Thomas Friedman
Saves Me Some Time

I was going to lambaste Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for his obnoxious post-election words (which I've been looking for online but can't find) but Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times has saved me the trouble.

Those words from McConnell, which are NOT cited by Friedman below, were something like:

President Obama, you need to step up to the plate and present legislation that Congress can pass.

No hint of a willingness to compromise, no hint of respect for the President, no hint of anything but the hardline attitude that Friedman DOES cite below.

It is a far more sober, less-idolatrous-of-Obama piece than I posted at twoberry's place yesterday that has been written by Tom Friedman and published by the New York Times.  Read it on line HERE or comment on it yourself right here on this page.  I'm not sure if I'll ever see it in my paper edition of the Times, because Friedman had another op-ed published just yesterday that had to be written before the election was decided.

 

 

Hope and Change:  Part 2
by Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times

In October 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, famously told The National Journal, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." And that’s how he and his party acted.

 

Well, Mitch, how’s that workin’ out for ya?

 

No one can know for sure what complex emotional chemistry tipped this election Obama’s way, but here’s my guess: In the end, it came down to a majority of Americans believing that whatever his faults, Obama was trying his hardest to fix what ails the country and that he had to do it with a Republican Party that, in its gut, did not want to meet him halfway but wanted him to fail — so that it could swoop in and pick up the pieces. To this day, I find McConnell’s declaration appalling. Consider all the problems we have faced in this country over the last four years — from debt to adapting to globalization to unemployment to the challenges of climate change to terrorism — and then roll over that statement: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

 

That, in my view, is what made the difference. The G.O.P. lost an election that, given the state of the economy, it should have won because of an excess of McConnell-like cynicism, a shortage of new ideas and an abundance of really bad ideas — about immigration, about climate, about how jobs are created and about abortion and other social issues.

 

It seems that many Americans went to the polls without much enthusiasm for either candidate, but, nevertheless, with a clear idea of whom they preferred. The majority seemed to be saying to Obama: "You didn’t get it all right the first time, but we’re going to give you a second chance." In a way, they voted for "hope and change" again. I don’t think it was so much a ratification of health care or "Race to the Top" or any other Obama initiative. It was more a vote on his character: "We think you’re trying. Now try even harder. Learn from your mistakes. Reach out to the other side, even if they slap away your hand, and focus like a laser on the economy, so those of us who voted for you today without much enthusiasm can feel good about this vote."

 

And that is why Obama’s victory is so devastating for the G.O.P. A country with nearly 8 percent unemployment preferred to give the president a second chance rather than Mitt Romney a first one. The Republican Party today needs to have a real heart-to-heart with itself.

 

The G.O.P. has lost two presidential elections in a row because it forced its candidate to run so far to the loony right to get through the primaries, dominated by its ultraconservative base, that he could not get close enough back to the center to carry the national election. It is not enough for Republicans to tell their Democratic colleagues in private — as some do — "I wish I could help you, but our base is crazy." They need to have their own reformation. The center-right has got to have it out with the far-right, or it is going to be a minority party for a long time.

 

Many in the next generation of America know climate change is real, and they want to see something done to mitigate it. Many in the next generation of America will be of Hispanic origin and insist on humane immigration reform that gives a practical legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The next generation is going to need immigration of high-I.Q. risk-takers from India, China and Latin America if the U.S. is going to remain at the cutting edge of the Information Technology revolution and be able to afford the government we want. Many in the next generation of America see gays and lesbians in their families, workplaces and Army barracks, and they don’t want to deny them the marriage rights held by others. The G.O.P. today is at war with too many in the next generation of America on all of these issues.

 

All that said, my prediction is that the biggest domestic issue in the next four years will be how we respond to changes in technology, globalization and markets that have, in a very short space of time, made the decent-wage, middle-skilled job — the backbone of the middle class — increasingly obsolete. The only decent-wage jobs will be high-skilled ones.

