October Week 1, 2005

Saturday October 1 , 2005

To alcohol! The cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems!

Homer J. Simpson

We went to Riverside to see Karen and Blaine and the rest of the family... we had a nice visit, I think it taxed Christy some... probably not a good idea with her situation but it's really the only chance we had to go see them and Christy is leading this parade... It was a nice Bon Voyage and Farewell parry, the food was good, the conversation was upbeat and cheery, the momentousness and ramifications of the move and everything else that is taking place however was put aside, no one seemed to want to get involved in reflecting on that aspect of this gathering. Which is fine... being aware and making preparations is something any sane person should do but there is absolutely no sense in dealing emotionally with things before they happen,

I had a nice Dis-argument with Wayne... He is upset with my Republican Bashing here on the web site... I think I am fairly restrained actually, but perspectives can be deceiving. I really try not to bash Republicans in general, I bash specific Republicans... Frist, DeLay, Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice... I will bash self-serving Democrats every chance I get too...

What fascinates me about talking with Wayne is that when we get past the gut reaction rhetoric we, more often then not, end up agreeing on most fundamental aspects of what is 'Right' and 'Wrong'... the problem seems to stem from preconceptions and (for lack of a better word) presentation. I really am the wrong person to argue my case, I am not confident enough in my facts or articulate enough to present them. I can write OK but I can't talk worth a damn.

Sunday October 2 , 2005

Lots of work to do and here I sit like a deer in headlights... damn... 0830, Time for work...

Bush linked to hemorrhoid controversy

The White House today issued a statement denying that President Bush faltered during the crucial early phase of Hurricane Katrina because he was busy making ads for a new medication used to treat hemorrhoids.

Critics claim this is yet another example of Bush doing favors for his cronies in the powerful anti-hemorrhoids industry and have called for a probe on whether he profited from his alleged endorsement of a product called Preparation W.

However, a spokesman pointed out that the ad actually makes the president look like a jackass and is probably a "partisan attack" from some latte-drinking, liberal satirist.

Preparation W, the ad claims, "relieves the painful burning, itching and discomfort associated with President Bush and his policies." The fine print says it "helps shrink swollen budget deficits" and "prevents further insurgency in the affected area."

Sen. Ted Kennedy declined to comment on the controversy over Preparation W and its promise of "fast, temporary relief from a pain-in-the-ass president." But sources say the Massachusetts Democrat has discreetly inquired about ordering five cartons.

http://www.humorgazette.com/

I forgot we haveto go see B today... not a very good visit. He told us to get the hell out... so we did. B doesn't get it... he's very angry at us, he is blaming us for being there and is not capable of assuming any responsibility for his situation. He said it was our fault because we didn't let him visit his friend Josh's house back about 4 years ago... damn.

I never managed to do any work... tomorrow I will have to really buckle down

In the Beginning, There Was Abramoff

New York Times, The (NY)
October 2, 2005

Author: FRANK RICH

"Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."
-- Tom DeLay, March 20, 2005

IF you believed Tom DeLay then, you no doubt believe now that the deposed House majority leader is only on "temporary" leave from his powerful perch in Washington and that he'll soon bounce back, laughing all the way, from a partisan witch hunt that unjustly requires his brief discomfort in a Texas courtroom.

Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, aka the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

But don't take my word for it. And don't listen to the canned talking points of the Democrats, who are still so busy trying to explain why they were for the war in Iraq before they were against it that it's hard to trust their logic on anything else. Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring "the end of the Republican Revolution."

He painted the big picture of the Abramoff ethos in vibrant strokes: the ill-gotten Indian gambling moolah snaking through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides; the "fact-finding" Congressional golfing trips to further the cause of sweatshop garment factories in the Marianas islands; the bogus "think tank" in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where the two scholars in residence were a yoga instructor and a lifeguard (albeit a "lifeguard of the year"). Certain names kept recurring in Mr. Ferguson's epic narrative, most prominently Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, Republican money-changers who are as tightly tied to President Bush and Karl Rove as they are to Mr. Abramoff and Mr.
DeLay, if not more so.

