reading

Published by Barkley Press

ISBN-10: 1-937674-18-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-937674-18-2

Cover design and typesetting: Michaela Freeman

Photography credits:

Front cover Moon: © Snizhanna

Front cover Bull in NY Wall Street : © Konstantin32

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author (contact at www.jim-freeman.com), except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in the United States of America

DEDICATION

In 1999 I took the Czech girlfriend who was to become my wife on a three month, 31 state, 27,000 mile driving trip around America. We met the citizenry that has always kept the country on track; the mechanic in Key West who was sweating out a truck repair over Memorial Day weekend, yet took the time to help absolute strangers fix their air conditioning on a hundred-degree day. He works with troubled teen boys in his spare time and told us the story at no extra charge, then waved us on our way.

We met people like him in campgrounds, restaurants and businesses from Maine to Florida, Texas to California, across the mountain states and back to New York. There, a black used car dealer gave us a fair price for our car, peeling off the cash, no matter that our radiator had just blown at the curb in front of his lot. He listened to our story, then gave us a ride to the train into New York City and threw in a baseball cap with a grin and good-luck handshake.

We visited 17 National Parks, walked through Jefferson’s Monticello and admired his beloved University of Virginia, walked the streets of Charleston, San Francisco and Bozeman, Montana, cared-for and cared-about every step of the way. We stayed with friends and got a chance to see their lives close up, appreciating the time they made for us even while holding two jobs.

This is the America that doesn’t make the news, isn’t part of the Daily Show, working for wages and giving America buoyancy to keep this unique country from sinking.

I dedicate this series of books to these millions of Americans.

BOOKS BY JIM FREEMAN

Novels

EVOKE

Letters from Ceilia

The Island

Non-Fiction

Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints

The Dark Side of the Moon

(a five-book series)

Poetry

The Smell of Tweed and Tobacco

Corner of My Mind

Broken Pieces

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

About the Series

The Dark Side of the Moon series is a chronological collection of observations on social, political and occasionally even personal subjects.

Jim Freeman’s views of the American scene are salted with irony and lightly peppered by humor, a relief from the unending rants of the far left or far right and reasonably balanced by common sense. They’re here as Freeman wrote and published them at the time, unedited and without the benefit of hindsight.

These books are food for thought and Freeman encourages readers to cut into them - use and abuse these books, dog-ear the pages, mark up with highlighter and write in the margins. Make them relevant, make them yours to refer to content that particularly pleased or infuriated you.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a time-machine that brings the blur of events into focus and context. Mark Twain said “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” Jim Freeman uncovers that dark side and strives to shine light on it.

About the 2007 Book

(Volume 4 of the 5 Volume Series)

2007 was a year when we came to realize 2006 wasn’t merely a blip on the screen and that Wall Street had us in deep trouble. This fourth segment of The Dark Side of the Moon series begins with Enough Naming Everything as War and winds up nearly 500 pages later with Making Second-Class Citizens of Non-Christians.

What else was going on while America edged closer to the crumbling cliff of financial disaster? Presidential candidates positioned (then repositioned) themselves, scandals seemed to come and go with equal regularity and The Dark Side of the Moon brings focus to the sequence. That’s its purpose as a remembrance of the times that so quickly become a blur and we find ourselves wondering how it all happened. If there’s a sense of humor and a bit of irony tucked in along the way, so much the better.

Enough Naming Everything as War

January 1, 2007

I elect to open the year writing about my dismay over our national addiction to calling nearly everything a ‘war’ on this or that. Depressingly, over the past decades we have had wars on

Drugs

Poverty

Terrorism

Want (international)

Journalism

Spam

And even a War on Christmas, courtesy of conservative pundit Bill O’reilly. Numberless wars, not a single victory. It would do us some good to be done with hyperbole, without, breathlessly, having to declare a war on it.

War is (or at least used to be) serious business and serious business is seldom helped by being made light of. Declaring what is as improbable to declare as a war on drugs and even less probable to win, makes drug intervention frivolous. A yellow-brick road that leads not to victory, but OZ. Winning a war against drugs, in the normal sense of the word, is not even definable.

War is a contest of arms against a declared enemy; hence the term declaration of war or a state of war. Another definition is ‘an active struggle between competing entities,’ such as a ‘price war.’ Yet a fourth definition includes ‘a concerted campaign to end something that is injurious’ and the stated examples are much the same as my bulleted entries. I suggest to you that the lesser entries are all late-comers and that war, since the dawn of language, has meant killing people rather than increasing market-share.

Confusing in the common lexicon two such widely disparate definitions of a single word (as loaded as ‘war’), is to denigrate the wasting of young men’s and women’s lives by comparison to a sales contest between Target and Wal-Mart. That’s why words matter and why the sloppy political use of words makes us careless. We care less about Iraq because it is an unclearly defined war. It somehow got all mixed up with terrorism, which cannot be entirely defeated and is, therefore, never won.

