQueen. In 1958. That was the year the 28-year-old McQueen made his film debut as a teenager named, well...Steve, in the classic horror film, “The Blob.” Everything about it was horrifying, from the screenplay to the acting.

Steve McQueen: the canary in the
 coal mine on global warming.

The Blob, as you may recall, arrived from outer space in some kind of ball and began consuming humans at an alarming rate, getting bigger and bigger, but apparently no more satisfied, as it oozed around a small American town. Unfortunately, the Blob didn’t have the good sense to land in Washington, D.C. The Blob, which resembled a particularly extravagant Jell-O mold CJG’s mother made in 1964, threatens the town until Steve, in a moment of desperation – he’s trapped in the basement of a diner  – sprays the thing with a fire extinguisher. The Blob, or at least part of it, recoils. Steve then remembers that the Blob failed to follow him into the meat freezer in his father’s grocery store just five minutes earlier. At that moment it dawns on Steve that it’s the cold from the CO2 in the fire extinguisher that is the Blob’s Achilles heel, since it has heretofore been immune to bullets, a jolt of electricity, and a poor script. (This is rather odd for a creature that came from somewhere near Pluto where daytime temperatures top out around 380 degrees F. below zero, but never mind.)

Fortunately, the cops have patched a line through to the diner, and Steve tells them to get every fire extinguisher in town. Then they hose the thing into submission. With a single call, Police Sgt. Dave from Podunk is able to persuade the United States Air Force to fly the Blob to the Arctic and drop it there. Government sure was efficient then. Imagine giving FEMA the same job today. The Blob would still be in a trailer on the Gulf Coast.

Anyway, in a prescient moment at the end, McQueen declares the Earth to be safe from the Blob as long as the Arctic stays cold, which, in 1958, was taken to mean forever, and everyone laughs a self-assured laugh, sure they will never have to worry about The Blob again. This sentiment was surely reassuring to millions of people who thought they might die any minute in a Soviet nuclear attack. Today, of course, a Soviet nuclear strike seems about as likely as the Arctic melting did in 1958. Forget hurricanes, drought, and drowning cities. Now CJG is worried about the return of the Blob. Someone should alert the president.