The bottom line, Mr. Ferguson wrote, was a culture antithetical to everything conservatives had stood for in the Gingrich revolution of 1994.
Slaying a corrupt, bloated Democratic establishment was out, gluttony for the G.O.P. and its fat cats was in. Mr. Abramoff and his gang embodied the very enemy the "Contract with America" Congress had supposedly come to Washington to smite: "'Beltway Bandits,' profiteers who manipulate the power of big government on behalf of well-heeled people who pay them tons of money to do so." Those tons of Republican money were deposited in the favors bank of K Street, where, as The Washington Post reported this year, the number of lobbyists has more than doubled (to some 35,000) since the Bush era began in 2000. Conservatives who once aspired to cut government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" -- as a famous Norquist maxim had it -- merely outsourced government instead to the highest bidder.

Mr. DeLay's latest plight is only a tiny detail within this vast Boschian canvas of depravity. If this were Watergate -- and Watergate itself increasingly looks like a relatively contained epidemic of corruption -- the Texas grand jury's indictment of the congressman and his associates would be a sideshow tantamount to the initial 1973 California grand jury indictment of the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and his pals in the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office; Watergate's real legal fireworks were still in the wings. So forget about all those details down in Texas that make your teeth hurt; don't bother to learn the difference between Trmpac and Armpac. Fasten your seat belt instead for the roller coaster of other revelations and possible indictments that's about to roar through the Beltway.

The most important plot development of the past two weeks, in fact, has nothing to do with Mr. DeLay (as far as we know). It was instead the arrest of the administration's top procurement officer, David Safavian, on charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff. And what an investigation it is: The F.B.I., the I.R.S., the Treasury Department and the Interior Department have all been involved. The popular theory of the case has it that Mr. Safavian, a former lobbying colleague of both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, is being muscled by the feds to rat on the big guys in Washington -- much as another smaller fish may have helped reel in Mr. DeLay in Texas.

The DeLay and Abramoff investigations are not to be confused with the many others percolating in the capital, including, most famously of late, the Justice Department and S.E.C. inquiries into the pious Bill Frist's divine stock-sale windfall and the homeland security inspector general's promised inquiry into possible fraud in the no-bid contracts doled out by FEMA for Hurricane Katrina. The mother of all investigations, of course, remains the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's pursuit of whoever outed the C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak and whoever may have lied to cover it up. The denouement is on its way.

But whatever the resolution of any of these individual dramas, they will not be the end of the story. Like the continuing revelations of detainee abuse emerging from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, this is a crisis in the governing culture, not the tale of a few bad apples. Every time you turn over a rock, you find more vermin. We've only just learned from The Los Angeles Times that Joseph Schmitz, until last month the inspector general in charge of policing waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, is himself the focus of a Congressional inquiry. He is accused of blocking the investigation of another Bush appointee who is suspected of siphoning Iraq reconstruction contracts to business cronies. At the Justice Department, the F.B.I. is looking into why a career prosecutor was demoted after he started probing alleged Abramoff illegality in Guam. According to The Los Angeles Times, the demoted prosecutor was then replaced by a Rove-approved Republican pol who just happened to be a cousin of a major target of another corruption investigation in Guam.

We have to hope that the law will get to the bottom of these cases and start to connect the recurring dots. But while everyone is innocent until proved guilty, the overall pattern stinks and has for a long time. It's so filthy that the Republican caucus couldn't even find someone clean to name as Mr. DeLay's "temporary" stand-in as House majority leader last week. As The Washington Post reported in 2003, Roy Blunt, the Missouri congressman who got the job, was found trying to alter a homeland security bill with a last-minute provision that would have benefited Philip Morris-brand cigarettes. Not only had the tobacco giant contributed royally to Mr. Blunt's various campaign coffers, but both the congressman's girlfriend (now wife) and his son were Philip Morris lobbyists at the time.

