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Warning: Liberal Rant Ahead...

This is a rant, not a well-thought out opinion, but I guess that happen's when you're angry. I managed to watch most of the state of the union address last night. My first comment is a quote from Benjamin Franklin that I would like everyone to ponder:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

I haven't blogged about this, but I am astounded that there hasn't been a bigger outcry regarding the ILLEGAL, Constitution-violating "surveillance" the Bush administration believes it has the right to conduct.

And why was Cindy Sheehan, a mother of a soldier killed who opposes Bush's moves in Iraq, "escorted" out of the chamber and arrested while the mother of a solider killed who supports the policies got to sit RIGHT NEXT to Laura Bush?

And I bet Coretta Scott King is turning in her grave to hear Bush open his speech with praise of her. He wouldn't know civil rights if they bit him in the leg.

My favorite line from Howard Dean's response to the speech: "America can do better than failed policies that have made Iraq a mess and let North Korea and Iran develop nuclear weapons while leaving our own country vulnerable to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina."

I could go on and on. But, go back to the top of this and re-read the Franklin quote. Think about what it meant in the revolutionary period. Think about what it means to us and our children today. What price is Bush asking us to pay for his plans?

Christmas Blessings

Click the link below for a nice slideshow about what to remember during the holiday season. (requires MS PowerPoint)

Download Christmasblessings.pps

You HAVE to see these photos ...

Like many of the links I find, this came from someone else's blog. The link below sends you to a series of photos with captions done by a guy who lived in New Orleans.

He started documenting just before Hurricane Katrina hit the area and continued his photos and journaling for several days. (The photo to the right is Bourbon Street after the levees broke.)

The entire series of photos and captions gives you a sense of the disaster in a way network TV doesn't seem to be able to do. I found it very moving, and although I don't know "Alvaro" I appreciate the work that he did in putting this together.

Visit his story here.

Summing Up Gasoline Prices

I'm ashamed to admit I copied this from someone else's blog, and even more embarrased that I forgot to track whose it was.

BUT, it was too good to pass up ... so here it is.

Maureen Dowd Hits a Grand Slam

I've said it before, Maureen Dowd is my heroine. If I could write like her, I might still be a journalist; I wish I could crystallize the issues as well as she does so I could argue against die-hard conservatives more effectively... hell, I wish I could get my hair red like hers.

Her column today, which you must read for yourself, includes this choice analysis of both the Iraq disaster and the New Orleans disaster in two neat paragraphs (or "graphs" as we journalists like to say):

The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.

But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a disaster that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.

(italics are mine)

Dick Cheney's Back in the Game

Last week, along with wondering why Bush wasn't taking the Katrina disaster seriously, we also wondered where the @#$% is Dick Cheney? If this had been the Clinton administration, you can bet Gore would have been there on the ground in New Orleans helping out (and victims wouldn't have had to do through metal detectors to talk to the president either.) Well, we're glad to report that Cheney is back in Washington and back to looking after himself and his friends.

The New York Daily News had this little item today:

The Navy announced yesterday that Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which has handled much of the repair work as well as support services for the U.S. military in Iraq, was hired to restore power and rebuild three naval facilities in Mississippi that were wrecked by Katrina.

Also last week, Kevin and I wondered why professional sports didn't respond to the disaster as they did after 9-11, when games were cancelled and the public relations power of sports was harnessed ...last week there wasn't even a moment of silence during games. Mike Lupica addressed that issue  in his column today. You should read the whole thing yourself, but here's an excerpt:

Sports can't clear the streets or stop the rising death toll or the violence of New Orleans, or the anger there about the bunglers in Washington. Sports can't go back and make the levees hold any more than any politician could have. Sports can't give a brain to a career hack like Michael Brown, Bush's head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who wants to blame the number of dead in New Orleans, whatever it will eventually be, on people who didn't get out of town fast enough. Forget about the people of New Orleans. Brown is the one in over his head here.

If Brown is in over his head (and he is) what about the guy who hired him????

And of course, there is my heroine, Maureen Dowd, at the New York Times. While no one could consider her impartial, she does make some good points:

... it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

Who are the Democrats who are going to step up into the vacumn after the implosion?

