| Monday 25th May 2009 |  |
Memorial DayMonday, families across the nation will honor our war dead. Many will return to their homes, small towns and large across the nation to decorate the graves of loved ones. It is as it should be.
A local monument company has for its slogan, “Not because they died, but because they lived.”
There is in that statement much truth.
There are many reasons that families return to the family cemetery, the old home town or the place of birth on this holiday.
Collectively we tell ourselves that we are there to decorate graves, or perhaps acknowledge that it is a meeting place for those who like us are there to decorate graves.
We suspect and might argue that we go there not for the dead, not to greet friends who we would not see otherwise, but for ourselves.
In those cemeteries, large and small, we are surrounded by the graves of people we never new, people we never met, people who are of no close relation, but people who nonetheless shaped our lives. An extended family, as it were who made us collectively and individually who we are/
From one vantage point in our own hometown cemetery we see not only the graves of our great-great-grandfather and our great-great-great grandfather But without leaving the spot and only a turn of the head we also see the graves of six other civil war veterans, one who sustained five wounds at Pea Ridge, one who survived the sinking of the Sultana, still another who rose from private to captain during the conflict.
These men served in most of the significant battles of that uncivil conflict. Looking in the distance, the lone confederate tombstone appears, distinctive because of its shape.
These men, and their families, came west and built a small community in the frontier. They, and those who followed, made our community and whether relative or not, known or unknown, they set in motion the events that shaped our lives.
They live on in what we have and will become and are a very part of us. Those pioneer mothers and founding fathers built the world we live in today. They made the difficult choices to start a new world on the frontier. It was their vision and their actions that made even our lives possible. And so I would suggest that we commemorate Memorial as a celebration of ourselves, every bit as much as a memorial to those who have passed on.
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| Saturday 9th May 2009 | |
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.Mother’s Day was the subject of one of our first columns when we started getting paid for putting words on paper nearly half a century ago. We have on a couple of occasions reprinted that column and today we draw heavily from the same.
Tomorrow we pay appropriate tribute to the individual who brought us into this world. In our own case, we find multiple meanings on that subject. Grandmother Sarah was the midwife when our own mother gave us life. And on that September day long ago, we happened to be born on the birthday of Great Grandmother Siemers.
When Grandmother Siemers passed on a few years later she had 96 living descendants. Talk about motherhood.
But who is mother? Webster (primary definition) defines Mother as a woman who has given birth. The verbal definition is likewise the act of giving birth. Biologically speaking everyone who has ever lived has had at one time a mother. One may not have known that individual, but we all have had a mother. Those of us who were/are fortunate also have a mom.
Both are worthy of our honor.
Mom covers a lot more ground. Mom seems to fit more than a biological mother. There are women who are not biological mothers who are real mom’s.
Mom, and a mother can be a mom and most are, is that person who gives of herself for no really good reason for the benefit of another person.
Mom is the person who on many occasions puts her interests second for the benefit of another.
Mom is that person, who for some mystical reason decides that the welfare of another person has an value and that value demands that she contribute in some way to enhance it.
Mom is the one, in the tired phrase I have used many times, who seeing that there is not enough dessert left for everyone pronounces that she really never liked pie.
Mom is the one who hurts when you hurt and rejoices in your triumph.
She is the one who mends the little scratches and bruises, physical and emotional, whenever and however they occur.
Mom is the one who talks of the sunrise when things seem darkest, speaks kindly of failure and sings sweetly of success and when the Lincoln logs of life lie scattered on the floor quietly picks them up and suggests you build again.
We had the good fortune to have one gracious mother/mom, but even more moms.
Thanks mom, and mom and mom ........
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| Saturday 7th March 2009 | |
Chicken Feed
We wandered off to the farm store this morning to get some grass seed for the worn patches in the yard. Fifteen pounds of seed later we started meandering through the aisles and came across the display for baby chicks.
If anyone was watching, they probably thought this old man was having something worse than a senior spell. We stood there and while we checked out half a dozen breeds we had never heard of before, we took a long trip down memory lane.
The first thing that struck us was the price. These chicks were priced from a low of $1.79 to a high of $3.79 each! We remember back on the farm when we ordered chicks from a catalog and they were delivered through the US mail. Our order came earlier than we expected once and for a while we had 400 baby chicks camped out in the bedroom until yours truly got a place cleaned out and heat lamps put up in the barn. We worked a little faster than normal. Incentive it is called.
I don’t think we paid more than $30 for the whole bunch. I do know that our chicken house got its first inhabitants on the farm when we bought a dozen “laying hens” for $10.
I remembered too when as a child dad arranged to have a couple of old buildings trucked in from an oil field and we set them up for coops and we fenced in most of my grandmother’s back yard for the chickens. When we fed them out we sold them for $1 each, $1.25 if they were dressed.
We fed them lots of grain, some commercial chicken feed and every day after school our grandmother and or this writer toated home a 5 gallon bucket of “slop” made up of potato peels, other vegetable waste and the scrapings from trays at the high school cafeteria.
The memory that came home to roost most prominently was one from the days when we worked at the grain company.
We had a promotional special that cosisted of 25 free baby chicks with the purchase of a 25 pound bag of “chick starter”. We ordered something like 500 baby chicks. At the end of the day (second day actually) we still had something like 450 baby chicks left. Baby chicks are OK for couple of days, but after that they need to be somewhere other than the shipping boxes. Our boss, a tender hearted person who wouldn’t hurt a fly, was growing tired of trying to “sell” those chicks and so he let the word drop to one of the town “gossips” whose name shall remain a secret, that if he hadn’t gotten rid of those chicks by the end of the next tay he was going to take them down to the creek and drown them.
Hard to believe just how many people are interested in helping out when they know a baby chick is in peril. They were all gone by a little after noon.
Now the moral of this story Mr President, perhaps you should let a few of those recalcitrant folks in Congress know that if they don’t get on the bandwagon and pick up the ball on getting our economy moving and the budget passed, perhaps you might be going down to the creek with their favorite programs.
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| Friday 20th February 2009 | |
Time for the Death Penalty to EndThe Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled hearings Feb. 26-27 on the bill (SB 208) that says nobody could be sentenced to death in Kansas after July 1.
It is a start.
State Sen. Caroline McGinn introduced the bill, saying lawmakers "need to be thinking out of the box" to save money.
The Sedgwick Republican said the death penalty hasn't proven to be a deterrent to crime, and there's always the risk of executing an innocent person.
And sometimes in the state of confusion, otherwise known as Kansas, the only way to get the legislature to consider doing the right thing is to talk about saving money.
According to a 2003 legislative post audit report, death penalty cases cost, on average, 70 percent more than cases in which the death penalty wasn't sought.
Since 1994, when Kansas reinstated the death penalty, the state has spent $4.7 million on fewer than 20 cases. Three of the cases cost the state $2 million.
And for those crying for vengeance, to date not one has been executed.
Saving money is hardly the argument we find to have the most merit on this issue, but if that is what it takes, we say go for it. We urge you to contact your senator in support of this legislation.And, if possible, attend the committee hearing at the statehouse on the 26th at 9:30 am, Rm 545-North.
It is time to end the death penalty in Kansas.
Out in the “Big Sky Country” of Montana, this week a bill that would abolish the death penalty in Montana passed its first vote in the Senate, 27–23. The bill sponsored by Sen. David Wanzenried, D-Missoula, would replace capital punishment with life-in-prison sentences without the possibility of parole.
“In order for punishment to be effective, it must be swift, and it must be sure,” Wanzenried said. “The death penalty is neither.”
He makes a good point.
But there is still another point to be made. Life in prison without the possibility of parole is a death sentence, it is just the matter of letting, if you will, that sentence to be carried out naturally.
Thirteen states do not have the death penalty: Alaska, District of Colombia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
It would appear from here that we must ask if the death penalty serves the purpose of criminal law. We do not believe that it does. Additionally, the very presence of the penalty coarsens the fabric of our society.
Consider:
Financial costs to taxpayers of capital punishment is several times that of keeping someone in prison for life.
Even with our “sanitized” method of lethal injection it is at best barbaric.
The endless appeals and required additional procedures clog our court system.
We as a society have to move away from the revenge mentality if civilization is to advance.
It sends the wrong message: why kill people who kill people to show killing is wrong.
Life in prison is a worse punishment and a more effective deterrent.
Other nations, especially in Europe, would have a more favorable image of America if we were to join most of the Western world and end this practice.
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Some jury members are reluctant to convict if it means putting someone to death.
The possibility exists that innocent men and women may be put to death.
It creates sympathy for the monsterous perpetrators of the crimes.
It is useless in that it doesn't bring the victim back to life
In 1930 Karl Menninger said his main objection to capital punishment was that it constituted a waste of good guinea pigs. That objection would be as true today as it was then. We can’t learn much about motivations and triggers to violent crime from dead men.
Our goal should be to bring an end to senseless violence, not encourage it with the blessing of the state.
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| Tuesday 17th February 2009 | |
They aren’t all in WashingtonMonday, the Republican leadership of the legislature told the Governor (Democrat) that the State Finance Council (Majority Republican) would not approve the issuance of a certificate of indebtedness – a routine action dealing with state cash flow, that allows the state to move money from one account to another to bills on time.
The use of these certificates has been approved every year for the last decade.
But the leadership decided instead to not approve the transfer of fund until the Governor signs the 2009 Budget Bill.
The problem is, due to the slow action by the legislature, the budget bill has not been delivered to the Governor’s desk, so there is no bill to sign.
The State has suspended paying income tax refunds, and may have to skip paying state employees Wednesday and cutback on payments for services. Payments to health care providers and school payments, due this month, could also be delayed.
