Trav Trivia

Volume 5, Number 20

August 24, 2009 -- This headline caught my eye this week: “Reader’s Digest to take Chapter Eleven.”

Shouldn’t they be allowed to take Chapter Five and a Half?”

It was a week like that, little snippet of this, that, and the other. In the Twitter age we deserve lonely little bits and pieces and snippets. Is it true one Congressman had to be hospitalized? Tried to Twitter the 1,000 page health care bill and it broke his spirit? Even our economically wounded Reader’s Digest couldn’t handle that one. Here's my tweet on the subject:

“Everyone plays, everyone pays, policies for all whether sick, lame or halt; public option keeps privateers honest, but Palin says Granny’s in big trouble.”

The most depressing news I’ve heard all week came from Democratic Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid. He spoke of splitting the health care reform bill in two parts so they could get one bill through Congress by the end of the year. End of the year! We have to go eighteen more weeks of this trauma, hysteria, phony accusations, bitter bitching, and fly speck picking garbage? And we won’t even be through then? My constitution won’t take this. I’ll be old before my time. Come to think of it my time was a few years ago so I’ll just have to live with it. The end of the year!

With Congress in recess our stalwart elected officials are back in their home bases, facing the most ignorant bunch of weirdos the rocks have ever sheltered. They make the people stopped by Jay Leno for his old Jay Walking segment look like Mensa people. Shouted at, threatened, bullied Senators and Congressmen have been cowed, except for Barney Frank. Barnacled Barney does not easily cow. Confronted by one young genius holding a doctored photo of President Obama as a Hitler, when she asked how he could support a Nazi plan he testily asked her what planets she spent her time on, a reasonable response I thought but rich fodder for the talkers on hate broadcast. I would have responded differently. I would have pointed out that indeed she had a right to fear a Nazi plan if there ever should be one, which this one isn’t, because in the third Reich it was people with her IQ on whom they performed prefrontal lobotomies.

Quentin Tarantino is either a very lucky man, or else he knew something we didn’t know. At a time when television is showing people showing up at town hall meetings with all of the Nazi regalia, and, at a time when people are showing up at Obama rallies with guns, his new movie “Inglorious Bastards” comes out that is all about killing Nazis. I hope those crazies at the rallies don’t point the finger at the President as a Nazi because those guys with guns might react. The only gun man who was allowed to show up at a Bush really was Dick Cheney. What a promotional tie in. Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: Tarantino set all of the protestors up in order to hype his movie. Makes as much sense as any other conspiracy theory.

Headline: “On Work Tour in the West, Obama Visits Old Faithful.”

I didn’t know Walter Mondale was still alive.

Headline: “Tom DeLay Agrees to Dance With Stars.”

After reading that I can’t get an image out of my head of Tom DeLay in a Tutu. Of course that is not the kind of dancing he will do (that’s how Rahm Emanual got his start) but wouldn’t it be great. He will probably do what he knows best, some kind of Lobbyist Shuffle with a partner from K Street. Just speculation on my part, but do you suppose DeLay, who was an exterminator before he got into politics, learned to dance when he got a bug up his pants? He had a bug up something when he was House Majority leader.

Headline: “Tiny Fijian island bans pants on Sundays.”

On the island of Bua the Methodist Church has ordered men not to wear pants on Sunday to “avoid offending God.” There’s an idea for the House of Representatives. One day of the week let them take their pant off in order not to offend Nancy Pelosi. Actually, the men of Bua have to wear a skirt, or “sulu,” instead. Might help the Congressmen get in touch with their feminine side. They would fit right in with the 75 women who now serve in the House. I would love to see what Henry Waxman would look like in a sulu.

Families on the Island may not travel or do any kind of work on the holy day. Are we sure these people are Methodists and not Jewish? Or, they are living like people lived in East Tennessee in 1943 when I spent about five month around Johnson City during the time of “Blue Laws.” No movies on Sunday, retail stores were closed, signs in restaurants reminded you that you would be fined for curing in public and of course no alcohol at any time. Except the moonshine “White Lightning” was sold almost openly off the beds of pickup trucks, everywhere. I caught the same bus every Saturday to travel up to Bristol, Virginia where I had a weekend gig in a combo playing for dancers in the dining room of a hotel, and on the way as we drove over a bridge spanning a little river, down on the bank was a preacher handling snakes in front of his gathered congregation. Reminds me of Senator Chuck “snake in the” Grassley as NYT columnist Charles Blow calls the ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of three Republicans supposedly working on the bipartisan health bill. You can imagine the Iowa Senator using live snakes to describe what he thinks of the Democratic version of health care reform since he, who more than anybody should know better, bought into the Palin base canard by telling his supporters you have “every right to fear ... a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” The corn grows tall in Iowa.

Headline: “Ridge's Telling Tale, or Just Another Tell-All?”

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reporting on a new book by our first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge that says Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft pressured him to raise the terror-alert level to a scarier color in order to influence the 2004 election. Why am I not aghast at hearing this? I thought so at the time. Ridge resigned “to spend more time with the family” he said then, but sings a different tune now. Fortunes are being made, paper mills can hardly keep up as the tell-all books roll out about the Bush administration. There should be a color coded alert system outside the Bush home in Dallas warning that another threat to the Bush legacy is eminent. Yellow, the turn coat color, for high alerts. The problem is these guys are pointing their finger at the other fellows as in “they did it, not me” so history may never know exactly who the evil doers were. The Bush library will need a separate room to hold these tattling tomes.

Headline: “Hurricane Spins Near New England.”

Just where the President headed for his family vacation this weekend, but I suspect at the moment he would rather face those 20-foot-high waves and winds of about 100mph than go through more speeches about health care.

“The United States has two parties now—the Obama Party and the Fox Party” writes Jonathan Alter of Newsweek. “It may no longer be possible in this country to have a serious debate about anything.” Well, we could have a debate about that if we can find anyone who actually believes we can.

Bipartisan. As Joe Klein of Time Magazine writes “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists?” Or if “one of the political parties has jumped the shark?” I prefer the snake metaphor.

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post brings up “Palinism,” which he defines as an updated version of McCarthyism, which Wikipedia defines as, “reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries.” He blames who he calls “Palin's Geppetto,” Sen. John McCain.

But McCarty went after Commies, not Nazis, being rather Nazi like himself, so it doesn’t quite scan. Another Post writer, Harold Meyerson, refers to “Palinoidal Republicans.” Well, is it the FOX party, or the Palin party? Get together, guys. We can only fight one demon at time.

Headline: “Gender Test After a Gold-Medal Finish.”

No, this did not refer to Forbes Magaine’s list of the world’s 100 most powerful women, although it sounds like a headline Forbes would use for this topic. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was number one, Sheila Blair, chairwoman of the FDIC was number two. CEOs of various big corporations filled out the top ten while Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Oprah came in at nos. 35, 36, 40, and 41 respectively. There are forty women more powerful than Oprah? Who would have thought?

Headline: “Obama Plays the God Card”

Well, someone has to do it. Religious leaders are being remarkably quiet about morality and health care reform. Where is Obama’s old buddy, Rick Warren, when the President needs him for more than just a swearing in ceremony? Not a word. Obama said: “… that we look out for one another, that I am my brother's keeper and I am my sister's keeper. And on the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call.” Can I have an Amen?

Headline you don’t want to read: “Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass.”