We have come to care. As the three thousandth soldier comes home in a flag-draped casket, we have come to care very much. Enough to reverse the popularity of a once popular president, to change the political makeup of Congress and probably enough to historically relegate this presidency to the bottom rung of its peers. Enough, certainly, to alienate most of America’s natural allegiances throughout the world. Enough, certainly, to upset a very large international apple cart, the contents of which will be rolling around underfoot for decades to come.

It’s perhaps an outsized complaint to blame all of this on semantic inaccuracies and yet, our definition of the world and our place in it is constantly a matter of degree, a consequence of image as well as words. The informality of jeans, as well as the hurling of epithet that may be appropriate to a ball-park, leaks into the office and the home and the political arena. This un-patched roof of our civility toward one another polarizes the nation, turns us unwillingly red and unnaturally blue.

So I would hope, on this first day of what surely will be a problematic year, to call for accuracy in what we think and how we speak, as well as the civility to listen to another point of view with patience. Maybe even a small willingness to hear the areas in which we concur instead of wedging ever wider the disagreements.

Enough of wars that are not wars. Tune down (if not turn off) talk radio. Agree among ourselves not to denigrate Hillary or Barack, John or Rudy and listen instead to what they say, in place of what is said about them. Patch the roof of our civil regard for each other and replicate rather than ruminate over the days when America was a simpler, more honest nation.

We are simple still and the simplicity of what binds us will stand. We are honest, more than we allow ourselves to admit and must require honesty in those who represent us. We are civil with our friends and have only to remember how to be civil with those who are not yet our friends.

It is possible. It is not the end of the American era. Not even the beginning of the end, as some would have us believe. But with just minor adjustments back in the direction of civility and purpose, it may well be a restatement of the greatness that the world hopes from us.

Lookin’ for Loopholes

January, 4, 2007

There’s a story about W.C.Fields, at the end of his life, when a friend visited him in the hospital. Fields was deep in study of the Bible.

“Bill, what are you doing? You’re an atheist.” Fields looked up, eyes moist.

“Lookin’ for loopholes.”

The newly sworn Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is off to a terrible start and the start hasn’t even started. She has shown herself to be petty, unforgiving, closed to the give and take of governance and a Class B conniver, all before sitting down in the chair. The absurd move toward achieving mostly Democratic goals in the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress, proves how little she understands the message of the mid-term elections. Now she has relegated herself, along with Fields, to looking for loopholes in her pre-election assurances.

Error number one was the well documented and much written about failure to seat Jane Harmon as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Harmon, a fellow Democrat and fellow Californian rated the Chair by the oldest and most honored standard in politics, seniority. Because Harmon was Harvard law-degreed, pretty, articulate and excellently credentialed for the job, Pelosi made the self-conscious error of preventing another California star from shining as brightly as herself.

They say the two were once friends. Hey, what are friends for?

Nancy Pelosi suffers from low self-esteem, there’s no other explanation. It’s the only diagnosis consistent with her absolute need for control and acquiescence over all matters of party. Without listing her additional stumbles, Pelosi’s machinations all point to a leader who is unsure and needy.

That’s not what she promised before November 7th and is exactly the opposite of electoral expectations. Don’t be surprised if the public shows little patience with business as usual and merely different pigs at the trough.

We have had enough of partisanship. We’re looking for effective governance and that’s no more likely from Democrats than Republicans, if they’re equally subjugated to the iron fist of dictatorial leaders. The nation has had its fill of representation by payoff. We’re sick to death of finger-pointing, tired of deficits, weary of war.

Pelosi plans to substitute glitz for substance, promising the first 100 hours of the incoming legislative session to disconnect lobbyist and lawmaker, increase (from what unknowable standard, she does not say) homeland security, raise the minimum wage, fund stem cell research, gut prescription drug prices, cut student loan interest rates and free the country from its dependence on international oil.

Thus, in one overwhelming campaign, the arrogant and impatient Speaker of the House threatens to knock the hopes of a disenchanted electorate into the ash heap of failed promises and savage partisanship. While her freshman representatives are still trying to find their way to the washroom and figure out the buttons on their phones, she may find

Breaking the back of K-Street lobbyists will take enormous bi-partisan cooperation

Homeland security (as in Department of) is a black-hole of incompetence, stupidity, graft, understaffing, political appointment and mindlessness.

The minimum wage can probably be raised, a meaningless sop to decades of Democratic doctrine.

Funding stem cell research is probably also doable and long past due.

Doing anything useful about prescription drug prices depends almost entirely upon the K-Street break, which is not all that likely in the short-term.