The Governor put it best: “Through their refusal to act today, the Republican legislative leadership is jeopardizing our citizens’ pocketbooks for no other reason than to play political games – games in which the only ones set to lose are Kansas families, workers and schools.”
There seems to be more than an adequate supply of hypocrisy these days.
The same Republicans who doubled the national debt in Washington, approved a $700 billion bailout for banks during the Bush administration have suddenly once again found “fiscal responsibility”. Now those back home here who wrote the underfunded budget last year are playing fiscal responsibility games.
Quit the positioning and games people. It is time you put people ahead of politics.
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| Thursday 1st January 2009 | |
New Years DayPerhaps it is just a sign of getting old(er). But are we the only ones who are looking forward to the next new year because we are tired of the 2001 -2009 sunglasses with the two zeros being the eyepieces?
The sun this morning had slightly red skies, not enough we hope to trigger the old saying “Red skies at morning, sailors take warning.” It was sort of a mixed review. Perhaps mixed review should be the theme of the day.
We know that for every person celebrating the outcome of the bowl games, there is another who is disappointed, but we are delighted to be on the side of those who celebrate. Originally the smart money was on Kansas University to defeat Minnesota, but by game time it had dropped to the point where it was just a majority of the money. Well, those Hawks came through!
New Years is of course a time to look forward, but it is a time to look back as well.
We remember a New Years Eve some 45 years ago when we took flight late in the evening from New York City and flew into the New Year on the way to Paris, December 31, 1963.
It was the champagne flight and the flight turned out to be short on passengers and long on champagne. We arrived in Paris for the new year to be greeted by a slightly hung over Paris, which for better or worse, matched our condition as well. Twelve or fourteen hours later we headed south on an all-night flight that took us to the heart of Africa and perhaps in some ways into to the nineteenth century. We spent the better part of the next two years in the Peace Corps in Gabon.
We brought back the usual souvenirs as we commonly define them, but more importantly we brought back those souvenirs as the French would translate -- the memories.
We consider the Peace Corps as one of the better, if not best actions ever initiated by our government. Important because of the contribution we have made to the so called “third world” but more important for what the volunteers have brought home.
We have re-established some of our links to those days. The contributions that some of our colleagues have and continue to make is astounding and even those of us who haven’t done as much with the experience have lived a much richer life as a result. Wet us hope that this program not only continues but grows.
It has been even longer since a skinny kid from Western Kansas thought he could play “big time” football at the University of Kansas. Forty-eight years to be exact. After ending a practice whose main highlight was having a 200 pound plus fullback none to carefully place his foot between the single bar face mask and our face leaving behind a black eye, bloody nose and one less tooth, we got the message.
We left the team after the University replaced the missing tooth. What happened that day in many respects changed our life.
When we went to turn in our uniform, we didn’t want to admit defeat. We told coach Don Fambrough that we planned to workout, put on some more weight and maybe tryout for spring football.
We both knew that skinny kid didn’t have the talent to play at that level, but instead to telling me not to bother or that I didn’t have what it took, he left me with my dignity intact and told me that sounded like a good plan or something to that effect. We have always felt that was a turning point. Thanks Coach Fambrough for not dashing our hopes.
We still carry that bit of hope, not for playing football (our eligibility has expired anyway) but hope for this tired old planet.
As we enter 2009, we look for and hope for leadership that will make a new effort to find peace, for a society that can turn to the greatness that has always been in the people of this nation and reach ahead to find energy solutions that do not damage our fragile eco systems, that we rebuild an economy that rewards the builders, the working people of this nation. It is our hope that in 2009 we move toward an economy driven by productivity and good hard work and innovation rather than a fragile bubble of investment.
As the new administration takes the reins of power we find the means and the desire to have universal health care. We hope for this and more.
At a time when we are at war, in an economic downturn unmatched since the great depression, at a time when our heavy dependence on fossil fuels has shattered our economy and fouls our environment, the wish for peace and prosperity in the new year seems too much to expect, but not if we have hope.
Happy New Year
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| Monday 29th December 2008 | |
Catch Up TimeOur faith requires of us, as do many, that we seek forgiveness when we have wronged another.
We have a period before Rosh Hashanah and then the final few days before Yom Kippur to reflect and seek forgiveness from those we have wrongedand have not asked for forgiveness. We are not instructed to wait until then, it is just one last chance to end the year right.
Likewise we are instructed to forgive those who have wronged us.
Our faith goes a step further. We are taught that it is also required that we thank those who have done good things to us or for us.
As Christmas season moves along with the twelve days of Christmas, youngsters are being reminded by parents that thank you notes need to be written – NOW! Trust your parents on this one kids, it is a good thing to do.
As children we were taught that the most important two words in the English language were "Thank You."
Still, as adults we find ourselves falling behind and forgetting to thank others for kindness they have extended to us.
And so, some 40 plus years after we first started writing with a byline, it is long since time we said thanks.
Thanks to those many people who have written us in appreciation of our writing; thanks to the many who have offered suggestions; and yes, thanks those who have offered constructive criticism.
After a few years of writing for a living, we learned that there was more money to be made printing the news than writing it and for many years we have been writing for “free”.
Thanks to all of you who have encouraged us to continue.
You will never know just how much your kind remarks mean. Believe us, they brighten the day.
Over they years we never managed to garner a Pulitzer or any high sounding award. We did pick up a couple of citations for AP newsman of the month in Nebraska and had a few photographs floated over the AP wire, but we have received a few awards that were all the much better - appreciation from our readers.
And on that subject, we would be missing an opportunity for a commercial if we let this pass.
One of the things we learned early on in our career was that writing for newspapers was not a high dollar vocation.
We suspect that is still true today, as we expect is the case with those local “personalities” on radio and television.
There are a lot of people out there, some good writers and some better, whose financial gain from writing is not great. It seems there is always a supply of people who are willing to write for a little pay and a byline.
So, please, the next time you really enjoy an article you read in the newspaper or pick up on the local radio or tv; take the time to thank that reporter. We’d like to think it makes them better at their craft because they are appreciated for their work and you will feel better about it as well.
Once again, to all of you for all you have done to make us feel like our efforts are worthwhile
Thanks.
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| Wednesday 24th December 2008 | |
It is the seasonThe winter solstice is now behind us and days are starting to lengthen in anticipation of spring.
Cultures in the northern hemisphere have long celebrated the day as the sun starts the journey back north and the anticipation of the rebirth we call spring begins.
We are tonight, halfway through the lighting of the Chanukah candles. They recall the rededication of the temple after a small band of Jews overturned the Greeks and cleansed the temple. The candles are used for no
“useful” purpose such as reading or lighting a room instead they are displayed near a window to be enjoyed and shared with the world as a reminder of the triumph of good over evil and the few over the many - a celebration of freedom.
Tomorrow, Christians around the world will celebrate Christmas with the centuries old message of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.
In this season of rebirth, of dedication, and the eternal message of peace, let us begin anew the quest to in this next year fulfil that age old message of Peace on Earth.
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| Monday 22nd December 2008 | |
Nes Gadol Hayah ShamLast night (contrary to the advice in the local newspaper which missed the day by one) observant Jews kindled the first candles of Chanukkah.
Year in and year out the holiday gets described by the non-Jewish world as “the Jewish Christmas” in part because there has been a certain amount of assimilation of secular holiday customs and the fact that Chanukkah falls near Christmas.
There is a particular irony in that the holiday commemorates the lighting of the temple lights after a revolution that was fought against assimilation and suppression of the Jewish religion.
A miracle, we are told, occurred when a small band of faithful led by the Maccabees drove the Greeks from the temple and rededicated the temple and the altar. Only enough consecrated oil for one day was found. The miracle of Chanukkah is that it burned for eight days. The time required to consecrate more oil.
Three blessings are recited the first night of Chanukkah when we light the first candle.
Blessed are you, Lord, our G-d, sovereign of the universe Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the lights of Chanukkah
Blessed are you, Lord, our G-d, sovereign of the universe Who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time
Blessed are you, Lord, our G-d, sovereign of the universe who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.
During Chanukkah, a game called driedel is played. A dreidel is a four sided top marked with four Hebrew letters: Nun, Gimel, Hei and Shin. These letters stand for the Hebrew phrase "Nes Gadol Hayah Sham", a great miracle happened there, referring to the miracle of the oil.
Which brings us to Topeka, Kansas. Yesterday evening we discovered to our chagrin that some of our plumbing had fallen victim to the cold temperatures. The cold had snuffed out our cold water to the kitchen sink.
Given my dependence on an oxygen hose and the temperatures hovering just above zero, crawling under the house and trying to thaw the pipes was not an option. The hair dryer focused on the pipes under the sink had no effect – except it required that the cabinets under the sink be cleaned out first. We stuffed some insulation around the one vent allowing air to flow under the house.
We lit the Chanukkah candles later and placed the menorah near the window facing out to our back yard. We left the faucet open just a crack although no water was flowing. We left the doors to the cabinet under the sink open and resolved to call a plumber first thing in the morning.
Meanwhile the temperature kept falling to to become the coldest evening of the year -2.
This morning the water was running.
Think what you will, miracles do still happen. Sometimes they require our assistance.
Most often they require our recognition and wonderment.
Happy Chanukkah!
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| Sunday 21st December 2008 | |
A different trade balancePick up the newspaper, turn on the televison, even the radio. What do you hear? Buy, buy, buy.
‘Tis not the season to be jolly, ‘tis the season to buy.
All the politicos are telling us to buy and stimulate the economy.
And we respond.
Chances are those bargains we gobble up at the local discount store, the roof-mart or whatever its name is or for that matter those bargains captured online were made somewhere in the “third world”. We suspect in many cases they were made by workers who are underpaid, have no benefits, and may have worked in a workplace where it is not healthy to be working.
Our question today is “Are we buying stolen goods.?”