If it’s in the water I suppose it’s in the bar drinks, too. And that’s bad news for a new hot trend as reported by beverage writers, the adding edible flowers to all kinds of drinks. If it kills weeds, it kills flowers. Order your drink, it comes with a beautiful edible bouquet immersed among the spirits, then watch the blossoms die.

Headline: “Whole Foods Devotees Lash Out at CEO”

Members of Congress are not the only ones to face angry constituents. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed column for the Wall Street Journal arguing against health care reform. He’s been sitting on the top floor of that big building in Austin, Texas too long. He should go down on the floor and look at his customers who treat the business like a cult hangout, paying higher prices for supporting the good guys. The store’s progressive base went ballistic. Angry e-mails and blogs. Boycotts. It’s like Tom and Jerry coming out against the environment, or asking for a big tax cut. Though an outspoken Libertarian for years, this time he went too far for his free spirit customers. It’s like Mackey was sitting around one day and asked himself, What can I do to really screw up my business? I’ve shopped off and on at Whole Foods since it was one store in downtown Austin, where the atmosphere originally was kind of Woodstock with food. I remember floor-length granny dresses. It was Bohemian, not Libertarian. Now where am I going to go to get my vegetarian tamales?

Headline: “Say Goodbye to Cash for Clunkers”

Drove the Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. Or, after tomorrow, Monday, driving wheels to make some deals will find the deals are gone bye-bye. Such a success. Even on its resurrection for a second chance it had to end two months early as the money ran out again.

Now Detroit will have to sell cars that people really want, and that probably means new models, and that probably means new names for them. A good name is important as Ford once found out in what I believe was the worst research/marketing disaster in history. Needing a model just below a Lincoln in order to match GM they launched a massive, historically expensive market research program to determine how to design it and what to call it, with polls, focus groups, everything they could think of. They engaged the services of Marianne Moore, at that time in 1955 our most famous poet, for name suggestions. She turned in dozens through the year, including “the Ford Silver Sword,” “Intelligent Bullet,” “the Ford Fabergé,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” “Astranaut,” even “Utopian Turtletop.” Part of the process was word associations as in what do you think of or what images come to mind when you hear the word. Finally, after all research was done they set out to build the car. But in the two years it took to get it to the market place public opinion completely changed. The design was no longer appealing. To make matter worse they had decided they owed it to a family member, uncle Edsel to name it after him, a word with lousy name association. They immortalized him all right, giving his name to a venture as disastrous in the public’s memory of the fate of the Hindenburg. Some of Moore’s names were salvaged for future vehicles, like Thunderbird or Mustang I believe.

I don’t think any new model coming out of Detroit now under today’s circumstances should have a very grandiose name. Small cars, electric cars, fuel efficient. Names telling it like it is.

Switch Grass Guzzler” for alternative fuel vehicle. “Clunkette” in honor of the buy-back program. “AceyDcey” for a hybrid that goes both ways. “Sparky” for an all-electric. Or how about “Spritz,” the sound a blown up balloon makes when you turn it loose without tying it off, or the raspberries as the case may be. I wish Detroit well but the raspberries seem the most appropriate. This needs more thought. I’ll get back to it after I get my Utopian Turtletop out of the shop.

Volume 5, Number 19

August 17, 2009 -- Did you know Obama played stick ball in his youth with a kid whose mother was the cousin of a man who once went to a union meeting where the speaker had a membership card to a lending library where they had a copy of Das Kapital on the shelves that anyone could check out? Important. Every American should know this. Pass this on to everyone you know.

Gracious, gracious so many fearsome things to worry about. This is the week we have all been forced to recognize that “euthanasia” is not a word referring to Japanese teenagers. It has to do with Obama “death panels,” a new bugaboo wished upon us by our dear deep thinker “Sarahcuda,” as NYT columnist Maureen Dowd and many others call Sarah Palin. Why, did you know those Wiley Democrats blame a pro-life Republican, U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, for coming up with the idea for advanced planning, an option he considers a perk because it offers to pay for, if you choose to take it, a one-time consultation with a doctor on living wills and the effect of options you have for terminal care. Isakson, who has been pumping for this for years, says the idea of a “death panel” is nuts, but who are we going to believe: one Republican senator from Georgia, or Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA)? I think we know the answer to that.

In a town hall meeting last week Senator Grassley said “you have every right to fear” and that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” He is one of “the gang of six” Senators working on a bipartisan version of the bill so we can count on how that is going to turn out.

Pooh, pooh to the idea that leading Republicans are cynically willing to cater to public paranoia of a significant minority by encouraging and directing disruptive demonstrations at town hall meetings; just ordinary citizens, most of them older white voters who feel disenfranchised by minorities, exercising their first amendment rights to threaten and scream at their duly elected members of Congress. And thank goodness for good patriotic Americans like Dallas Woodhouse who is the North Carolina state director for the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity (as opposed to those Americans who are against prosperity) who is the leader of the attack on the heinous plan. As such he helps organize groups protesting at the forums hosted by lawmakers so they can be shouted down, and passionately warns (he doesn’t need evidence, you can take his word for it) “politicians want to control who lives and who dies.”

As Bill Maher writer Chris Kelly wrote on Huffington Post: “We all know, given the chance, a doctor will always talk you into suicide. That's where the money is. Why not forbid doctors from talking to patients at all, just to be safe? Call it the Palin-Grassley Freedom from Information Act.”

Conservatives have been fighting the good fight against universal health care for about a hundred years and can certainly be proud of their success in defeating it every time it comes up. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt campaigned on the Progressive Party ticket promising national health insurance. President Harry Truman, that radical, had the same cockamamie idea that millions of Americans might be better off if they had access to health care, but was in effect “shouted down.” We all remember the Clinton effort in 1993 (as do many of the same people who pulled out all of the stops to oppose it then and are using the same tactics now). Bleeding heart people just can’t seem to give up trying to push reform off on to those who really, really matter, the for-profit insurance companies, drug companies and big privately owned hospitals rather than the one in six Americans who think they need health insurance but can’t afford it.

Now you might think Rush Limbaugh gets credit for advancing the idea that Obama’s policies match those of Nazi Germany, comparing the Democratic Party to Hitler’s Germany. Shouldn’t we credit the Washington Times, who in November last year before the new administration was sworn in, ran an editorial about the Nazi Aktion T4 program saying “children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.” In a follow-up: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.” It was a warm-up for the battle that was looming on health care reform. Of course now it is the insurance companies who “deny the useless dissipation of costly medications” by denying or canceling policies.

“No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia” columnist Cal Thomas wrote about the same time. Socially conservative George Neumayr is on record in the American Spectator with “Euthanasia is another shovel ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama’s plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus, too — controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs.” If there is anything the Republicans know about it is controlling cost as witnessed the last eight years, and as for controlling life, remember the case of Terry Schiavo? If you can spare the time I recommend you watch the excellent video titled from the August 13 Rachel Maddow show which exposes some of the hypocrisy surrounding the case then and now.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#32411068

Who would have thought that in this country we would have a national dialogue about euthanasia? All in favor of it raise your feeble hand. If you can’t get you hand up you’re out of here.

So why reform health care anyway? Glenn Beck says it’s the best in the world, and I suspect the health care he has is just that. Even though Joe Conason of the New York Observer says: “The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.” But should we care? “They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival.” But at least it can’t be said we have “socialized medicine.”