Cutting student loan interest rates is merely a transfer of tax dollars, not always to the needy.

Even the laughable suggestion of ‘freeing’ our dependence on international oil is not only disingenuous, but absurd within the time-frame.

And so, it seems as if a mere three of seven goals are even slightly achievable. The cost of a hundred-hour crunch, in terms of bi-partisan legislation, is unacceptable. Democrats promised better government. Rather than miracles, they promised a turning-away from partisanship toward governance.

The time is ripe. The possibility exists. The leadership is exactly wrong in the self- aggrandizing beginnings of Nancy Pelosi’s term as Speaker.

Dennis Hastert, we hardly knew ye.

The Legacy of Not Having Impeached Richard Nixon

January 8, 2007

There is a rather broad coalition of the angry across the nation, fairly salivating over the possibility of impeaching George Walker Bush. I am not among them. The assassination or impeachment of presidents is outrageous to the minds of Americans who cherish our willingness to accept differences, to mediate between disparate opinions and to slog on through the difficulties of governance.

Having said that, there are limits.

Slogging through doesn’t admit a temperament of indefinitely sitting on our hands while the national body politic is ravaged. The time has come to bring the principal executives of the nation before the law; certainly George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld; probably David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as well.

A scant 40% of Americans survive who remember the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Nixon resigned rather than stand before that humiliation and we, along with then president Gerald Ford, made the mistake of letting him off the hook. It was perhaps understandable. Up to that time we hadn’t much experience with seriously devious, paranoid and crooked presidents. Then, much like now, the nation was raging over an endless and unwinnable war.

The mistake was not warning future presidents, by our actions, that the American Constitution was not only a document they swore to uphold, but one to be feared as well. We are, because of that document, a nation of law. Letting slip the nation’s most visible defender of that law, the president, is to denigrate and trample the principal of our equality under law. If we are not equal, we are nothing. If we allow ourselves inequality, then the whole precept of our nation under law comes tumbling down.

It is alarmingly coincident to the Nixon avoidance of prosecution that it spawned two lawless mentalities, each of whom worked in that failed administration--Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. They are the long expected “what goes ‘round comes ‘round” of the Nixon legacy. Urging-on a weak and desperately unconfident President Bush, they bring us to another national moment that tests who we are as a nation. That moment tests who we will be to future generations of Americans as well.

Our international reputation is also being measured, but I set that aside as an (almost) irrelevant argument, because this is an American moment.

Elizabeth Holtzman, former congresswoman, Harvard Law School graduate and member of the House Judiciary Committee that brought about Articles of Impeachment against former President Richard Nixon, recently put the Bush situation in remarkable perspective;

“The constitution doesn’t require the minimum. It requires the maximum. We can’t have a president of the United States who puts himself above the rule of law if we want to continue with this democracy. That’s it. No ifs ands or buts. The fact that we have checks and balances does not mean that we are not obliged to remove the person who threatens our democracy from the presidency.”

Maryann Mann writes in OpEd News.com;

Yet, on November 15th – eight days following the Democratic victory – John Conyers sent an email to supporters telling them that proceedings of impeachment are now “off the table.” Newly appointed Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, D-Ca., is in public agreement with Conyers, declaring the potential proceedings “a waste of time.”

But where is the opposition? The force of electoral frustration which surged Democrats into power November 7th seems filled with the very opposition the Democratic Party itself lacks. Indeed, come January, if Conyers and Pelosi hold fast, the 110th Congress will allow the criminal precedents of Bush/Cheney to escape reproach without ever being held to account.

By whose definition does Nancy Pelosi determine a Bush impeachment to be a ‘waste of time?’ How dare she determine that an administration that has ransacked the laws of the nation, whose leader continues to wreak havoc as a majority of one, is beyond the boundaries of law?

This administration (knowingly and deviously)

lied us into a war that has multiplied our exposure to terrorism by a factor of ten;

aided and abetted a wholesale waste and fraud among war zone contractors;

made a revolving door at the Pentagon and in the field, among generals who disagreed with their war strategy;

closed off the avenues of ‘advice and consent’ that constitutionally belong to the Congress

and (by signing statements) rewrote congressional laws to suit themselves and their purposes.

This president, in the face of united and complete disagreement with his policies, in an atmosphere where he enjoys absolutely no support either nationally of internationally, refuses to change any aspect of his failed policy. What the hell can be done with a man like that? The nation, his generals, his own party as well as the opposition keep telling him they don’t want what he (and he alone) insists upon and, like a recalcitrant child, he doesn’t get it.

Reluctantly, but insistently, we must hold his feet to the fire.

