It's Only Money!

There comes a time when you really have to wonder what in the world anybody's thinking, at least the people who get to make decisions. The federal government has spent $350 billion of the bailout money. And they didn't spend it where they thought they were going to, mainly because Congress didn't seem to see fit to provide an oversight or restrictions on how it was spent.

So last night, I'm watching television news (the News Hour on PBS) and they show one of the leading Republican senators talking about how they don't want to release the next 350 billion because, after all, it wasn't spent the way they thought it ought to be last time. Gee, you think? why on earth would President Bush and his administration possibly have done it the way you thought they'd might? You didn't bother to put in place any restrictions on how it was spent or to tell him to how to do it the way you wanted it done. And this is the president has lied about everything since he got into office -- did you think he was going to change his spots overnight?.

So now we have a new president coming in, and Congress thinks maybe they should've done something different and so with going to start now? They're crazy! The barn is on fire, the horses are burned, the money you spent to put out the fire got spent on something else, so now you're going to delay medical treatment for horses? It's much too late to develop qualms now.

Might as well give the new administration a chance to prove whether they're better/more honest than the prior one. After all, it's only money...

I am a Unitarian Universalist

I am not much into forwarding the various things that pass through my inbox. But today I got a copy of a blog entry, which is one that expresses one of the ways I feel about the world right now. This is my way of forwarding it; it is also my way of changing the world. You see, I am a Unitarian Universalist and last Sunday a gunman entered a UU church in TN and shot several congregation members. It was a children's service and the kids were performing Annie. Linda Kraeger and Greg McKendry died and 5 others were injured. The reason for the shooting? UUs are a liberal denomination.

I wish I could say this is the first time UUs have been targeted for their liberal faith. It is not. One of the things a minister once asked my congregation is if UUs were ever targeted again, would anyone know we were UUs. It is a question that has remained with me for years, particularly as I have listened to the ultra-conservatives talk.

Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote a poem which goes (depending on which translation you read):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

I first read that poem in college. It has remained a reminder to me that we have an obligation to stand up for others if we want them to stand up for us. That society is really a collection of voices, and if ours are not heard, then society can go terribly wrong.

And so today I want you to know that I am indeed a Unitarian Universalist. And I am speaking up. I may not have known the individuals involved, but I feel a lot of pain, not just for the children who witnessed this horror, not just for the families and friends of the dead and injured, but also because someone so hates what I believe in, that he was willing to take a shotgun into a UU church and open fire on people he did not know. I am horrified that there has been so little news interest in this event. And like the writer, I am struggling to forgive the hate mongers who encourage this kind of behavior.

Please take a moment to read this wonderful entry on Unitarian forgiveness!

Blogging your dreams

A friend of mine, the Cheeky Librarian, sent me this link for blogging your dreams. It's a contest, which I'm likely to enter and unlikely to win. But it got me thinking about what are the things you dream of and how possible are they. For instance, I dream about economic justice for everybody in the world, about children having access to a good education no matter where they live, about available medical care, food and shelter for everyone, about a world without war, where people could visit one another across boundaries without worrying about nationality or religion. I would love to see a world where we lived with nature, instead of trying to conquer or overrun the nature. I don't even know how I would go about building economic justice in my own hometown. When the football coach who was fired makes 5 million and I'm making about 1% of that, I really don't see how I'm going to affect the difference.

I also found that I got to thinking about what dreams are practical and which ones aren't. For instance, I dream of a US political structure, where Bush is not president, where civil liberties are more valuable than so-called security measures, and where politicians really try to help the citizenry, all the citizenry, have better lives. Between you and me, I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. I suppose I could submit my dream of getting rid of Bush , but that's going to happen anyway. And unless you and I get off our duffs and elect an all-new cadre of politicians, I have little hope for Congress. But that presupposes that we get a different type of candidate running for office. Of course, the real solution would be for somebody like me to run for Congress.

Which brings me to another dream -- I'd like to be a Congressional Representative. But I don't have that much hope of obtaining that one either. First place, I live in Nebraska. For those of you who don't know it, Nebraska is a very conservative state. As far as I'm concerned, our Democratic candidates would be Republicans in any other state. So what are the chances of a woman who with a very liberal political views ever getting elected in Nebraska -- probably nil. And of course I'm not rich -- seems like you have to have an incredible amount of money to even run for Congress. And finally, who wants to go through the mudslinging that is part of modern politics.