We picked up a few items at a church bazaar a couple of weeks ago, items being made overseas by charitable agencies as fund raisers. We purchased them with the certain knowledge that the money would make it back to the people who created them.
We suspect however that many of the goods we all purchase in the rush to outdo Santa himself, are the product of child labor or the twenty-first century equivalent of slave labor – workers working long hours and earning less than a living wage.
When we buy those products we are stealing childhood from a child.
When we buy sweat shop products we steal the legitimate wages due the worker.
No, we are not into the Bah Humbug mode. Christmas is a holiday of gift giving. Nothing wrong with that. As long as we aren’t giving away something that is not rightly our’s.
We do think we should carefully consider our purchases. And where we purchase them.
Not just in this season - every day.
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| Thursday 18th December 2008 | |
Christmas . . . FamilyToday's offering is a reprint, a piece we wrote for a holiday supplement more than a quarter of a century ago. Like an old sweater, maybe a little rough around the edges and not brand new, it still feels comfortable.
As a small child, Christmas was bright lights, pretty packages, candy, and in the words of the songwriter, "Santa Claus is coming to town."
It was wearing a bathrobe four sizes too large, and being a shepherd, and singing "Away In A Manger" in the church play.
Christmas was being so excited that it was hard to wait to open gifts and hard to wait until a reasonable hour to run down the street to share and compare with my best friend. Christmas was going to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. It was family.
As I grew older, Santa Claus faded from the scene, but Christmas was still family. One of my fond memories is of my uncle singing at church, "C is for the Christ Child, born upon this day, H for herald angels in the night..." It is still one of my favorite carols. And...Christmas was family.
In college, Christmas was the production of a 17th century German pageant and singing "Stille Nacht." After the pageant, there was the trip back to that small Kansas town where with mom and dad...It was Christmas ..and.it was family.
A few years later in Africa, a small group of Americans went to midnight mass Christmas Eve in a small jungle church. For that small group in a far-away land....it was family.
Then came the Army. As the week before Christmas approached, there was less than $5 in the bank account. There wasn't enough money for a Christmas tree and there wouldn't have been room for one in our small trailer anyway. We broke a branch from a cedar tree and decorated it with pieces of ribbon from packages and a star made from broomstraws. For the two of us and our dog; it was Christmas...and it was family.
Vietnam. Bob Hope arrived the day before Christmas. Christmas day was calm and quiet. "I'll be home for Christmas..if only in my dreams," playing on the armed forces radio reminded me of those at home, and my new son.... family.
Later, Christmas was the smiles of my children as they tore through the bright papers on their gifts, packages carefully wrapped by their mother. Their faces shined brighter than the Christmas lights as they opened their gifts with anticipation. That too, was family.
At midnight on Christmas Eve, we gathered with friends and heard the measured tones of the church organ, watched the procession of the choir, and just at midnight, with candles glowing against the stained glass, we heard again the centuries old message about The Child born in Bethlehem. That too was family.
I've spent Christmas in several states, many towns, and on three continents, with people of many races.
Everywhere, Christmas is the sparkle in a child's eye, the warm love of a mother, a hug from dad, smiles of grandparents, and best wishes of friends. It's family.
Christmas is a celebration of a family.... ....Mankind.
That first Christmas night, St. Luke tells us, the angels appeared to shepherds and told them of ' Tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior." And Luke tells us that suddenly there was a throng of heavenly host praising God and saying ' 'Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth, goodwill to men."
Christmas has always been family.
Merry Christmas.... family.
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| Saturday 25th October 2008 | |
A Values Voter GuideWe consider ourselves a “values voter.”
We happen to be a registered Democrat and we believe in God.
There are those who think those are mutually exclusive terms.
They are wrong.
That doesn’t require that we obsess over some single issues that, we were going to write affect or effect some, but we have settled on infect some. Unlike the much maligned Pharisees we choose not to“strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”
Our values issues are more of a broad scope. Like for instance poverty. The Christian Bible has something in excess of 2,000 verses about how we are supposed to treat the poor and oppressed. (Thanks to Jim Wallis for doing the counting.)
We will vote for the candidate who we believe, on the basis of message and record, is most likely to address the needs of the many who have little rather than the few who have much.
We are ashamed (yes, we will use that word) to live in a society that looks first to the needs of the wealthy and then is willing to toss table scraps to the poor.
We are in the midst of an economic crisis. Merely solving the problems for those in high finance is not adequate, we need to address the needs and concerns of not only the wealthy, not only the middle class, but those who are at the very bottom of the economic scale. Anything less borders on immoral.
Call it spreading the wealth around if you will, we call it spreading the wealth in a different direction. The tax cuts of recent years have been spreading the wealth of the next generation on the already affluent of our generation.
We do not expect to live to see the day when as Isaiah envisioned when men would beat swords into plowshares and pruning hooks, but we would hope to see the generation that stops beating plowshares into swords.
We would look for the candidates most likely to lead us away from the doctrine of continuous confrontation and instead toward security for all people.
Conflict breeds its own kind. We worry about other nations developing weapons of mass destruction while we spend billions to create more of our own.
It is time for us to stop crying “peace” and “security” while our actions do little for either.
It could be argued that possessing a stockpile of weapons makes us strong. The truth is that it only makes us a warehouse of weapons. Our reliance on weaponry to provide our national security is a tragically flawed concept. We need to reduce the number of enemies, not increase the number of our weapons.
It not likely we will do both.
We choose life. But, that said, life and slavery are not the same. We look for a candidate with a consistent concept of life. Choosing life is not about prohibiting abortions. It is about creating conditions where abortions are few. The best available numbers indicate that there were a greater percentage of women undergoing abortions before Roe v Wade than today. Overturning Roe v Wade will not reduce the number of abortions, it will only reduce the number of legal abortions.
We look for candidates who will support rational policies that will reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, not those who would make abortions a crime.
If we choose life we must look at the whole picture. Health care, genocide, starvation, war, the death penalty human and civil rights are all issues that candidates must consider and choose life.
We have the ability, if we only have the desire, to provide adequate, affordable and available health care for every American. We can’t do it while we play footsie with the insurance industry that skims off the top of our health care dollars for profit and then squanders another large chunk for administrative costs – too often aimed at not paying claims.
We cannot shout, “choose life,” and stand idly by and watch as 30,000 children die globally each day of preventable hunger.
Yet we do.
We are engaged in two wars in the Middle East.
Both are tragic. Neither has served our national interest.
We look to candidates who will bring about an end to both these conflicts. Acts of international terrorism are crimes against us all; acts committed by what was once a small group of individuals.
We chose to answer those crimes with war against large groups of people and we have only kindled the fire of terrorism.
In our hopes of justice we once again have picked up the banner of capital punishment.
Better we would spend our money and our time in preventing crime rather than continue capital punishment in the name of justice. “Vengeance and recompence”, we are told, belong to the Lord.
The world we live in is not the world we were born into.
How often we have looked at the prairies or the mountain landscapes and thought “What was it like to see this land when it was brand new?”
Today we even lament the changes we have seen in our lifetime and think, “If only our children could have seen the world we once knew.”
Our environment is under assault and we are the ones leading the charge.
Climate change is real and we are a real part of it. It matters little if the change is accidental, incidental or planned.
We knew of a “conservation” agency a few years back that planned to pump the aquifer dry. If
fact they had calculated when it would no longer be good economics to try and irrigate from the
aquifer. Their thinking was that by then they would find another source of water. They were
wrong.
We are, in large part because of our dependence on fossil fuels, befouling our atmosphere and degrading our environment.
The answer is not to find more fossil fuel sources.
Recently we were told that it was vital to allow drilling offshore and that if we opened up more areas to drilling then gasoline prices would go down.
Congress finally was bullied into opening up areas for drilling and even though we lost drilling platforms to hurricanes and even though we have not drilled one new well offshore in the areas released and won’t for years, the price at the pump has dropped dramatically because of lowered demand and less speculation.
What does that say about the need to drill in those areas?
We have available, and have had available, the technology to improve fuel efficiency and to develop alternate fuels and energy sources. We haven’t.
We look for a candidate who will not encourage the same, profit driven oil economy, that is befouling the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, as long as we allow the pollution to continue and as long as we encourage more drilling for oil, and as long as we provide tax breaks for that industry, we will not see any substantial effort to develop alternative energies.
Those folks who most often talk about “creation” don’t seem to realize that it is clearly under assault.
Our dependence on oil and our choice of profit over people needs to change and a change to renewable clean energy would have far reaching and favorable effects on our economy, on our international relations, and on the world that our children will inherit and pass on to their children.
Choosing life requires that we endorse candidates with a “healthy” respect for the environment.and we will choose the candidates who will likely be most faithful in our care of our resources and seek to have a “healthy” environment.
We are taught in the Jewish scriptures we all descended from Adam. It is further taught that we descended from one man so that no person could claim superior ancestry.
It is also taught that we descended from one because every individual is one from whom a whole world could descend.
Every person, we are taught, is made in the image of G-d.
What does that say about how we should treat every other individual.
What does that say about human and civil rights?
How can we approve torture?
How can we treat unjustly those who for any variety of circumstances appear to be different.
If we look at values; how can we ignore the plight of even the “illegal” immigrants.
Were we not taught to “Welcome the stranger”?
We look for a candidate who will follow the precepts of Isaiah: “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.”
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| Tuesday 21st October 2008 | |
PoleCats on TV -- Yes We know what a polecat is!Faux News is reporting the results of a poll that shows the military strongly supports John McCain.
These noble guardians of fair and balanced coverage are less than forthright with their presentation of the “poll.”
The Army Times, in its reporting, points out the Military Times did the survey, which is what it is. The Army Times is upfront with the clear notice Military Times started with 80,000 readers inviting them to participate in the survey and that some 2,813 active-duty members, 1,480 members of the National Guard or reserve and 4,411 retirees participated.