It Doesn’t Matter What Maliki Says

January 9, 2007

President Bush is all charged up because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has had a ‘sea-change,’ in the president’s words, on his determination to fight insurgents. If it has indeed been a sea change, the foot-dragging Iraqi minister must have been off on a Caribbean vacation when no one was looking. His countenance these days is far more sea-sick, the pallor of a man desperate to step off the plunging decks of Iraqi politics.

If we are sufficiently and accurately leaked and primed and forewarned about tomorrow’s speech before the nation, it’s going to be different this time. We learned from our mistakes and the Iraqi government has a new backbone, with which it is presumably shrugging-off centuries-old traditions of back-stabbing and intrigue.

Not plausible, George. Not even remotely believable. Somehow the president has contrived to lump the 70% who don’t think he knows what he is doing into the collective ‘we’ who have learned. Personally, it seems, he has learned nothing. Personally, his record is stuck in the same groove and, in the place of the desperate search for solutions we thought he was busy with down at the ranch, he is presenting his desperate new face on the same old same-old.

Maliki will thrash the warlords with his indomitable army, even though the main warlord in question is cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. They are the largest, the best funded and best equipped of the various armed factions. They have twice fought U.S. Marines to a sulky standstill. Maliki will overcome the fact that 2 million of Baghdad’s 6.5 million inhabitants are such rabid supporters of Sadr that their slum ghetto is named Sadr City. He will clobber these insurgent scum, even though he dares not leave the American held Green Zone to speak with, mingle among or even associate with his fellow Iraqis.

All that thrashing, overcoming and clobbering has been promised to George by secure telephone--the only thing left in Iraq that is secure.

Maliki will deal unmercifully with Sadr, even though the cleric outright controls 32 democratically elected seats in parliament and a third of the Baghdad population. The only reason Maliki is still standing as Prime Minister (although that may be short-lived) is because he has systematically avoided any confrontation with al-Sadr. Mr. Maliki will sweep to victory where no man and no army has before, on the wings of a military made up of every-man-for-himself, confused by cross-allegiances and complicated with tribal obligation. This is the pillar upon which rests the argument for a ‘surge’ in U.S. forces. Hell of a plan, George.

Phase two (after the miracle of phase one has been achieved) involves bribing Iraqis not to kill each other with the promise of jobs. They will be busily reconstructing what the world’s greatest military power was unable to reconstruct, due to unexpected and embarrassing contingencies such as being shot, hanged in effigy and dragged through the streets. Phase two will prevail, we are asked to believe, because certainly Iraqis will not murder, kidnap or otherwise terrorize other Iraqis, busily climbing telephone poles, patching electric substations or repairing water pipes.

Earth, calling George Bush: there are factors out there and these factors do not share your eloquent (or Maliki’s forced) vision of a democratic beacon, shining through the muck and turmoil of the Arabian Middle East. Those factors want the booty for themselves. The Shiite majority in Iraq has waited three times as long as the Democrats in Congress, to take back power. And, like those American Democrats, the Shiites are damned well going to get theirs now, while the getting is good. What is there about that political equation that you don’t understand? Maybe Karl Rove can explain it to you before more American troops and Iraqi civilians die for your misunderstanding.

You’re the world’s most prominent and powerful politician, George. The sad fact is you don’t understand politics and misread your base (however the hell you and Karl define it). You given (as you have been given everything in your life) an apex of popularity that included a world-wide willingness (even in the Islamic world) to cooperate after 9-11. You just plain pissed it away in 74 months. There’s no other word for it.

You are the first president to dip his toe into pre-emptive war. Having set that dangerous principle, you’ve taken the world’s most powerful nation and subjected it to ridicule, military impotence and the most wild-eyed conspiracy theories since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Learning absolutely nothing from that, you’ve lost control of your party, set back ‘conservatism’ for the foreseeable future, bankrupted the nation monetarily and philosophically, nearly destroyed the military and become a pariah to 7 out of 10 of your fellow citizens. Who knows what may be added to that sad list in the remaining 24 months of your term?

Like a man gambling someone else’s money, you insist on doubling-down a losing hand. Tomorrow evening you will try to explain that system with which you hope to beat the house. The media will stroke their chins, because the media no longer has the staff-time, money, interest or even minimal sense of responsibility to challenge you. That hope expired in the flash of light that was the Nixon reportage and has not been seen these intervening thirty years.

One can only hope this newly elected, self-interested and shaky Democratic congress will have sufficient courage and sense of history to stop you.

Failure Is Not an Option

January 12, 2007

Robert Gates said, “failure in Iraq is not an option.” The president told Americans on Wednesday that failure in Iraq would be a disaster and Condi Rice repeated the mantra in front of a Senate committee with its hair on fire.