And so I will probably enter my very plebeian dream of having a backyard refuge for birds. I love wild birds and I truly do dream of having a yard which provides food, water and shelter for hundreds of birds. I'd have splashing fountains, run by solar panels. I would put lots of bushes with fruit around the edge of my yard, the part that still get sunshine (I have a big tree in the backyard). I woulf find a place to put a cherry tree and leave all of cherries for the birds. I would put up a swallow house; the summer I bought my house, there were swallows in the yard, but I haven't seen any this year. I'd have bird feeders that the squirrels could steal all the food out of.

Or maybe I could have my dream of an aviary so I could free all those poor birds at the pet store from their little tiny cages. But I really don't have a house for that. So I probably won't use that one. See it all comes down to what's practical -- after all, they're only talking about $5,000. Maybe if it was $200,000...

what's your dream? Is it practical? What could you do toward it if you had $5,000? Maybe you should enter the contest too. The contest is run by the advertising team of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive: http://www.bloggingyourdreams.com/registration.html .

Just in case you thought the Bush cared about civil liberties

Just in case we had any misconception about how much of a dictator President Bush wants to be, read the quotations about Hepting vs AT&T case. Perhaps the following is the most telling:

“"Did you go to the FISA court on this case?" Pregerson asked. "Again, your honor, that gets into state secrets," Garre replied.”

Not only are they unwilling to discuss the basics of the case, the administration is unwilling even to tell one court if they got permission from another court. That is how dictators operate – they are unwilling to let anyone know what they are doing in case they try to stop them.

Enough is enough. It is time for everyone to start bombarding their congressional representatives about maintaining American freedoms in America. Otherwise, we are just letting al-Qaeda win. They want us to loose our freedoms; that was one of the goals of 9-11. Now Bush is handing it to them on a platter. God help us all.

Another secret policy change

The Washington Post has article that reads, in part, “A decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation's emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago.”

I really hope that they don’t expect me to be too shocked. Bush long ago convinced me that he wants to be a dictator. He doesn’t want to hear bad news or any opinion that doesn’t match his. He doesn’t believe in democratic processes. He doesn’t believe in individual rights. So why should his administration believe that any individual, regardless of their expertise or responsibilities, would have anything to offer on public policy?

The sad part is that we have over another year of his administration. It may take decades for us to realize the amount of damage he has wreaked, let alone reverse it.

What we need is for the states to write an emergency response blueprint that would work and provide it to Congress. Only if the record shows that there is an alternative, will we have any hope of coping when the next big disaster strikes.

Some things just make you feel good

The Washington Post has a story about the injured daughter of an Iraqi interpreter being brought to the US military hospital after a car bomb. It is the sort of thing that makes you feel really good. But it also makes me wonder, if we spent more time saving the lives of Iraqi citizens, the everyday people caught up in a fight with the extremists, would we win the war for their hearts?

I cannot help thinking that in our past actions we have unsettled the region and harmed many people by destroying the social stability. We should be giving them a social structure that helps them - reliable electricity, water, and sewage; an education system; and decent health care.

Three Cups of Tea

I have just read the most amazing story about a man who is conducting a mission towards peace in Central Asia. Finally, proof that I am not the only one who believes that Bush's policies are only leading to more terror, not less. And a way to do something about it. But that is for later, after you have read this book.

It takes place at the base of K2, when a man promises a school to the porter who saves his life. The man, an American, begins an odyssey that will lead to a career building schools and other small public health projects. In an area where the US is synonymous with horror, pain, and the disruption of life accompanied by lies about helping to build infrastructure, the small NGO created out of his promise to build a school, now proves that not all Americans are bad.

The book is a must read!

