This and that

MANIFESTO

Again with the silver bullet:

President Obama held his third and final health-care town hall gathering Saturday, and ... about halfway through the questioning, Obama sought to encourage people to have realistic expectations about what could come of health-care reform, his largest domestic initiative.

"The truth is—I want to be completely honest here—there is no perfect, painless silver bullet out there that solves every problem, gives everyone perfect health care, for free," he said. "There isn't. I wish there was."

He's right: There isn't a silver bullet out there. But there just might be a magic bullet.

And Governor Clubwoman is really upset that people are being mean to her.

Last Monday, the governor's press office held an unusual closed-door meeting of high-priced media spokesmen for state agencies — about $2 million worth of them, figuring that about 20 attended and that their annual taxpayer-funded salaries average about $100,000, according to state records.

The internal meeting, in a state Capitol conference room, was never announced to the news media. That's undoubtedly because its purpose was to strategize about how to handle the media during an ongoing state budget crisis in which top aides to Gov. M. Jodi Rell now feel that the governor isn't always getting fair coverage ...

[I]f you look at the official, civil-service job descriptions of the officials who attended — including communications officers for such state departments as Administrative Services, Correction, Environmental Protection, Motor Vehicles, Public Works, Revenue Services, Social Services, and Transportation — they mention nothing about dealing with "how the media is playing or not playing the issues."

It's off-putting that my tax dollars are going toward something so self-indulgent. Or, to use the old cliché, the governor can dish it out, but she can't take it.