So, I guess the natural question to ask (that no one seems to be asking) is, if we find ourselves in a disaster where failure is not an option, who got us there? Just as the first requirement of an architect is to keep the rain out of a building, the first requirement of a president is to keep the country out of failures without options.

George Bush didn’t do that. Now that he feels there is no option but continuing, he has lied (again) about the reasons to continue. From Fort Benning, Georgia the president claimed

“The [Iraqi] Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we’ve got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work….

“The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to -- by the way, that’s what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don’t want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won’t work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence….

“And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr. President, it’s not going to work until -- unless we support -- provide more troops. And so last night I told the country that I’ve committed an additional -- a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad.”

That’s a total and unforgivable lie. A lie that hands off Bush’s personal responsibility for failed strategy to the Prime Minister of Iraq and whoever the latest of Bush’s remaining generals ‘commanding’ in Iraq might be. It’s a cowardly passing of blame by a cowardly, bull-headed and ignorant commander in chief.

Nouri al-Maliki is just waiting (and hoping) to get American troops the hell out of the way, so his Shiite death-squads, in combination with Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, can clean up what Sunni resistance yet remains. They will turn the country from a perhaps-democracy to a for-sure-theocracy.

Maliki asked Bush to take his troops and go home in September. The president wasn’t having any. That was our one great shining moment to take Maliki at his word and get out, but Bush couldn’t bear to leave the oil, his swagger and the permanent basing behind. This, far more than any false hope of democracy in the Middle East, is why failure is not an option. Where the hell would we base our troops?

Well, he’s correct—failure is not an option. An option is the act of choosing or selecting and the time of choice or selection in Iraq is long gone. The enemy there is

not Shiite, Sunni or Kurd;

not al-Qaeda, Syria or Iran;

not the forces of evil,

the death squads

or even the insurgent roadside bombers

The enemy is everyone. We will not be allowed to rebuild anything. There isn’t a contractor in the world (not even the criminally protected Halliburton) who would be able to successfully undertake a construction project under fire. We will funnel more billions into the coffers of the Halliburtons of our nation, but we will build no schools, transmit no electricity, treat no sewage, repair no pipelines and put no wages into the pockets of Iraqis.

We will not be allowed to keep our two ‘permanent bases,’ constructed under the fraudulent rationale of temporary military support. Meant to base our Middle East contingent of troops for decades to come, these bases were to be the Middle East equivalent of our client-state basing in the Philippines. That particular failure has Saudi Arabia sweating, as well they should. Nor is it welcome news in Israel. Suffice it to say, the Iraqi oil is and will remain beyond our control. Iraq is not currently buffering any American costs with their oil revenues (some 60 million barrels of which conveniently ‘go missing’ each year).

Additionally interesting in that regard, Iran is said to be running dry of oil, the last pump to stop within twenty years. Thus, we may be able to buy Iraqi oil in future, except probably through Iran and most probably for Euros. George Bush, incredibly, has now upset the applecart of world-oil trading in dollars; a former (1970s) bulwark against a steadily weakening dollar.

This will be his least noticed and least cared about immediate failure in Iraq, but certainly do the most long-term damage to America. Failure in Iraq not being an option takes on an entirely different rationale, when one considers that this former ball-club-owner president has left America precariously obligated to single-source oil availability—Saudi Arabia. Among the oil producing nations of the world (Algeria, Angola, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela) we can perhaps count on Saudi, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. One need only scan the political turmoil within these nations to see how disastrous has been our foreign policy toward major suppliers.

Small wonder the sweating administration is adamant about opening up Alaska and the Gulf to drilling. Small wonder Cheney’s hidden energy policymakers encouraged the ‘regime change’ in Iraq. The game is up, the loss attributed to a president hornswoggled by swagger, greed, avarice and score-settling within a small coterie of his advisors. Desperately unwilling to walk away from a losing hand, they have convinced The Decider to double down on two pairs. That’s a chump-bluff even among the greenest of poker players.

But Bush is an easy guy for Cheney to manage. George’s career was built on swagger in the place of ability and, ultimately, bail-outs to disguise his repeated failures. Now, with failure assured, failure is no longer an option because this man has never stood up to it. Lacking that basic requirement of a well-lived life, Bush has subscribed your and my sons and daughters lives to lay his calamity at the door of the next president. Which will allow, for the rest of a dishonorable life, the 43rd president of the United States to blame anyone but himself for his own lack of integrity, strategic vision and honesty.

The next president of the United States will be blamed by this failed man for not having ‘stayed the course.’

Calling in the Cavalry and Killer Whales

January 15, 2007

There is of course no cavalry anymore. First to go were the horses, following the First World War. Then the boots and spurs finally were put to pasture as well, after WWII. It always amused me to see General George Patton spiffied up in boots and breeches, a tank-commander wearing spurs and riding a motorcycle. Slow to drop the old ways, the modern Pentagon is quick to insert itself into new responsibilities. Perhaps too quick.