Time for some rational choice making about health care

Today I read this article in the Washing Post on the Texas Futile-Treatment Law and how there is a fight to prevent hospitals from withdrawing “care when a patient's ongoing treatment is declared "medically futile." The patient in the case is described as “A 17-month-old deaf, blind and terminally ill child” who, as I calculate it, has been on life support in a pediatric ICU for about 100 days. An ethics review board decided that the case is hopeless and that it would be best to terminate life support if the mother could not find an alternative hospital to provide care for the child. The right-to-life people are all up in arms about turning off the ventilators and letting the child die the natural death that technology is preventing. They seem to believe that we need to keep everyone alive as long as technologically possible regardless of the costs. But it is about time that we thought about the very real costs of keeping infants alive at any expense:

1. This child is taking up valuable resources without any hope that he can be helped: bed space, doctors and nursing staff time and energy. What if there is another child who is denied a bed in the Pediatric ICU because there is not enough space, a child without a terminal condition?
2. What is the emotional cost to the staff? How debilitating it must be not to be able to relieve the child’s pain and suffering and even worse if they think the technology is only allowing them to make the child suffer more. According to the Post report, “doctors have declared that continuing treatment is potentially painful and is prolonging the child's suffering.”
3. Who is paying for this prolonged ICU stay? Extrapolating from Ampofo, et al (PEDIATRICS Vol. 118 No. 6 December 2006, pp. 2409-2417 (doi:10.1542/peds.2006-1475) (who estimated the cost for a child’s influenza hospitalization - only 29 of the 325 of whom were on respirators), the average hospital cost for a 6mo- 23mo childs stay, per day, was $1,397 and the average hospital charges were $2,006. That would result in a charge for this child’s care somewhere between $139,000 and $201,000 assuming that the charges are not any more than they were for the Ampofo et al study. More realistically, the costs are higher AND that does not include the physician charges and the costs of medicines. So let’s just guess that the daily cost for this child’s care is about $3,250 per day, before attorney fees. That means the outstanding hospital bill is $325,000 and climbing.
   Who is paying that bill? If you and I are really lucky, Mom and Dad are paying it out of their pocket. Second best, Mom and Dad have good health insurance and can pay their share. Worst case, Medicaid pays part and the hospital charges off the rest of it as charity care. Why is that the worst case for you and I? Because we pay for Medicaid with our tax money, the hospitals charge us more to cover that loss, and too many losses drive our hospitals out of business.

Every dollar we spend on this child cannot help another. For example, we could be ensuring that more children are vaccinated, including the vaccinations for influenza. By one estimate, “For every dollar spent on immunizations, as many as $29 can be saved in direct and indirect costs.” So, if you use the CDC’s cost estimator for vaccines, the daily $3,250 cost of keeping this terminal child alive would buy us:

• 2,387 pediatric vaccines for influenza (which, extrapolating again from Ampofo would prevent 239 cases of influenza, 48 hospitalizations (with an estimated average cost of $292, 411) and 14 deaths. Or we could have gotten
• 1,475 doses of DTAP vaccines or
• 269 doses Quadrivalent Human Papillomavirus Types 6, 11, 16 and 18 Recombinant Vaccines (which prevents cervical cancer)

If we spend our money on this terminally ill little boy, we cannot spend it to save the lives of other children who have a chance of surviving!

Yes, I feel sorry for his mother. But keeping a terminally ill child on a respirator indefinitely because his mother is not ready to lose her child is insane. We could be saving lives with that money. Instead the courts will hold a hearing on the injunction in another 7 days (That is another $22750 or 1671 cases of influenza we won’t prevent, 334 hospitalizations with a cost of $2 million we won’t prevent and 100 pediatric deaths from influenza we won’t prevent).

Today I read an article in the Washington Post about a man injured at Guantanamo. One quote really struck me. His mother asked, "What did the Americans do to him?" It struck me as a huge part of the problem. She sees Americans as this undifferentiated group who are complicit in maiming her son. Americans see all Arabic people as Muslims who want to destroy the USA.

I did not do anything to her son. I deplore what I know about Guantanamo. Its very existance and police state/secret police identity are not endorsed like Americans like me. Yet how can the people of each nation know about the people of another nation? How could she know about people like me - who abhor what our government is doing, who keep telling their political leaders that the current policy is unacceptable, who want a different way of dealing with issues. How can I know about the Muslims who practice the Quran in unmilitaristic ways?

