Blonde on Blonde: Obamacare, Vaccinations, and Spying on Your Kids

It’s not a great sign when a wife can’t believe she and her husband have not yet divorced, as Deirdre Imus marveled this morning during the latest installment of Blonde on Blonde with her pal Lis Wiehl.

In an effort to clear that hurdle, Imus wondered if Deirdre or Lis would install a device on their kids’ phones to prevent them from sending racy text messages.

“Absolutely,” Lis said, before Imus could even finish the sentence. “I’m totally in favor of that. No privacy for my kids. None.”

Deirdre, however, would like to use such a program for another member of her family. “Even though you’re chronologically technically not a kid, you’re like a kid,” she told Imus.

While Lis has no problem snooping around her children’s business without them knowing, Deirdre and the I-Man are straightforward with their son. “If you can’t trust your kid, they won’t trust you,” Imus told Lis, who was not swayed.

Both women were armed today with some pros and cons about Obama-care, the President’s health care plan. One of the cons, as Lis sees it, is that big companies won’t be able to afford to give low-paid employees Medicare provisions.

“The Obama administration is saying, ‘Okay, big companies—McDonald’s, for example—we’ll give you an exemption,’” she said. “Well what about Ma and Pa companies? What about the companies that aren’t going to get this big incentive, the ones that really need it?”

Lis, a Harvard-educated attorney, also indicated that the health care reform bill could be unconstitutional because it requires people to have health insurance and fines them if they do not. “We’re going to be forced to pay a penalty, pay a tax, levied by the IRS, for something we don’t want,” she said.

One of the plan’s really strong pros, in Deirdre’s view, is that the Boriken Center, one of the predominant health care facilities in the grossly underserved neighborhood of East Harlem, was recently awarded $12 million of stimulus money because of Obama-care.

“That’s where this kind of money should be going, to a facility like that,” Deirdre said of Boriken, which has been trying for years to raise money to build New York City’s first entirely green hospital.

In other medical news, Deirdre praised New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for keeping one of his campaign promises: he changed the state law so that parents not wanting to vaccinate their children can claim religious exemption without requiring further explanation or justification.

But Lis sees a slippery slope in this policy change, and referenced a recent case where a girl claiming to be a member of a religion called the Body Modification Movement was kicked out of school for having too many piercings, and then reinstated when she claimed religious exemption. “So can any religion count?” Lis asked.

Furthermore, Lis worries that unvaccinated children could contract certain diseases and make her own kids sick, which Deirdre brushed off as lunacy. “Immunization doesn’t work that way,” she said.

If possible, a number of people would probably inoculate themselves against Brett Favre, who sent pictures of his wiener, for lack of a better term, to female employees of the New York Jets when he was the team’s quarterback.

Such behavior would turn Deirdre Imus off, though she relented when asked how she would feel if the photograph revealed a sizeable “package.” And if the I-Man wasn’t already ticked off, Deirdre then said she admires Sarah Palin.

“I want a divorce,” he said, and turned to Lis. “I’ve got a lawyer right here.”

-Julie Kanfer