I'm sorry, I Just Couldn't Help It

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help it. Last evening at a Super Bowl party, one of the persons in attendance, a very nice person, made the comment in an entirely different politically-unrelated context, that she didn’t like science fiction of any kind. I asked her, “You watch Fox news right?” When she nodded affirmatively, I continued, “So then you do watch science fiction.” Several other guests murmured quietly to themselves and I felt the lash of general disapproval at the dinner table. After that I had a sleepless night. My actions and statement bothered me. Had I unfairly attacked this individual simply because I was put out by Fox News and Chris Wallace’s handling of Sarah Palin’s speech to the Teabaggers Saturday evening? In that speech, Palin, who is known to stretch the truth and is employed by Fox, took cheap shots and made several wildly exaggerated claims about Obama. While she stood there and read from a prepared speech, she mocked Obama’s use of a teleprompter. What is a teleprompter other than a prepared speech? In substance, Palin's tea party speech was full of false and misleading national security claims including suggesting that the Obama administration doesn't use the word "war," that interrogators didn't ask alleged Christmas Day bomber UmarFarouk Abdulmutallab about his training and future al Qaeda plots, and that Abdulmutallab has not provided information since he "lawyered up and invoked our U.S. constitutional right to remain silent." What really irritated me about this is that Chris Wallace interviewed Palin on his Sunday morning talk show and, if Fox is truly fair and balanced [as it claims about a hundred times an hour on air] , a fledgling interviewer should have pointed out to Palin the obvious exaggerations and called her to account for them. Nothing of the sort took place. All Wallace did was to continue lobbing softball questions to Palin which resulted in her intimation that she may be available for a run for the presidency in 2012. More grievously Palin ragged Obama for calling the ongoing wars in Iran and Afghanistan “Overseas Contingency Operations” rather than “War.” This is an absolute falsehood. Obama has repeatedly used the word "war." He used the word "war" at least seven times during his January 27 State of the Union speech. Moreover, following Obama's January 7 remarks on the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight -- remarks during which Obama stated, "We are at war. We are at war with al Qaeda" -- numerous conservative media figures started falsely suggesting that Obama had not characterized the fight against terrorists as a war. In fact, in his inaugural address, Obama stated that "[o]ur nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred," and he has repeatedly discussed terrorism as the rationale for U.S. military action abroad

Bottom Line: I apologize openly and publicly to my friend for saying what I said last night, not that it wasn’t true, but in the context of a genial discussion about other subjects. This morning I will also call her and apologize personally for my exuberance.

Tort Reform with a Texas Twist

Trial lawyers have been the whipping boys of Republican politics since the Reagan era. The popular game of blaming medical malpractice suits for the ever- increasing cost of medical care has been the favorite pastime of folks who like their ideas simple, straightforward and tinged with demagoguery. The terrible irony of all this is that the same people who foist the myth of malpractice claims as the scourge of all scourges on the public are also the first to raise gun ownership as a God given right under the Constitution. Like I said, these people like their solutions simple and straightforward, apparently so much so that they cannot be bothered with the nuance of actually reading the Constitution further than the first two or three Amendments to the Bill of Rights. The Gun Amendment is the second Amendment. It is easy, simple and straightforward and, most importantly, not buried in a complicated list and appearing early in the list of enumerated rights provided by the wisdom of our founding fathers. Not like the Seventh Amendment. The Seventh amendment guarantees the right of a citizen harmed by another to civil trial by jury. That Amendment, on the same page but further down on the list than the Second Amendment, is ignored by this group known as Republicans, Tea Baggers, whatever, because it is easy to blame something or somebody that you either can’t understand or shoot. It’s okay for these people to fervently defend the right of gun ownership although in so doing, it costs thirty thousand fellow Americans their lives each year. Medical malpractice, according to serious studies performed by doctors, kills more than one hundred thousand patients each year. To this group I say let’s make a deal. Let’s agree to honor the entire Constitution, including the Seventh Amendment, rather than pick and choose. Finally, let me tell you about tort reform Texas-style. In a small town in western Texas, two courageous nurses reported the questionable antics of a local doctor [who had previously been reprimanded several times and whose license had been restricted for his activities related to a weight loss clinic] to the Texas Medical Society. Because of their actions, these nurses are now being charged with a ten year felony for alleged misuse of confidential information. The sheriff who brought the charges against these women is a patient of the doctor and claims that the doctor saved his life after suffering a heart attack. This episode is the poster child of the tort reformers. Toss the baby out with the bath water. Folks, we can do better than this, a whole lot better.