There are oddities in the world of health. In this country we have a problem with obesity. Dr. Arthur Garson Jr., executive vice president and provost of the University of Virginia, wants to put a tax on unhealthy food like we do on tobacco. He says: “Issues related to obesity are killing 112,000 people per year.” Not only that but there is the additional cost of “added fuel needed to power airplanes carrying 20 percent more weight per passenger” than they once did. Yet in the New York Times Magazine section today a report says that in France eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia are severe problems. People smoke heavily to suppress their appetites. How ironic is that in a country with arguably the best food in the world. Must be cheaper to fly the friendly skis though.

One headline read “Taiwan Leader Says Typhoon Toll May Exceed 500.” That’s terrible, but we can go them one better than that. The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers.

In other headline news President Obama met in Guadalajara, Mexico with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. Comprehensive immigration reform was a main topic. It must have went well since President Obama was able to reenter the United States despite Lou Dobbs, the border Minute Men, and the “Birthers” who would want to see his green card.

In one town hall type gathering the roles were somewhat reversed. It was the speaker, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who got testy, not the Congolese student who made the mistake of asking a question that was interpreted as misogynist. Secretary Clinton was attempting to promote the rights of women on her trip to Africa and it did not go down well to infer that she should defer to her husband. The student needs to know that in the U.S. it is only the Southern Baptists who believe that women should always defer to their husbands. In this country women now account for 51 percent of all workers in high-paying management, professional, or related occupations. So the federal government reported in its latest labor force portrait. They outnumber men as writers and public relations managers. Not to mention wait persons at Hooters. Fellows, get used to it. We are becoming mere play things.

This has been a week of nostalgia for the 1960s. Woodstock and flower power. The death of Eunice Kennedy, the sister of Jack, Robert and Ted, after a life of good works, which makes us recall the terrible assignations of the period. “Mad Men,” the television series that nails the era of booze and advertising so well, begins season three today with a lot of hoopla if not audience. I don’t think I would want to go back to the three piece suits I wore, or the crew cut I sported. The occasional three martini lunch depicted in the TV show is another matter. I would give it a curtain call. However, to put that in perspective NYT columnist Timothy Egan reports that in that period deaths due to accidents involving drunk driving were about twice what they were last year which totaled 11,773 Americans.

In a biopic movie of Cole Porter’s life a few years ago he is forced at the end of time on earth to sit and view a replay of his life. I’m not sure it’s good to spend time reflecting on past eras in your life. I go with a cartoon in the June 27th issue of The New Yorker magazine in which a woman is standing over a seated man saying to him “you should never engage in unsupervised introspection.” To quote from something I once wrote about staring off into space: “it’s not the façade of the wall but what I see projected there.” You know you are beginning to lose it when you start quoting yourself.

On the subject of quotes, we’ve been a little harsh with Sarah Palin, ex governor of Alaska, so when she has something good to say we ought to acknowledge it. Here, then, is a proclamation Palin issued in 2008 for Health Decisions Day: “to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care ... and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.” Of course that was 2008. In 2009 it is “Death Panels.”

The New York Times on line often has travel pieces under headings like 36 HOURS IN BORA BORA or 18 HOURS IN SCHEMECTADY. With no opportunity to visit such exotic spots I have to work with what I’ve got, in this case 12 HOURS IN COMPUTER HELL. If I seem bitter it’s because my PhotoShop suddenly ran away from home taking with it about five hours of text and graphics work on an ad, which of course I hadn’t saved and even if I had PhotoShop is gone, won’t work now anyway.

Now I know I am hardly alone in having this kind of problem. At one time or another I’ve heard computer horror stories from everyone I know. People deserve sympathy when these bad things happen. I am considering starting a line of HALLMARK CADS to send on these occasions.

 

Computer went down? A file it tossed?

Data disappears and nobody can

Ever retrieve it from oblivion?

My deepest sympathy for your loss

 

When virus hits it’s sad that it’s

The sign of mean skullduggery

You may be sure I’ll pray for your

Computer’s swift recovery

 

I want you to know you have a friend.

Need comfort? I’ll bestow it.

And a system crash is not the end

Of life as we now know it.

 

I’m not altogether sure of the truth of that last line. Vale.

Volume 5, Number 19

August 17, 2009 -- Did you know Obama played stick ball in his youth with a kid whose mother was the cousin of a man who once went to a union meeting where the speaker had a membership card to a lending library where they had a copy of Das Kapital on the shelves that anyone could check out? Important. Every American should know this. Pass this on to everyone you know.

Gracious, gracious so many fearsome things to worry about. This is the week we have all been forced to recognize that “euthanasia” is not a word referring to Japanese teenagers. It has to do with Obama “death panels,” a new bugaboo wished upon us by our dear deep thinker “Sarahcuda,” as NYT columnist Maureen Dowd and many others call Sarah Palin. Why, did you know those Wiley Democrats blame a pro-life Republican, U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, for coming up with the idea for advanced planning, an option he considers a perk because it offers to pay for, if you choose to take it, a one-time consultation with a doctor on living wills and the effect of options you have for terminal care. Isakson, who has been pumping for this for years, says the idea of a “death panel” is nuts, but who are we going to believe: one Republican senator from Georgia, or Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA)? I think we know the answer to that.

In a town hall meeting last week Senator Grassley said “you have every right to fear” and that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” He is one of “the gang of six” Senators working on a bipartisan version of the bill so we can count on how that is going to turn out.

Pooh, pooh to the idea that leading Republicans are cynically willing to cater to public paranoia of a significant minority by encouraging and directing disruptive demonstrations at town hall meetings; just ordinary citizens, most of them older white voters who feel disenfranchised by minorities, exercising their first amendment rights to threaten and scream at their duly elected members of Congress. And thank goodness for good patriotic Americans like Dallas Woodhouse who is the North Carolina state director for the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity (as opposed to those Americans who are against prosperity) who is the leader of the attack on the heinous plan. As such he helps organize groups protesting at the forums hosted by lawmakers so they can be shouted down, and passionately warns (he doesn’t need evidence, you can take his word for it) “politicians want to control who lives and who dies.”

As Bill Maher writer Chris Kelly wrote on Huffington Post: “We all know, given the chance, a doctor will always talk you into suicide. That's where the money is. Why not forbid doctors from talking to patients at all, just to be safe? Call it the Palin-Grassley Freedom from Information Act.”

Conservatives have been fighting the good fight against universal health care for about a hundred years and can certainly be proud of their success in defeating it every time it comes up. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt campaigned on the Progressive Party ticket promising national health insurance. President Harry Truman, that radical, had the same cockamamie idea that millions of Americans might be better off if they had access to health care, but was in effect “shouted down.” We all remember the Clinton effort in 1993 (as do many of the same people who pulled out all of the stops to oppose it then and are using the same tactics now). Bleeding heart people just can’t seem to give up trying to push reform off on to those who really, really matter, the for-profit insurance companies, drug companies and big privately owned hospitals rather than the one in six Americans who think they need health insurance but can’t afford it.

Now you might think Rush Limbaugh gets credit for advancing the idea that Obama’s policies match those of Nazi Germany, comparing the Democratic Party to Hitler’s Germany. Shouldn’t we credit the Washington Times, who in November last year before the new administration was sworn in, ran an editorial about the Nazi Aktion T4 program saying “children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.” In a follow-up: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.” It was a warm-up for the battle that was looming on health care reform. Of course now it is the insurance companies who “deny the useless dissipation of costly medications” by denying or canceling policies.