 

The answer to that challenge will require a new level of political imagination — a combination of educational reforms and unprecedented collaboration between business, schools, universities and government to change how workers are trained and empowered to keep learning. It will require tax reforms and immigration reforms. America today desperately needs a center-right G.O.P. that is offering merit-based, market-based approaches to all these issues — and a willingness to meet the other side halfway. The country is starved for practical, bipartisan cooperation, and it will reward politicians who deliver it and punish those who don’t.

 

The votes have been counted. President Obama now needs to get to work to justify the second chance the country has given him, and the Republicans need to get to work understanding why that happened.

© 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved

 

I meant to post this shortly after it was published in the New York Times maybe a week or two ago.  So busy.  So busy.

 

How to Die

By

BILL KELLER

New York Times

ONE morning last month, Anthony Gilbey awakened from anesthesia in a hospital in the east of England. At his bedside were his daughter and an attending physician.

The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.

"So I’m dying?" the patient asked.

The doctor hesitated. "Yes," he said.

"You’re dying, Dad," his daughter affirmed.

"So," the patient mused, "no more whoop-de-doo."

"On the other side, there’ll be loads," his daughter — my wife — promised.

The patient laughed. "Yes," he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.

When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.

But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. "The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die," said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: "Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out."

The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. "It’s not about hastening death," Sir Thomas told me. "It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?"

Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.

And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to "the other side."

Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it. The Liverpool Pathway or variations of it are now standard in most British hospitals and in several other countries — but not ours. When I asked one American end-of-life specialist what chance he saw that something of the kind could be replicated here, the answer was immediate: "Zero." There is an obvious reason for that, and a less obvious reason.

The obvious reason, of course, is that advocates of such programs have been demonized. They have been criticized by the Catholic Church in the name of "life," and vilified by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the pursuit of cheap political gain. "Anything that looks like an official protocol, or guideline — you’re going to get death-paneled," said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist and expert on end-of-life care who has been a target of the rabble-rousers. (He is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.) Humane end-of-life practices have quietly found their way into cancer treatment, but other specialties lag behind.

The British advocates of the Liverpool approach have endured similar attacks, mainly from "pro-life" lobbyists who portray it as a back-door form of euthanasia. (They also get it from euthanasia advocates who say it isn’t euthanasia-like enough.) Surveys of families that use this protocol report overwhelming satisfaction, but inevitably in a field that touches families at their most emotionally raw, and that requires trained coordination of several medical disciplines, nursing and family counseling, the end is not always as smooth as my father-in-law’s.

The less obvious problem, I suspect, is that those who favor such programs in this country often frame it as a cost issue. Their starting point is the arresting fact that a quarter or more of Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life, which suggests that we are squandering a fortune to buy a few weeks or months of a life spent hooked to machinery and consumed by fear and discomfort. That last year of life offers a tempting target if we want to contain costs and assure that Medicare and Medicaid exist for future generations.

No doubt, we have a crying need to contain health care costs. We pay more than many other developed countries for comparable or inferior health care, and the total bill consumes a growing share of our national wealth. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — makes a start by establishing a board to identify savings in Medicare, by emphasizing preventive care, and by financing pilot programs to pay doctors for achieving outcomes rather than performing procedures. But it is barely a start. Common sense suggests that if officials were not afraid of being "death-paneled," we could save some money by withholding care when, rather than saving a life, it serves only to prolong misery for a little while.

But I’m beginning to think that is both questionable economics and bad politics.

For one thing, whatever your common sense tells you, there is little evidence so far that these guidelines do save money. Emanuel has studied the fairly sketchy research and concluded that, with the possible exception of hospice care for cancer patients, measures to eliminate futile care in dying patients have not proved to be significant cost-savers. That seems to be partly because the programs kick in so late, and partly because good palliative care is not free.

Even if it turns out that programs like the Liverpool Pathway save big money, promoting end-of-life care on fiscal grounds just plays into fears that the medical-industrial complex is rushing our loved ones to the morgue to save on doctors and hospital beds.

When I asked British specialists whether the Liverpool protocol cut costs, they insisted they had never asked the question — and never would.