Right now, the media are busy capitalizing on the differences, the sensational. They don't focus on every day people who disagree with the policy makers. They don't make waves by letting us understand the people of another nation, particularly ones in a nation where we are at "war". The media has no reason to work toward an understanding of the people of Iraq in terms other than terrorists and victims. We hear about Sunnis and Shites, but only when one group visits atrocities on the other.

This is not Soviet Union

Just in case you thought that your government was about freedom and democracy, the Bush administration is doing everything in its power to ensure it gets the powers appropriate to a secret police. The Washington Post reported on Saturday, November 4, 2006 (Page A01) that “The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk. The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

And not only that, if prisoners are allowed to tell the world what the CIA did to them, we might know what kinds of torture the CIA and the Bush administration are indulging in. Tell the Bush and the World that human rights are more important than his power to do whatever he wants.

From Chapter 49 of the Tao Te Ching

He is good to those who are good;
He is also good to those who are not good,
Thereby he is good.
He trusts those who are trustworthy;
He also trusts those who are not trustworthy,
Thereby he is trustworthy.

The Framers of the Constitution Must be Rolling In Their Graves!

Congress has lost its collective mind.

Okay, so I am not politically conservative. But when Congress decided that Habeus Corpus is not important, they threw out one of the most important protections of our freedoms. Never mind, they tell us, it is just for terrorists, after all.

Yeah right. As I read the language, any one of us can be classified by the president and his band of thugs as a terrorist sympathizer and then thrown into one of their secret jails. Remind you of anyone? (Hint, we started a war in another country so we could get rid of him.) Okay, so calling the homeland security people thugs is a little extreme but not by any where near as much as I would like.

What is happening to our country that we don’t care about civil liberties any more? How can it be okay to have secret wire taps and secret jails and to throw people in prison because they might be terrorists? We sound more and more like Germany in Hitler’s rise to power or like we are a member of the so called “axis of evil.”

I’ve gone way beyond appalled at what my government is doing. Now I am just plain scared. G.W Bush sounds and acts like a dictator in the making. I have begun to wonder if he will attempt to stay in office after the next election. Is it possible that he will pull it off? Can I escape this country if he does? I no longer have any faith that Congress will try to prevent him. They will just ratify it as another necessary step to fighting terror…

Foley scandal

The Foley case leaves me a little sad but not terribly surprised. What does worry me is that Congress seems to have adopted a position that no matter what one of our own do, it doesn’t matter. They seem to believe that money and power are adequate excuses for any behavior. I cannot say I am surprised but I am disgusted. I am also disgusted at Foley’s excuses: alcoholism and a personal history of abuse do NOT justify his actions. There are loads of gay men out there who do not abuse their positions and who do not solicit underage men.

I keep wondering if the minors in questions were female, would it even have made the news? In the grand scheme of things, I am guessing not. And Foley almost certainly would not have had to resign - or maybe the IM content would have done him in anyway, but I doubt it.

What bothers me is that Congress doesn’t seem to be able to police itself. I can see where those in power might not have been sure on the basis of just the one email. I read the original email and think that it was perhaps a little more friendly than one might expect from a very powerful man. But I could also read it as avuncular – and that would be okay. Those of us without children of our own often have more interest in the kids of others simply because we have the time and energy to do so. We also will leave our legacies to other people’s children. So that was not so troubling to me.

But surely, when someone complained, they should have investigated. They should already have had some system so that questionable behavior, regardless of the gender of the page, is investigated. Any half-way competent investigator who asked the basic question “are there any members about whom the pages warn each other?” should have gotten to the bottom of the matter in a hurry. It makes you wonder about who else has such a reputation with either the male or female pages.

I frankly don’t know what to think about the IM texts. They are very graphic and obviously an attempt to engage in cyber sex. The questions I have are if the young man was of the age of consent at the time and if there was any sense of pressure to cooperate or Foley would harm his future career etc. Frankly, in some ways the transcript reads as if the young man were a willing participant. It is only at the end that one has to wonder.