“No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia” columnist Cal Thomas wrote about the same time. Socially conservative George Neumayr is on record in the American Spectator with “Euthanasia is another shovel ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama’s plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus, too — controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs.” If there is anything the Republicans know about it is controlling cost as witnessed the last eight years, and as for controlling life, remember the case of Terry Schiavo? If you can spare the time I recommend you watch the excellent video titled from the August 13 Rachel Maddow show which exposes some of the hypocrisy surrounding the case then and now.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#32411068

Who would have thought that in this country we would have a national dialogue about euthanasia? All in favor of it raise your feeble hand. If you can’t get you hand up you’re out of here.

So why reform health care anyway? Glenn Beck says it’s the best in the world, and I suspect the health care he has is just that. Even though Joe Conason of the New York Observer says: “The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.” But should we care? “They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival.” But at least it can’t be said we have “socialized medicine.”

There are oddities in the world of health. In this country we have a problem with obesity. Dr. Arthur Garson Jr., executive vice president and provost of the University of Virginia, wants to put a tax on unhealthy food like we do on tobacco. He says: “Issues related to obesity are killing 112,000 people per year.” Not only that but there is the additional cost of “added fuel needed to power airplanes carrying 20 percent more weight per passenger” than they once did. Yet in the New York Times Magazine section today a report says that in France eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia are severe problems. People smoke heavily to suppress their appetites. How ironic is that in a country with arguably the best food in the world. Must be cheaper to fly the friendly skis though.

One headline read “Taiwan Leader Says Typhoon Toll May Exceed 500.” That’s terrible, but we can go them one better than that. The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers.

In other headline news President Obama met in Guadalajara, Mexico with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. Comprehensive immigration reform was a main topic. It must have went well since President Obama was able to reenter the United States despite Lou Dobbs, the border Minute Men, and the “Birthers” who would want to see his green card.

In one town hall type gathering the roles were somewhat reversed. It was the speaker, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who got testy, not the Congolese student who made the mistake of asking a question that was interpreted as misogynist. Secretary Clinton was attempting to promote the rights of women on her trip to Africa and it did not go down well to infer that she should defer to her husband. The student needs to know that in the U.S. it is only the Southern Baptists who believe that women should always defer to their husbands. In this country women now account for 51 percent of all workers in high-paying management, professional, or related occupations. So the federal government reported in its latest labor force portrait. They outnumber men as writers and public relations managers. Not to mention wait persons at Hooters. Fellows, get used to it. We are becoming mere play things.

This has been a week of nostalgia for the 1960s. Woodstock and flower power. The death of Eunice Kennedy, the sister of Jack, Robert and Ted, after a life of good works, which makes us recall the terrible assignations of the period. “Mad Men,” the television series that nails the era of booze and advertising so well, begins season three today with a lot of hoopla if not audience. I don’t think I would want to go back to the three piece suits I wore, or the crew cut I sported. The occasional three martini lunch depicted in the TV show is another matter. I would give it a curtain call. However, to put that in perspective NYT columnist Timothy Egan reports that in that period deaths due to accidents involving drunk driving were about twice what they were last year which totaled 11,773 Americans.

In a biopic movie of Cole Porter’s life a few years ago he is forced at the end of time on earth to sit and view a replay of his life. I’m not sure it’s good to spend time reflecting on past eras in your life. I go with a cartoon in the June 27th issue of The New Yorker magazine in which a woman is standing over a seated man saying to him “you should never engage in unsupervised introspection.” To quote from something I once wrote about staring off into space: “it’s not the façade of the wall but what I see projected there.” You know you are beginning to lose it when you start quoting yourself.

On the subject of quotes, we’ve been a little harsh with Sarah Palin, ex governor of Alaska, so when she has something good to say we ought to acknowledge it. Here, then, is a proclamation Palin issued in 2008 for Health Decisions Day: “to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care ... and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.” Of course that was 2008. In 2009 it is “Death Panels.”

The New York Times on line often has travel pieces under headings like 36 HOURS IN BORA BORA or 18 HOURS IN SCHEMECTADY. With no opportunity to visit such exotic spots I have to work with what I’ve got, in this case 12 HOURS IN COMPUTER HELL. If I seem bitter it’s because my PhotoShop suddenly ran away from home taking with it about five hours of text and graphics work on an ad, which of course I hadn’t saved and even if I had PhotoShop is gone, won’t work now anyway.

Now I know I am hardly alone in having this kind of problem. At one time or another I’ve heard computer horror stories from everyone I know. People deserve sympathy when these bad things happen. I am considering starting a line of HALLMARK CADS to send on these occasions.

 

Computer went down? A file it tossed?

Data disappears and nobody can

Ever retrieve it from oblivion?

My deepest sympathy for your loss

 

When virus hits it’s sad that it’s

The sign of mean skullduggery

You may be sure I’ll pray for your

Computer’s swift recovery

 

I want you to know you have a friend.

Need comfort? I’ll bestow it.

And a system crash is not the end

Of life as we now know it.

 

I’m not altogether sure of the truth of that last line. Vale.

Volume 5, Number 18

August 10, 2009 -- “That man should go hang himself from a bonsai tree.”

That quote is my favorite quote of a week of quotes, and it’s an old one credited to the late film maker Billy Wilder referring to the epitome of all obnoxious Hollywood agents Swifty Lazar, a very tiny little man. Maureen Dowd brought that up in a column for the New York Times after she saw a photo of the crazy dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, also a teeny tiny little man even when wearing lifts, standing next to Bill Clinton. As the whole world knows our ex-President flew into the world’s most stringent dictatorship, secured a pardon for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two foolhardy American TV reporters who stumbled into North Korea only to be sentenced to 12 years of hard labor, then Big Dog flew them home to a warm reception at LAX.

Now that was a good thing, wasn’t it? Many people thought so. Al Gore thought it was worth joining Big Bill in a body hug at the airport, kind of a metrosexual thing to do. About Clinton, Keli Gof had this to say in a post on Huffington Post: “This big victory helps him get his groove back.”

Some, like Gof, believe he is now back in the game after being written off, as in the famous quote from the late Ann Richards: you could “Stick a fork in him, because he was done.”

Of course the “poisonous opiners” (blame me for this one in trying to come up with some description of the foam-at-the-mouth people on radio, TV, and the blogosphere who see evil in every episode), the usual suspects, are sure we gave away the farm to get the ladies back, castigate Clinton for sucking up to this dangerous mad man and there must be a conspiracy theory in there somewhere. Thank the Lord there is no photo of Clinton smiling or we would have heard about it 24/7. You might say like George W. Bush, Dick the Cheney, and many other prominent guys who got out of the Vietnam thing, at least Clinton can claim service in North Korea.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H. G. Wells. Ironically, North Korea, synonymous with concern about atomic bombs, was in the news on the 64th anniversary of the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilian men, women, and children instantly and leaving up to 50,000 more to suffer in the time that followed. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later only killed 40,000 instantly with tens of thousands left to a lingering, painful, death. Film footage of the horror of it all, shot be Japanese newsreel crews on the spot and American occupying troops shortly thereafter exists, showing such things as shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls, and is slowly coming to the fore after being tucked away, kept from public view by government fiat for all of those decades. Might have turned public sentiment against developing more atomic weaponry. If you share with the large segment of our populous what seems to be a taste for gore on film, look for it in a theater near you someday soon.