Mark Mazzetti, in a New York Times article, talks about the recent attacks against insurgents in Somalia, as they fled Ethiopian troops;

Military officials said the strike by an American gunship on terrorism suspects in southern Somalia on Sunday showed that even with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, Special Operations troops intended to take advantage of the directive given to them by Mr. Rumsfeld in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of Congress on Friday that the strike in Somalia was executed under the Pentagon’s authority to hunt and kill terrorism suspects around the globe, a power the White House gave it shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was this authority that Mr. Rumsfeld used to order commanders to develop plans for using American Special Operations troops for missions within countries that had not been declared war zones.

This military incursion into a country with whom we are not presently at war is pretty chilly stuff. The Somali attack was carried out by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, (an outgrowth of the old Phoenix program from Vietnam). This, on the strength of Rumsfeld’s post 9-11 directive, which was in turn empowered by the White House. And that might be a good thing, to have a quick-strike force ready. But it would make me more comfortable if Congress were involved and Rumsfeld authority from White House authority doesn’t sound like they were—or are.

Somalia. Do we care? Should we? Nah, maybe not. But the principle, so freely made precedent in Somalia, could as easily start a hot war in Iran. Taken to extreme—and this is an administration of extremes—why not U.S. military gunships surrounding and pounding a ‘terrorist’ enclave in France or Britain?

The Somali exercise was claimed to be ‘a blueprint that Pentagon strategists say they hope to use more frequently in counterterrorism missions around the globe.’ That escalation into dream-worlds might seem (and be) outrageously unacceptable, but the quasi-legal justifications fit just as perfectly whether it be Somalia, France or Britain. Certainly not something to get lost in the cracks.

Turning from gunships to the Pentagon’s less lethal, but (again) precedent-setting intimidation of their perceived enemies, this time it’s civilian law firms. On the same news day as the above piece, a loose screw by the name of Cully Stimson, boldly encouraged a boycott of some of the nation’s top law firms. Shoved to the edge of the political ice like a penguin, pushed in to see if there are killer-whales in the water, ol’ Cul told it like he was told to tell it. According to the Associated Press;

Stimson on Thursday told Federal News Radio, a local commercial station that covers the government, that he found it ‘‘shocking’‘ that lawyers at many of the nation’s top law firms represent detainees.

Stimson listed the names of more than a dozen major firms he suggested should be boycotted.

“And I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” Stimson said.

Asked who might be paying the law firms to represent Guantanamo detainees, Stimson hinted at wrongdoing for which some explaining should be done.

“It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart -- that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are,’‘ he said. ‘‘Others are receiving monies from who knows where and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Stimson also described Guantanamo as “certainly, probably the most transparent and open location in the world” because of visits from more than 2,000 journalists since it opened five years ago. However, journalists are not allowed to talk to detainees on those visits, their photos are censored and their access to the base has at times been shut off entirely. He discounted international outrage over the detention center as ‘‘small little protests around the world” that were ‘‘drummed up by Amnesty International” and inflated in importance by liberal news media outlets.

Stimson holds down a deck chair over at the Pentagon as ‘deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs,’ and it’s gotta be a tough job. Detainee affairs haven’t been going all that well, public-relations wise, in recent years. Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.

In a more honest world, Cully might have been gobbled up by a killer-whale. Amazingly, he’s still at his desk, pondering the affairs of detainees.

A Pretty Hollow Complaint, Doctor

January 17, 2007

Ranit Mishori, (himself a family-medicine resident at Georgetown University/ Prov-idence Hospital) writes in the Washington Post about an intriguing, new, and (in the eyes of some physicians) controversial medical treatment philosophy;

Some of the newest players in health care are rubbing doctors the wrong way.

You may know them: those small clinics at your neighborhood Wal-Mart, Target or CVS that promise quick attention for routine visits -- sore throats, minor aches and pains, flu shots -- with no appointments needed. The clinics, which go by such names as MinuteClinic, RediClinic, QuickClinic, Medpoint Express, Curaquick and MediMin, offer convenience and low price -- scarce commodities in today’s medical marketplace. But while consumers are taking to the concept, physician resistance is building.

I’m not an unbiased observer in this controversy, because I have long advocated just such centers, across the nation, operated on the McDonald’s model of low cost and universal sameness. It fascinates me that private capital has wedged itself into a market where public access has increasingly failed.

Emergency rooms have become the source of primary medicine for the poor.

Children, particularly inner-city and poor children, are not sufficiently served by public medicine.

The cost of this ignorance toward the poor and the uninsured is short-term individual health crises that turn into long-term disabilities.

