DHS Announces Mandatory Underwear Inspection

Responding quickly to the Christmas Eve terrorist threat aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit from Amsterdam, the US Dept. of Homeland Security announced new security procedures today in addition to not letting passengers use toilets one hour before landing.

Enhancing its screening passengers at security checkpoints, starting tomorrow all passengers on every flight arriving in, departing from or flying over the US will be required to remove their trousers or skirts at boarding gates for a last-minute underwear check.

According to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, news reports that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – the man accused of trying to blow up NW253 – concealed explosives in his underpants are accurate “so we want to be sure that, along with making people walk barefoot through check points, and banning shampoo and deodorant, no one is trying to sneak explosives aboard in their knickers.”

She also announced that, as part of the new measure, passengers will be required to put their underwear on the outside of their clothes at checkpoints and, halfway through each flight, flight attendants will have each passenger give their bra’s, panties and briefs or boxers to the person sitting directly in front of them “who will wear them for the balance of the flight.”

Dismissing suggestions that this is a slapstick strategy straight out of Bananas, a 1971 Woody Allen film in which the famed writer-actor accidentally takes over a South American dictatorship, Sec. Napolitano told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday “this new tactic will absolutely foil anyone from using their own underwear as a terrorist weapon.”

Admitting that some passengers may not wear any underwear at all, Sec. Napolitano insists DHS is prepared.

“Part of the new regulations requires airlines to carry spare underwear on all planes,” she says, “so everyone will be subjected to the same rigorous inspection requirements.”

On Wall St., news of the enhanced security procedures sent stock prices of apparel manufacturers Hanes and Jockey soaring in heavy trading Monday afternoon.

You Can't Fix Stupid

"Sure wish folks would invent something to keep the sun out of my eyes!"

Neo-Con Renews Call to Bomb Iran in NY Times Op-Ed

They’re baaaack.

Having disappeared under a rock after being exposed as frauds during Iraq on a scale matched only by the Wizard of Oz, the neo-con foreign policy lug nuts are sticking their heads out again, looking for a shadow by calling for renewing a policy that totally destroyed America’s moral, ethical and political standing in the world, especially among Moslems: Launch another pre-emptive strike in the Middle East.

T’was the night before Christmas when Dr. Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas-Austin, penned an Op-Ed in The New York Times urging Pres. Obama to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran in a pre-emptive strike to end its nuclear enrichment programme. Never mind that authoritative sources that actuaIrlly know what they’re talking about, ranging from UN inspectors to the CIA to noted Middle East authority Dr. Juan Cole, say there’s no evidence that Iran wants anything more than to enhance its electrical generating capacity and, possibly, have a stand-by ability to make nuclear bombs in an emergency the same way Japan has such capacity. Phooey, snorts Dr. Kuperman: Drop bombs tonight, insisting “The sooner the United States takes action, the better.”

Sure, why not? The Cheney Doctrine worked so well the last time America shot itself in the foot following it so let’s try again and to hell with any repercussions.

“Iran could retaliate by aiding America’s opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does that anyway,” Dr. Kuperman writes dismissively. He’s equally dismissive of history.

Blasé About Facts

In fact, Tehran has been quietly cooperating with the US since 2001 by ensuring Afghan insurgents don’t flee into Iran and trying – unsuccessfully – to stem the flow of option out of Afghanistan. Moreover, the Islamic Republic didn’t start meddling in Iraq to assist various Shiite factions until Civil War broke out with Sunni’s during the US-tolerated ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. In any event, Sunni’s and Shiites have been fighting with each other since sometime around 700, long before there was an Iraqi or Iranian state, more than a full millennia before the US was even created and some 1,900 years before Bush charged head first into Iraq.

You’d think an academic such as Dr. Kuperman wouldn’t be quite so blasé about facts.

In what amounts to a throwaway line, Dr. Kuperman concedes that “bombing might not work” before going on to argue, essentially, “So what?”

For evidence, he reaches back 30 years to cite Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Dr. Kuperman claims it deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons, “a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion.”

Still Cherrypicking Facts

What history books does this guy read?

Saddam Hussein didn’t rebuild Osirak because he needed money for his Army to fight a war with Iran. Then, UN sanctions effectively cut him off from funds, supplies and equipment to build any nuclear capability, civilian or military, even if he wanted to do so. Moreover, it’s been well-documented that intelligence agencies in London, Berlin and Washington knew full well that Iraq had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons long before the 2003 invasion; it’s just that Bush and Cheney cherry-picked the information they revealed to the UN, Congress and the American people.

Indeed, just a few weeks ago, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted on BBC’s Newsnight he knew in 2003 there weren’t any such horrors waiting in Baghdad when he tag-teamed with Bush to invade Iraq.

If Dr. Kuperman wants to cherry-pick facts, as his fellow neo-con’s did all during the Iraq folly, you’d think he would have learned by now to at least pick those that are true.

Not content with one bombing run, Kuperman proclaims “Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Tehran will just sit there and take it, of course, before crying “Uncle.” They won’t fire off a few missiles at Israel, Turkey and US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. They won’t flood either country with arms or maybe even troops. And the Iranian dissident movement won’t collapse, supporting its nation when the US attacks.

The saddest thing about Kuperman is that the Times gave him serious space in a supposedly serious newspaper to spout the same discredited nonsense that got us into a mess in the Middle East at the same time Pres. Obama is trying to extricate the world from the chaos unleashed the last time the neo-con war mongers had their way.

Peace on earth and all of that.

Why Is GOP Running Possible War Criminal For Congress?