As one of those poised to invade the Japanese homeland after Okinawa I have to recuse myself in any discussion on whether it was a wise thing to do or not. We were spared an operation that would have cost an estimated half million lives, Japanese and American; Japan had been guilty of many atrocities dating back to their invasion of China; this was the war where civilian men, women and children became fair game. At least the military did not do what they first intended to do, not yet understanding radiation, which was to drop the bomb on a beach head and then send invading troops and ships into it and over it. Those of us who would have made it back would have come home with more than a souvenir kimono or sword, glowing in the dark. Perhaps Clinton should have given Kim Jong-Il a DVD of that footage (his probable reaction, look at the pretty pictures).

“Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work.” That quote certainly does not apply to the disruptive mobs at town hall meetings around America this week. It is an old quote from Lou Yank, chief of police in Monticello, N.Y. about the crowds at the Woodstock Festival 40 years ago this week. Jon Pareles recalls it in the New York Times, 300,000 to 400,000 people with a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Are these the same Boomers who are showing up at Tea Parties and Town Hall Meeting shouting down speakers, hanging Congressmen in effigy, spreading misinformation and hate? What became of peace and love?

“Become a part of the mob!” urged Sean Hannity on his Web site Friday. Yes, be a part of the well-orchestrated, well-financed groups that are pretending to be grass roots protesters barging in to disrupt town hall meetings on health care reform around the country. It is the same technique used in 2000 when conservatives flew Washington staffers into Florida to stage “grass roots” protests on ballot counting which worked very well in helping George W. Bush win the election. Disgusting, disgraceful distortion of the democratic process. Of course Blue Dog Democrats who took megabucks from insurers and drug companies and then fought against a public option for health insurance have something to answer for as well.

“… anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do. Blinded by fear and passion, armed with misinformation and misplaced anger, they descend on these meetings and hoot and holler in an attempt to shut down the debate rather than add to it. Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt. Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it.” Columnist Charles M. Blow in the New York Times.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.” Sarah Palin. Ignorance at work. Of course the proposed health care reform does none of those things. It is evil to spread fear and say it does. It is one thing to contend the plan is not a right one, it is quite another thing to distort, spread fear, bully proponents. As for ignorance, Republicans in general (not my Republican friends of course) have earned an anti-knowledgeable reputation not helped by Ms. Palin: Blow reports that a Pew poll found that only 6 percent of scientists said that they were Republicans (admittedly, it did not say what the other 94 percent are; they could be Klingons)

Drugmakers, labor unions, Democrats, Republicans, and health-insurance companies so far have spent over $52 million on health care reform advertising. I think advocates need a jingle along the lines of one of the earliest, and certainly the most memorable. Remember “Pepsi Cola hits the spot, 12 full ounces that’s a lot, twice as much for the money, too, Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.

I offer my services, as:

Health insurance they ain’t got

50 million, that’s a lot

Health reform is over due

The health care bill will be good for you.

You're welcome.

“Our political system is hostile to change, particularly liberal change, given both the power of money in politics and the small-state, conservative weighting of the Senate." Cecil Connolly of the Washington Post. Let’s hope we don’t end up with a system run by and far private insurance companies with the help of for-profit hospitals and drug companies.

“Facts are absolutely irrelevant in the current political climate of hate, paranoia and demonization." Editor of Salon, Joan Walsh. However, if you are interested in FACTS, the Associated Press summed up distortions versus facts which you check out by clicking on:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g5ewCvsGcSPBeHJurb6qYZLVU8OgD99QQ2OG0

“Barack Obama had his 48th birthday this week. American influence is rising abroad, and at home nobody in the White House appears to be plotting to undermine our civil rights on a daily basis. The economy’s looking kind of stimulated Since we learned during last year’s campaign that he can be blamed for anything bad that’s happened in this country since he was a toddler, perhaps this is a good time to suggest that it’s his fault the Beatles didn’t perform at Woodstock.” Gail Collins in the New York Times. Well, at least someone still has a positive view of our Kenyan born, killer of Granny, hater of whitey, socialist, Nazi, Muslim, 5th columnist, elitist, empathetic, arugula eating, Dijon mustard spreading, spendthrift president.

Will Obama catch it for taking his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard as another example of being an “elitist,” even though he is paying for it himself, or will he be accused of shunning the white culture he is said to hate since Martha's Vineyard is home to the town of Oak Bluffs, one of the few historically middle-class African-American summer retreats in the country. Five will get you seven that it will be “elitist.”

"Erotica is using a feather; pornography is using the whole chicken." This quote by author Isabel Allende has nothing to do with politics or anything else this week but as long as we’re dealing with quotes this one taken from Dr. Mardy is too good to pass up. On a more mundane note:

“However, an excellent resume and an inspiring life story are not enough to qualify one for a lifetime of service on the Supreme Court” Senator John McCain explaining why he voted against the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. He, whose main claim to fame is a compelling story had “excellent resume” in mind when he chose Governor Sarah Palin as his designated stand-in should he become president? Really? Sotomayor was confirmed by Senate, in a vote of 68-31. Many of the Senate Republicans who voted against her seemed to be Up in Arms, namely the Second Amendment. You could almost hear the pistols being cocked as senators like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas gave their concerns about her position on gun control as their reason for rejecting the first Latin American appointed to the Court. Senators like the two from Texas have to go back and face Hispanic voters and they are grasping for a reasonable excuse. Maybe they figure all Hispanic males still wear Bandaleros.

“… a barnacled cluster of senators, this program must be sunk, now. It’s been far too successful — dealers have been swamped, people are lining up to buy cars that burn less gas and bring instant cash to crippled local economies.” Citizen Mother in the NYT on some reaction to the cash for clunkers program, a billion dollar effort meant to last until fall that ran out of cash in five days. The Senate just voted to extend it adding another $2 billion. Once upon a time in the fifties I bought an old Ford convertible for $200 as a second car, then sold it year later for $100. If then was now I could have made a much better deal.

"You can really do a lot of damage, even with a careless closing. And one of the terrifying things about e-mail is: You may never know.” Will Schwalbe, co-author with David Shipley of "Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better.” Turns out there is a lot of soul searching going on about how to close an e-mail. Like it or not, you leave an impression, which may be why some people do not include a close at all, but then doesn’t that also leave an impression? Ruth McCann, writing in the Washington Post took a serious look at this question. She related an account of a guy whose troubles with the girlfriend he lost began when he closed an e-mail with “Regards;” wasn’t caring enough, sounded too “emotionally detached.”

“Thank you” and “Your Welcome” have mainly gone by the boards. “Sincerely” and “Sincerely Yours” are alive but not well. When I took a business letter writing course at the University of Texas in 1946, then considered the toughest course to pass in the School of Business you wouldn’t of had a prayer to make it through if you didn’t “Sincerely” your letter.

“Love” is the common closing for personal e-mails but if I am sending to a young female friend in her twenties it comes off as if I am hitting on her, which she would find disgusting. One female friend sends “Big Hug” which I like, and I respond with “Big Squeeze” which is O.K. as long as I don’t say where. McCann says one Chef signs off with “Love and Bacon.” I suppose I could sign off with “Love and Pouilly-Fussé.”

Many choices are out there: Best, All the Best, Fondly, Warmly, As Ever, Cheers, Cao, sure thing, my pleasure, any time, no sweat and you bet, even “Make love not war, that's what Army cots are for,"' which is a little long for Twitter. The old XOXO gets good usage. My problem is deciding which one. Do I feel warmly about this person? Affectionate for “Love?” Such a decision. All things considered, for an all-purpose sign off I think I will turn to E. B. White, arguably the best master of the written word in the 20th. Century in everything from essays, to humor, to criticism, to fiction, to children’s books, like Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web (if you can call them children’s books). In something he wrote around 1936 he ended with the word “Vale.” Perfectly good word, Vale. I’ve used it from time to time since then. It means “express leave-taking or farewell.” A word that shouldn’t get you into trouble. Sounds literary. Pays homage top E. B. So at this point I wish you “Vale” (Yr Obdt Srvt. … trav).

