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As one of the major issues facing the U.S. is our health care system, which is seriously FUBAR, it's wonderful to see this story highlighted at Daily Kos:



During his family practice residency at UNM Hospital, Dr. Andru Ziwasimon said he became aware of the profound barriers and inflated costs of medical care for low-income and uninsured people, and he decided the best way to do his part to fix the problem was start a health clinic that offers primary care to uninsured patients.



"In a lot of ways our system of medicine is so corrupt in its values around money instead of taking care of patients," said Ziwasimon. "So I decided I wanted to practice medicine in a way that was respectful to my community and met the needs of the most vulnerable people."



Follow the link to read the details of how Dr. Ziwasimon runs his clinic. One of my constant refrains is that there are two things that should never be done for profit: health care and education. The good doctor is living proof that quality health care is not dependent on the profit motive.



We need more doctors like this. I hope he gets a lot of publicity, and that others follow his lead.

Via the Eschaton blog:



Amount the U.S. has pledged for humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the earthquake/tsunami that has so far killed 50,000 people:



$15 million.



Amount the White House expects to spend on George W. Bush's second inauguration:



$30-$40 million--not counting security costs.



Imagining that if there were no hell, one would be created especially for this administration:



priceless.



Update: this story reports that another $20 million is being added to the U.S.'s aid package.



Update II: Professor Juan Cole points out that Bush could have done himself a huge favor in terms of U.S.-Muslim relations by providing more aid. The death toll continues to rise; some now estimate the number of dead in Indonesia alone will top 80,000.

Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion range as high as 100,000, most of them innocent civilians, many of them children. Though on an admittedly smaller scale, families here are also suffering for Bush's war: in addition to the parents, siblings, and spouses of the troops killed, 900 U.S. children so far have lost parents in Iraq.



Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.



"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.







More than 40 U.S. troops have died without ever seeing their children, including Army 1st Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, whose daughter, Grace Ashley, was born six weeks after his death.







I wonder what these mothers will tell their children as they're growing up. I couldn't blame any mother who felt the need to heroize her husband and what he was doing, because she can't bear the thought of her child believing his father died in an unjust cause. But I pray they'll have the strength to someday tell their children the truth about why their fathers were in Iraq, and about the government that sent them there.

Oh, the sweet sweet music of Senate hearings:



New Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Monday his party will launch investigative hearings next year in response to what he said was the reluctance of Republicans to look into problems in the Bush administration.



There are too many unasked and unanswered questions and the American public deserves better,' the Nevada senator said at a news conference. [ . . . ]



Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who heads the Democratic Policy Committee, said the first hearing will be at the end of January and he suggested it might focus on contract abuse in Iraq. He said the policy committee, which has held occasional investigative hearings in the past, planned to convene at least one such hearing a month.

[ . . . ]



They said issues that "cry out" for closer investigation, in addition to contracting abuses in Iraq, include the administration's use of prewar intelligence and its reported effort to stifle information about the true cost of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. Reid also mentioned global warming and the "No Child Left Behind" education program as topics that needed a closer look.



The Democratic-organized hearings would not have subpoena powers, but Dorgan said there are plenty of whistleblowers "anxious to tell their story."



It's a start, oh yes it is. Everyone think good Watergatey thoughts.

The incomparable Daily Kos was one of the first blogs I ever read. It's now a community of 20,000+ registered members, with hundreds of thousands more stopping by regularly to read it.



Markos, the founder of the site, is a U.S. Armed Services veteran; he was also an early, and vocal, opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and dKos was one of the sites around which opposition to the war coalesced. The dKos bloggers (Markos, his designated guest bloggers, and the diaries that can be written by any registered user) have been tracking both the runup to the war, and its consequences, all along. And the consequences just keep getting worse.



The service men and women in Iraq have an amazingly high survival rate, thanks to improved medical techniques. But that means they are surviving with horrific, life-long injuries (warning: graphic photo). We need to see these images; we need to understand that the damage being done is not an abstraction. And the costs, financial as well as human, of this unjust, ill-conceived clusterfuck of a war will be with us for generations. The immediate costs of the war are bankrupting our economy, and the long-term costs can only be guessed at.