The invitation was issued to subscribers to one of the Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times or Air Force Times.
They were invited to participate by email. And the survey was completed over the web. In the Army Times reporting of the results they state: “Although public opinion pollsters use random selection to survey the general public, the Military Times survey is based on responses from those who chose to participate.
That means it is impossible to calculate statistical margins of error commonly reported in opinion surveys, because those calculations depend on random sampling techniques.”
“The voluntary nature of the survey could affect the results,” they wrote, “if supporters of one candidate are more prone to express their opinions, for example.”
They rightly point out, “The dependence on e-mail could also affect the results, because e-mail users may have different characteristics than the military population as a whole.”
Characteristics of Military Times readers may also affect the results. According to the report in Army Times, “the group surveyed is significantly older than the military as a whole, and the survey group contains a higher percentage of officers than is present in the military.”
“Conversely, junior enlisted troops, women and racial and ethnic minorities made up a smaller share of the sample than of the military at large. “
Unlike that channel mentioned when we began, Military Times begins with a disclaimer “The results of the Military Times 2008 Election Poll are not representative of the opinions of the military as a whole.”
They point out in the second paragraph of their coverage “The group surveyed is older, more senior in rank and less ethnically diverse than the overall armed services.”
Oh yes, did we mention that although Faux News, is treating the “poll” as developing news The Military Times printed the results the 12 days ago.
So much for developing “news”
Years ago I helped conduct a “poll” with relatively careful demographics.
The final results were heavily in favor of the position taken by the organization providing my paycheck. My boss was very excited about getting the results published until I cautioned him that the demographics of those participating did not reflect the make up of the population in the district. Although the majority of the respondents agreed with the agency position, they represented less than 15 percent of the population. Worse yet anyone who didn’t fit that particular group (farmers over age 50) strongly disagreed with our position. Sometimes polls aren’t worth the paper they are written on. We have no way of knowing for sure about this survey by the Military Times and neither do they. Unlike Faux News, they are honest and admit it right up front.
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| Monday 20th October 2008 | |
Just the factsBack when dinosaurs roamed the earth and your humble scribe was a youngster; yes even before the television screen dominated every home, we gathered around the radio to listen to Dragnet.
We listened as the familiar voice of George Fenneman told us “The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”
The story then usually began with footsteps and a door closing, followed by Joe Friday intoning something like: "Tuesday, February 12. It was cold in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of robbery division. . . .” What followed was half-hour carefully detailed police drama with Joe Friday and his partner.
My how things have changed. Now on the nightly cable news we are able to listen to the doings of ‘Joe the Plumber’ and John McCain’s girl Friday, Sarah Palin.
What has changed most dramatically in recent weeks is, as George Fenneman might intone, :The story you are about to hear is false. Only the names have not been changed to discredit the innocent.”
We really admired John McCain . . . until recently.
‘Joe the Plumber’ wasn’t thrust onto the national stage by Obama.
It was, if memory serves us properly, John McCain who brought it up (how many times?) during the debate and continues to bring up ‘Joe the Plumber.’
It wasn’t the Obama campaign that went to ‘Joe the Plumber.’ As near as we can tell, Joe went down the street from his house, not to his own front door to confront Obama.
It wasn’t the Obama campaign that found our that Joe doesn’t have a license, owes back taxes, has no real plans to purchase the business where he works and that the business in question doesn’t make the $250,000 - $280,000 per year he used in his question to Obama.
Yet John McCain and the McCain campaign continue to try and ride this horse, never mind the facts, it makes a good story.
And the terrorist thing. The implications in the continuing Bill Ayers saga are just plain bush league. Or should that be Bush League?
Palin made the comments at three appearances in separate states.
"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," said told donors at a private airport in Englewood, Colorado. Palin echoed the line later in Carson and Costa Mesa, California.
And what about “these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”
And where do I live? Is 110,000 population small enough to be a wonderful little pocket of real Americans? Or is it large enough that we aren’t really Americans? Or can we be not American merely by supporting her opponent no matter where we live?
When a candidate misrepresents his or her opponent’s position, it is understandable. If it is the result of misunderstanding or based on inadequate information if is forgivable.
But when that error is pointed out, time and time again and the candidate continues with the misrepresentation, it speaks volumes about the character of the person making the charge.
We might be tempted to continue with the Dragnet theme and write “Just the facts, ma'am”.
Unfortunately, that line was never uttered during the series.
We try to check our facts first.
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| Friday 17th October 2008 | |
Hunger -- Unfinished BusinessThere are those among us who remember being encouraged to drink a full glass of water before beginning the evening meal. Not for any particular health purpose; but rather because it would make the meager evening meal seem a bit more filling. We may remember occasions when extra water was added to the stew pot to make enough servings.
Some of us have gone for a brief time without eating, for dieting reasons, because of inconvenience or poor planning or as observant Jews did a week ago or so, for religious reasons.
Unfortunately for most of us hunger is just another word.
However, in the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty"
Every year 15 million children die of hunger. Hunger!
The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed and one-third is starving.
Why?
Could it possibly be misplaced priorities?
For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years. God knows we have fired enough missiles in recent years.
It isn’t entirely about lack of food.
Most estimates of the world food production indicate that enough food is produced every year to provide a 2700 calorie diet for every person on earth.
It is about distribution, availability and cost. And priorities.
In the U.S., rising unemployment, gas prices, increased food prices, and the credit squeeze have hit poor people the hardest. The number of people receiving food stamps is reaching record levels, in excess of 28 million. The number of families coming to churches and food banks to get help as they try to feed their children has increased by 20 percent.
The impact is even more severe in many developing countries, partly because people are much poorer to start with. Also, poor people in developing countries typically spend two-thirds of their entire income on a basic staple – rice, wheat, corn, or sorghum. The prices of these basic grains have roughly doubled in the last two years.
Here at home, according to the Department of Labor, the cost of food rose 7.6 percent from September 2007 – September 2008. Were that not enough some food items continue to experience a double-digit increase in price during the same time period – cheese increased by 11 percent and bread increased by 17.4 percent.
The price of a market basket of basics on which low-income people rely rose even faster.
From August 2007 to August 2008, the cost of the “Thrifty Food Plan” rose by 10.5 percent. The Thrifty Food Plan is the government’s basis for Food Stamp allotments – it represents the least expensive basket of food the government prices (and recommends only for short-term use).
Studies show that most families cannot actually obtain a healthy diet with this level of spending, but it is what many low-income families are relegated to, at best.
The rise in food costs may be even more dramatic for more healthful, more nutritious food (such as lean meats and vegetables). These food items increased by 20 percent over the past two years, according to researchers at the University of Washington.
Polls by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the percentage of adults saying they were finding it difficult to afford the food they need rose 11 percent between January (27 percent) and July (38 percent) of 2008.
A 2008 survey by the Kaiser Foundation/Washington Post/Harvard Low-Wage Worker poll found that almost half of workers who make less than $27,000 a year are having a hard time buying food.
Since you started reading this column, statistics indicate that worldwide another 200 people have died from starvation.
Yesterday, October 16 was World Food Day. Coincidentally yesterday also marked the sixth anniversary of President Bush signing the Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq ( Public Law No: 107-243).
Do you remember any of the candidates discussing hunger in the debates?
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| Thursday 16th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- The Path to Peace At this writing we are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have troops scattered around the world. There are those in the administration who are searching harder for a reason to expand the war in the middle east to Iran than they are for ways to bring the two wars we now have to a successful and swift conclusion."We The People of the United Nations Determined save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm With in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom...."
Members of that generation of Americans who kept faith through the dark days of the depression and World War II, still were able to see a ray of sunlight through the clouds of war. Under the leadership of the United States on October 24, 1945 the United Nations officially came into existence.
The United States was -- through many administrations -- seen as a nation of peace.
Today, people around the world view us as a greater threat to world peace than many of the nations we call "rogue states".
What has changed?
We have entered a new era of isolationism.
Our foreign policy had become "my way or the highway."
It is time that we once again turn to the processes where war is never a first option nor the preferred choice.
Me must work for that kind of support for peace and to hold in check those who would issue a carte blanc for war.
Americans today should settle for nothing less and generations to come deserve that and more.
As Richard Nixon so rightly said of peace at his inaugural "The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America--the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization."
As well as peace, your world in 2008 and beyond also requires cooperation. We cannot, should not and must not continue to act unilaterally or nearly so.
It is time that we renew our commitment to the United Nations, and not only when it suits the narrow purpose of a current frustration.
Finally, we must renew our commitment to the continued growth and the effectiveness of the United Nations.
We have a long journey to take down the road to peace -- it is unfinished business -- let's walk that road together.
"The frustrations of the United Nations are a product of the world that we live in, and not of the institution which gives them voice. -- It is far better to throw these differences open to the assembly of nations than to permit them to fester in silent danger."
President Jimmy Carter July 15, 1979
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| Wednesday 15th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- Equal Opportunity & Equal RightsWe have come far from the time when men and women were sold on the block of slavery. But we have a long journey yet ahead. Equal opportunity still does not exist for many minorities who are "protected" by law and other groups systematically have their civil rights abridged by hate, bigotry, misunderstanding and even calous disregard.
Forms of blind hatred are not acceptable in a civilized society. We cannot rest until equality is a fact for all people, with no distinctions under the law because of race, religion, language, age, gender, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability or cultural background.
We can, if we will, bring an end to these injustices and it it must be our goal that our grand children and their children will not remember a time when inequality existed.
Consider: Thirty-five states ratified the ERA Amendment. Only thirty-five. It failed for lack of favorable action by a handful of states.
A follow up resolution was introduced in the United States Senate which read very simply: " Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."
Not one single Republican signed on as a sponsor!