Florida’s 22nd Congressional District is a narrow stretch of heavily gerrymandered coastal land stretching from Ft. Lauderdale north to Jupiter, mostly hugging beach communities but occasionally meandering inland to grab bits of West Palm Beach –Palm Beach’s down-market cousin, home to the black and Hispanic domestics, gardeners and roustabouts who work in the Palm’s posh hotels, luxury condos and gated estates – as well as Coral Springs and Cooper City.

To really see the district, stay off the interstate and crawl through the small towns that blur together along US 1 from Lauderdale to Jupiter. They’re towns where the humidity hangs like a panting dog, school test scores are further south than the state itself, gun shops dot an unending parade of strip malls, and waitresses in small diners wearing big hair and nylon uniforms serve coffee to Lou and Mario and Eudora.

You won’t find many yachts in the harbours; they’re up in Palm Beach or down in Lauderdale. The marinas here mostly berth sea-battered fishing boats, second or third-hand 22’ runabouts with goofy names like “Phil’s Pholly” or “Mary’s Movin,” and little sloops so far past their use-by date that only a fool would dare take them outside the breakwater.

It’s like stumbling into a John D. MacDonald novel; stop for lunch and you half-expect Travis McGee will saunter in right behind you.

The district is also where Allen West, a former lieutenant colonel who was drummed out of the Army for torturing an Iraqi prisoner by holding a mock execution after allowing men under his command to repeatedly beat the detainee, has the GOP endorsement to run for Congress in 2010.

America’s Worst

The military boasts that its personnel are among America’s best. And, for the majority of officers and enlisted people serving bravely, with distinction and without incident, it’s true. But people like West give lie to the boast.

So why did Sid Dinerstein, chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party and author of a self-published right wing political manifesto, Adults Only, hand the GOP endorsement for Congress in FL22 to a man who effectively admitted to committing two war crimes?

The case against West stems from an Aug. 20, 2003 incident at a military base in Taji, just north of Baghdad, when West was interrogating an Iraqi policeman who was thought to have information about a plot to ambush a US convoy.

In testimony at his Article 32 hearing – a military grand jury – West said the policeman was not cooperating so he allowed four soldiers he commanded to beat the detainee’s head and body. Then joining in the festivities, West admits threatening to kill the prisoner. Military prosecutors said West followed up by taking the blindfolded suspect outside, putting his head in a weapons clearing barrel and firing his 9mm pistol into the barrel one foot from the prisoner’s ear.

According to an August 2009 article in The Washington Post, West told the beaten Iraqi that "this is where it will end," meaning that West would kill him if he did not talk. When faced with another refusal, West said, he took the Iraqi's head under his arm, pushed it into the barrel and shot twice with his pistol a foot from the Iraqi's ear. He said he pointed the gun away.

How thoughtful; West is a real officer and a gentleman.

When West testified that he had "no malice toward (the detainee)" and that he "just wanted information," prosecutors presented West's typed statement prepared after the incident, ordering him to read aloud his report to the court: "In my anger, I couldn't remember how many shots were fired."

In Dec. 2003, the Army took action. West was fined $5,000, relieved of all command responsibilities and allowed to retire in what amounts to a plea bargain. The Army could have held a court martial where, if found guilty, he could have faced 11 years in prison, according to military prosecutors.

West's GOP and tea party supporters in Florida’s 22nd call him a hero. But military prosecutors say he committed torture, violating articles 128 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“By all rights, he (West) should have been put on trial, convicted for war crimes and sent to prison,” says a former Army judge advocate who is familiar with the case. “But (then-Maj. Gen. Raymond) Odierno, the top commander in the area, just wanted the case to go away. All hell was breaking out in Iraq at the time. Although it wasn’t yet public, Abu Ghraib was happening and neither top brass nor the (Bush) administration wanted to risk bad news leaking out about bad officers.”

Sidestepping

Trying to short circuit the humiliation of his military record being publicly exposed, West responded to the Washington Post by criticizing coverage of his Army misdeeds, stammering in a news release, “If we continue to have our Country led by … ‘perfumed princes’ the security of our Republic is threatened. I would challenge President Obama and Attorney General Holder to find the intestinal fortitude to make hard decisions, and not be cowards prosecuting those far more honourable.

“I shall not allow the future and legacy of my Country to be left to petulant, intellectual elites who would sacrifice our Liberty and Freedom,” West fumed. Yet for a man who expresses disdain for “intellectual elites” and “perfumed princes” – whatever that means – his election website boasts of the three degrees West earned, including two Masters. Uhm, doesn’t that put him in among the perfumed intellectual elite?

And yet he sidesteps the key issue of the charges against him: Torturing prisoners. The closest he comes is saying, “I made a simple statement at my Article 32 hearing when asked if I would take the same action again, ‘If it is about the safety and lives of my men, I would go through hell with a gasoline can’.”

West doesn’t bother explaining how an unarmed and bound prisoner being held at a secure Army base posed a risk to “the safety and lives of my men” that justified a beating and mock execution.

Yet despite West’s shameful military record and triangulating on his plea deal, neither the Palm Beach County Republican Party nor Dinerstein, its chair, are stepping back from their endorsement.

Cut Taxes, Monger Fear

Florida’s 22nd is represented by Ron Klein, a member of the House’s New Democrat Coalition, a self-described group of “moderate, pro-business Democrats” – read “ConservaDem” business shills – who often vote against much of the party’s platform. First elected in 2006, Klein is seeking his third term in 2010. Yet as marginal a Democrat as Klein might be, West makes him seem like Markos Moulitsas by comparison.