This is the culture that has given us the government we have. It's a government that has spent more of the taxpayers' money than any since L.B.J.'s (as calculated by the Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution), even as it rewards its benefactors with tax breaks and corporate pork. It's a government so used to lying that Mr. DeLay could say with a straight face that the cost of Katrina relief could not be offset by budget cuts because there was no governmental fat left to cut. It's the government that fostered the wholesale loss of American lives in both Iraq and on the Gulf Coast by putting cronyism above patriotism.

The courts can punish crooks, but they can't reform democracy from the ground up, and the voters can't get into the game until 2006. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the key players both in the White House and in the leadership of both houses of Congress are either under investigation or joined at the hip to Messrs Rove, DeLay, Abramoff, Reed or Norquist. They seem to be hoping that some magical event -- a sudden outbreak of peace and democracy in Iraq, the capture of Osama bin Laden, a hurricane affording better presidential photo ops than Rita -- will turn things around. Dream on.

The one notable anomaly is John McCain, who retains a genuine hunger for reform, a rage at the corruption around him and the compelling motive of his presidential ambitions to push him forward; it's his Indian Affairs Committee, after all, that exposed the hideous Abramoff cesspool to public view last year. The Democrats, bereft of leadership and ideas (though not of their own Beltway bandits), also harbor a number of would-be presidents, but they are busier positioning themselves politically than they are articulating actual positions that might indicate what a new governmental order would look like. While the Republican revolution is dead, it says everything about the power vacuum left in its wake that Geena Davis's fictional commander in chief has more traction, as measured in Nielsen ratings and press, than any of the real-life contenders for that job in D.C.

Longer Lives Reveal the Ties That Bind Us
Author: DAVID BROOKS
Date: October 2, 2005
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 12

Let me tell you how we're going to die. Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corporation study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition and we'll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another twenty percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We'll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die.

But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer's disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take 8 or 10 or even 20 years, during which we will cease to become the person we were. We will linger on, in some new state, depending on the care of others.As the population ages, more people will live in this final category. Between now and 2050, the percentage of the population above age 85 is expected to quadruple, and the number of people with Alzheimer's disease is expected to quadruple, too.

The President's Council on Bioethics, under Leon Kass, who stepped down yesterday as chairman, has been trying to grapple with what this means. The council considers the practical issues. We don't have enough people to take care of the millions on the glide path toward death. Fewer people go into nursing. Families are smaller and divided.

But the biggest issues the Kass report takes up are moral and cultural. We live in an individualistic society. We think of ourselves as autonomous creatures, making up our own minds and seeking self-fulfillment.

That was fine in an earlier age, when kids could go off at age 16 to make their way in the world, and when people died at age 65 after a short illness. But as the Kass report notes, "The defining characteristic of our time seems to be that we are both younger longer and older longer."

Parents have to spend a lot more time preparing their children for the new economy and children have to spend a lot more time caring for their parents when they are old.

In other words, technology, which was supposed to be liberating, actually creates more dependence. We spend more of our lives while young and old dependent upon others, and we spend more time in between caring for those who depend upon us.

Will our moral philosophy catch up to this reality?

When George Bush delivered a speech on the ownership society, Peter Augustine Lawler, who is a member of the bioethics council, wrote an essay in The New Atlantis called "The Caregiving Society," chiding the president for offering an overly individualistic social vision. "The ownership society only makes sense if it prepares us to be care-givers and care-receivers," he wrote, "and if it does not encourage us to see ourselves as unencumbered individuals."

Lawler argued that the ethic of "mutual neediness should limit the idea of self-ownership." He cited the French philosopher Chantal Delsol, who observed that the "amount of vigilance, care, friendship and patience that must be given any person, if he is not to be driven insane or to despair, is almost literally incredible."

The council report is very much in this vein. It is a rebuke to the economic individualism of the right and to the moral individualism of the left. With its emphasis on mutual obligation, I sometimes thought I was reading a report from the old German Christian Democrats.

The report argues strongly against living wills and advanced directives, against individuals' attempts to control their own treatments and deaths. It is more ethical and more effective, the council believes, to give a loved one the power of attorney to make medical decisions for you, and so acknowledge your own dependence.