Volume 5, Number 17

August 3, 2009 -- The nationally televised press conference opened when the President stepped to the lectern and began:

First, I have an apology to make to the American people. When you elected me I promised you change. I promised you reform. On combating climate change, on closing Guantanamo Bay, and most particularly on the effective reform of health care. It has not happened. I have failed.

I had thought mistakenly as it turns out, with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic Administration we would be able to withstand the assaults of far right demagoguery, we would be able to overcome the vast sum of money by lobbyists of special interest groups, but I was wrong.

Hard right conservatives have made health care reform a referendum on me, personally. You’ve heard them speak. You’ve seen their memos. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Lou Dobbs, Bill Kristol, others in the Republican leadership, if health care can be defeated it will be the Obama “Waterloo.” Not that health care reform would help the American people, but the defeat of it would return this group to power. Never mind the cost in human suffering. It is the obliterate Obama campaign, not the how should health care be reformed campaign.

The desire to reform health care dates back to a time before I was born, to 1947 when the proposals of President Harry Truman were defeated by the American Medical Association. Efforts by the Clinton Administration came to naught, with residual acrimony. This time insurers, hospitals and hospital groups have hired more that 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress to lobby against health care reform, spending more than $1.4 million a day. They have gotten their money’s worth.

In our system where members of Congress must raise vast sums of money to win and hold office they welcome contributions to their political PACs. The chairman of the committee most actively involved in working on the health care bill accepted millions of dollar in contributions from the health care industry and if fact holds the record for receiving the most. I failed to be persuasive enough to overcome the effect of all that money. I tried everything, even offering to bring opposing forces to the White House for a beer but this time it didn’t work.

There are those who say reform will cost too much money. They are the same people who enthusiastically voted for the big Bush tax cuts in 2001 that added $1.35 trillion to the federal deficit in one of the biggest redistributions of wealth in memory, from middle income people to the wealthiest few. It is better for the wealthiest few to pay less taxes than to ease the pain and suffering of 47 million Americans, than to eliminate the largest cause of personal bankruptcies, to ease the burden on American businesses, than to reduce the burgeoning costs that are set to overwhelm our economy. To get health care right is to save money in the long term, a concept some members of Congress seem to have trouble grasping.

Not surprisingly, Health Care Reform opponents and the destroy Obama forces have done a superb job of disseminating distortions, misleading information and out right falsehoods. You’ve seen the phony charts, listened to the horror stories based on health care in countries in no way like the plan based on insurance we proposed, listened to the charge of socialized medicine, and the people who make that claim should look up the definition of the word "socialized" in the dictionary.

We’ve been the only civilized country in Western civilization that has not been providing health care to all citizens, but are we civilized if we deny 47 or more citizens access to health care? Are we not a better people than that? Tell me more Canadian horror stories than tell me why Canadians live longer. Tell me the evils of French socialized medicine which covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system. And we are not even attempting to do it their way. We’re trying for an insurance system which allows patients freedom of choice. Tell me America is not good enough to do it better than those other countries and you tell me you have no faith in American know how.

The bill as passed, watered down with no public option to control costs, and unfairly requiring an individual mandate but no employer mandate is a bad bill that does not get the job done, not worth the cost. That is why I can not in all consciousness sign this bill. I will veto it, in the hope there will come a day when members of Congress will have the courage to rise above partisan politics and put the interests of American citizens above their need for campaign funds. I wonder if Harry Truman had that same hope 62 years ago.

The public option was one of the main pillars of reform, and as one columnist* put it, knock away any of the pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse probably taking the my presidency down with it. This has come to pass. I can only express my regrets to the American public for not succeeding in fulfilling that vitally important pledge I made on the campaign trail. My effectiveness may be over, but I shall not pull a Palin and resign. I will continue to strive to serve to the best of my ability, but in the end the changes we hoped for lay in the hands of the member of Congress for whom you voted. Real reform rests upon your ballot. Use it wisely.

*Paul Krugman, New York Times

Did it seem to you that the President did not speak with his usual eloquence? I wonder why? Or better still it shows why I don’t write speeches for Presidents.

This is a press conference I hope the President does not have to make, but at this moment in time it does not look good.

We in America have such disdain for anything European (politically that is; we go for the food, the wine, the women, the art). A holdover from the revolution, perhaps, or a symptom of the frontier spirit of individualism when our elected officials try to work for the common good. Krugman reflected on this in a column a week or so ago. As he put it “America doesn’t have to adhere to the same rules and constraints as the rest of the world. America is God’s favored nation, so why should Americans adopt ideas and programs that appear to limit our God-given “personal freedom”? Certainly not from the 'intellectual corrupt' European countries.” I say we ought to take and apply any ideas and programs that make sense and just make them that much better. The fervent belief we can do that sounds patriotic to me.

We shouldn’t throw stones about “intellectual corruption” however. As Dr. Francis Collins, the newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health, puts it we have an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. Though a physical chemist, a medical geneticist, and the former head of the Human Genome Project he is also an evangelical who believes that there is no conflict between science and religion, a tough sell. He embraces the idea that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago and we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. Would that were so across the board. It is almost as though when an evangelical has his head plunged under water three times a certain sense of reason gets washed out. Oh, they remain more intellectual than the banana but I’m not sure about the fly.

My main beef with Sarah Palin is that at a time we have this epidemic she is the poster child for the celebration of ignorance. And even though she has officially resigned she is now in what NYT columnist Maureen Dowd calls her “new role as bizarre babe-at-large, a Nixon with hair extensions ranting about ‘American apologetics,’ which sounds like a cross between apologists and Dianetics.” She is “preachy, screechy and angry, playing to people’s worst impulses.” What was it that got her in this position of national prominence? As Republican strategist Mike Murphy put it: “If Sarah Palin looked like Golda Meir, would we even be talking about her today?” I don’t know. I’ll bet there was someone at some time who found Golda Meir sexy. Meir was a tough lady, but I don’t see her shooting wolves from air planes.

We’ve been told that for years the smartest and brightest graduates of Ivy League colleges make a B line to Wall Street for jobs, rather than put their superior training and proven intellect to work in fields producing tangible results for the economy. No question why. Nine firms we just bailed out with government money paid about 5,000 traders and bankers over $1 million each … repeat, over $1 million EACH … in bonuses for the year, which just proves they were the smartest and brightest to take those jobs. Goldman Sachs alone awarded more than $1 million to 953 workers. Workers? More like vacuum cleaners sucking up money. As a result there is a bill in Congress to give regulators new powers and stockholder a vote, if nothing more than symbolic, over executive compensation. Jon Stewart did a segment on the Daily Show about how Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury and a man trying to fix the housing bust, is having trouble selling his own house in Larchmont, New York, for $1.6 million, not a very big price up there. Geithner gave up the big bucks temporarily to serve his country but think of it … to the 5,000 mentioned above that is chump change, like just reaching for it in your wallet. I’m not opposed to people earning big money, but the key word is “earn.” I would like to know what each of those 5,000 did to earn it; they got up each morning at say, Larchmont and rode the train to the city where they, in addition to a salary, and God only knows what that is, earned $3,845 or more each work day as a bonus. Maybe they need another little incentive tax cut.