For example, in a campaign appearance that was taped and made its way around the right wing blogosphere, West says repeatedly that the US is fighting “Islamic jihad” – fundamentalist code words calling for a Christian war on Islam. He ignores the reality that even the Pentagon and CIA have concluded the insurgency in both countries is between rival religious factions, tribes, warlords and criminal gangs. Both government and independent investigations have stated unequivocally that many Afghan fighters are farmers with no particular political views who either simply want foreign armies out of their country or are being paid $5-to-$10 a day to plant roadside bombs and lob RGPs out of the hills at US and other forces.

But West’s debunked claim is typical of how the GOP operates, relying on unsubstantiated fear mongering and distorting facts to try scoring points.

Worse, his prescription for fixing America’s broken health care system is more of the same: “Our health care system needs reforms … These reforms can be instituted within the classic conservative principles of limited government, liberty, individual responsibility and accountability, and free market solutions.”

I guess “individual responsibility” means the 47-million people without health care coverage better stay healthy.

He is equally off-kilter on energy, stating on his website that “In the late 70s we were importing some 18-20% of our energy resources from foreign sources. Today we are importing close to 65% of our energy resources from foreign sources, making the failures of the Department of Energy evident to everyone.”

That both the US and its economy grew over the last 30-some years, more than quadrupling the demand for energy, isn’t mentioned nor does West explain the tautology of somehow equating rising consumption with the Dept. of Energy – which has nothing to do with determining how or where oil comes from. Forget about alternative sources. To West, it’s all drill, baby, drill.

Finally, in a district thick with immigrants, he concludes that “furthering the illegal immigrant agenda over that of America, I consider them seditious and treasonous … Talk radio host Michael Savage sums this issue up nicely: Borders, culture, and language.”

Since America is a land of immigrants, I’m not sure what he means by “furthering the illegal immigrant agenda over America.” What is the illegal immigrant agenda, anyway? And why is a black candidate quoting the words of Michael Savage, an avowed racist?

Don Dinerstein

Enter Sid Dinerstein, godfather of the Palm Beach GOP apparatus, who handed the endorsement to West.

According to Pete Corson, a Florida political observer and partially disabled Vietnam veteran, “Palm Beach has the clout on this one, so Sid gets his way. Most of us have had a hard time figuring this one out. Sid is not a racist per se but he is damn close. There has to be a deal in here somewhere.”

In his self-published book, Dinerstein lashes out at immigrants, blaming them for so-called “multiculturalism” by writing “As long as there were many cultures, English was essential. Now that there is one other extraordinarily large culture…the Hispanic culture…English is even more essential. In Canada, they have friends and ‘amis’ – and Separation referenda. If we have friends and “amigos,” our “e pluribus” will stop becoming ‘Unum.’”

Excuse me, Sid, but Canada has had only two separation votes in its long history, both defeated, and Québec nationalism all but died off after the last vote in the early 1990s. And how does someone speaking Spanish destroy the concept of e pluribus Unum?

And when Democrats are in control, Dinerstein is a fiscal hawk, writing “Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Congress and the President are going to chip in $100-billion to help them rebuild that town, and we say “OK.” Where’s it coming from? The answer is, nowhere. It’s Off Budget. That means that it doesn’t change the 200 billion dollars one bit. But it adds $100-billion to next year’s debt. It’s Off the budget and On the debt. Nice!”

Sid conveniently forgets that it was George Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress that did this off-budget sleight-of-hand year after year – including costs for the illegal Iraq misadventure and the botched Afghan war.

Toss Up

According to Corson, “(West’s) appeal has been minimal in the more moneyed ‘white’ areas of the district, so most observers regard his candidacy as a wash. The conventional wisdom is he loses in a close race to Ron Klein because he isn't Jewish and he won't get enough "black" votes to offset the low turnout in the country club areas.

“Otherwise, insiders are sticking tightly to the existing script, believing that they represent truth, justice, and the American Way,” Corson concludes

So Allen West campaigns in FL22 by crying out for taking back the country – but from whom?

I seem to recall rather large elections in 2006 and again in 2008 in which the now-sitting president and Democrats running for House and Senate seats were elected by an overwhelming majority of voters who were dissatisfied by, and fed up with, the other party’s ideas, demagoguery, lack of respect for the Constitution, and a total and complete disregard for American laws, traditions and values.

Candidate West is a living example of why Republicans – those like him as well as those who actually put country ahead of party – were tossed from office in the last two elections. And why he should be kept as far from Congress as possible.

h/t to Steve Kufus

Joe Lieberman Is “Unbalanced”

According to five clinical psychiatrists who describe themselves as being politically aware, Joe Lieberman’s behaviour over the last few weeks of the Senate health care debate reveals numerous signs that he is increasingly “unbalanced.”

All five caution that, while it is difficult to make a specific diagnosis without seeing a patient in their office, Lieberman’s public statements show growing evidence of an individual who is disconnected with pieces of the reality around them.

“If somebody called me and described the symptoms in their spouse that Joe Lieberman is displaying, I’d recommend they come in for an appointment or two so an initial assessment could be made,” says Dr. Stanley Shapiro, who retired recently from his practice and says he is a lifelong Democrat. “From what I’ve watched on television and read in the papers, he’s acting clinically unbalanced.”

At the same time, senior Senate aides from both sides of the aisle report that while Lieberman has always been unpredictable and difficult to work with, it’s a trait that became magnified after he lost his primary challenge to Ned Lamont in 2006.