The Citizens Mutual Case and Viagra/Levitra

The U.S.Supreme Court ala Scalia took it upon itself to upend and reverse over 106 years of precedent by declaring recently that corporations have the same constitutional standings as flesh and blood individuals do when it comes to freedom of speech as guaranteed by the first amendment. The mantra of conservatives led by Scalia is that activist judges should not replace, for example, statutes enacted by legislative bodies to satisfy the judge's moral code as to what is right or wrong. In Citizens Mutual the five man conservative majority abandoned this principle and reversed both long standing judicial precedent, including two recent decisions of its own, and the Congressionally-enacted McCain Feingold law which placed common sense limitations on unbridled corporate spending in elections. The previously-existing rationale for placing spending limits was the undue influence that big dollars from corporate coffers could have on what is intended to be a fair and balanced (sound familiar?) process. Let me show by example what can happen now that the activist Court has shown its true colors. Let's talk about Viagra and Levitra. Untold millions of dollars are spent on the advertising of these two drugs on television and in journals. This money is being spent to push the use of these two drugs on an alleged disease process that most of us guys didn't even realize existed a decade ago. Regular TV watchers, including young kids, can spout the side effects of these drugs readily [do not take this drug if you are taking nitrates . . .you should see a doctor if an erection last longer than four hours. As Jay Leno said "I can't even smile that long."] The corporate effort beyond the pushing of Viagra and Levitra into our collective consciousness has worked infamously, but what is reveals in the present discussion is the power of the almighty dollar in influencing decision making. What follows is a comment of mine that appeared recently in response to an editorial in the New York Times.


February 2nd, 2010
8:35 am

The country is getting now what it paid for by electing "He who would be King" (Bush the Second) who placed the final touches on the process of corporatizing America by putting Roberts and Alito (Scalito) on the bench. The bottom line is that corporations have the money to outshout and drown out anyone with a smattering of principle. As Professor Fish points out, the Republican Teddy Roosevelt pointed that out in no uncertain terms more than 100 years ago.

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Pay to Play?

One of the things I have learned to do in this polarized climate is to keep my mouth shut when I hear others ranting about Obama, Pelosi, Reid and all the Democrats who throw away our tax dollars on excessive programs. As a rule, I bite my tongue and avoid saying things like “Where were you when Bush and a Republican majority in Congress created a trillion dollar deficit in just a couple of short years after entering office with the first surplus in the modern history of our nation?” At lunch yesterday, I sat patiently and waited, without comment, while two of my fellow golfers did what I euphemistically refer to as ‘the Fox thing’. They worked their way through Obama’s arrogance, Pelosi’s facelift, the failure of Social Security and the government’s role in deciding what kind of medical treatment we would get if the health plan is passed. Finally, I couldn’t help myself. In my most measured tone of voice, I leaned forward and asked the question, “What do you guys think about last week’s Supreme Court decision that allows foreign corporations to give unlimited funding to political candidates in the United States?” [Background: The conservative five members of the Court who rave constantly about judicial activism and other judges who ignore the original meaning and intent of the men who drafted our Constitution took it upon themselves to overturn case law over the last 104 years establishing reasonable limits on the campaign expenditures of corporations. They did this even though the original appeal before them did not seek the relief the Court provided. When Obama mentioned this during his State of the Union address this week, Alito, one of the justices who participated in the decision shook his head and mouthed the words ‘that’s not true.’]

Both guys sat back and looked at me like I just stepped out of a spaceship from a different planet. “Money has nothing to do with politics,” one of them said. The other nodded his head approvingly. He continued, “Money doesn’t influence politics. It is issues that are important.” These are nice guys, and both of them are a hell of a lot better golfers than I ever will be, but I sat there dumbfounded. I didn’t have to practice any restraint in staying silent, because I didn’t know how to respond. My mind worked furiously, I was trying to remember the exact phrasing of an old saying. I was trying to remember who said it. It goes something like this. “There are two things that are important in politics, the first is money, . . .and I can’t remember the second.” My final thought as we shook hands and went our separate ways is that I had missed an opportunity for a teachable moment by staying silent. It wouldn’t have done any good. Fox had already spoken on this issue. The various pundits had already proclaimed that spending money on campaigns does not influence outcomes. And so it is.

Maybe I am from a different planet.