But if the young man is legally an adult, then what is the difference between him and Monica Lewinski? Both engage in sexual behavior with much older men. 50 year old men get 20 something trophy wives/mistresses all the time. Why shouldn’t a 50+ year old gay man get a trophy boy? Since the young man no longer worked for Congress, I don’t see the problem if he is of age and consented. It would not be the first time that sex was willingly traded for opportunities and power. We certainly shouldn't be holding a gay man to a different standard than we hold the strait man to. Maybe we should insist on all congressional members maintaining some ethical standards....

Iraq - not yet time to pull out

The Iraq War was not something I thought we should do but now that we are there, we are obligated to stay until we can leave them in better shape than when we arrived. What I have a hard time with is the whole politics of the thing.

At the time we were discussing going to war, I was against it. My first objection was the underlying premise: We think Saddam has weapons of mass destruction so we should remove him. That statement is like saying someone is capable of committing a crime so we should arrest them and put them in prison. Granted that in this case, the individual has a known tendency to use violence. That does not validate the argument. Preemptive wars simply prove which party is most prone to use violence.

My second objection has to do with state’s autonomy – we do not have a general right to invade another country because we don’t like their government. I do not want to live my life subject to the laws of Iran or Iraq. I do not want them to have the right to decide that I need to change the laws I live under because those laws do not match what their holy law. But if we set a precedent of overthrowing governments that we don’t like, we really don’t have much to protest if someday they decide to overthrow our government.

And that leads me to my third object – if the concepts we are using to justify the Iraq war were applied to the US, could someone justify invading us? The answer is yes. We are a nation with weapons of mass destruction and the only nation to use a nuclear weapon. We have a demonstrated aggressive government that has been known to make preemptive strikes. And we have now demonstrated that we believe one country has the right to remake the political system of another country.

My unrelated objection was that I could not see how this war would help us in the long run. People do not like having outsiders dictate to them. There is a natural resentment that results from being forced to do it the way someone else wants. Thus I expected an increase in resentment/hatred of Americans. I also felt that there was too much religious language in use, making us Christians and them Muslims. Religion is so personal that it amps up the emotional impact of everything else. And when you add in the clearly defined US as the outsider them, then there is a focus for all the rage, anger and fear. I could not help but believe that our invasion in Iraq would lead to an increase in anti-American hostility and a subsequent increase in the number of individuals willing to become “terrorists.” (and I am not even going to go into the whole issue of what is a terrorist this entry).

My expectation was always that this would be a long war. My fear was that it would become another Vietnam. I could not see how we could possibly get out in any short term (under 4 years). I could potentially envision us getting out in 10 years. But my fear was that this was really a 15-20 year project.

But President Bush and his cabinet ignored these issues and pushed us into the war. I doubt we will ever know the truth, but I believe that the decision was made in advance and Bush just looked for the facts that would support his decision. He does not welcome dissenting opinions and seems to prefer a group-think process to any intellectual rigor. My personal take on it is that George W is trying to prove that he is better than his father and so wanted to do internationally the one thing his father did not do. The problem is that he is taking the rest of us along with us (nothing more dangerous than a man with ego-problems and some power).

So now we are in this war and everyone has decided that it is time for us to pull-out. Not because we have accomplished something, but because they are beginning to realize how costly a war can be. The US public apparently believed that one can invade another country, change the government, and then walk away in a couple of months! All, of course, without any opposition or deaths. How naïve can they get?! It doesn’t really take all that much brains to figure out that it takes time and money, that when you fight a war people die. Yes, your people can die when you invade some other country. Perhaps they forgot the Korean and Vietnam wars?

Which brings me to my current struggle with the whole politics of what we do next. If we don’t want to make it worse, we have to stay and ensure a stable, democratic government is installed with adequate police and military to prevent ethnic cleansing and/or the reversion to a brutal dictatorship. We need to ensure that there is better infrastructure when we leave than when we arrived.

But I fear that once again I am going to be a minority voice. As a nation, we want instant gratification without paying for it. I am hearing more and more rumblings that the war is too costly and it is time to pull out. What we need now is someone willing to point out that the cost of pulling out too soon will be worse.

If we don’t accomplish better and more stable conditions, we will desperately wish that we had. Leaving to soon will do nothing more than create a crucible in which anti-US terrorists will breed and multiply. We will create a world condition worse than what we started with and, eventually, it will be our own citizens who die as a result.

©scrapsnthread