Senator Kennedy in introducing the resolution said, among other things, "Despite passage of the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, discrimination against women continues to permeate the workforce and many areas of the economy. Today, women earn about 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, and the gap is even greater for women of color. In 2004, African American women earned only 67 percent of the earnings of white men, and Hispanic women earned only 56 percent."
"Women with college and professional degrees have achieved advances in a number of professional and managerial occupations in recent years. Yet more than 60 percent of working women are still clustered in a narrow range of traditionally female, traditionally low-paying occupations, and female-headed households continue to dominate the bottom rungs of the economic ladder."
"A stronger effort is clearly needed to finally live up to our commitment of full equality. The Equal Rights Amendment alone cannot remedy all discrimination, but it will clearly strengthen the ongoing efforts of women across the country to obtain equal treatment."
The resolution sits in committee.
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in a speech on January 14, 1879 pleaded with the govenment:
"Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. . . . all people should have equal rights. "I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated. . . .We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. . . .with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all. . . .that all people may be one people."
Nearly one hundred and thirty years later, that dream remains unfulfilled.
Equality remains unfinished business in America. It is time we once again lifted that banner and marched forward.
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt's greeting to the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-born, January 9, 1940
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| Tuesday 14th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- Honor in the World CommunityMay we pursue the right without self-righteousness.
May we know unity without conformity.
May we grow in strength without pride in self.
May we, in our dealings with all peoples of the earth, ever speak truth and serve justice.
And so shall America - in the sight of all men of good will - prove true to the honorable purposes that bind and rule us as a people in all this time of trial through which we pass.
--Dwight D Eisenhower Second Inaugural Address
What a fellow Kansan asked in his second inaugural address, half a century ago, remains a challenge today.
Self-righteousness has become a way of life for too many of those in political office.
Motives are not to be questioned, they say, because they possess the truth -- not just some truth, but the whole truth and the only truth.
Unity is measured only by the degree of conformity. and the net result is division.
Our capacity for pride is exceeded only by our claim of patriotism and the lack thereof with any with whom we disagree.
Around the world the peoples of the earth are asking if we ever speak truth.
Our refusal to be bound by the rules of civilized society, unless those rules match the needs of our economic plan or other current excuse, have separated us from increasing numbers of the world's people.
Those of us who served our country overseas in the early 1960's know firsthand the affection and admiration that the peoples of the world once held for the United States. We lament the loss. All of us are all to familar with the empathy that the world community felt for the Untied States in the days after the tragic events of 9-11. Bluster and bravado largely erased that support and we are now bogged down in conflict around the globe that has greatly diminished world support for this great nation.
If we, as arguably the most powerful nation on earth would provide leadership befitting that position then we must set aside self-righteousness and excessive pride. We must without fear negotiate. It is time that we boldly face challenges rather than arrogantly challenging those we face.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's prayer of 1956 remains Unfinished Business.
Government must live up to those standards he envisioned.
It can change and with new leadership -- It will!
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| Monday 13th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- It's our environment. . .Those of us who were born in the first half of the last century grew to adulthood under the influence of men and women who knew this land when it was new.
We lived in the world being built by people who came across the great prairies on covered wagons or on horseback. Some of us were fortunate enough to experience first hand pristine lands.
Several years ago, high in the mountains of Colorado we climbed to a rock outcropping overlooking miles and miles of valley below. Away from the main trails, we briefly speculated that perhaps we were the first man to see that glorious vista from that vantage point. As we strained to take it all in, a twinkle caught our eye and there between a couple of large rocks, the reflection of an aluminum can.
We have all visited that kind of disappointment of litter and the obvious environmental degradation brought on by carelessness and convenience.
It is sad.
But what is more tragic is the darkening of our skies, the poisoning of our streams and the wasting of our landscape for profit.
There can be little question that in time, our streams will again run pure, our skies will be blue and clear and our landscapes green and stable.
The question is: "Will man be there to admire them?"
We have the capacity to bring about our own ruin and we have too often hidden our steady progress toward that degradation blinded by the gleam of profit.
The dangers of greenhouse gases and climate change are all too obvious.
We can no longer look away.
There was a time we could turn our back on a problem, but today we are surrounded by the problems of climate change. Smokestacks and automotibles that belch carbon dioxide and worse into our air have been so efficient that they contaminate areas where they have never been seen.
More than 30 years ago President Nixon brought into existence the Environmental Protection Agency to address those needs. He defined a goal that "our entire society develop a new understanding and a new awareness of man's relation to his environment - what might be called "environmental literacy." This will require the development and teaching of environmental concepts at every point in the educational process. . . ."
Sadly, the current administration, in the face of the greatest threat to our environment ever has chosen to weaken that agency and look for ways to allow big money to circumvent even minimal requirements. They have advocated a policy of spoils rather than stewardship. The challenge President Nixon issued in July of 1970 remains today and we have unfinished business.
"The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man. With its acceptance of the reorganization plans, the Congress will help us fulfill that commitment."
How far we have slipped in the last 40 years.
That commitment remains unfullfilled.
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| Sunday 12th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- Civil RightsThe struggle for equal rights for minorities took more than a century to even bring it to the forefront.
In America, in the 21st Century, we cannot delay, we cannot wait and we cannot deny equal rights to women and to other minorites who are by common practice or by law denied full and equal access to the rights of citizenship. The challenges laid down nearly 40 years ago remain a challenge and for us must remain unfinished business.
It's time we finished this work.
In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson, in an address at Howard University, the school where we received considerable training before going overseas with the Peace Corps, called for equality in no uncertain terms. "Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting. . . Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this rights.""This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.," he said.
"The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal" - "Government by consent of the governed" - "Give me liberty or give me death". And those are not just clever words and not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries."
In 1965, the issue was voting rights and was applied to racial equality. Today, other measures of inequality exist in housing, employment and opportunity.
In 1965, what President Johnson said concerning racial injustice remains valid as we work to insure equality. "There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem."
"Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument.
-- No law that we now have on the books...can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it...
There is no Constitutional issue here.
The command of the Constitution is plain.
There is no moral issue.
It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of States' rights or National rights.
There is only the struggle for human rights."
Today, we continue to face the issue of basic civil rights.
We have yet to solve the issues of discrimination based on sex, race, sexual orientation, national origin, and yes, religion.
Today the right to vote is being challenged for those whose economic hardship places them on the edge of the growing number of homeless. As we write, thousands of voter registration challenges are being put forward across the nation, some no doubt valid, but we face the likelyhood of throwing the baby out with the bath. We as a people seem all too often willing to use discrimination to correct one social ill with little thought that we are creating another.
The issue of civil rights is unfinished business and it is time we again picked up the standard and moved forward.
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| Friday 10th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business Health CareFor too many Americans, adequate health care remains out of reach.
For some, the cost of health insurance is prohibitive. For others, the cost of prescription drugs medicine necessary for health and well being must be balanced against food and shelter.
For others, even the best medical insurance and prescription plans are not enough. If medical attention is a matter of hours away insurance often means little. This is not a new problem.
A single-payer system (where the government finances health care insurance, but keeps the delivery of health care to mostly private control) may be the only solution to solving the United States' many health care problems. More than 45 million citizens with no health insurance, many more with only limited coverage, skyrocketing health insurance premiums, malpractice costs, long-term care issues, and relatively poor health indicators, when compared to similar industrialized nations; these are not American values..
Health care in this country must be a service industry not a investment business.
A few years back when then Kansas Commissioner of Insurance Kathleen Sebelius denied the attempt of Anthem to purchase Blue Cross Blue Shield, one question should have been very prominent in the minds of every Kansan, "Why does Anthem want to own Blue Cross Blue Shield?"
The answer of course is because them wanted it as an investment -- a moneymaker. Insurance companies should make money-- no question about that, but--
Our health care should not be driven primarily by "a healthy bottom line" but rather a healthy population.
Harry Truman pointed out in 1945, " The deficiencies are especially severe in rural and semirural areas and in those cities where changes in population have placed great strains on community facilities."
"The principal reason why people do not receive the care they need is that they cannot afford to pay for it on an individual basis at the time they need it. This is true not only for needy persons. It is also true for a large proportion of normally self-supporting persons."
"Individual families pay their individual costs, and not average costs. They may be hit by sickness that calls for many times the average cost--in extreme cases for more than their annual income. . . When this happens they may come face to face with economic disaster. Many families, fearful of expense, delay calling the doctor long beyond the time when medical care would do the most good."
"For some persons with very low income or no income at all we now use taxpayers' money in the form of free services, free clinics, and public hospitals. Tax-supported, free medical care for needy persons, however, is insufficient in most of our cities and in nearly all of our rural areas. This deficiency cannot be met by private charity or the kindness of individual physicians."
"Each of us knows doctors who work through endless days and nights, never expecting to be paid for their services because many of their patients are unable to pay. Often the physician spends not only his time and effort, but even part of the fees he has collected from patients able to pay, in order to buy medical supplies for those who cannot afford them. I am sure that there are thousands of such physicians throughout our country. They cannot, and should not, be expected to carry so heavy a load."
"(Another) problem has to do with loss of earnings when sickness strikes. Sickness not only brings doctor bills; it also cuts off income."
"These then are . . . problems which must be solved, if we hope to attain our objective of adequate medical care, good health, and protection from the economic fears of sickness and disability."
"To meet these problems, I recommend that the Congress adopt a comprehensive and modern health program for the Nation. . . "
Harry Truman addressed the problem in 1945. People born in 1945 are eligible for Social Security and we have still failed to answer that challenge.
It remains unfinished business. And it won't be solved by tax breaks.
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| Thursday 9th October 2008 | |
Unfinished Business -- Economic Bill of Rights
It would be the height of naivete to expect the election process to change overnight and become a contest about goals, dreams and plans instead of compromise and halftruth in search of votes.