"I don’t think we would dare," said Sir Thomas. "There was some very nasty press here in this country this year about the Pathway, saying it was a way of killing people quickly to free up hospital beds. The moment you go into that argument, you might threaten the whole program."

In America, nothing happens without a cost-benefit analysis. But the case for a less excruciating death can stand on a more neutral, less disturbing foundation, namely that it is simply a kinder way of death.

"There are lots of reasons to believe you could save money," said Emanuel. "I just think we can’t do it for the reason of saving money."

During Anthony Gilbey’s six days of dying he floated in and out of awareness on a cloud of morphine. Unfettered by tubes and unpestered by hovering medics, he reminisced and made some amends, exchanged jokes and assurances of love with his family, received Catholic rites and managed to swallow a communion host that was probably his last meal. Then he fell into a coma. He died gently, loved and knowing it, dignified and ready.

"I have fought death for so long," he told my wife near the end. "It is such a relief to give up."

We should all die so well.

© 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved

End of article.

The comments section at the Times is worth reading.  Go HERE.

Whoa -- There Was Prep?

That's just my favorite line from Maureen Dowd's riotous New York Times summation of what happened Wednesday night between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Enjoy:

Two Presidents, Smoking and Scheming

By

MAUREEN DOWD

New York Times

AFTER the debate, I was talking to Aaron Sorkin, who was a little down. Or, as he put it, "nonverbal, shouting incoherently at a squirrel, angrier than when the Jets lost to the 49ers last Sunday without ever really being on the field."

Aaron was mollified when he learned that President Obama, realizing things were dire, privately sought the counsel of a former Democratic president known for throwing down in debates. I asked Aaron if he knew how the conversation between the two presidents had gone and, as it happened, he did. This is his account.

•

The lights from the presidential motorcade illuminate a New Hampshire farmhouse at night in the sprawling New England landscape. JED BARTLET steps out onto his porch as the motorcade slows to a stop.

BARTLET

(calling out) Don’t even get out of the car!

BARACK OBAMA

(opening the door of his limo)Five minutes, that’s all I want.

BARTLET

Were you sleepy?

OBAMA

Jed —

BARTLET

Was that the problem? Had you just taken allergy medication? General anesthesia?

OBAMA

I had an off night.

BARTLET

What makes you say that? The fact that the Cheesecake Factory is preparing an ad campaign boasting that it served Romney his pre-debate meal? Law school graduates all over America are preparing to take the bar exam by going to the freakin’ Cheesecake Factory!

OBAMA

(following Bartlet inside)I can understand why you’re upset, Jed.

BARTLET

Did your staff let you know the debate was gonna be on television?

OBAMA

(looking in the other room)Is that Jeff Daniels?

BARTLET

That’s Will McAvoy, he just looks like Jeff Daniels.

OBAMA

Why’s he got Jim Lehrer in a hammerlock?

BARTLET

That’s called an Apache Persuasion Hold. McAvoy thinks it’s the responsibility of the moderator to expose — what are they called? — lies.

WILL

(shouting)Did Obama remove the work requirement from Welfare-to-Work?!

LEHRER

No!

WILL

And you didn’t want to ask Romney about that because? It would’ve been impolite?!

BARTLET

Let’s go in another room, Mr. President. You want a cigarette?

OBAMA

I stopped smoking.

BARTLET

Start again. (Leading the way into his study)I’m a father of daughters, you’re a father of daughters. It looked to me like right before you went on stage, Sasha told you she likes a boy in her class who has a tattoo.

OBAMA

That’s not what hap —

BARTLET

Here’s what you do. You invite the boy over for dinner, you have a couple of fellas from your detail brush their suit coats back just enough so the lad can see the .44 Magnums — problem solved. You have what every father of a daughter dreams of — an army and a good dog.

OBAMA

The girls are fine, that wasn’t the problem. In the debate prep we —

BARTLET

Whoa ... there was prep?

OBAMA

(shouting) Enough! (taking a cigarette and lighting it)I appreciate that the view’s pretty good from the cheap seats. Gore chalked up my debate performance to the altitude. He debated at sea level — what was his excuse?