The psychiatrists all spoke in their professional capacity and, to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently interviewing only doctors who tilt left, I asked each to identify their political views. Of the five, one described their views as progressive or Democratic, two say they lean towards “conservative” or “Republican” and one refused to indicate their political position. Some would speak for attribution but others requested anonymity, citing professional concerns.

“He contradicts himself from day to day,” notes Dr. Irvin Wolkoff, citing as an example Lieberman’s statement last Friday that he would wait for the Congressional Budget Office to “score” the then-compromise version of the Senate health care bill before deciding whether to support the bill – and then appearing on Face the Nation two days later voicing die-hard opposition.

Dr. Wolkoff, a self-described conservative, summed up Lieberman in two words.

“He’s meshugener,” the psychiatrist stated matter-of-factly, using the Yiddish word for “crazy person.” Asked if this is a personal or professional opinion, Dr. Wolkoff replied half-jokingly, “maybe a bit of both.”

In other words, no one – people working on the Hill, Pres. Obama or people in The White House, voters back in Connecticut or cable news’ talking heads – should be surprised that it’s impossible to negotiate with Lieberman on health care or anything else substantive. He’s simply acting crazy.

The Beytrayed’s Revenge

The question is why; what might explain Lieberman’s behaviour?

“No doubt, Lieberman felt betrayed by voters in 2006,” says a Boston analyst who does not want her name used, “and this is his unconscious acting out a sort of ‘revenge of the betrayed.’ I see it frequently in my practice with patients who are angry that their spouse had an affair or who lost their job in circumstances they consider unfair.”

Several other psychiatrists echo her judgment.

“When he felt cornered, he even abandoned his own long-held policies,” states a Chicago psychiatrist under assurances of anonymity. “He’s favoured a Medicare buy-in since 2000 but dropped (his support) in a day because a liberal Democrat in the House said it was a good idea.

“This is the mark of someone grappling with major psychological issues,” the politically independent doctor concludes. “He needs help and, meantime, he’s damaging himself and the nation.”

Hillside Manner

Senate staffers are as worried about Sen. Lieberman as are mental health professionals.

A half-dozen senior aides interviewed for this article expressed varying degrees of frustration and despair in dealing with the Senator and his staff. None allowed their name to be used because they’re not authorised to speak to the media on-the-record.

“He’s always been a problem child,” says a senior staff member of a Republican senator, “but in the last few years Sen. Lieberman often seems disconnected with what is happening around him.”

When that occurs, said another who works for a long-time Democratic senator, “he lashes out.”

In her Friday column in the New York Times, Gail Collins, who has covered Lieberman since the days when he was a Connecticut state senator, is more colourfully blunt:

“Observers who have known him for a long time feel as though they’re living out a scene in a science-fiction movie when the guy who’s just been bitten by the vampire-moose comes home and sits down to dinner, unaware that he’s sprouting antlers.”

Bah Humbug! Holiday Films So Cute I Puke

Crank up the schmaltz and mix in a preposterous plot. It’s nearly Christmas and for the next few weeks we’ll be bombarded with movies that give me hives.

We’ve all had the experience of wandering into the wrong bar and immediately realizing that, unless we leave quickly, something horrid will occur. This has happened to me in Toronto, once in Detroit, twice in Jamaica where every local bar seems to have something bad happening in it, and in Manhattan’s meat packing district. In each case, I sized up the situation fast, realised that my life hung in the balance and beat a hasty retreat.

This is exactly how I feel about Christmas movies.

If I turn on television and the words “John Hughes,” “Chevy Chase,” “Tim Allen” and “Dan Aykroyd” pop up on the screen, my blood runs cold, my temples throb and I switch over to Fat Boy Hackeysack on ESPN2, or faux history shows like Ancestors in the Attic and Ice Road Truckers. I’d rather watch more bad news from Afghanistan on BBC World, or even Céline Dion on Ice.

In fact, I’ll watch almost anything other than Christmas movies, which have one of only four plots: Cuddly, cloying, cretinous and cute.

It’s a Wonderful Life, a story about a small-time banker with a heart of gold, manages to combine all four elements as it inexplicably lionises a mulyak who risks the financial health of his entire community by making a series of bad loans to people who are in no position to repay them. Particularly unsuitable for holiday viewing this year, the 1947 Frank Capra-corn film should be re-titled It’s A Wonderful Subprime Life, with Bernie Madoff and the entire AIG board in digitally manipulated cameo appearances.

A Christmas Carol, in any of its myriad versions, perpetuates the myth that the obscenely rich can be made to see the error of their ways and be rehabilitated even though anyone who has ever dealt with someone obscenely rich knows it isn’t true.

Miracle on 34th Street, in which a department store Santa goes on trial to prove that Kris Kringle actually exists, has been tugging at heartstrings for so long that everybody’s heartstrings are completely tugged out.

Where Old Stars Die

More recent Christmas movies resemble elephants’ graveyards where deposed matinee idols go to die. How sad to see Robert Mitchum, at the tail end of his brilliant career, trading one-liners in Scrooged with a smarmy Bill Murray. How distressing to see Jamie Lee Curtis, once the very hottest of the hot, served up as a paunchy sight gag in a skimpy bikini in Christmas with the Kranks. How unsettling to see Robert Duvall in Four Christmases.

These people were genuine stars. Not stand-up comics like Will Ferrell or Chevy Chase or Vince Vaughn who get cast in films only because they sell tickets, but bona fide movie stars. Christmas With the Kranks is so bad that after 20 minutes, I switched the audio from to French from English and SAP’d Korean subtitles hoping it would make Aykroyd seem amusing.