Tone Deafness

Question: What do the lack of talent of thousands of American Idol wannabes and politicians of all stripes in Washington have in common? Watching the early tryouts on American Idol is eerily similar to the tripping over each other antics of the Washington crowd as it stumbles through botched efforts of trying to correct wrongs with additional wrongs. To illustrate the point I am trying to make, I ask two additional questions to serve only as examples; First, how is it that the taxpayers provide billions of dollars to keep banks from failing and the very same bank executives who took our country to the brink of disaster use those billions to provide themselves with billions of bonus dollars while doing nothing to alleviate the very situation that caused the problem in the first place? Second, how did health care reform become an agenda for the pro-life crowd?

The current party in power (ostensibly the Democrats) is in a tizzy at the moment because of the Massachusetts election which placed a relative unknown (unless one reads and looks at the pictures in Cosmopolitan) in the Senate and destroyed the supermajority of sixty votes required to defeat filibuster efforts. I submit to the reader that Scott Brown was elected for the very same reason Obama was elected, i.e., the promise of change from the same old business as usual. As those who are addicted to reading my blogs know, I was truly excited about Obama and the hope and promise he brought. I was not alone. A majority of Americans welcomed the concept of change and wanted business as usual to stop.

Obama was elected to facilitate change. What do we get instead? The president sided with the pharmaceutical industry by cutting a back room deal worth billions of dollars to that industry before a bill was even on the table. He helped the failing big banks while unemployment continued [and still continues] to rise, then sees the banks executives laugh it off and take huge bonuses. Meanwhile, Republicans offer NOTHING but criticism, kind of like Simon Cowell stuck on fast forward. The president and Democratic Congress can't pass a health care bill that helps the people without back room deals that in no uncertain terms bribe people to go along with the program. Brown ran neither as a Republican or a Democrat but on the promise of change. He accomplished this by claiming to be a populist driving around his state in an old pickup truck to make the point. He was singing the same tune that Obama had sung during his campaign. Independents, who are the ones that elected Brown, also elected Obama. Republicans, the pimps for big corporations, do not represent change. But independents voted for Brown anyway.

As an independent liberal who has followed the "negotiations" on health care carefully, I have two thoughts; first, the need is to go back to the drawing board and redo the plan is a straightforward simplified form. Second, is to truly do this in a transparent fashion. This is all the more so important at this critical juncture in our republic now that the activist Supreme Court in the last week set aside a hundred years of case law and created a new concept that the corporation is a super-person within the meaning of the Constitution and, thus, has given greater first amendment rights than ordinary citizens to the likes of Chinese-owned and funded corporations (such as giving billions of dollars to buy politicians to affect elections). The drug companies' deal, the Ben Nelson deal, these are currently what it is all about and the Supreme Court has compounded the situation. Instead of going forward, we are moving backward to the era of robber barons.

Tea Partiers are absolutely right in raising the hell that they have. I find myself wondering, however, where these strident voices were when Bush was doing the same thing that they now protest about Obama. But that's another story and the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits. The same goes for the bank bailouts.

The message is clear: sing a different tune, but keep it simple.