BARTLET

They told you to make sure you didn’t seem condescending, right? They told you, "First, do no harm," and in your case that means don’t appear condescending, and you bought it. ’Cause for the American right, condescension is the worst crime you can commit.

OBAMA

What’s your suggestion?

BARTLET

Appear condescending. Now it comes naturally to me —

OBAMA

I know.

BARTLET

It’s a gift, but I’m likable and you’re likable enough. Thirty straight months of job growth — blown off. G.M. showing record profits — unmentioned. "Governor, would you still let Detroit go bankrupt as you urged us to do four years ago?" — unasked. (shouting)I’m talkin’ to you, too, Lehrer!

WILL

(in the other room)I got him, sir!

BARTLET

All right! (back to OBAMA)And that was quite a display of hard-nosed, fiscal conservatism when he slashed one one-hundredth of 1 percent from the federal budget by canceling "Sesame Street" and "Downton Abbey." I think we’re halfway home. Mr. President, your prep for the next debate need not consist of anything more than learning to pronounce three words: "Governor, you’re lying." Let’s replay some of Wednesday night’s more jaw-dropping visits to the Land Where Facts Go to Die. "I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale you’re talking about."

OBAMA

The Tax Policy Center analysis of your proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and other reductions, says it would be a $5 trillion tax cut.

BARTLET

In other words ...

OBAMA

You’re lying, Governor.

BARTLET

"I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by $3,000 to $4,000 on middle-income families."

OBAMA

The American Enterprise Institute found my budget actually would reduce the share of taxes that each taxpayer pays to service the debt by $1,289.89 for taxpayers earning in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.

BARTLET

Which is another way of saying ...

OBAMA

You’re lying, Governor.

BARTLET

"I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare."

OBAMA

The $716 billion I’ve cut is from the providers, not the beneficiaries. I think that’s a better idea than cutting the exact same $716 billion and replacing it with a gift certificate, which is what’s contained in the plan that’s named for your running mate.

BARTLET

"Pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan."

OBAMA

Not unless you’ve come up with a new plan since this afternoon.

BARTLET

"You doubled the deficit."

OBAMA

When I took office in 2009, the deficit was 1.4 trillion. According to the C.B.O., the deficit for 2012 will be 1.1 trillion. Either you have the mathematics aptitude of a Shetland pony or, much more likely, you’re lying.

BARTLET

"All of the increase in natural gas has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half."

OBAMA

Maybe your difficulty is with the words "half" and "double." Oil production on federal land is higher, not lower. And the oil and gas industry are currently sitting on 7,000 approved permits to drill on government land that they’ve not yet begun developing.

BARTLET

"I think about half the green firms you’ve invested in have gone out of business."

OBAMA

Yeah, your problem’s definitely with the word "half." As of this moment there have been 26 recipients of loan guarantees — 23 of which are very much in business. What was Bain’s bankruptcy record again?

BARTLET

And finally?

OBAMA

Governor, if your ideas are the right ideas for our country, if you have a plan and it’s the best plan for our future, if your vision is the best vision for all of us and not 53 percent of us, why aren’t you able to make that case in the same ZIP code as the truth?

BARTLET

And?

OBAMA

Tell John Sununu anytime he wants to teach me how to be more American he knows my address for the next four years. He used to have an office there before he was fired.

BARTLET

You picked a bad night to have a bad night, that’s all. You’ve got two more chances to change the scoreboard, and Joe unplugged should be pretty good television too. Make Romney your cabana boy in New York.

OBAMA

Got it.

BARTLET

(taking the cigarette out of OBAMA’s hand and stubbing it out) These things’ll kill you. Pull McAvoy off Lehrer on your way out.

© 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved.

Yes, It's All About the Kids

 

Not to mention, our nation's future.

Here's Charles M. Blow's brilliant column from yesterday's New York Times, "Starving the Future," in which he illustrates the folly of shortchanging our kids, our teachers, our schools, and our future.

************

Starving the Future

by Charles M. Blow
New York Times

America is in trouble.