We really don’t expect to hear much about those hopes in the closing days of the race so we offer instead a series of dreams we think should be part and parcel of any campaign for federal office.
Unfinished Business -- Economic Bill of Rights
Many American were not enjoying the benefits of a sound and growing economy even when it was sound. The working poor are the first to feel the effects of a down turn in the economy such as we have experienced throughout the Bush Administration and are hit ever harder today.
Working people should expect to be able to provide an adequate standard of living for their families.
FDR anticipated it with his "economic bill of rights" In 1944.
Make a copy and read it frequently.
It is where we should be today.
We aren't and there is no excuse -- we have known it for nearly six decades!!
FDR's Economic Bill of Rights:
"We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure."This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty."
"As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness."
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence."'
"Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed."
"Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
"All of these rights spell security. .... we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being."
"America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union
The challenges laid down nearly 60 years ago remain a challenge and for us remain unfinished business.
When you go to the polling place on election day remember it's time we once again set ourselves to that task.
It's time we finished this work.
Contact the writer at PS@postrockcountry.com Please mention the subject of the column.
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| Tuesday 23rd September 2008 | |
WWAMDThis morning we drank our orange juice from a glass that started its existence as a jelly jar. All of Great Aunt Mary’s glasses were of that genre.
We write from Topeka, Kansas. It was here that in 1896 Charles Sheldon wrote a book that may have changed more lives than any other outside of the Bible, “In His Steps.”
Probably more people are familiar with the key expression of Sheldon’s social gospel “What Would Jesus Do?” than the book, but that said, it all started here in Topeka.
The central ethos of the novel was not about personal redemption but about moral choices related to encountering circumstances of poverty and deprivation.
Today we offer a second set of initials to go along with the WWJD bracelets, WWAMD.
What Would Aunt Mary Do?
Aunt Mary was the last surviving member of our family who was counted in the 1880 census. She passed on a few days short of her 102nd birthday.
One might expect that in that many years she accumulated a great many things and left a hefty carbon footprint. She didn’t.
At the age of 24 she moved with her parents from Minnesota to Kansas and following that move, as near as we can determine, never ventured more than perhaps 30 miles from her new home.
Aunt Mary never had much of anything except a perpetual smile, gratitude for any kindness and thankfulness for what she had.
She and uncle John shared 70 years of married life, the lion’s share of it in a house that had three rooms, all of them small.
The house remained unpainted for many years past the time the last bit of paint had disappeared.
Perennial wildflowers grew around the house and the grassin the yard, such as it was, was trimmed with a weed whip.
We still have her kitchen stove. A three burner gas stove with an oven barely large enough to bake one loaf of bread, it provides a stand for our fancy coffee brewing station. There isn’t a lot of room left over.
Sometime in the 1950's or perhaps early 1960's aunt Mary and uncle John switched from an ice box to a refrigerator. We had the refrigerator hauled away last week, a 1949 model that has run almost continuously since then.
The small house that Mary and John occupied had three lights, one in each room, single light bulbs at the end of a braided cord.. The only electrical appliance they had, aside from a radio, was an electric toaster. It was a relatively simple thing, doors opened on either side of the device and a the bread was inserted. The glowing wires toasted one side of the bread, the doors were opened and the bread turned over to toast the second side.
Her dishes for the most part were the variety that come from premiums, the kind that once came in soap and even with oatmeal.
They were content, they were happy. They left a carbon footprint that was barely visible, and a lesson for us all.
Instead of having to make the choice between paper or plastic, how hard would it be to have a cloth shopping bag?
Instead of insisting on picture perfect water loving lawns, would it be all that bad to have native grasses that don’t require extra water?
Do we really need to have every corner of the house illuminated all the time?
How much energy do we really need to use?
Do we really need to wash down the driveway?
How many trips do we really need to make across town to shop?
What Would Aunt Mary Do?
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| Monday 22nd September 2008 | |
Where Do We Go Now?There are times when wisdom dictates that one move ahead with caution. There are other times when the same advises to turn around and run like hell. The Bush Banker Bailout is the latter.
The proposal as put forward by the administration is so simple and straightforward that it would not appear to require a significant amount of thought to see through the holes.
The draft legislation would:
Increase the national debt to allow for another 700 billion of debt. (That is more than we have spent outright on the war in Iraq to date) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion [Sec. 10]
Give that money to the Secretary of the Treasury to spend on mortgages gone bad at his sole discretion. The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled "assets") [Sec. 6]
Not only provide no oversight, but prevent any oversight either by the Congress or the courts. "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency" [Sec. 8].
The administration that has done more than any other to bankrupt the American People continues down that path of increasing the wealth at the top of the heap and in underwriting bad judgement and greed reduce the amount of responsibility for those to whom the wealth accrues.
As Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders points out: “Since President Bush has been in office, nearly 6 million Americans have slipped into poverty, median family income for working Americans has declined by more than $2,000, more than 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, over 4 million have lost their pensions, foreclosures are at an all time high, total consumer debt has more than doubled, and we have a national debt of over $9.7 trillion dollars.”
“While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president. In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.”
How did we get there?
Those on the right, the trickle down folks, argue that the meltdown in the financial sector was the result of government interference in the marketplace. They blame bad loans on the Community Reinvestment Act and claim that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, as quasi-governmental firms, were at the root of the crisis.
Keep in mind my friends that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were not government agencies. Not until the bailout. They were private enterprise with stockholders.
John McCain talks about the large salaries that the CEO’s of those organizations received and they were nothing short of obscene, but they were at the time those salaries were paid, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were private enterprises. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.
There was no public money to retrieve before the bailout. Those fellows weren’t paid those huge salaries with your money.
The failure of the federal government in this is a matter of too little regulation, not government interference.
The right is wrong on this. The reality is simple and plain.
Those same folks who brought you high unemployment, inflation for the low and middle income and massive tax breaks for the wealthy caused the current financial crisis.
The cause was not "the market."
It was not miscalculation.
It was not even entirely greed.
Financial corporations are failing because conservatives created the unregulated conditions for greed to inevitably lead to economic chaos.
Those on the right hand side of the aisle are blaming the Democrat party. They never seem to understand it is Democratic Party and they seem to have a hard time remembering that for the majority of the last 8 years they have been in power in both the Congress and the White House.
These "free market" fundamentalists dismantled New Deal protections.
It took a while but Phil Gramm and company managed to get it done.
The Great Depression taught us that irresponsible speculation is not sound economics, a lesson that has been forgotten of late. FDR and the Congress back then reformed the financial industry with tighter controls on banks, mortgage lenders and other creditors, and stock exchanges.
Those basic reforms worked for half a century until we stumbled onto and into the “Reagan revolution”.
Smaller government, fewer regulations and the idea that a major deficit didn’t matter was the beginning and the result was a shrinking role of the federal government in regulating the elements of the economy.
The economic safeguards were systematically dismantled.
Conservatives weakened and eventually repealed of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
Glass-Steagall separated investment banks and commercial banks to prevent a single institution from making risky loans, repackaging them as securities, and selling them to investors--a major part of the current crisis. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, eliminated the Glass-Steagall limits.
It’s author, good old then Senator Phil Gramm, the fellow who called Americans concerned about the economy a bunch of “whiners”. He was then and most likely still is John McCain's chief financial advisor.
The Federal Reserve, led by conservative Alan Greenspan, had the power and responsibility to police the mortgage market. A Democratic Congress gave him that job as part of the Homeownership Opportunity and Equity Protection Act of 1994. But acting on conservative anti-regulation philosophy, he never implemented the law.
The current Administration subsequently encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase sub-prime lending.
With this largely unregulated banking system hedge funds and private-equity firms have been allowed to operate without limits. The practice created among other things extremely risky securities. The banking industry (not your local home town banks, but the large investment banks) made millions by taking on ever-more exotic risks.
They turned home mortgages into speculative packages, then pushed hard to lower standards of lending. And for the most part they got them.
And now we have the bailouts.
What do we need to do next?
Trust us on this one, it is not a $700,000,000,000.00 no strings bailout.
First off we need to impose new regulations on all parts of the financial system--limits on capital, leverage, exotic instruments, and compensation.
The bailout, and we are confident that the Congress will have the intestinal fortitude to do it, must include as part of the price of rescuing the financial system getting it back under control.
Even new regulations won’t help if we continue with those in power who are unwilling philosophically to enforce regulation.
If we give new tools to the watchdogs we must have watchdogs who will enforce the laws not look for ways to skirt them.
Bailing out big money isn’t going to cut it. That wheel was squeaking pretty loud last week and about to fall off, but just covering the investment losses isn’t enough.
For some reason billions for bailout is something easy for the administration to demand and for Congress to rubberstamp but is isn’t going to do all that much for the economy in general.
You can expect resistance from the same folks who are demanding a bailout when it comes to reaching down to the economic problems of the average citizen.
Feel free to use “Billion For Bailout, Not One Cent For Citizens” for a T shirt.
However, if we are going to rebuild the economy, it is time that we start at the bottom.
For starters, we need public investment in renewable energy and green building, extending unemployment insurance, helping cities and states avoid deep cuts in health care, improving police and fire services, and improving the infrastructure.
Bailouts have happened and will continue to happen.
However we remain with that basic problem of wealth. Wealth is the result of either resources taken from the earth in mining (in a broad sense) and agriculture or by labor. For too long we have expected it to be a self generating commodity.
The most shocking thing about the bailouts is there is no apparent plan to pay for those huge expenditures. We need one and it should not depend on the middle class to payoff banking industry financial missteps.
We need in this same legislation provisions that ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so that we do not reward risky behavior and that there is a realistic hope that the taxpayers will recover at least what we initially pay for the bailout. If we believe in any kind of fairness, the taxpayers should have provision to recover part of the costs if the stock in those companies rescued increases.