Pas de chance.

The kids in Christmas films don’t help.

The precocious tyke who rides in Santa’s sleigh in The Santa Clause is so overbearing that I keep hoping Dancer and Prancer will leave him behind on an ice floe to get ripped to shreds by polar bears. The moppets in Miracle on 34th Street, Jingle All the Way, and Elf make me ask if there are no orphanages. Even Home Alone, which was entertaining enough when first released, ultimately becomes impossible to watch. Not only did it lead to Home Alone 2, Home Alone 3 and Daniel Stern’s career, but because Macaulay Culkin eventually turned into the kind of showbiz monster the entire planet should forget.

Along with my Aunt Fay, a niece in my ex-wife’s family was born on Christmas morning. Not long after she first drew breath, I began haunting video stores, buying up every copy of Dolly Parton’s A Smoky Mountain Christmas so that she would never witness the holiday depths to which Hollywood could sink. As it turns out, a great advantage of having a niece born on Dec. 25th is that Christmas babies, without exception, revile Christmas movies.

Some Respite

Of course, there are some Christmas movies that do not induce nausea or hives.

Love, Actually is redeemed by Bill Nighy’s memorable turn as a washed-up rocker trying to cash in on the holiday season. Once you get past all the bayonets, tear gas and intestines flying through the air, Joyeux Noël – an odd 2006 French flick about an improbable Yuletide truce during the First World War – is bearable enough. Then there’s the strange Un Conte de Noël, starring Catherine Deneuve. Putting Catherine Deneuve in a Christmas movie is a cheap trick because Catherine Deneuve is France’s Christmas gift to humanity. Merci beaucoup. Merci, mille fois.

Oh. Before I forget, in Un Conte de Noël Deneuve plays a woman dying of leukaemia who hates her kids. This is the French idea of Christmas cheer.

If I could give a gift to Christmas Day itself, it would be the promise that there would never be another Christmas movie. Obviously I can’t do this because Christmas Day is an abstraction that can’t receive gifts and I don’t have the power to make such a guarantee anyway.

Until then, I stick to my all-time favourite Christmas movie: Bad Santa, a vicious, uncompromising attack on the entire genre featuring Billy Bob Thornton as the grumpy old elf in an unrelentingly funny performance almost on a par with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers. A particularly acrid feature of Bad Santa is casting child actor Brett Kelly as a dim witted porker who honestly believes that Thornton’s debased department store Santa is the real McCoy. I only wish that my aunt had lived long enough to see this film; she would have loved it.

And if you’re truly in a foul mood from watching too many Christmas movies, there’s always Sarah Silverman’s holiday music video.



To you, the best of the holiday season – which is more likely to happen if you avoid holiday movies. They’re so cute you could puke.

Paul Volcker Body Slams World Bankers

It wasn’t the kind of genteel discussion the world’s highest-level bankers probably expected when a large group of them gathered at a posh Surrey country house hotel in England this week for a conference under the cosy auspices of the very friendly Wall Street Journal and billed as the “Future of Finance Initiative.”

I’ve covered this sort of conference in the past and, other than the topic, they’re all basically the same: A group of mostly-men, nearly all very white, all very wealthy, typically in their late 50s and early 60s, wearing very expensive suits sitting in a comfy room somewhere plush listening to what they want to hear. The meals are lavish, golf outings plentiful, the time convivial and private jets wait at a nearby strip to ferry them home when it’s over.

So they must have been dumbstruck when Paul Volcker, head of Pres. Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former chair of the Federal Reserve, rose to his considerable full height to deliver one body slam after another. He scolded them like they were school boys who got caught being naughty and are sloughing off what they did as a harmless prank.

First, he took after the billions in salaries and bonuses bankers in the room are still hauling in, even in the wake of the financial sector meltdown that almost ruined the global economy. Volcker fumed, “Has there been one financial leader to say this is really excessive? Wake up, gentlemen. Your response … has been inadequate.”

The colour must have drained from the assembled faces and pink may not have had time to return to the well-fed cheeks when he delivered another round-house punch. He attacked the rise of incomprehensible products such as credit default swaps, the instrument that brought down AIG and Lehman Bros., and almost took a half-dozen major banks along with it.

“I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence,” Volcker slapped.

No Real Innovation

According to a report at TimesOn-Line, no one in the audience disputed him, instead arguing that “innovation” was a necessity for bankers while claiming re-regulating the sector would sound a death knell for any new clever products. A clearly irritated Volcker shot back that the biggest innovation in the banking industry over the past 20 years was the cash machine.

Why didn’t Pres. Obama deliver this speech when he spoke to bankers on Wall St. a few months ago? Better late than never, I suppose, and bankers are slightly more likely to pay attention to Volcker than to Obama as evidenced by the fact that several major US bank CEOs turned down the invitation to hear the president speak.

Volcker went on to note that financial services in the US increased its share of value to 6.5% from 2%, demanding to know whether it’s “a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

A mighty sigh of relief must have filled the chamber when Volcker sat down. Little did they know that another chilling contribution from Sir Deryck Maughan, a partner in private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a former head of investment bank Salomon Bros., was awaiting them.

Sir Deryck took after bank’s risk management techniques, warning delegates that many of the flawed mathematical models underpinning the banks failed approaches are still being used, saying that the industry had not “faced up to the intellectual failure of risk management systems, which are still hardwired into many banks and many trading floors.”