How smart is this: six senators, three Democrats, three Republicans, have been meeting every day for weeks trying to hammer out a bipartisan version of health care reform, in other words working to improve the public’s health. The meetings are long, and they have snacks: chocolate-covered potato chips, Doritos, pretzels, Oreo cookies, and beef jerky. Do we really want these people in charge of our health?

In a related story (more or less) the Rochester Medical Center in New York reports that the dye used in blue M&Ms, Brilliant Blue G, can help prevent spinal-cord injuries. But there is just one thing: when they treat rats with it the rodent’s skin turned bright blue. Think “healthy diet”, think obstructionist ‘Blue Dog Democrats,’ think “rats” … it all ties together somehow. Committees meet, pop chips and Oreos, dither away, discuss the merits of “bending the cost curve” and “evidenced-based medicine” while 14,000 American’s lose their health care every day.

Outside of those Congressional conferences and meeting rooms the latest attack on reform began with antiabortion leader Randall Terry calling it an attempt to “Kill Granny.” Other distortioners prefer “Obama wants to tell you how to die.” Reps. Earl Blumerauer (D-OR) and Sander Levin (D-MI) have responded, writing colleagues “Allegations of mandatory counseling and euthanasia are blatantly false” and are “as offensive as they are untrue.” The proposal is to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills, should they wish it. This is considered a good thing by the American Medical Association and AARP, both of whom endorsed it, but what do they know compared to talk radio and the blogosphere.

Another politician is giving up her seat before her term ends, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison who will leave the Senate in September to run for Governor of Texas against incumbent “we don’t want tainted federal money” and “we don’t need the USA, we can succeed” Rick Perry, who had this to say about it: “When people elect you to an office they expect you to fulfill the obligations to the job.”

But when Palin resigned he said “Sarah Palin is a good friend and accomplished governor who will continue to be a strong voice of conservatism in American politics. Her state and our country are better off as a result of her tenure as governor and her candidacy for vice president.” Besides that, she is better looking than Golda Meir.

With so many women in politics, or for that matter with so many women in high profile positions a linguistics problem is getting more attention: how to express gender neutrality? It is somewhat offensive, or perhaps degrading to use the word “man” in cases where gender is unknown or could be either. A couple of linguists wrote about this in a column on language in the New York Times Magazine a couple of Sundays ago. They reported on some of the efforts to solve this problem by combining words, like his and her into “hisser,” and he and she into “s/he” (you could write it, but how would you pronounce it without approaching scatology?). He, him, and his is being replaced by “their” even when singular, to go both ways (well, there is a lot of that going around).

This is not all that new. As long as thirty years ago it came up in a conversation I had with a man of my acquaintance who was adamant that the word “man” referred to the species and “woman” was man with a womb. Therefore, he said, we simply needed to add a prefix to the word man to indicate the masculine and leave “man” alone as neutral gender. He had many colorful suggestions, too colorful to list here, but I believe he was on to something. What, then, might we combine for general use? Sperm and man for sperman? “Pardon me, I am going to use the sperman’s room?” “A sperman and a woman were sitting at a bar …” Too blatantly sexual. Maleman sounds too postal. The obvious word “penman” is already taken. We could adapt the Yiddish word “moil,” except it already refers to the male do-er rather than the male do-ee. What if we combined “Phallus” and man for “phalman?” A couple of letters longer than “woman,” but doable. “When a phalman meets a woman.” It works. Now to get it in to general use.

Volume 5, Number 16

July 27, 2009 -- It’s a rough, rugged, competitive game which uses such terms as “try,” “scum,” “conversions”, and play doesn’t stop until there is no movement. That’s the game of Rugby but could also be said of the Congress at work on health care reform. Democrats are giving it a try, looking for conversions from Republican opponents and as for scum, there is enough of that to go around. Democrats, most of them, trying to get reform fostered by the Administration as promised to voters in the last election are not only faced with mad dog Republicans, but Blue Dog Democrats, a lovely bunch of pale-white males mostly from Southern states like Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana who seem to carry the party card with reluctance.

The Republican approach to this effort is very simple and clearly stated, as hard as that is to believe: health care reform is the signature legislation of the Obama Administration. If he can be prevented from getting it, Republicans have a good chance of returning to power in 2012. It must be defeated at all costs.

Sound far fetched that decent human beings, elected to look after the welfare of the citizenry, would exploit a crises of mounting proportions which is causing increasing suffering to millions of Americans as pure political power grab? Here is a sampling of what is being said, and remember there has been no Republican plan for health care reform:

• Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) who declared that he would do everything in his power to kill health reform in the Senate saying “if we are able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

• Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), “We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2012 election.”

• Rush Limbaugh to his audience “There’s one thing we gotta stop is health care. I’m serious, now. If they get that, that’s the tipping point.”

• Newt Gingrich (R-GA), former House Speaker, “This could be the bill that drags Obama’s whole presidency down.”

So it isn’t about better health care. It isn’t about having different ideas on how to reform the system. It’s all about destroying Obama. Did I mention the word “scum?”

Count Texas Governor Rick Perry in the “we-don’t-need-no-damn-health-care” boy’s club, but he has his own unique twist. He says the first role is to defeat the plan in Congress, apparently no matter what it turns out to be, but if that fails he plans to invoke states rights protection under the 10th amendment. The idea is that Texas has sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government. Never mind that Texas has a higher percentage of uninsured people than any other state. This is Texas and if we want our uninsured to suck eggs, that’s our affair.

The unofficial slogan of Austin, the state capital is “Keep Austin Weird,” but I don’t believe it was meant to include supporting a governor like Perry. This is the governor who turned down money in the stimulus package intended to provide unemployment benefits, but who now wants to “borrow” an equivalent amount for the same purpose. This is the governor who talked about how some day Texas might succeed from the Union. This is the governor whose base is hard-nosed evangelicals which he pampers by appointing to the Texas Board of Education, where curriculum is set and text books approved, people who want to have Creationism taught in public schools at the expense of that ungodly Darwinism evolution thing, who want to expunge from history books people like Caesar Chavez, Thurgood Marshall, and Henry Cisneros as though they never existed, who favor abstinence only sex education in the state with one of the largest, if no the largest percentage of teen pregnancy. His enthusiastic base includes the Southern Baptists who believe wives should defer to their husbands, and that this is a “Christian Nation” instead of a nation where the majority are Christians, there being a whale of a difference in those two statements.

This is also the governor who lives rather well thanks to taxpayers and a host of wealthy donors who of course do not expect quid pro quo. R.G. Ratcliffe did a little run down in the Houston Chronicle: “Taxpayers shell out $108,000 a year to rent him an estate west of Austin, and they spend another $168,000 on chefs, stewards and housekeepers for the Perrys' creature comforts.” And “wealthy donors and corporate-funded foundations have flown Perry to the Bahamas for scuba diving, to Paris, Rome and Dubai for business promotion; and to San Diego, Calif., for the one-time Texas A&M yell leader to attend an Aggie Muster for A&M graduates.” And then there are the little personal gifts like 16 pairs of custom-made boots, hunting trips, sports tickets, and a football helmet signed by former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith. Why should Perry concern himself about health care? Or the unemployed?