Tale of Two Photos

I've never been a George W. Bush fan. Not even when he rallied after 9-11; I thought he was cheesy and smarmy. His economic policies are horrid; his foreign policy is even worse; his military policy is beyond belief.

But the way he's responded to the Hurricane Katrina disaster has now convinced me that his is: a) evil; b) amazingly selfish and short-sighted ; or c) dumb as dirt. Probably some combination of all three.

In the wake of Katrina, Bush cut his vacation short to focus on the disaster. The administration acted like that was a big deal and a huge sacrifice by the president. However, look how he spent part of Tuesday.

(caption: President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz.)

Meanwhile, back in the disaster zone, while Bush was strumming along, this was going on:

(Caption: Volunteers rescue a family from the roof of their Suburban, which became trapped in floodwaters on US 90 in Bay St. Louis, Miss. (Ben Sklar / AP) August 30, 2005)

The New York Times ran an editorial on Thursday that started with "George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life Wednesday ..."

Our President just doesn't seem to understand what needs to be done.

The Times-Picayune is reporting that 100 of the 1500 people “rescued” from their rooftops in Chalmette (St. Bernard Parish – south of New Orleans) to the Chalmette Slip have died since arriving there. We've all seen the footage from the Superdome and Convention Center.

What is going on? It is unfathomable to me that PEOPLE HAVE DIED post-Hurricane in government-sponsored shelters because of NEGLECT. Get to those people in the Convention center and Superdome and local hospitals and give them some food, water and medicine.

You say you can't get into those areas to help because a couple of wackos are shooting at the helicopters? SO WHAT? Send in the military; they're freakin' soldiers, after all.

The Bush administration seems to have no hesitation about putting U.S. soldiers "in harm's way" to quell civil unrest in other countries (where we have no business meddling, anyway), however, resolving a civil disaster in OUR OWN COUNTRY seems not to be be on this administration's agenda.

Perhaps if George Bush turned the amp down on his own guitar, he might hear the people crying for help.

Conversation with the President

My condolences to everyone in London after yesterday's bombing. London is a wonderful city ... I used to visit regularly when I lived in Europe and we're taking the boys to visit this summer as part of our trip to England and Scotland (no, we're NOT changing our plans.)

All day yesterday, I kept having this imaginary conversation in my head with George W. Bush following his comments about the London bombings. (For example he said: "The contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill, those who've got such evil in their hearts that they will take the lives of innocent folks. [emphasis mine] The war on terror goes on.")

Me: It really is terrible about what's happened in London ...

(interruption) George Bush: We're gonna whip them terrorists.

Me: ... but don't you think the reaction is a little bit excessive? I mean, places like Baghdad and Israel having bombings practically on a daily basis.

(inarticulate sputtering) George Bush: But this was an attack on civilians.

Me (said sarcastically): And it wasn't an attack on civilians when the U.S. was dropping bombs on villages in Iraq?

George Bush: But we were at war in Iraq.

Me: But aren't we "at war" against terrorists? Doesn't that make all the G-8 countries, for example, part of the theatre of war?

Does it mean the U.S. solidiers have "evil in their hearts" if they carry out their missions in Iraq? Do you mean to say that it's OK to bomb in Iraq because it's a war zone?

You have declared a global war on terrorists; that makes London a part of that war zone. Why then, is what happened in London more horrific than what happened say, on last Tuesday in Iraq?

(more sputtering; sounds not recognizable as English)

I don't mean to downplay what happened in London; it was terrible and WRONG and the perpetrators should be punished. But here in the West, there seems to be a sliding scale about death. You get the impression from the government and the media that the death of 50+ Londoners due to the "terrorism war" is much worse than the death of hundreds (thousands ?) of Iraqi civilians in that "war" or thousands of central Africans. It's still a very much "us vs them" reaction.

When I was in graduate school, someone did a somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of news coverages of disasters and war. I wish I still had a copy; I don't remember the specifics, but the gist of it was that a significantly greater number of non-Westerners has to die (significantly greater, on the order of 100s or 1,000s) in order to generate front-page coverage. It seems that we still have that parochial outlook.