Emerging economic powers China and India are heavily investing in educating the world’s future workers while we squabble about punishing teachers and coddling children.

This week, the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation released a report entitled "The Race That Really Matters: Comparing U.S., Chinese and Indian Investments in the Next Generation Workforce." The findings were breathtaking:

• Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment.

• More than a quarter of U.S. children have a chronic health condition, such as obesity or asthma, threatening their capacity to learn.

• More than 22 percent of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2007.

• More than half of U.S. postsecondary students drop out without receiving a degree.

Now compare that with the report’s findings on China. It estimates that "by 2030, China will have 200 million college graduates — more than the entire U.S. work force," and points out that by 2020 China plans to:

• Enroll 40 million children in preschool, a 50 percent increase from today.

• Provide 70 percent of children in China with three years of preschool.

• Graduate 95 percent of Chinese youths through nine years of compulsory education (that’s 165 million students, more than the U.S. labor force).

• Ensure that no child drops out of school for financial reasons.

• More than double enrollment in higher education.

And the report also points out that "by 2017, India will graduate 20 million people from high school — or five times as many as in the United States."

As I have mentioned before, a book written last year by Jim Clifton, the chairman of Gallup, called "The Coming Jobs War," pointed out that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs.

This should make it crystal clear to every American that we don’t have any time — or students — to waste. Every child in this country must be equipped to perform. The country’s future financial stability depends on it.

As if to underscore that point, the Center for American Progress pointed out that "between 2000 and 2008, China graduated 1.14 million people in the STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, subjects; the United States graduated 496,000."

But instead of dramatically upping our investment in our children’s education so that they’ll be able to compete in a future that has more educated foreign job seekers, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. A White House report issued last Saturday noted that:

"Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the economy lost over 300,000 local education jobs. The loss of education jobs stands in stark contrast to every other recovery in recent years, under Republican and Democratic administrations."

Not only is our education system being starved of investment, but many of our children are literally too hungry to learn.

A survey of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers released this week by Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that seeks to end child hunger, found that 6 in 10 of those teachers say "students regularly come to school hungry because they are not getting enough to eat at home," and "a majority of teachers who see hunger as a problem believe that the problem is growing."

The report quotes a teacher in the Midwest as saying, "The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won’t get lunch."

It is in this environment that Representative Paul Ryan proposes huge cuts to food assistance programs. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, Ryan’s plan "includes cuts in SNAP (formerly known as the food stamp program) of $133.5 billion — more than 17 percent — over the next 10 years (2013-22), which would necessitate ending assistance for millions of low-income families, cutting benefits for millions of such households, or some combination of the two."

Representative Todd Akin, he of "legitimate rape" infamy, even said earlier this month that the federal government should stop financing the National School Lunch Program altogether. That man is just a font of humanity.

We will need to make choices as we seek to balance the nation’s budget and reduce the deficit, but cutting investments in our children is horribly shortsighted.

And, as we pursue educational reforms, beating up on teachers — who are underpaid, overworked and always blamed — is a distraction from the real problem: We’re being outpaced in producing the employees of the future.

We’re cutting back, while our children’s future competitors are plowing ahead.

© 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved.

Nature Doesn't Care
About the Politics

 

The words are sheer poetry.  Alas, so are the thoughts, but the thoughts are not as beautiful as the words.

This piece was written by Timothy Egan of the New York Times and appeared in yesterday's Sunday Review section:

 

By Timothy Egan

CASCADE, Colo. - Nature makes a mockery of our vanity. We live in flood and fire zones, nurture stately oaks and take shade under pines holding the best air of the Rocky Mountains. We plant villas next to sandstone spires called the Garden of the Gods, and McMansions in Virginia stocked with people who have the world at their fingertips.

Then, with a clap, a boom and a roar, fire marches through a subdivision on a conveyance of 60 mile an hour winds. A platoon of thunderstorms so loaded with energy it has its own category name - derecho - cuts a swath from east of Chicago to the Atlantic.