The market speaks for itself—these facilities are a public success. But the familiar whine of the AMA and various doctors can be heard in the background like chainsaws in the north woods. From Mishori’s article;

“The quickest, most convenient medical care is not always the best,” says Caroline Van Vleck, a Washington pediatrician. Particularly, she and a growing chorus of primary care physicians contend, when it comes to children.

Van Vleck is hard to argue against, as far as she goes. Problem is, the best is not even an option to huge portions of the population. Their option is none at all, until the relatively simple case of a sore throat or chronic cough gets to the point where a frantic mom takes her child to an emergency room in the middle of the night. Guess how much chance that poor and uninsured mom has of getting her child admitted. Yeah, that’s right. None.

There is the world as we would have it—the well scrubbed and best-care world of Dr. Van Vleck--and then there is the real world. In that grubby, dangerous, unsanitary real world of the poor and uninsured, MinuteClinic, RediClinic, QuickClinic, Medpoint Express, Curaquick (or any such available option) is a life-saver. These clinics exist because private physicians and public medicine have failed those who need it most.

“Convenience is not enough,” the AMA lamented in a recent editorial. Comparing the mini-clinic phenomenon to kudzu -- the tree-strangling vine rampant in the South -- the AMA complained these new services are spreading too far, too fast. In a policy statement issued this fall, the AAP “opposes retail-based clinics as an appropriate source of medical care for infants, children, and adolescents and strongly discourages their use.”

The AMA and their current president can lament until the cows come home, but they haven’t done a damned thing to provide medical care to the poor before it becomes a matter of emergency rooms. By then, the acute has become chronic. I doubt that anyone even vaguely connected with the self-righteous AMA has ever sat up with a seriously sick child and had no place to go. Kudzu is a plant of opportunity and so is the failure of national health. Each of them thrive where no one cares.

Interestingly, on the AMA web site Advocacy Page, their first three goals are listed in this order:

1. Medical liability reform: To preserve patients’ access to care, the AMA will continue to lead an aggressive, multi-year campaign to reduce medical liability premiums.

2. Medicare physician payment reform and regulatory relief: As the leading force in Washington for Medicare reform, the AMA will be relentless in the battle to replace the flawed Medicare physician payment formula.

3. Expanding coverage for the uninsured and increasing access to care: The AMA is committed to leading a response of America’s physicians to solve the health coverage crisis for all uninsured patients

So, after all those predominantly white and predominantly rich and predominantly insured members of the AMA get their liability eased and their payment schedules improved, then they might get around to expanding coverage for the uninsured. Meanwhile, they’ll continue to oppose and strongly discourage.

The poor and uninsured certainly ought to rally around that flag.

In more blather from the American Academy of Pediatrics, Robert Corwin, who recently served as a director, worries about a child’s receiving medical care at different places by different providers -- most retail clinics are staffed by nurse practitioners and physician assistants, not doctors -- who may not communicate with one another.

Children, he argues, need a “medical home” -- a place offering comprehensive, family-centered, coordinated, continuous care, in which a doctor knows the patient over time.

“Parents may say, ‘It’s just a sore throat,’ “ explains Corwin, a practicing pediatrician in Rochester, N.Y. But those sore throat visits, he says, are a pediatrician’s “vehicle to continue developing the relationship with the family.”

Planet Earth, calling Dr. Bob—these clinics are a life-saver to children who hardly have any home at all, much less a ‘medical home.’ The current vehicle that fails medicine is most often a Mercedes or Jaguar and before developing relationships with poor kids’ families, a whole lot of self-serving and profitable layering of interventions to the practice and delivery of medicine are going to have to be torn apart.

In the meantime, the market will have to serve where doctors fear to go.

Four-Fifths of the World

January 19, 2007

Water covers approximately four-fifths of the earth’s surface and there are strange stories and strange circumstances attached to it. One of the most strange, concerns Jennifer Strange, the California woman who died of the effects of ‘water intoxication.’

The background, for those of you who missed the story, is that a Sacramento radio station organized a contest to hype the station. Nothing new in that. The contest they devised was to see who could drink the most water without going to the toilet and the prize was a PlayStation--a Sony computer-game that’s hot with kids. Ms. Strange has kids, but the game was a bit pricey for her budget and she joined in the fun for her kids benefit.

Who knew that water could be toxic? I never knew that. The radio station disc-jockeys apparently knew about the danger, but joked about it and let the contest go on. Ten employees, responsible for putting on the stunt, were fired and the morning show has been taken off the air.

Hyponatremia, the specific occurrence that took Ms. Strange’s life, occurs when too much water dilutes the sodium in the body. I remember in my laboring days (long past) and also in the Army (longer past), that hot weather water intake was always accompanied by salt pills. Without them, the body’s electrolytes get all out of whack, you soon get light-headed and can suffer possible heatstroke. But in an air-conditioned radio station? Tragically, the answer is yes.