Today, January 7, 2010

January 7, 2010

Today in History-Jan. 7
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:39 a.m. ET
Today is Thursday, Jan. 7, the seventh day of 2010. There are 358 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Jan. 7, 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei began observing three of Jupiter's moons, which he initially took to be stars; he spotted a fourth moon almost a week later. (Another astronomer, Simon Marius, who claimed to have spotted the moons before Galileo did, later named the Jovian satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.)
On this date:
In 1608, an accidental fire devastated the Jamestown settlement in the Virginia Colony.
In 1789, the first U.S. presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation's first president.
In 1800, the 13th president of the United States, Millard Fillmore, was born in Summerhill, N.Y.
In 1927, commercial trans-Atlantic telephone service was inaugurated between New York and London.
In 1942, Mary Ellen Appleton was born in Detroit, Michigan. She married Tom Bleakley in 1961 and went on to become the best wife, mother and grandmother of the 20th century. At last count, she is well on the way to achieving the same distinction in the 21st century. Her wit, sense of compassion and charm have beguiled those who know her for many years. Also, the Japanese siege of Bataan began during World War II.
In 1949, George C. Marshall resigned as U.S. Secretary of State; President Harry S. Truman chose Dean Acheson to succeed him.
In 1972, Lewis F. Powell Jr. and William H. Rehnquist were sworn in as the 99th and 100th members of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1979, Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.
In 1989, Emperor Hirohito of Japan died in Tokyo at age 87; he was succeeded by his son, Crown Prince Akihito.
In 1999, for the second time in history, an impeached American president went on trial before the Senate. President Bill Clinton faced charges of perjury and obstruction of justice; he was acquitted.
Ten years ago: U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., subpoenaed Elian Gonzalez to testify before Congress in a bid to keep Elian in the United States for at least another month while courts decided whether the 6-year-old should be returned to Cuba. (Elian never testified.)
Five years ago: A military jury at Fort Hood, Texas, acquitted Army Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins of involuntary manslaughter in the alleged drowning of an Iraqi civilian, but convicted him of assault in the January 2004 incident. (Perkins was sentenced to six months in prison.) Rosemary Kennedy, the oldest sister of President John F. Kennedy and the inspiration for the Special Olympics, died at a Fort Atkinson, Wis. hospital at age 86. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston announced they were separating after 4 1/2 years of marriage.
One year ago: President-elect Barack Obama met at the White House with America's four living presidents: George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Russia shut off all its gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine in a price and payment dispute; the cutoff lasted nearly two weeks.
Today's Birthdays: Ohio’s favorite golfer, Ted Guarasci, who refuses to reveal his actual age, but who will concede to being born on this day “sometime in the 20th century”. Author William Peter Blatty is 82. Country singer Jack Greene is 80. Pop musician Paul Revere is 72. Magazine publisher Jann Wenner is 64. Singer Kenny Loggins is 62. Singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman is 61. Latin pop singer Juan Gabriel is 60. Actress Erin Gray is 60. Actor Sammo Hung is 58. Actor David Caruso is 54. ''CBS Evening News'' anchor Katie Couric is 53. Country singer David Lee Murphy is 51. Rock musician Kathy Valentine (The Go-Go's) is 51. Actor David Marciano is 50. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is 49. Actress Hallie Todd is 48. Actor Nicolas Cage is 46. Singer-songwriter John Ondrasik (Five for Fighting) is 45. Actor Doug E. Doug is 40. Actor Kevin Rahm is 39. Actor Jeremy Renner is 39. Country singer-musician John Rich is 36. Actor Dustin Diamond is 33. Actor Robert Ri'chard is 27. Actor Liam Aiken is 20. Actress Camryn Grimes is 20. Actor Max Morrow is 19.
Thought for Today: ''There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness.'' -- John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish author (1875-1940).

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press
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A Note of Christmas Cheer

I hope that what I write today is not to be construed as bragging for, truth be known, the only thing I like to brag about is my grandchildren and the occasional accidental good golf shot. But here goes anyway. For five years now I have played my various lower brass instruments at Salvation Army kettles in Florida and Michigan. This year I started in Lakewood Ranch, Florida on November 13 playing two hours daily five days a week. A week ago Tuesday, my last day in Florida, I sat in front of the local Publix where the temp was 83 degrees. Three days later, I was playing at the local Kroger’s store in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 29 degree weather bundled in layers of clothing. Today at noon, I start my last two hour stint for the season. Feedback from the Salvation Army llfts my spirits as they tell me that the playing of the instruments increases the donation amounts three to four fold. The 27 days I have spent has generated more than thirty thousand dollars in cash for this worthwhile charity. Let me tell you why I am not bragging. The truth is, I love doing this. The gift I get from the doing far exceeds the benefits that are derived for others. I am unsure of the origin of the phrase “give and you shall receive”,but in this instance it is true. The benefits I receive by being in a position to listen firsthand to the many people who stop by and stuff five or ten dollars, sometimes more and sometimes less, while telling me how the Salvation Army helped them or a family member in the past provides me with a touching lesson and reminder of the fortunate life I have lived. I like to start and finish each of my playing sessions at the kettle with “Amazing Grace.” A young man stopped by the kettle in Florida just before I came back north for Christmas and told me that he had been transferred from out-of-state to Florida the year before and was not happy at all about the situation. He said that as he got out of his car in the Publix parking lot last year and walked to the store, I began playing “Amazing Grace” and he knew that everything was going to be all right for him and his family. This year he asked to hear it again. He stood in front of me and listened with tears streaming down his face, stuffed a hundred dollar bill into the kettle, and walked away. Looking back he said “Merry Christmas.” The same to you, pass it on!