The pines flame and hiss, shooting sparks on the house next door, a fortress no more. The oaks tumble and crush roofs. Almost 350 homes burn to the ground, and nearly 5 million people lose all electricity in sweltering heat. Lobbyists and congressmen curse at mute cellphones and sweat through their seersucker. The powerful are powerless.

So it went the first 10 days of summer, another extraordinary chapter in a weather year of living dangerously. At one point, 113 million Americans were under an extreme heat advisory. It was 109 degrees in Nashville, 104 in Washington, D.C., and much of the West was aflame.

If recent history is a guide, it will all be soon forgotten and dismissed. Amnesia, in regard to unpleasant science, is the guiding principle for a political party that has an even chance of winning everything that matters this year.

But at a time when warnings of violence are too often attached to the weather forecast, the unpleasantness may not be so easy to wish away. At the least, we should get used to intimacy with a ferocious new face of nature.

It is one thing to hear that 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in June throughout the United States, following a winter and spring that were the warmest ever recorded. Numbers are like box scores.

It is another to look up from the eerie serenity of the Holy Cross Novitiate here in this chalk-dry hamlet west of Colorado Springs and see the ridge on fire, as if bombed from aerial assault, as the Rev. Kevin Russeau did. The 1922 novitiate is built of marble that was shipped from Chicago after a zeppelin crash destroyed a building there. It is supposed to be fireproof, protecting men devoted to a life of prayer and humility.

"The sheriff called and said you've got to get out," said Father Russeau. He and about a dozen novices evacuated, and the fire skipped over their compound. After returning, the priest said he would never look at the Rockies the same.

"We respect fire," he said. "We know what fire can do."

Just down the mountain from him, the storm of the Waldo Canyon fire forced 32,000 people out of their homes. The most destructive wildfire in Colorado history tore through half-million-dollar houses near the Garden of the Gods, at the edge of a city that has shrunk its police and fire department in a tax-cutting binge.

"Unreal," said residents, after returning to ashen lots.

"Surreal," said Colorado's governor, John Hickenlooper.

In Colorado Springs, where even municipal officials have taken the mindless Grover Norquist pledge to never raise taxes, it cost at least $12 million in tax money - most of it from the rest of us - to contain the fire. Not everybody thinks like Norquist.

In the West, the populated fire zone is called the urban wildland interface, a clunky term to describe a vulnerable habitat for almost 40 percent of new homes built over the last two decades. And the fire danger will only grow, as 40 million acres of ghost forests - standing trees killed by an epidemic of bark beetles that metastasize in warmer winters - are ready to burn.

Summer is barely two weeks old and two-thirds of the country is in the grip of a severe drought. More crops will die. More forests will burn. More power brokers will become familiar with the consequences of a derecho. It sounds biblical, but smart scientists have been predicting this very cycle.

In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a special report of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events" to come. The events are here, though the skeptics now running the Republican Party deny the obvious, in large part because they are paid to deny the obvious.

But for those who are already familiar with the new face of nature, no amount of posturing can wish away the fire this time.

"When you live up here now, it's always a question of when, not if," said Eric Eide, head of the volunteer fire department in Cascade. He's been on duty, without pay, for almost two weeks. A few days ago, when it looked as if all 140 homes of Cascade would burn, Eide's volunteers joined federal firefighters in digging a line and saving the town. It was a daring triage, and heroic. By summer's end, such actions may be routine - the price of living in a new world that we made, but can no longer dominate.

Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Hello?

 

I just watched an "Outside the Lines" episode where host and guests were, I don't know, trying to figure out Dennis Rodman, or how to solve his problem with depression, or something.

It's not that I'm afraid of controversy, but here's my take:

What's so fucking wrong with conformity?   I mean, Rodman was a great basketball player, or at least a pretty good one, but if his cross-dressing or his earrings through his lips, or whatever was causing him to be depressed, is supposed to be a big deal, then it seems to me that he just can't handle his nonconformity.

So?

What's so fucking wrong with conformity?