Is there really a health care crisis? NYT columnist and economist Paul Krugman put it this way: “The health care system is in crisis. The fate of America’s middle class hangs in the balance.” He notes “health insurance premiums doubled during the Bush years.” I know the last two or three years before I retired our Director of Personnel was beside himself dealing with health insurance providers. He changed them about every six month as costs shot up, and that was eighteen years ago. I believe it led him to quit his job, move to Florida to sell Porches and work as a pianist in a cocktail bar (beats personnel work any day). Aside from the cost of it, should we care about the morality of it? We are the only civilized country that doe not make health care available to all citizens, yet we are spending far more per capita. Can we call ourselves “Civilized?”

Dr. Jon LaPook, chief medical correspondent for the CBS Evening News outlined on the Huffington Post health care topics to be considered:

• Coverage expansion and subsidies

• Insurance market reforms including a "public option"

• Delivery and payment reforms. About 20 percent of the 2.5 trillion dollar annual health care price tag does not at time contribute to better health.

• Prevention. For example if you can treat a foot under siege from diabetes before it reaches the point it must be amputated the patient not only benefits but treatment costs less than surgery.

As Krugman points out some of the objectives are to restrain “proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs” and provide “comparative effectiveness research.”

Dr. Jon LaPook decries the “spin, mis-statement of fact and plain old mis-truths” swirling around out there about the House bill, Idiotic Charts that make no sense. Phony comparisons of single-payer systems to our proposed insurance payer system. Horror stories to make your hair stand on end. If you lack faith in the Administration elected to fix the problem, get a copy of the bill and read it. That will be like the time I decided I would learn the names of the grape varieties used to make wine in Italy, until I learned they numbered more than 250. The bill covers 1,000 pages. Not a quick read. It’s more than take an aspirin and call me in the morning.

Henry Waxman is a man beside himself (and the bulldog-like representative from California beside himself is a sight to behold), frustrated by the Blue Dog Democratic coalition from getting the bill out of committee, the idea is to get it to a vote before summer break at the end of the week and he is threatening to run over them and get it to the floor anyway, which is causing loud cries of “foul” from the “Dogs.” They were working on another compromise late Friday, but the coming week will tell the tale. There may be blood on the floor. Will the Bill get passed? Or will Obama meet his Waterloo? Tune in next week when “all will be revealed.”

In 1835, as given in Dr. Mardy’s quotations, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his book on the U.S., soon famous, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults." In Health Care Reform, we are about to see if we still earn the right to “greatness.”

The idea of racial overtones in this brouhaha came up. African-American Democrat, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia made the point that the seven Blue Dog Democrats holding up the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee were “a nondiverse group” of white men. “They should be more concerned about people who are dying than about their basic philosophy, which involves simply money,” Mr. Johnson said. “Which is more important, money or live human beings with flesh and blood running through their veins, who cannot get health care?” O.K., I ask you are we civilized or are we not?

Unfortunately, the matter of race popped up at the end of the Obama press conference on health care detracting from the coverage of the message. The answer Obama gave to the reporter’s question seemed reasonable to me because it did seem stupid to handcuff a middle aged man with a cane, haul him off, and charge him with disorderly conduct once he established he had broken into his own home because he didn’t have his keys. In retrospect it doesn’t seem likely Sergeant Crowley treated Harvard professor, and Obama friend, Louis Gates differently because he is African American, or that Gates, part white himself with a white wife, reacted because Crowley is white. It looks like two guys just lost it. NYT columnist Maureen Dowd quotes John Timoney, the police chief of Miami, as saying “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech.” Obama has invited both parties to go to the White House to have a “symbolic beer” but is that really a good idea? Giving beer to a couple of hot heads? One thing I learned from this is that using a cane, as I now do, doesn’t cut you any slack from the police. Hell of a note.

Health care has to do with mortality. Recent high profile deaths remind us of our own mortality. Michael Jackson’s departure is still making news as the LAPD are now calling it manslaughter with Jackson’s personal physician a suspect. About a thousand invited guests said goodbye to America’s “Most Trusted Newscaster,” Walter Cronkite, last weekend. Now, in an age of what NYT columnist Frank Rich calls “cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet” (a lovely phrase) in a poll conducted by Time magazine, Daily Show host Jon Stewart has been voted America's Most Trusted Newscaster. Since Stewart thinks of his show as a spoof newscast that pretty much shows us the state of things. But I have to agree with the poll.

Rich took a different view of the Cronkite legacy, pointing out that the newscaster, going against the advice of management turned what was then only a modest local Washington story on the Watergate break-in into national news Oct. 27, 1972 with the subsequent consequences. Rich also referred to the legacy of another prominent figure who died recently, Robert Strange McNamara, who helped send some 50,000 Americans to pointless deaths in Viet Nam. And here in the age of electronics when a man died, his Facebook page became an online gathering place for his hundreds of Facebook friends to offer a memory or a reflection. Now that’s a different way to sit shiva. But where are the refreshments?

While not the size of Watergate, political scandals continue to keep us titillated. What happens in Nevada no longer stays there. The governor is being sued by a cocktail waitress, who claims he assaulted her outside a nightclub, and also his wife, who wants a divorce. The lieutenant governor is facing felony charges for misusing funds when he was the state treasurer. That U.S. Senator from Nevada who had the affair with his campaign bookkeeper (cooking the books?) who was married to his chief of staff makes it a trifecta. Just one more political sex sandal to report (a slow news week on the sex scene), Republican Tennessee State Senator Paul Stanley admitted to having a "sexual relationship" with his 22-year-old intern. He has been another outspoken family values man. He must consider his intern part of his extended family.

The House and the Senate are not the only scene of competitive activity of living creatures jostling for dominance and position. Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, wrote a piece this week in the New York Times bringing us up to date on the world of microbes that inhabit our bodies. We exist, it seems, as a kind of walking coral reef habitat for millions of diverse living creatures in the form of microbes. In fact they total ten times more cells than we do, so as she puts it when you come right down to it we are only one tenth human.

The diversity of these microbes is incredible. The colony on your little finger is different from the one on your thumb or the palm of your hand. And of course my microbes are quite different from yours. Wash them off and another batch appears, not necessarily the same, the evolutionary principle at work.

The real action, however, is down in the gut (I never liked the word “gut;” looking at some attractive woman and thinking about her “gut,” but it’s a scientific term). There we host hoards of microbes in a symbiotic relationship; we have to have them working away, to live; they have to have us. And boy are they a bunch of different species, down there competing for food and territory. They are in charge of our nutrition and our immune system and perhaps how we feel about ourselves, so how well they do their job depends on how well we live, even how long we live. We, on the other hand, keep them in turmoil. If your diet is rich in sugar and fat, certain types of bacteria prevail; switch to eating more plants and the balance shifts to other kinds able to make more efficient use of that type of diet. It’s a war down there and we are both the battle field and the product of the outcome.

It is known that people from different parts of the world, and people of different ethnic backgrounds host entirely different bacteria, but it is not yet known why: geography, culture, ethnicity. Ms. Judson considers the gut the new frontier, and to boldly go where no one has gone before. As for me, I wonder about the ramifications of only being one tenth me; court of law “I’m sorry, but my microbes made me do it.” I want to find a way to take a meeting with the little fellows down there, “settle down, settle down, we’re in this together. We need team work, perhaps some workplace rules. What should I provide, a lamb chop or a fish fillet, red wine or white? Our well being depends upon it.” Do you suppose the purpose of our lives is just to play host to these creatures? The meaning of life after all?