If this were a just world, most of the Bush administration would be under indictment now. But it isn't, and we will all have to pick up the pieces of what's left of the world when they're done with it.

You probably know that conservative/religious groups would like to ban RU-486, or at least have it labeled as dangerous and potentially fatal, since a woman died last year after taking it.



Well, okay, that seems reasonable; if something is dangerous we should certainly know about it. And really, maybe we should ban it. So let's look at some statistics to get an idea where we are.



The associated (not causal, as the causality isn't clear) mortality rate for RU-486 is 0.8/100,000. For comparison, the associated mortality rate for a pencillin shot is 2/100,000. So RU-486 doesn't seem all that dangerous, really.



But, of course, a penicillin shot serves an altogether different purpose than RU-486; to be fair, we should really look at another sex-related drug, like, say, Viagra, since it's been on the market for years now.



So what's the death risk for men taking Viagra?



Well. Um. Turns out it's 6/100,000. That would make it more than six times as dangerous as RU-486.



So I guess we'll be banning Viagra any day now. Or at least putting dire warning labels on it.



(Via one of my favorite blogs: Bitch. Ph.D. [best enjoyed by academics, though others can play too]).

"Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it."

-Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (1601-1658)

It's that time of the quarter when insanity is the only reasonable state of mind. I have papers to write, and papers and finals to grade; posting will have to be sporadic over the next ten days or so.

The news that Harry Reid, a Mormon from Utah, had been elected the new Democratic minority leader in Congress did not inspire a great deal of confidence. With all due respect to the state and the people, Utah is not exactly a hotbed of progressive politics, and "Democratic Mormon" feels like an oxymoron. But Reid went on Meet the Press on Sunday, and darned if he didn't offer up some genuine criticisms of the Bush administration.



For example, here he is on Social Security:



Tim, I can remember as a little boy my widowed grandmother with eight children. She lived alone, but she felt independent because she got every month her old age pension check. That's what this is all about. The most successful social program in the history of the world is being hijacked by Wall Street. Yes, Social Security is a good program. And if the president has some ideas about trying to improve it, I'll talk to him, and we as Democrats will, but we are not going to let Wall Street hijack Social Security. It won't happen. They are trying to destroy Social Security . . . when Social Security came before the Congress, who opposed it? The Republicans. And they have a long memory. They've been trying to destroy Social Security for a long time and now they think they have an opening to do it.



Reid also had some harsh words for the administration's notion of tax "reform." And he defended the Democratic Party's status as the big-tent, inclusive party, by insisting that the Democrats are not going to follow the new Republican policy of using ideological litmus tests, rather than seniority, to decide committee chairmanships. (He also said that Barbara Boxer, whose views on abortion are quite different from his own, is the closest thing to a sister he's ever had.)



And to top it all off, he took on Clarence Thomas:



I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don't--I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.



Of course, the accusations of racism have already started, but Reid had to know that was coming, and he took a stand against the--yes--embarrassingly incompetent Thomas anyway.



It's almost enough to give a person hope.

The eight soldiers come from places scattered across the country, from this small town an hour northwest of Little Rock to cities in Arizona, New Jersey and New York. In Iraq and Kuwait, where they all work now, most of them hold different jobs in different units, miles apart. Most have never met.



But the eight share a bond of anger: each says he has been prevented from coming home for good by an Army policy that has barred thousands of soldiers from leaving Iraq this year even though the terms of enlistment they signed up for have run out. And each of these eight soldiers has separately taken the extraordinary step of seeking legal help, through late-night Internet searches and e-mail inquiries from their camps in the conflict zone, or through rounds of phone calls by an equally frustrated wife or mother back home.



With legal support from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal-leaning public interest group, lawyers for the eight men say they will file a lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Washington challenging the Army policy known as stop-loss.



Good for them. The DoD, and the Bush White House, need to be forced to acknowledge what they're doing to our troops.



(Story in the New York Times; registration required. To bypass annoying and invasive compulsory online registrations, use Bugmenot.com.)

U.S. border guards at busy northern crossings will start fingerprinting foreign visitors entering from Canada by the end of the year, a top official in the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.



[ . . . ]



Homeland Security is in the process of expanding the collection of fingerprints and other digital data to the nation's 50 busiest land crossings. Fingerprinting has already started at Mexican border crossings in Arizona, Texas and California . . . The fingerprinting technology, used already at airports and seaports, is to be extended to all land border crossings by the end of 2005.