I expect to take a lot of heat for taking this position, for a lot of reasons, but I maintain:

If you're a weirdo, and you're getting depressed, then stop being a weirdo.  I realize that I might be switching cause and effect, but what's wrong with trying something different, if the first thing isn't working?

If you want to criticize me for writing this, go ahead, but please be kind.  I don't like being criticized.

The following is op-ed column written for the New York Times by the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  It appeared on Thursday, May 10, 2012, and I just got around to reading it this morning.

It pulls no punches and it is SCARY.

 

Game Over for the Climate

By JAMES HANSEN

 

Rick Reilly of ESPN has forced me to change my thinking.

**********

More great reading, on the same subject:

Chris Carter

***********

More great reading, on a way different subject:

Jennifer Granholm

************

 

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Vilma's options not appealing

　

By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com

There are few institutions more like the U.S. Army than the National Football League.

Uniforms and helmets and training camps. Stick with your squads. If you're on time, you're late. Be 15 minutes early. Pull up your socks or you'll pay. Next month's optional workouts are mandatory. Take ground. Never retreat. You're injured? Next man up. This is war.

Above all, in both, you do what your leaders say, no questions asked. They bark, you bolt. If you think, you hurt the team.

So what did NFL commissioner Roger Goodell think New Orleans Saints football players would do when their leaders put in a bounty program for quarterbacks' heads?

Did he expect them to stand up in the middle of the fire and brimstone the night before a huge game and say, "Uh, Coach? I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Maybe we need to check with Roger?"

Did he expect the Saints players to raise their hands and say, "You know what, Coach? I'm out. But good luck with that!"

Did Goodell expect players to risk insurrection, to risk the esprit d' corps, to risk their jobs by conscientiously objecting?

Apparently, he did. Because he just threw one of the Saints players out of his league for a year. Linebacker Jonathan Vilma was suspended the entire season without pay. That's more than $2 million, flushed. That's more than four times the $500,000 Goodell fined the Saints' multimillionaire owner, Tom Benson. So remind me: Whose head had a bounty on it in this thing?

Then Goodell gave former Saints defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove (now with Green Bay) eight games, defensive end Will Smith four, and linebacker Scott Fujita (now with Cleveland) three.

And here was the most hilarious part. The NFL hired a former U.S. attorney named Mary Jo White to "review" the evidence, and you'll never believe what she concluded. She said the NFL was right. "[The players] always had the option to say no," she wrote. "They didn't say no." And who knows the intense peer and coach pressure of an NFL locker room better than Mary Jo White?

On May 7, Vilma and his former teammates announced they would appeal their suspensions.

So who does somebody like Vilma go to when he thinks the sentence handed down by Goodell is unfair? Who does he see to get his hands on the evidence that Goodell will show Mary Jo White but not him?

Goodell, of course.

Goodell: Jonathan, we have evidence.

Vilma: What? What evidence?

Goodell: You don't get to see it. You're suspended one year.

Vilma: What? I appeal!

Goodell: No problem.

(Goodell flips "Commissioner" sign around on his desk to the other side. It reads, "Appeals Court.")

Goodell: Court's in session. What's your beef?

This is the worst railroad job since Amtrak. These guys had zero chance to stop this bounty program. In the NFL, you stand up to your coach on something like this, and you're immediately a "locker room lawyer" and suddenly you're Super-Glued to the bench. There are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. You have two choices: You do what your coaches say or you do what your coaches say.

And don't forget, there's no video of any Saints player making illegal hits on Brett Favre or Kurt Warner in the two bounty games in question. To be ordered to carry out a hit and then doing it are two separate things.

Yes, according to the NFL, Vilma offered $10,000 to his teammates for the head of Warner in their 2009 playoff game with the Arizona Cardinals. But there are also reports that the money was given to him in the first place by his defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams. ESPN's Ed Werder reported that Vilma gave it back to him after that game, saying he didn't want to be in charge of it anymore.

Why didn't Vilma go see Goodell when he was offered the chance, weeks before the sentence came down? I'll bet you a Ferrari to a flapjack it was because his team told him not to. "You'll just get us in deeper," is what they probably said to him.