Excess in America is celebrated. During the depression, couples would dance until the last pair standing won a small cash prize. College kids regularly binge drink, swallow goldfish, eat hotdogs, see how many bodies can be stuffed in a phone booth or Volkswagen. Pizza, pancakes, hard-boiled eggs, hot-wings, pies—whatever can be measured and eaten makes a contest. But this particular excess got me thinking about water in the world outside America.

Yes, there actually is such a place.

In ever increasing portions of that world-outside-our-world, you can die over water.

Not having any will do it.

Having it, but having it infected with bacteria or viruses or chemicals will do it.

Owning it, which can mean defending it, can do it.

Remember the opening scene of Lawrence of Arabia? A Beduin drinks from a well in the desert, his companion looking on. A shimmering figure on a camel is seen in the background across his shoulder, growing ever larger, shimmering in the heat and yet still undefined. The figure stops. A shot rings out. The Beduin falls dead. Lawrence rides up and says to the companion, “He should have asked.”

In those ancient days when I was a kid, wasting your money was tantamount to ‘buying water.’ Who on earth would ever pay for something like that? Then, sometime in the sixties, the French sneaked a bit of bottled water into America and it became chic to serve. Chic is a French word for ‘elegant and stylish,’ but those of us who were inelegant slobs just laughed at the dummies blowing their dough and drank tap-water.

In 2004, the world drank over 40 billion gallons of bottled water and laid out in excess of $100 billion to do it, an average of $2.50 per gallon. That includes

Artesian water

Fluoridated water

Ground water

Mineral water

Purified water

Sparkling water

Spring water

Sterile water

Well water

And that market, the product no one would ever possibly pay for, increases by 10 percent every year. To no one’s surprise, the United States (where the need is least) consumes 25% of the world supply. We Americans are twenty-five percenters. We account for twenty-five percent of the world’s pollution, hope, despair, freedom, persecution and now—ta-da!—bottled water consumption.

The world consumes 3 billion barrels of oil per year. That’s 42 gallons of oil for every thirteen gallons of bottled water. At two and a half bucks a gallon for bottled water (average), water is costing half again as much as oil. But get this. If you’re chic and drink that French stuff, it’s outta sight. A gallon is equal to about 11.6 (11 oz) bottles of Perrier. That makes Perrier, at 75 cents a bottle, cost $8.70 a gallon, or an outstanding (and outrageous?) $365 per 42 gallon barrel.

Damn those French. Their sissy water is costing us over five times as much as a barrel of Saudi crude. Who would ever have believed?

Talking About (Blush) Breast Feeding

January 20, 2007

It’s getting easier to talk about what breasts are actually for, but not much. They’re for feeding infants and it’s important to breast-feed newborns all the way through the first year and maybe more, because

(Washington Post) a comprehensive analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of multiple studies on breast-feeding, generally found it was associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.

Whoa. Ear infections are the nemesis of parenthood and intestinal infections are definitely not fun. But diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome are not problems, they’re family disasters that a parent would do almost anything to prevent.

Except perhaps to breast feed.

It’s inconvenient, and made more so by infant-formula companies who incessantly remind us of that inconvenience. Conveniently left out of the argument is whether or not their solution to all the ills (of actually giving an infant a human nipple to suck) could kill your child.

There’s huge profit in anything over-sugared. Huge profits trump health advice on a regular basis, trumpeting from the pages of our favorite magazines.

(Wikipedia) Use of infant formula has been decreasing in industrial countries for over forty years as a result of antenatal education, increased understanding of the risks of infant formula, and social activism. Most major medical and health organizations strongly advocate breastfeeding over the use of infant formula except in unusual circumstances.

So, there’s not much argument. When federal officials commissioned an ad campaign to promote breast feeding, it should have been a slam-dunk (will that phrase ever be the same?). Uncontested support quickly became contested and proved how subservient the higher levels are to the lower levels, the presidentially appointed advisory levels.

(Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee, Washington Post Staff Writers) In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Wow. Now there’s a powerful campaign with a really useful goal. I can’t wait to see the ads. Not everyone was impressed as I and not everyone supported the campaign, excellent as it was.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

Infant-formula industry 1, United States Government 0. End of game and not even close. The United States Department of Health and Human Services was essentially steam-rollered into an alternative advisory position on a major health care matter by political appointees, responding to the offending industry. That ‘political appointees ‘ tag sounds like it might point toward Cristina Beato, who was then an acting assistant secretary at HHS. She was only ‘acting’ because Congress refused to vote on her confirmation. The complaint was that she had padded her official resume (read that lied about her prior experience). So our president made her a recess appointee.