(via Talk Left)

Many of us have been concerned for some time about the security vulnerabilities of touchscreen voting machines that have no paper trail, especially their susceptibility to hacking that can invisibly change vote totals. And given the track record of this administration, it seemed a little too naive to trust that it would not make use of such a vulnerability, and a little too tidy that Bush edged out a win in heavily Democratic areas of Florida, among other areas, on November 2. Well, now a programmer has admitted that Florida Republican Tom Feeney hired him to write software for Florida's touchscreen machines that would accomplish just such vote-rigging:



According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.



Feeney talks about using police patrols to suppress the minority vote, and tells Clint Curtis, the programmer, that he wants the software to "flip" enough votes to produce a 51% to 49% win for Bush.



Read the whole thing. There are several independent investigations going on right now that are trying to connect the dots between a number of bad actors, several of them current or former members of the U.S. government, that form a very dark web including the CIA, certain key banks, drug running, the Saudi royal family, Islamist terrorism, and the Bush family. I haven't been posting much on them, because hard proof is still hard to come by, and talking about the allegations (which include the suspicious "suicides" of two men who got too close to the seamy underside of the Bush family) without the proof risks sounding like tinfoil-hat territory. But I will bring you information like the above as it becomes available.

James Wolcott, whose writing I perpetually envy, has a post up just for men. Read 'em and heed 'em, oh andro-Americans.



Update: That is to say, I admire his writing generally, not for this post in particular; and snarky comments about pen envy are entirely unnecessary.

There have been a number of posts around the blogosphere lately with the "And So it Begins" title, as various folk see various warning signs of the dangerous path our country is on. Here's another hint that Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale may prove to be all too prophetic: Employers are now screening potential employees for conformity to certain religious and political beliefs.



Yesterday, my wife went looking for work at various retailers around town, hoping to make some extra green for the holiday season. She's been off the market for the last 4+ years raising our son, and I've been with my current employer for that same period of time, so neither of us has any recent experience on the job-seeking scene. Thus we were surprised to discover a new trend in the kind of questions being asked on applications. It seems that certain employers are attempting to determine the political and religious preferences of applicants.



The applications in question all had to be completed on computers in the HR office, so I've got no hardcopy proof to offer, only the anecdotal accounts from my wife (no coincidence I suspect). At a certain "big box" store, which go will unnamed, she was asked "Would you say that God is an important factor in your life?" and "Do you believe that our current political leaders are doing a good job?". At a couple other places there were questions like "Would you say that you have 'traditional' values or 'progressive' values?" or something similar.



These are paraphrases unfortunately, but regardless of the specific text, the intent is clear - some employers are attempting to screen applicants based on their political and religious views. Oh, I'm sure that these questions are phrased in such a way to skirt equal-opportunity regulations and appear "neutral" in regards to a given viewpoint and that, if taken to task, the employer can claim that they are not considered in the final hiring decisions, but then why ask the questions at all? What possible relevance could a person's religious/political beliefs have to punching numbers on a cash register?



The implications are truly frightening. The least disturbing justification would be that of maintaining a "harmonious work environment" by insuring that all the employees have compatible world views. But one can imagine much more sinister motivations, such as the assumption that those who give a negative answer to the "God" question are more likely to be immoral (and thus rip-off the company), or those that express a lack of faith in political leaders are more likely to question the authority of the management, or even that their views may be "anti-American" and/or sympathetic to the "enemy". Another motivation might be the advancement of a larger social agenda through a privately-controlled system of economic reward and punishment ("right-minded" folks will be the only ones gainfully employed, thus having their opinions materially validated, as well as more time and money to contribute to the cause; while "wrong-minded" people will be too busy just trying to survive to make any political trouble).



And even if it is entirely true that such questions are ignored in evaluating suitability for employment, the message is clear. My spouse answered the questions based on what she thought the employer wanted to hear, rather than her actual beliefs - she responded "yes" to the God question, "yes" to the political leaders question, and said her values were more "traditional". And though these were all lies, she likely just increased her chances of getting a job. After all, when was the last time you heard of a company hiring applicants specifically because they didn't believe in God, didn't support our political leaders, and were avidly Progressive?