We know our friends on the right believe that government is there to bailout companies when they fail and pass the success on to the shareholders, but we don’t subscribe to that kind of thinking.
Finally, we must have a economic recovery package which rebuilds the economy. We need action that will create jobs for Americans at decent wages.
We need economic activity that rebuilds our badly in need of repair infrastructure.
It is time for meaningful government action to help move us from fossil fuel dependency to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
We need to recognize that protection of working families is equally important with bailing out the banking industry.
We need to ensure that health insurance is available for every American, that we have access to adequate and that means college education in most cases, for every student who seeks it.
And we need to address the problems of hunger, yes hunger in this country.
We have to clean up the financial industry and that probably means not only restoring and enforcing the regulations that were cast aside over the past ten years but regulation of energy markets. Speculation in energy has not been without fault in the crash of the economy.
Finally, we need to address the continuing enlargement of our financial industries. We cannot afford and should not allow, as AIG has shown, our institutions to grow so large that the breakdown of one can create havoc on the economy.
That is just a starter from where this writer sits. Congress and the Administration face a major problem and the administration’s bailout plan is not the answer.
Contact the writer at PS@postrockcountry.com Please mention the subject of the column.
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| Saturday 20th September 2008 | |
Dollars and SenseMore years ago than we care to remember, we worked for an elected board of directors made up of ordinary people, farmers, businessmen and people who were interested in conservation.
It was a standard joke among the staff that the directors would approve a quarter of a million dollar project with no discussion but would spend hours discussing the best place to buy $5 worth of pencils.
It was true and there was a perfectly good reason for the action.
They could relate to the $5 package of pencils, but the $250,000 was beyond their normal experience.
This week (in case you haven’t noticed) we had a major breakdown of the financial system.
Monday the stock market tanked and after making a minor recovery on Wednesday it took another plunge. At one point Thursday it was 900 points below where it started the week – primarily we are told, the result of failing financial institutions. A series of bailouts and voila, the market finished the week with a small gain for the week.
Today, the Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in bad mortgages in the largest financial bailout since the Great Depression, according to a draft of the plan obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.
That isn’t chicken feed. But the truth of the matter is that $700 billion estimite is about as bogus as the $3 bills we are going to have to print to pay it off.
We went on a spree last week with public money being used to bail out private mistakes that is without precedent.
$29 billion to fund JPMorgan's takeover of Bear Stearns
Up to $200 billion each for nationalization of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Some sources put that number between $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion, and is not unlikely to reach $2.5 trillion. Remember the Savings and Loan bailout that was going to cost $60 billion and settled in at a neat $190 Billion. Also keep in mind this was not a government program gone bad, it was privately held.
Up to $85 billion for AIG
$50 billion to insure money market funds
Approximately $300 billion of Fed liquidity measures last week alone.
Of course we will pay these costs by borrowing more money from the future and the foreign
markets.
The next step after this little add-on to the national debt will start in January.
Having run the national debt out of sight, having created a deficit budget that will be in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars, and having bailed out the financial institutions, we will hear the argument that we cannot afford any entitlement programs or any costs for healthcare, etc. We will probably also hear that the answer to a badly overdrawn federal checkbook is to cut taxes.
We don’t know how it works around your house but at our house when the checkbook is getting empty we don’t solve the problem by giving back part of the paycheck.
Interestingly enough, at the same time that the government was asking for hundreds of billions to bail out bad and greedy decisions on Wall Street, the department of Health and Human Services announced the funding for the Low Income Heating Assistance Program. That is the program that will provide some assistance to the very poorest of our families as they struggle to keep warm this winter. The budget for the program totals $115 million for the entire country.
We suspect that in the days ahead we will hear more arguments about how we cannot afford more investments in alternative energy or to address concerns about climate change. We won’t be able to address the problems of unemployment or health insurance because of the cost.
Unfortunately when it comes to dealing with money we Americans are to often like that board of directors. We are ready to debate the issues that make up the smallest portion of our national budget, but the billions upon billions bailout the costs of which are being sent straight to the national debt; that is different., Because it is a crisis, we just nod our heads and pass the cost on to our children.
A lot of dollars doesn’t always make a lot of sense.
Next: Some thoughts about the way out of this problem.
Contact the writer at PS@postrockcountry.com Please mention the subject of the column.
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| Wednesday 17th September 2008 | |
Governor Sarah Palin
Wins Rubber Dodo Award
Sought to Remove Endangered Species Act Protection for the Polar Bear, Suppressed and Lied About State Global Warming Studies, and Denied That Global Warming Is Caused by Greenhouse Gas Emissions
TUSCON, Ariz - September 17 - The Center for Biological Diversity today awarded Alaska Governor Sarah Palin the 2008 Rubber Dodo Award. Last year's award, which inaugurated the prize, went to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne for setting a new record in refusing to add imperiled plants and animals to the endangered species list. This year's award goes to Governor Palin for fighting Kempthorne's designation of the polar bear as a threatened species.
"Governor Palin has waged a deceptive, dangerous, and costly battle against the polar bear," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Her position on global warming is so extreme, she makes Dick Cheney look like an Al Gore devotee."
Palin has waged a deceptive public relations campaign, asserting that the polar bear is increasing. But many populations (including Alaska's southern Beaufort Sea) are in decline and two-thirds (including all Alaska bears) are projected to disappear by 2050 by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Palin has repeatedly asserted that Alaska Department of Fish and Game scientists found fatal flaws in the sea ice models used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine the polar bear is threatened. When challenged, Palin refused to release the alleged state review. Independent scientists eventually obtained a summary through the federal Freedom of Information Act, revealing that Palin had lied: The state mammalogists concurred with the Fish and Wildlife Service determination that Arctic sea ice is melting at an extraordinary rate and threatens the polar bear with extinction.
"All global warming deniers are eventually forced to suppress scientific studies, and Palin is no different," said Suckling. "To maintain her ludicrous opposition to protecting the polar bear in the face of massive scientific consensus, Palin stepped over the line to lie about and suppress government science."
Palin has since filed a frivolous lawsuit against the Bush administration to have the threatened listing overturned. Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey announced on September 16th that the 2008 summertime Arctic sea-ice melt was the second greatest on record, nearly matching the extraordinary melt of 2007.
"Palin's insistence that Arctic melting is ‘uncertain' is like someone debating the theory of gravity as they plunge off a cliff," said Suckling. "It's hopeless, reckless, and extremely cynical."
Background
In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless, three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary scientists use the less defamatory Raphus cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it's the dodo - the most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits, nuts, and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying them to Mauritius.
Its trusting nature led to its rapid extinction. By 1681, the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and out-competed by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques, and pigs. Humans logged its forest cover and pigs uprooted and ate much of the understory vegetation.
The origin of the name dodo is unclear. It likely came from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning "sluggard," the Portuguese word doudo, meaning "fool" or "crazy," or the Dutch word dodaars meaning "plump-arse" (that nation's name for the little grebe).
The dodo's reputation as a foolish, ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naiveté and the very plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal's reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Based on skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings, scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a nonprofit conservation organization with more than 180,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
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| Wednesday 3rd September 2008 | |
Do you believe?We will not jump into the commentary about the Republican nominees vice president with both feet; but we do have two questions.
Do you believe that if Hillary Clinton were the vice presidential nominee for the Democratic Party and Chelsea Clinton was unmarried and five months pregnant that story would not be thelead item for every talking head on TV for the next several weeks?
Do you believe that were Hillary Clinton the vice presidential nominee and the mother of a four-month old special needs child and a unwed 17 year old who also happens to be pregnant, the talking heads would not be chastising her for putting her blind ambition ahead of her responsibilities as a mother?
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| Monday 1st September 2008 | |
What a difference a year makes – and doesn’t makeOne year ago today, this writer stood on the Capitol grounds before a crowd of workers celebrating Labor day and spoke out for, among other things universal health care.
We spoke of the American Dream of affordable health care, decent wages, environmental stewardship, quality education and an end to hunger. A year later, that dream remains unfulfilled for too many Americans.
To be certain a year ago we were looking for a show of support that would tip the scales in favor of a decision to run for public office.
We said in part “Dare we forget that in this great land, 47 million Americans are still without health insurance and one in four who have it are under insured. I think not.
“Millions of working Americans pay payroll taxes to support medical care for the aged and the indigent but are unable to afford that same coverage for their own families. That must change.”
Today the number is 45 million without health care, in part because of more children being covered by federal programs and some states such as Massachusetts adopting some kind of health care program. We cannot afford 45 million of our citizens without adequate health insurance.
A year ago this writer stood before the crowd the picture of apparent health and called for single payer health insurance.
Today, we are tethered to an oxygen tank, perhaps more cognizant of the costs of health care and hoping to maintain some kind of health without an undue burden on his family. We are not alone.
We recently visited with an individual who was a combat veteran in the Pacific during WWII for 32 months. He was receiving his prescriptions from the VA at the rate of $8 per prescription per month. He had petitioned the VA to review his case because even at eight dollars a prescription when one has ten prescriptions to fill, it turns into a substantial amount of money from a social security check already reduced by medicare payments.
A year ago we spoke out about wages, about the environment, and yes, the American Dream.
“Like that promised land of old the American Dream is our promise, but it is not given to us.
“If we would bring to life that dream then we must make it ours.
“There is no guarantee that we in this generation will be successful.
“The only guarantee we have is failure if we do not try.”
The challenges are great: the opportunities are many; the time is now.
Only 65 days remain until election day.
Contact the writer at PS@postrockcountry.com Please mention the subject of the column.