Why do I think that? Because in one of the few documents that have filtered out from the NFL, Goodell says Hargrove confessed to lying about participating in the bounty scheme but admits "you were instructed to [lie] by the coaching staff." Exactly. You do what your staff sergeant orders you to do, or you're playing in Winnipeg.

What's happening here is that Goodell is staring down the barrel of more than 1,000 lawsuits from former players with concussions. He has to prove the NFL front office is dead-set against violence, while, in NFL locker rooms, the coaches are dead-set in favor of it.

Now that Vilma is out one-ninth of his career for following orders, he's finally standing up. "I intend to fight this injustice," he says. But it's too late.

During the lockout, the NFLPA signed up for nine more years of a dictatorship, nine more years of a one-man judicial system. They agreed to it in exchange for not having to play an 18-game season, hoping to lessen the number of holes in their brains from collisions that equal a car hitting a brick wall at 45 miles per hour. But that doesn't mean the NFL shouldn't have an independent panel. To most Americans, the way the NFL is set up now looks positively Cuban.

I'm not saying the players didn't take part. They did. It was wrong and dangerous and they deserved punishment. And I admire Goodell for the steps he's taken to stop players from stupefying themselves with helmet-to-helmet collisions. But to slap these players as harshly as their bosses is like giving Bernie Madoff's secretary the same sentence as Madoff.

The players are led by, and at the mercy of, the absolute and unchecked power of Goodell.

This time, he led them into a trap.

© 2012 ESPN. All rights reserved.

I'm proud to call myself a tree-hugger, and here are a few dozen reasons why.

This article was written by Jim Robbins, author of the forthcoming book, "The Man Who Planted Trees," and it appeared in the April 12, 2012, edition of the New York Times.

 

***********************************

 

 

Why Trees Matter

 

By JIM ROBBINS

The New Frontrunner

 

I don't imagine Rick Santorum's candidacy will stand up to scrutiny any better than those of the nutcases who preceded him in the Republicans' nomination derby.  I base this opinion on the fact that he was VERY soundly defeated when in 2006 he ran for a third term as U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.  The Pennsylvania voters were rightly scared of his extremist positions, once they got to understand that he means what he says.

But at least he's a more serious candidate than Donald Trump, Herman Cain, and even Newt Gingrich, who are referred to in the article I've republished today.

Margaret Carlson (see below) is one of my favorite writers, and I thought I'd share the following article with you.  I'm not sure how I got on the newsmax emailing list, but when I saw her byline I knew that the article wouldn't make me throw up, as most of the newsmax articles do.

 

****************

By Margaret Carlson

 

Like Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum is more admired than liked. Many of Santorum's former Senate colleagues don't love him, though some respect him. Even the Christian right had a hard time wrapping its arms around him. So I suspect Santorum's three wins last night won't mean much in the grand scheme of things.

Unlike Romney, however, Santorum is sweaty with belief. He is convinced that life begins on the first date and ends with "death panels" created by Obamacare, which he will repeal by executive fiat within seconds after being inaugurated.

Whether this intensity will help him is unclear. What is clear after last night is the shallowness of Romney's front-runner status. Thus far the anti-Mitt vote has been split. The Republican base has given a string of candidates — from a vulgar casino owner to a crackpot pizza magnate to a grandiose adulterer — a twirl around the dance floor. Can Santorum finally unite the anybody-but-Romney vote?

If the current field of Republican candidates lived in your neighborhood — a shuddering thought, I realize — you might think of them this way: Romney is a great next-door neighbor, never complaining when you don't return the hedge clippers, but you wouldn't have him over for a beer.

Ron Paul looks and sounds like the cranky old man across the street — and he pretty much is, though he occasionally makes sense at the debates.

Gingrich is the guy from the block who never stops talking, smooth and entertaining but so full of himself you soon find yourself shutting off the porch light when he appears.

And then there is Santorum, whose default expression is a pout, even when you're telling him how much you admire his lawn.

The Republican race will now proceed with two unloved candidates. May the best man win.

© 2012 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.