I don't want people in London to be murdered by bombs. But neither do I want people in Mosul, or Tel Aviv or Tehran to be murdered by bombs (dropped by soldiers OR strapped to a suicider).

Makes You Wonder about the Government

It seems like a thimerosol controversy is heating up in the media. (Some say that thimerosol, a mercury-derived preservative used in vaccinations, is linked to autism. The preservative allows the vaccination solution to be stored in multi-use vials, instead of the more expensive single-use vials.) I've been following this for a while, out of some concern in the back of my mind 'cause Jack and Owen are in the supposed risk group of kids who got their shots when thimerosol was still being used.

Don Imus has picked up on mercury/autism issue and talks about it on his show all the time now, and just last week, the online magazine Salon -- in conjunction with Rolling Stone magazine -- published an "expose" written by Robert Kennedy Jr. detailing an alleged government cover up by the government of mercury/thimerosol data. You can read the Salon article here (you just have to register to get a "day pass" to read the article.)

As soon as the Salon article was published an explosion of support and rebuttal hit the media, both online and traditional. One of the most reasoned criticisms of the Salon article was in a blog I read, supposedly written by a physician. He summarizes the weak points of the Salon article quite convincingly.

For me, one of the most damning pieces of evidence pointing to some sort of government cover-up is that Bill Frist has introduced legislation to protect vaccine manufacturers from suits stemming from the use of thimerosol. It's also of much concern that thimerosol-preserved vaccines aren't used in the US, but the US still provides vaccines with thimerosol to children in other parts of the worlds, justifying it by saying that those countries can't afford the single-use vials (what? and they CAN afford autism?)

It does seem odd is that autism rates have exploded in the past ten to 15 years or so, much like asthma rates ... but are there really more kids suffering from these diseases now, or are physicians just better and quicker diagnosticians?

I know a NUMBER of kids who supposedly have asthma, Owen among them. I even remember when Jack was nine months old, he had a cold/cough around the date of his check up. The doctor listened to his chest, and said he sounded wheezy (um, yes, he did sound wheezy, he had a cold.) The doctor did a nebulizer treatment in the office and then immediately said that he would have to be followed to see if his asthma developed because the medication cleared up the wheeziness. (HELLO? if you take any person off the street with a chest cold, puff some albuterol down the lungs and then listen, OF COURSE, it will sound less wheezy.) I'm not sure that post-albuterol clarity in the lungs is a key indicator of asthma. But it seems like about 1/3 of the kids in daycare have their own nebulizers and supposedly have asthma. Being an supposed asthmatic myself, I question some of those diagnoses based on both my anecdotal and factual knowledge of asthma.

Does my asthma skepticism relate to autism? Not really, other than it does reinforce my questions about the standards of determination and diagnosis in the autism controversy, the research that is available (and more importantly, that which is held back), and ABOVE ALL:

makes me wonder about how to find a credible source for medical information when you're treating your kids.

Any ideas?

Out of the mouths of babes...

Jack and Owen listen to the radio news when it's on, and always ask a lot of questions. For a while now, they've been focused on the situation in Iraq.  This morning, they heard the report of the mess hall bombing.  The conversation went like this:

Jack: "What did the radio say?"
Mom: "An Iraqi citizen committed a suicide bombing and killed a lot of soldiers."
Jack: "It sounds like they still really don't want us there."
Owen: "Are we winning the war?"
Jack: "O-wen (said with much exasperation) the President already said we won the war."
Owen: "How can we be the winners if they keep killing the soldiers?"
Jack: "The 'Iraqians' (Jack's term for Iraqis) didn't want Saddam (Jack always calls him by his first name) but they don't want us there either."
Owen: "I think the President should just bring all the soldiers home."

Along those lines, I saw a quote today ... can't immediately find the source (help, Ellen???) but it seems to fit in with this morning's conversation:

"They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours?  It was written by a lot of really smart guys and it's worked for over 200 years, and hell, since the Patriot Act, it's not like we're using it anymore."