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| Sunday 24th August 2008 | |
Why we don’t deserve betterWe are fed up with business as usual or what has become usual in the political campaign. We haven’t missed an election since we had our first opportunity when we turned 21 and voted by absentee ballot from Africa. Not too long after that we voted early on our way to Vietnam.
We are growing increasingly tempted to sit this one out.
It is perhaps too much to hope for and more than we Americans deserve, considering the way we respond to this political process; but we wish that we had a few, just a few candidates who chose to campaign on their own values and their own hopes and aspirations for this country.
Alas, We have John McCain and his staff telling us about Obama and Barack Obama and his staff telling us about John McCain.
Speak for yourselves boys.
It would appear that about ninety percent of the political discourse is bad mouthing the opponent. We would like to have some candidates who would stand up and tell us what is right about what they would do, not what is wrong with what the opponent has done or might do.
We are tired of skeletons in the closet stories. Hell, there are fine doctors who have gone all the way through med school who haven’t seen as many skeletons as are dragged out in typical campaigns. I wouldn’t want to vote for someone who didn’t have a few of those problems that most folk wouldn’t want to talk about. What are we electing, senators, congressmen, presidents or saints?
We don’t expect to hear many candidates tell us what they would do instead of trying to convince us of the fallacy of what “my opponent” would do.
Why?
Because we respond to negative advertisement.
According to the New York Times t “Senator Barack Obama has started a sustained and hard-hitting advertising campaign against Senator John McCain in states that will be vital this fall, painting Mr. McCain in a series of commercials as disconnected from the economic struggles of the middle class.”
We are hearing figures like $400,000 spent over one weekend in those kinds of commercials.
Why is he doing that?
Look no further than the poll by Reuters/Zogby. (We aren’t real fond of campaign decisions and direction being determined by polls either)
“In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.”
Negative ads work.
The whole darn process is headed hell bent for election. The election is the single most driving factor and it seems that those on both sides are willing to do anything to win. Anything that is except tell us what they believe is right for our country.
This week is the Democratic Convention in Denver. It should be a time when the Democratic Party members select a nominee, work out a platform and begin their campaign in earnest.
Sunday night news reports tell us of the headquarters the Republican Party is setting up in Denver in an attempt to distract the media and gain some of the limelight, not content to wait a week or so for their own convention. With the announcement of Biden as the Democratic VP nominee, we have a fresh new assault.
We’ve already heard enough about why we shouldn’t vote for the other guy.
Please, a candidate who will give us a GOOD reason to put the mark by his or her name.
This is one voter who is turned off by the conduct of both parties reminiscent of schoolboys scuffling on the school yard vying for attention.
Maybe we don’t deserve better, but it would sure be a refreshing change.
Contact the writer at PS@postrockcountry.com Please mention the subject of the column.
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| Friday 15th August 2008 | |
Money can’t Buy EverythingWe can’t drill our way out of the energy problem, we can’t dig our way out of the energy problem and we can’t buy our way out of greenhouse gases.
We all can laugh at the country boy who uttered the immortal words, “I’d give a hundred dollars to be one o’ those millionaires.”
But, when it comes to our energy problems, we are inclined to act like that country boy.
There is legislation now pending in Congress to levy a carbon tax on among other things power plants that are belching tons and tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are talking about big bucks here folks.
The Texas Public Utility Commission has done some calculations and the results are, to say the least expensive. They knock the sails out of the winds blowing the good ship coal plant and the carbon tax would destroy the only argument coal generated power plants had going for them. The claim that it was “cheap”
On Tuesday, the PUC said that costs associated with national carbon legislation – which would put a price tag on the carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants – could range from as low as $13 a ton to as much as $70 a ton annually, and perhaps go even higher.
They anticipated that the average annual cost would be between $30 to $45 a ton.
The following is a list of recent or proposed coal plants in Texas with the added annual cost of carbon legislation at $35 a ton, based on available information about C02 emissions:
TXU, Oak Grove: $581 mil/year
CPS, Spruce: $259 mil/year
Dynegy, Sandy Creek: $263 mil/year
Formosa & Calhoun Co.: $196 mil/year
TXU, Sandow: $189 mil/year
NRG, Limestone: $259 mil/year
Int. Power, Coleto Creek: $210 mil/year
Las Brisas: $364 mil/year
Tenaska (w/ carbon capture): $26 mil/year
Total - $2.347 billion/year
Additional carbon dioxide emissions from the 19 older plants in Texas would amount to $8 billion at the average carbon tax of $35 a ton every year, Public Citizen estimates. Including the plants listed above, the total annual price tag of Texas coal plants would be more than $10 billion per year.
We know they do things big in Texas, but this is not small change and those costs will ultimately be passed on to the consumer.
But, that is not half the problem. There is something inherently wrong with the thinking that says adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere is alright as long as we spend greenbacks to do it.
That whole kind of thinking has guided our energy policies for years. It is time for a change.
We aren’t going to be able to dig our way out of the energy problem any more than we will be able to drill our way out. To be certain, oil, natural gas and coal are and will remain for some time major players in our energy picture. But, we cannot sit still and look to those sources as the ultimate answers.
They are not the only problems with the energy picture, Nuclear power is another area where we looked to cheap fuel and the consequences be damned. At the moment there are 104 nuclear powered electric plants in the United States. And by the way, we don’t have an answer with what to do with the spent nuclear fuel wich will be radioactive and a potential hazard for not just years, but centuries.
Last time we had an “energy crisis” back in the mid-70's we had a total of 57 nuclear power plants on line, generating nine percent of our electricity, some 172 million kilowatthours (KWH)a year
Today, even though we hear a lot of talk about no new plants being built in the last so many years, we have 104 plants online delivering 19.5 percent of our electricity and generating some 806 million KWH of electricity.
Do a little math here. Those numbers, from the governments nuclear regulatory site appear to indicate that our electrical usage has more than doubled since 1975. Back then is would have been 1,911 KWH and in 2007 the number works out to 4,231 KWH. There should be a clue here folks.
Nuclear energy ,with no way to dispose of the radioactive waste; coal fired plants that produce greenhouse gases that will somehow magically respond to a tax (costs that will ultimately be passed on to the consumer) are two legs of the three legged stool we seem to be content to sit on.
The third leg - Ethanol. As we wrote a year and a half ago, Ethanol is an answer but not a solution. Back then the President called for an increase in the production of renewable and alternative fuels from 7.5 billion gallons today to 35 billion gallons by 2017.
Some studies have indicated that it takes about one and a half times as much energy (production of corn, fertilizer, processing and refining of the alcohol) to produce ethanol as it contains.
Using those kinds of figures, more ethanol production would drive us deeper into the need for oil.
The most favorable figures show a 20 percent increase in fuel. One gallon of petroleum product to produce 1.2 gallons of ethanol. Unfortunately, Ethanol does not produce as much energy per gallon as gasoline. The ratio is about 5.5 to 7.7.
Ethanol does burn cleaner than gasoline in our automobiles. However as a renewable resource produced from corn, it is at best not much of a savings in fuel.
There is the other problem -- space. To produce enough corn for that 35 billion gallons of ethanol would require 129,000 square miles of farmland. That is roughly the equivalent of the land area of Kansas and Iowa combined.
We can sit on that three-legged stool and hope for an answer or we can get up off our backsides and start working to renewable energy sources that don’t carry heavy environmental penalties and we can conserve energy to reduce the demand.
The record profits of big oil, it appears, have not been pushed into research and development, but rather large portions of the profits have been used to buy back stock and solidify the companies.
We will write more later about nuclear energy and the problem with profits in that industry, but suffice it to say, we aren’t building nuclear power plants not because of any greenhouse effect, but a greenback effect.
We are not confident that we, as a people have the intestinal fortitude to conserve.
Last week, in our home state, The Kansas Energy Council gave a preliminary nod "I guess I'm going to vote for this just as a way of advancing the public discussion," said Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson, the council's co-chairman. "Gas has never been $4 a gallon. We're in a different environment."
However, state Sen. Janis Lee, D-Kensington, said the change stood no chance of making it through the Kansas Legislature.to reducing the state's speed limit as a way of encouraging more energy efficient driving and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The decrease, which would require a change in state law, appears to be a long way from becoming reality.
"There's no way, shape or form this is going to pass," said Lee, a member of the panel.
Reducing driving speed from 70 mph to 65 mph is expected to increase fuel economy by 7 percent to 23 percent while also reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other heat-trapping gases, according to the council.
Secretary of Transportation Deb Miller said the average speed on Kansas highways posted with 70 mph limits is 78 mph. The average speed on rural roads posted with 65 mph limits is 75 mph, she said.
Most of the highways that would be affected by the 5 mph change would be Interstate highways and heavily traveled federal or state highways, she said.
According to news reports, Michael J. Volker, an energy economist for Midwest Energy in Hays, said people living in the western part of the state would be disproportionately hurt by a decrease in the speed limit.
He said he'd prefer to see the council push for changes that would result in more fuel-efficient vehicles.
"We'd much rather see us build a better mousetrap rather than lower our standard of living by making us spend more time on the road."
Travel on Kansas roadways dropped by 6.7 percent in June compared to the amount of miles driven in that same month a year ago, the Federal Highway Administration announced Wednesday.
The drop was the seventh-biggest percentage decrease among states behind Idaho (7.7 percent), Maine (7.0 percent), Utah (6.9 percent), Nevada (6.7 percent), Washington (6.8 percent) and Alabama (6.4 percent).
The one comment posted to the news article about the proposed reduction in the speed limit perhaps reflects our national attitude concerning the energy and environmental problems:
“If you are worried about global warming, one way to eliminate a lot of hot air would be to do away with the Kansas Energy Council.”
We don’t see a lot of hope on the horizon until we all start accepting the energy problem and not just for somebody else. It belongs to us all.
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