I have nothing to add.

Also from the fraternal unit in the Windy City:



"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing."



Dwight David Eisenhower - 34th president of the United States

From my bruddah in Chicagah, things to do before the next inauguration in January:



1. Get that abortion you've always wanted.



2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.



3. Cash your social security check.



4. See a doctor of your own choosing.



5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.



6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.



7. Get that gas mask you've been putting off buying.



8. Hoard gasoline.



10. Borrow books from library before they're banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, etc.



11. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix - do it now.



12. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!



13. Jam in all the Alzheimer's stem cell research you can.



14. Stay out late before the curfews start.



16. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his "accident."



17. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.



18. Use the phrase, "You can't do that - this is America."



19. If you're white - marry a black person, if you're black - marry a white person.



21. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.



22. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.



23. Start your school day without a prayer.



24. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.



26. Learn French.



28. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.



29. Take a factory tour anywhere in the US.



30. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.



31. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.



32. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.



33. Visit Alaska before "The Big Spill."



34. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a State.



What else should be on the list? Add your suggestions in the comments.

Ah yes, it's that wonderful time again: when giving becomes confused with money and materialism, deeper meanings are overshadowed by the frantic ringing of cash registers, and families go into debt for the coming year.



Want to opt out of the crass commercialism? Homemade gifts are great, of course, but also time-consuming. If you'd like to purchase gifts, but want them to be more meaningful and less materialistic, the Natural Resources Defense Council has some great gift suggestions emphasizing green/sustainable living, including national parks passes, solar chargers, night scopes for catching glimpses of nocturnal creatures, and lots of other creative ideas.



One of my favorites on their list is Heifer International, an organization that helps communities all over the world escape crushing poverty by giving them animals: cows, goats, chickens, lambs, and more. Recipients pledge to pass on their gift by sharing their animals' offpsring with others. The HI program promotes sustainable living, strong communities, and peaceful cooperation. You can donate in honor of those on your gift list in amounts from $10 on up, so there's something for every budget.



The ELCA (the American Lutheran Church) also has an alternative gift-giving catalog; donations can be given to a wide variety of projects from disaster relief, to community development, to feeding the hungry, to hiring teachers for refugee camps. Donations can be as little as $1, so this is a great option for kids. Also in the family vein, this article from Penn State has some good suggestions for intergenerational gift-giving.



Want more choices? Charity Navigator is a non-profit organization that has evaluated over thirty-four hundred charities nationwide; here's a list of all their four-star charities, including Jewish, Catholic, and nonreligious organizations.



Whatever you do, I hope you'll find a way to look beyond the glitzy surface of this holiday season and celebrate the values of love and generosity instead.

Melanie, over at Just a Bump in the Beltway, has a roundup of articles about the folk now being forced back into uniform to go to Iraq:



* A 43-year-old single mom who completed her service twelve years ago has been called up. She's training with a man in his 70s. He's an officer who somehow didn't fill out his discharge paperwork when he retired, so he's fair game.



* Other middle-aged members of the IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) are facing physical challenges, from failing eyesight to bad knees and backs, but the Army is determined: “We don’t give up on them. We haven’t failed to qualify a single person,” said Staff Sgt. Kenneth Calloway, a 29-year-old Army Reserve instructor. “We just give each individual a lot of time — and lots of ammunition.”



* A man who served honorably in both the Army and Marines, and has no remaining service obligation, was told he would be treated as a deserter if he didn't report for duty. A letter from his chiropractor detailing his back injury was ignored; other back-door draftees with similar physical ailments are receiving the same treatment. A retired colonel, Andrew Bacevich, isn't surprised. "The Individual Ready Reserve -- that title is a misnomer. They're not ready," Bacevich said. "It's the equivalent of me walking out here on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and taking the first 5,000 people I meet and saying 'you're now in the military.' "



Follow the link for all three stories. The draft will be here sooner rather than later. If you are between the ages of 18 and 35, start thinking very seriously about your options. If you have kids, grandkids, nephews or nieces aged 18 to 35, sit them down and talk to them about this--and if you have friends or family in Canada, keep in touch. You may need them.