He also questioned whether taxpayers should continue to underwrite many of those risks.

“There’s something wrong about large proprietary risks being taken at the risk of taxpayers,” he insisted.

Earlier Baroness Vadera, an adviser to the G20 and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during the banking crisis — warned that European lenders had yet to acknowledge the scale of their losses and bad debts, something the Obama administration has been quietly admonishing senior government officials in France and Germany about. She said, “… some of the continental banks still have (serious) issues.”

She said she continues to have nightmares about how close the banking system came to total collapse last year.

Meanwhile, US multi-billionaire investor George Soros told the group the same thing he told Congress earlier this year: Credit default swaps should be banned. The billionaire investor likened them to buying life insurance and then giving someone a licence to shoot the insured person.

A Teachable Moment

It’s too bad that Volcker’s speech wasn’t webcast into the office of every Senator and member of Congress back in Washington. They needed to hear the message as much as did the bankers.

The fact is that while many Democrats in Congress struggle to come up with some kind of meaningful re-regulation of banks and the financial services sector generally, the very same people who were rebuked by Volcker at the conference flew home to the States to lobby on behalf of keeping the status quo. Helped by Republicans and “conservative” Democrats who receive more-than-generous campaign contributions from the very institutions that sunk the economy and millions of individuals, it’s likely that Volcker’s words will be ignored at best, forgotten at worst.

If that happens, then what Pres. Obama likes to call “a teachable moment” will be lost.

Canadian PM Harper Carries On As Bush Lite.

For as long as anyone can remember, Canada has been the world’s warm-hearted, generous friend.

When Mao’s millions were on the long march, Canadian physician Dr. Norman Bethune went to China to care for the sick, wounded and disabled making the trek, regardless of their politics.

Because British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery used Canadian troops as disposable cannon fodder during World War II, the nation’s soldiers liberated places like Central Italy and Holland after ferocious fighting left thousands of Canadians dead and wounded. To this day, the Dutch of all ages revere Canadians. I was in a small café in rural Holland one evening and when people learned I was from Toronto, they insisted on paying for my food and drinks, not taking no for an answer after inviting me to join them rather than eating alone. I felt like Tony Bennett at an AARP convention.

When England, France and Israel tried grabbing the Suez Canal from the Egyptians in the mid-50s, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Lester Pearson rushed to the UN and worked out a peaceful end to the disaster. Blue helmeted Canadian peace keepers became a welcomed site in war-torn nations everywhere since then.

All during the Bush years, countless Americans pasted Canadian flag decals on their luggage or backpacks and wore the Maple Leaf flag in their lapel when travelling the world ‘lest they be taunted, tormented or worse as if they were Yanks, even in friendly nations. No one hates Canada.

But Stephen Harper, prime minister of a minority Canadian government since February, 2006, is doing his Bushian best to change this.

Shortcomings

Harper is such a reactionary, so Neanderthal in his outlook, beliefs and world view that he makes Mike Huckabee seem qualified to lead MoveOn.org by comparison.

If you’ve never seen a picture of Harper, he’s the guy at the far end of the line of world leaders at G8 summits, usually wearing an ill-fitting, tan sports jacket and looking so out of place, he seems like the bookkeeper who came to do the accounts, stumbled into the wrong room by mistake and ended up in the photo before anyone realised he was there.

Canadians, or at least those who don’t live in Alberta which is Harper’s home and political base, are well aware of his many shortcomings.

For example, as the world economy collapsed last year, he refused to even consider a stimulus package until the three main opposition parties in Parliament – Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois – threatened to gang up and topple his minority government. An election was avoided only because Harper reluctantly supported a robust bill to help relieve the hideous problems facing Canadians. One result is that Canada now owns about 5% of GM, which has several large factories in Ontario and saving thousands of jobs. While many of its people are still struggling, Canada seems to be inching out of the Great Recession more easily than the US, no thanks to Harper’s darkly distorted ideology and widely discredited view of the role of government.

Extreme Naiveté

Like his role model and folk hero George W. Bush, Harper is busy doing as much damage to Canada’s world role as he is to its long tradition of providing a functional social safety net.

Just this week, in a move totally out of character for China – especially for senior government officials – as Harper stepped off his government green Boeing 757 jet at Beijing’s Capitol Airport, he was pointedly and publicly rebuked by both its premier and president for not visiting the country sooner. After the US, China is one of Canada’s largest trading partners and huge numbers of Chinese live here: Toronto has the largest Chinese community outside of Asia and Vancouver is home to the second-largest. The two countries have been strategically important to each other since the early 1960s.

“For some reason, Harper thinks he doesn’t like China, if he thinks about it at all,” a career foreign service officer with decades of experience dealing with the country told me. Although not authorised to speak publicly, I’ve known and trusted this source since 1993 when I made the first of nearly a dozen trips to Beijing, Shanghai and other provinces.

“We’ve been after the (Prime Minister’s Office) to schedule a trip for as long as Harper has been PM,” he continued. “The Chinese embassy here suggested a number of dates and became insulted when Harper’s people kept saying ‘no’.

“It was increasingly embarrassing to both sides, which is why (prime minister) Wen Jia Bao and (president) President Hu Jin Tao both gave him a polite but very public slap when he arrived in Beijing. Anyone who knows Chinese culture grasped that they are really pissed.”

Two other officials in the foreign affairs ministry essentially confirmed the information.

“I don’t know if he (Harper) is extremely naïve or doesn’t like Chinese food or it’s something else,” one of them complained. “It was especially insulting to the Chinese that he made several official trips to Asia since taking office but wouldn’t stop for a day or two in China.”

