Such as it was, it was really quite cool. Last Friday, fellow Austin blogger Chris Kerstiens and had a beer with me and my brother, Al, and my friend Ed on the famous Trudy's porch. Kerstiens is a very nice and amusing fellow, just as I had suspected.
I haven't been a very good blogger lately, because I spend nearly all my spare time these days contemplating health care reform, with a special little focus lately on one of the greatest injustices of our time-- the exclusion of employer-based health care contributions from taxable income. Many smart people are unaware that folks whose employers arrange their health insurance situation get a huge tax break from the government. About $100 billion dollars worth annually. But if you buy your own health insurance, you get zippo from the feds. Instead, they tax you up the wazoo and then let you gather up the leftover crumbs to pay for health insurance on an increasingly expensive private market. Meanwhile, those who work for large firms that provide insurance suffer under the bizarre delusion that a visit to the doctor costs $15, the average co-payment. This $ 0.1 trillion tax break encourages all sorts of inefficiencies and overconsumption of health care services that then drive up insurance premiums for everyone. As prices go up, small firms are forced to drop coverage and even more people are left uninsured.
Now, I don't know if I ever mentioned that as a house-less, child-less, married, secondary-income-earner who enjoys a very nice benefits package from the State of Texas, this happens to be one of my few little tax shelters. Yet, I sincerely believe it should go and be replaced with a universal tax credit that would be fairer and lack the perverse incentives of the current tax exclusion. And I spend lots of time these days meditating on this and other issues of fairness in our health care system, to the recent detriment of my blog.
Imagine my shame, then, to find this website was not included on the good Nick Denton's list of "liberal" blogs. I would have been surprised normally if I were included on such a list, but for the charming method Mr. Denton uses to judge the liberal from the illiberal. Why, it's so simple! He defines liberal "as anyone who cares about injustice, whether in the US, or in the world at large." One is left to surmise then that bloggers not on the special "liberal" list couldn't give a rat's patooty for justice here or anywhere. That's really a very stupid assumption about A. Liberals and B. Everyone Else. I guess I'd feel worse if Layne weren't also inexplicably missing from Mr. Denton's list. To my mind, he's the classical liberal and I call myself proud to not be on a list that also excludes the likes of Ken Layne.
Alain Ducasse continued to amaze with his suggestions for roast chicken last week. The man is a freakin' genius. I was blown away by his suggestion to roast the chicken on top pieces of dark meat and garlic for especially chickeny juices. Kiss your roasting rack goodbye! Then, today he has some lovely thoughts on mangos and sour cream sorbet for dessert. Not as paradigm shifting as the chicken or steak pieces, but nonetheless delicious, I'm sure.