The report questions the foundation of individualism, that our worth is determined by what we say and do. No, the report says. Our worth is in our bodies, and our relationships. As Kass put it the other day, "The much diminished mother I hugged on the day of her death was the same woman I'd been hugging all my life."

The report also shows how far social thinking has moved in the past 30 years. A generation ago, all the emphasis was on rebelling against conformity, on liberating the individual. Now the emphasis is on nurturing bonds so sacred they are beyond the realm of choice. Now the individual is less likely to be regarded as the fundamental unit of society. Instead, it's the family.

In a mobile, high-tech age, the Kass report is a declaration of dependence.

Author: DAVID BROOKS
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 12

Copyright (c) 2005 The New York Times Company

Medicine's Sticker Shock
Author: NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Date: October 2, 2005
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 13

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we have an opportunity to construct something far more important than higher levees -- a national health care system that looks less like a tightrope and more like a safety net.

A dozen years after Bill Clinton's health reform efforts were destroyed by the insurance industry's duplicity, it's worth trying again. The health care system is steadily becoming more gummed up in ways that are impossible to hide.One of the bumper stickers attacking the Clinton plan read: "If You Like the Post Office, You'll Love National Health Insurance." That wouldn't work today: the Postal Service runs a system that is manifestly more rational and efficient than our health care system. For starters, imagine a postal system that refused to deliver letters to or from 45 million Americans -- except on rare occasions, by ambulance.

"This is one of those fleeting opportunities where a catastrophe creates an opportunity to rebuild something better than before," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

In a sign of the growing disenchantment with our health system, 13,000 doctors have joined Physicians for a National Health Program, which lobbies for a single-payer government-financed health program.

There are four main problems with the existing system. First, it leaves out 45 million uninsured Americans, and their number is rising. Second, it is by far the most expensive in the world, costing 15 percent of our national income, yet our outcomes are awful -- U.S. life expectancy is worse than Costa Rica's. Third, our business competitiveness is undermined when, for example, medical expenses add $1,500 to the sticker of each General Motors car. Fourth, our system is catastrophically inefficient: according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, health administrative costs are $1,059 per capita in the U.S., and just $307 in Canada.

A single-payer system would be most efficient but probably is not politically feasible at the moment. The smart new book "The Health Care Mess" suggests a variety of more gradual approaches that would face less opposition.

Whatever the mechanism, all children should be covered. It's a disgrace that we use public funds to save the lives of nonagenarians but not those of 9-year-olds. And kids are a bargain: per capita medical spending is $1,525 for children less than 5, and $9,000 per person aged 65 to 74.

A second principle is that we should put less emphasis on curative medicine and more on public health and prevention -- everything from preparing for avian flu to encouraging exercise. Sure, we can buy more "left ventricular assist devices," which cost $210,000 per patient installed, or buy Erbitux for colon cancer, at $17,000 per month of treatment. But as a wise new book, "Prescription for a Healthy Nation," argues, you get more bang for the buck when you promote healthier lifestyles -- fighting obesity, cigarette smoking and the like.

Raising cigarette taxes saved far more American lives, for example, than an army of neurologists ever could. In the same spirit, I'd like to see a French-fry tax. And imagine the health gains if we banned potato chips and soda from schools.

Reforming the health system won't be easy. In the real world, poor kids don't see doctors not only because they're uninsured, but also because Mom doesn't have a car, can't easily get time off from work, or doesn't speak English. Those are hard nuts to crack -- but one reason to think that we can do better is that much of the world does better.

I've been thinking of health care partly because of something that happened when I was on vacation in August. My kids and I were stacking firewood for my parents on the Yamhill, Ore., farm where I grew up, when suddenly the seven-foot stack collapsed -- on top of my youngest. She was knocked down and pinned, her face bleeding, under a pile of logs.

I had insurance, and a car to get to the emergency room -- and in the end the logs (stained with blood) turned out to be in worse shape than my daughter. She's just fine. But that instant was heart-stopping in its terror -- and the system routinely does fail such children in need. Isn't it worth fighting one more time for reforms, so that we Americans can get health care every bit as good as Canada's?

Author: NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 13

Copyright (c) 2005 The New York Times Company