“In working with the people around Harper, I get the feeling they don’t grasp the diplomatic, business and foreign policy importance of China to Canada,” the third stated in exasperation.

By comparison, each of Harper’s three predecessors made countless trips to China. Jean Chrétien went so often when he was Prime Minister, insiders jokingly wondered if he was hiding a second family in Beijing.

It Gets Worse

As if the Beijing photo-op wasn’t personally embarrassing enough, his nation chastised by an old friend, other Harper foreign policy disasters lie scattered around the world.

Last week, a special Parliamentary committee on Afghanistan – where Canadian troops have been fighting since the beginning – was stunned when a senior intelligence officer testified that insurgents captured by Canadian forces were tortured when they were turned over to the Afghan government. Even more shocking, Richard Colvin revealed that during his 18 months stationed in Kabul, cabinet ministers in Harper’s government knew it was happening.

Colvin directly contradicted three years of assurances by Harper that there was no credible evidence prisoners handed over to local authorities were tortured.

Colvin said the sweeping roundups of prisoners – many of them innocent by-standers – and their subsequent torture drove a wedge between Canada and the people of Kandahar where most Canadian troops are stationed, destroying much of the good will soldiers died to achieve.

"In my judgment, (our) complicity in torture turned local people against us," Colvin told a hushed room, where opposition MPs sat slack jawed and open-mouthed at what they were hearing.

"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure,” Colvin insisted.

Colvin said he remains concerned because Canada continues to hand over its prisoners to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service.

While the Harper government first denied the claim, within days Foreign Minister Peter McKay admitted Colvin’s testimony was true but only after memos incriminating the government were leaked.

Same At Gitmo

Harper is equally indifferent about a Canadian citizen detained for years at Guantanamo Bay.

Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan by Americans and shipped to Gitmo where a secret video of him begging for help from someone he thought was a diplomat but was really an intelligence officer was leaked. Khadr has told officials he was a soldier only because his father, now living in Pakistan, threatened to kill him if he didn’t. Evidence indicates that Khadr hadn’t shot or killed any US forces, as his original detention alleged, and now the US wants to send him home.

But Harper is blocking it, forcing the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene and agree to hear the case. Nothing in Canadian law allows the government to refuse entry to a citizen but Harper doesn’t want the boy – who’s now 22 – to be reunited with his family.

O, Canada. Stephen Harper stands on guard for who?

We Can’t “Train” Our Way Out Of Afghanistan

According to a BBC news report, last week in Kabul “an American service member and an Afghan police officer got into an argument because the American was drinking water in front of the Afghan police, who are not eating or drinking … because of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan … (The policeman) shot the American and seriously wounded him, while other American troops responded by seriously wounding the (policeman).”

This depressing vignette spotlights the problem for American troops in Afghanistan. And it shows the problems Afghans have with ignorant foreigners whose boorish insensitivity would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

A perceptive American military officer told The Washington Post that “Having US troops enforcing martial law where they don’t understand the people or speak the language — this is a recipe for disaster.” Quite so, although using the phrase “martial law” is a bit disconcerting.

The same applies to training the Afghan army and police, a key component of Pres. Obama’s escalation. Training and “mentoring” of Afghan troops and police by Americans – lush with shades of Vietnam-era condescension – won’t work and we can’t “train” our way out of the country.

Sounds Like “Stripes”

To begin with, along with the US Army, training is conducted by different nations, none of which use similar methods. Indeed, NATO and troops from other nations don’t have compatible rules of engagement, communications or logistics systems, equipment, command structures or domestic political pressures. NATO and the “International Security Assistance Force” have some 65,000 troops there. About half are American, but more than 30,000 other US troops operate under entirely US command, having nothing to do with NATO.

To say this is fucked-up is being polite. Here are the lordly superior nations of the West, intent on bringing law, order and clean government to Afghanistan – a land where none of the three has ever existed – and they do not have a single headquarters responsible for commanding all military operations.

If a young captain at West Point proposed such a structure in a term paper, he would flunk out of the academy. It all sounds like a scene from the Bill Murray and Harold Ramis film, Stripes. Except Stripes was a comedy and we’re talking about the real world.

There is no overall Mission Statement for the 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. As the war intensifies, it is likely that national contingents now operating in comparatively safe areas will be subjected to action by warlords, Taliban, drug barons and other criminal thugs. If this happens – and we’re beginning to see some of it already in the previously peaceful north – there will be even more chaos.

Fiasco Looms

The US says that training soldiers is the responsibility of the Afghan army with our assistance. True, as far as it goes. But at least six countries are involved in training Afghans, a surefire recipe for confusion. So last April, realising that the training process had failed, NATO announced it would create a Training Mission with “a single commander for both the US-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan.”

Good luck trying, but it won’t work. What is needed is a stand-alone training system that could be designed in detail by a competent major in about a week.

One reason the US Army is so good is because all recruits are functionally literate and speak English, along with whatever other language they may know. The dedication and ingenuity of their instructors is utterly amazing. The logistics system is, for the most part, staggeringly efficient. A former Army drill sergeant once told me about one of his fresh-faced recruits with size 16 feet who showed up at basic training. The Army doesn’t stock size 16 boots so the quartermaster phoned the boot supplier; two pairs arrived the next day.

Afghanistan doesn’t have supply lines efficient enough to deliver food around the country, let alone a constant stream of goods and ammunition to troops in remote outposts.

