"Inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly"

Washington Post syndicated columnist Richard Cohen pays appropriate homage to tattoos -- and, along the way, other societal travesties:



How can anyone who knows how fickle fashion is, how times change, how their own tastes have "improved," decorate their body in a way that's nearly permanent?



The Oracle has never understood why anyone would so disfigure perfectly good skin. In one instance familiar to The Oracle, a tattoo mars that which otherwise might be close to perfection.

Huh?

I have no idea what this opening sentence from a page 1, above the fold, story in the Dallas Morning News means:

They were the Renaissance men of crime, a mixture of white-collar cunning and blue-collar ruthless violence.

What on earth is the authors' definition of a Renaissance man?

Meanwhile, a front page story in The Tennessean managed to get a story backwards:

Physicians last week narrowly escaped a 10.6 percent reimbursement cut when Congress voted to override President Bush's veto of a bill that included rescinding the cuts. If the legislation had passed, Tennessee doctors stood to lose $350 million in care reimbursements, according to the Tennessee Medical Association.

Actually, if it had NOT passed, physicians would have faced a cut.

With regard to the Medicare story, this has been an ongoing issue annually for several years now, with Congress annually refusing to come up with a long term fix, and with Congress this year funding the temporary fix by decimating a managed care program (disclosure: my employer has an interest in that program). Such ongoing failure to fix a relatively simple problem should give pause to those screaming for greater levels of federal government management of our health care system.

The Eternal Optimist Quote of the Day

"The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

-- William Faulkner, as enunciated by Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury.