Straight No Chaser - 12 Days

And if that doesn't put you in the holiday mood - how about trying good old fashioned giving until it hurts.... and I don't mean a fruitcake regifted from your Aunt Hatty. Try pulling out your checkbook and trying one of these:

• International Rescue Committee. More than 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes because of violence, at least 2.2 million within Iraq and 1.8 million to other countries. This venerable NGO assists them in Jordan and southern Iraq, where many are living in desperate conditions, and will soon expand to Syria and northern Iraq. These are people who, thanks to our unprovoked and illegal war, have lost everything. Remember the Pottery Barn rule? We broke it; we have to fix it (write "Iraqi refugee relief" on your check; IRC, Box 98152, Washington, DC 20090-8152; theirc.org).

• Vietnam Vets Against the War. It's a different war, but VVAW is still organizing against it. These hardy campaigners wage protests, support soldiers who resist the war, address classrooms, demystify the false promises of recruiters, help homeless veterans and support Iraq Veterans Against the War. They run on a shoestring, and Howard Zinn says we should send them money--and I always try to do what Howard Zinn says (VVAW National Office, Box 408594, Chicago, IL 60640; vvaw.org).

• Women for Afghan Women. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, where billions of development dollars have been wasted by a large cast of schemers. This group is different. Headed by the indefatigable Fahima Vorgetts, the WAW's Afghan Women's Fund provides material aid, healthcare and literacy classes, vocational training and organizes small businesses and women's co-ops. AWF has built three girls' schools and will be starting construction on a fourth in the spring. For $50 a month, you can support an orphan and give him or her a shot at a future (make checks out to WAW/AWF, 978 Yachtsman Way, Annapolis, MS 21403; womenforafghanwomen.org).

• Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. The war has made life more dangerous for Iraqi women both inside and outside the family. Heroic secular feminist Yanar Mohammed runs the only women's shelters in Iraq, plus an Underground Railroad to help women escape from abuse and threats of "honor killing." You can help Iraqi women start newer, safer lives by writing a check to MADRE, the women's international social justice organization, with OWFI in the memo line; MADRE, 121 West 27th Street #301, New York, NY 10001; www.madre.org.

Many thanks to Katha Pollitt at the Nation for these suggestions. See more here.

Cardiac Arrest

Okay, so I've been having some issues with my blood pressure. Can't imagine why, since I'm so calm, cool, and collected in the face of Armageddon with Mr. Deciderer at the helm. And global warming. And recently relocating my business... while teaching a 12 week class... and mediating recent marital difficulties with Number One son and his lovely bride. Did I mention Christmas is like 2 and a half weeks away? Can't imagine why my BP decided to shoot for the moon, but I suddenly found myself listening to my pounding heart in my ears. Time to head to one of those fine American physicians that I get to choose for myownself.

So I go off to see the PA ($28 copay for the short visit,) who is aghast at the numbers on my very proactive little two week stat sheet and decides that yes, hallelujah, I am hypertensive and need medication. Shit. But wait there's more. She wants to rule out something other than "my magic hypertension gene has suddenly come to life" as a probable cause. So she writes up a referral to my friendly neighborhood vampire for a simple blood test. Cholesterol, fasting blood sugar and thyroid function to be exact.

I'm an obedient sort, so I head to the hospital first thing Monday morning to open a vein. Takes about 3 minutes from start to finish (I mean the one vial of blood thing, not the 45 minutes of check in and registration.) Less than a week later I get a tidy report that I'm perfectly healthy - except for the BP thing, of course. I'm popping my daily pill now and everything is going swimmingly until...

I have a heart attack when I get the f-ing bill.

So how much do you think simple lipids, blood sugar and thyroid tests cost? One vial of blood. Three minutes to stick me, probably another ten to add some chemicals and read the thing. We are not talking NUCLEAR MEDICINE here... we are not talking CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY. We are talking $299. My very expensive, for the self employed, high deductible, catastrophic coverage pays less than half of that. $160 to tell me I'm perfectly fine.

The kicker - and reason that I'm ranting - is this. The very same hospital offers two of those three tests for $50 AND throws in an EKG and calls it a "heart health screening." So when you hear someone ranting about frivolous lawsuits and how trial lawyers are the reason our health insurance rates are so spectacular, consider what those delightful, of our own choosing, health care providers are CHARGING those insurance companies. And be afraid.

Good thing I'm so healthy, since my plan is going up 33% in January.

Just Because I'm Paranoid...

doesn't mean they aren't out to get us. I know I've been a bit of a pansy with regard to our civil rights - you know how I rant about the Patriot Act and re-writing the Constitution and all. This government scares me, and I'm pretty much equally horrified by the fact that it doesn't scare everyone. But brother, if the past couple of weeks hasn't made you nervous, you'd better take your pulse.

Exhibit A - HR 1955 or the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” which flew through our House of non-Representatives by 404-6 and will probably slide right through the Senate with equivalent ease. The bill creates a commission with sweeping investigative power and a mandate to propose laws prohibiting whatever the commission labels “homegrown terrorism,”defined as “planned” or “threatened” use of force to coerce the government or the people in the promotion of “political or social objectives.” No force need actually have occurred as long as the government charges that the individual or group thought about doing it. I'm homegrown terrorist all the way as I'm constantly 'threatening' people with the loss of their humanity if they don't wake up and call for an end to this ridiculous and immoral war, a social objective if I ever heard one. Please write to me in prison. (By the way, good old Dennis Kucinich was one of the six Reps. who voted nay.)

Exhibit B - Look - up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a unmanned aircraft to spy on ordinary American citizens! Yes, in Houston (leave it to Texas!) the regular old police department is acquiring drones to watch your every move. After a super secret test flight was caught on tape by local news investigators (wow, I thought they were extinct!) the executive assistant police chief gave a hasty press conference saying that the drones would be used for "mobility" or traffic issues, evacuations during storms, homeland security, search and rescue, and also "tactical." These adorable mini spyplanes were developed by Insitu, Inc. a Washington state based company. Since we Washingtonians are all over buying local... I'm willing to bet our cops have some serious drone envy. And I'm curling up in a fetal position with my blankie....

Thanksgiving

“Our nation’s greatest strength is the decency and compassion of our people. As we count our many blessings, I encourage all Americans to show their thanks by giving back.” These are the words of our Fearless Leader - remarks made after a photo op at a DC food bank and that most important presidential tradition, the pardoning of the turkeys.

America has never been wealthier. In fact the number of people earning in excess of a million dollars annually has more than doubled in the last decade. And yet this week some 35.5 million Americans lined up at soup kitchens and food stamps offices to feed their families for the Thanksgiving holiday. As we sit down to our turkey dinners with all the trimmings, hundreds of food banks and pantries that put food on the table of the nation’s poor are staggering under the weight of increased need and sharply reduced donations. Part of the reason food banks are running low on supplies is the absence of direct government spending; we just hate spending taxpayers’ money on slackers when it could be better spent, you know, overseas.

Mike Curtain, executive director of DC Central Kitchen which provides hot meals for thousands, had this to say about the need and low donations. “I don’t think as a nation we are who we think we are. When I see the money wasted overseas in Iraq and knowing what it could do here, it makes me sick...People in the world hate us, and rightly so, because of the way we treat our own people,” he says. “Poverty would soon disappear if we invested some of that money on a living wage, healthcare and education. ”

Gee, Mike, that seems so un-American of you.

Thanks to Leonard Doyle of the Independent for this insight... read his whole article here.

I think that I shall never see...

In this era of global warming, rampant consumerism, and deforestation in the name of the god Profit... consider the ramblings of Henry David Thoreau...

Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, - to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, - who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, - who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, - who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.

We learn nothing from those who have gone before us.

This is who I'd vote for

well, if I had the chance and since the man I'd really like to vote for, Dennis Kucinich, has been marginalized because he is short and ethical. In a perfect world we'd have something more like a Kucinich / Anderson ticket and we could all go home happy. Anyway Rocky is my other guy...

Mayor Ross (Rocky) Anderson took Salt Lake City green. Not just green mind you, but Kyoto Protocol green. This guy has cojones. So check out this excerpt from his latest little speech...

"Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our
voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other
members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of
Congress, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation, and to much of
the mainstream media: “You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it
any more.

While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been
pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to
a moral, military, and national security abyss.

You have breached trust with the American people in the most
egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs.
You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most
fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.

You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of
the sort never before countenanced in our nation’s history as a matter of
official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be
killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without
competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental
blunder.

We are here to tell you: We won’t take it any more!"

Gives you shivers, doesn't it? Read the rest.

Orwell in 2007 by Robert Weiner

"In “1984,” the novel that most baby boomers read in high school, George Orwell creates a theoretical modern-day government with absolute power — a state in which government, called the Party, monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law...

In “1984,” the Party barrages citizens with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind. The giant telescreen in every room monitors behavior. People are continuously reminded of government’s surveillance, especially by omnipresent signs reading, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Individuals are encouraged to spy on each other, even children on their parents, and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party — i.e., government.

“1984″ is happening in 2007.

Signs along interstate highways urge citizens, “Report Suspicious Behavior.” Cameras mounted at strategic locations monitor our everyday movement (just as in the novel). Red, orange and yellow are no longer just bright, pretty colors: They now represent levels of national security alerts. Intelligence agencies now define “chatter” as “terrorist speak.”

The Party in “1984″ uses psychological manipulation to make citizens “doublethink” — hold two contradictory ideas contrary to common sense.

Back to 2007: The Patriot Act by its very name defies individuals to disagree with it, for to do so would be “unpatriotic.”

The Patriot Act was passed hastily in October 2001, under a cloak of fear in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some of the fundamental changes to American’s traditional legal rights include:

Establishing a huge surveillance system on millions with no court approval, without probable cause.

Holding citizens indefinitely without access to the courts or counsel.

Monitoring library withdrawals and Internet communications.

Taping attorney-client communications.

Creating a national system for citizens to monitor and report on each other, regardless of reason, including paranoia or ethnic bias.

Developing a massive computer system to monitor every purchase.

Creating a national identification card.

The new federal court rulings are a step forward against threats to our freedom — as were other recent court rulings against the Bush administration’s contention that the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture were “obsolete” and “trite” and against our secret holding of prisoners abroad without due process.

9-11 was real, as the recent videos by Osama bin Laden confirm now more than six years after he attacked us. However, that fact does not allow playing on our fears and increasing our paranoia about our personal safety. Sen. Joseph McCarthy tried that with Communism in the 1950s. The administration has tried to condition the American people, just as Pavlov did with his dogs.

Congress is now revisiting the legality of the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance programs, torture of prisoners in secret prisons and barring detainees from counsel and knowing the charges against them. By law, in the next few months, Congress must renew, change or end the Patriot Act and surveillance programs."

Robert Weiner was a Clinton White House public affairs director and spokesman for the U.S. House Government Operations Committee. Read the whole article here.

Watcha think? Will the worst Congress ever repeal the Patriot Act? Or have we kissed our Constitution goodbye already? You know where my money is.

By the way, for a more modern take on the joys of Orwellian government I invite you to enjoy these films - V for Vendetta, based on a comic book or the German film, The Lives of Others.