Beyond supplies, it takes at least a year to produce a reasonably efficient soldier — and that’s with an almost perfect system. It would be criminal to ask a soldier to hazard his or her life before they were competent.

But Afghan army training is only 10 weeks, and 90% of recruits are illiterate. Worse, they seldom speak the same language as either their peers or the foreigners instructing them. Afghan instructors are keen but barely effective. US and other foreign instructors may be good but most are depressingly ignorant of Afghanistan’s language, culture and customs. Moreover, with a desertion rate of 25%, the country’s troops and police have a turnover rate that would cripple even the best training regimen.

Fighters Diverted To Training

It’s reported that, as part of Obama’s surge, one brigade of the 82nd Airborne will be deployed to serve as trainers. But the 82nd Airborne is a regular Army brigade trained hard and tough to fight; unit members are not trained to train.

What a farce.

The training system in Afghanistan won’t work, nor will the absurdly complex new command arrangements being put in place. For example, there will be a “new ISAF Upper Command Structure, (which) will consist of a higher operational Headquarters, ISAF HQ commanded by a 4-star General, and a subordinate 3-star HQ called ISAF Joint Command (IJC) HQ. Both will be located in Kabul …” And so on.

In a marvellous piece of military speak, another bulletin announces that “COMIC-J (emphasis mine) will be exclusively a NATO Commander, as opposed to COMNTM-A who will be double-hatted as NATO/ISAF Commander and Commander of the US-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A).”

COMIC? I couldn’t make it up. But it’s all too real, if barely believable.

Heaven help Afghanistan, our soldiers sent to fight and die there for no good reason, and the rest of us.

UPDATE 8: Goofy Sarah Gets Punked - Again

Once again, Sarah Palin got punked by a comedian.

This time, "reporter" Marg Delahunty - played by Mary Walsh - of Canada's long-running social and political satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes tries to interview Sarah Palin at a book signing in Ohio.



So she's advocating repealing the "socialist" Canadian healthcare system and replacing it with a system that works so well in the US?

Hey, Sarah: Donchaknow your plane flies over Canada on the way to Wasilla?

h/t to Denis Campbell at The UK Progressive.

Obama’s Afghan Box Canyon

Anyone who’s been to Afghanistan knows that its eastern mountains bordering Pakistan are filled with countless box canyons from which the only way out is the same way you came in. They’re deadly – Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire in this nightmarish geography – because it’s easy for insurgents to rain RPGs, mortars and small arms fire down on soldiers who never see what’s coming or from where it’s coming.

Thanks to George Bush’s seven years of neglect, Pres. Obama finds himself in just such a deadly box canyon in Afghanistan, militarily, politically and financially. Tomorrow night, he’ll lay out a strategy to do the nearly impossible: Outline a way out without getting out or getting trapped.

Carefully leaked snippets of what he’ll say at West Point are telegraphing that he won’t agree that the best way out of Afghanistan is to leave. So, we’re likely to hear some new version of the old version of the story.

Beyond Bush, a good measure of Obama’s dilemma is that someone high up in the Pentagon or working on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff in Kabul leaked his troop proposals to The New York Times and other reporters and then gave a public speech in London touting his views while the president was still forming an overall strategy; the speech earned the general a face-to-face dressing down from Obama on Air Force One as it sat on the ramp in Copenhagen after the president’s appearance at the Olympic Selection Committee. McChrystal got off easy because Harry Truman fired Douglas Macarthur for doing pretty much the same thing over Korea.

A combination of the leaked memo and McChrystal’s telling the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that a scaled down policy favoured by Vice President Joe Biden would lead to "Chaos-istan" narrowed Obama’s options. It gave Republicans a chance to scream “Listen to your general!” while allowing the left to accuse the president of opening the door to another Vietnam quagmire.

Even Bill Moyers – who was present at the creation of Lyndon Johnson’s mess – is expressing strong reservations. Besides announcing his retirement, Moyers devoted an entire Journal episode a week ago to a detailed recounting of how LBJ spent more time “listening to his generals” than to thoughtful people such as Senators William Fulbright and Richard Russell or newspaper publisher John Knight who, while recognising the domestic political risks, were telling the president Vietnam was a mistake, we should get out because Americans would be fighting for a decade and 50,000 soldiers would be killed.

How sadly prescient Fulbright, Russell, Knight, Sen. Wayne Morse and others were in 1965.

Military Debacle

As Danny Schechter wrote at Media Matters a few days after Moyer’s broadcast his cautionary warning, “The parallels with the present day, and the upcoming decision by President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan, are unmistakable and undeniable.”

As did LBJ in 1965, today the words “winning” and “finishing the job” and “fighting terrorists” creep into nearly every discussion of Afghanistan. Politicians, so-called military experts, reporters, pundits, talking heads, Dick Cheney, and loudmouth idiots insist upon looking at the war through a cracked prism, one that sees Bullets Over Broadway as the only possible, logical outcome if we don’t throw everything we’ve got into a fight in Khandahar.

The fact is, there’s a military debacle awaiting Obama behind every boulder.

“Whether Obama can 'finish the job' in Afghanistan depends on what he defines the job as,” Juan Cole wrote at Informed Comment, his authoritative blog on the Middle East and South Asia. Cole continues, “If it is to build a 21st century Afghan state and crush the Taliban and other Muslim political movements in the Pashtun areas, then I am extremely skeptical. If it is to prop up a shaky … Afghan government and military before pulling out, then his odds of success, while still bad, do rise.”

Pres. Obama will reportedly send 4,000 military trainers as part of the escalation. He could send 40,000 and it wouldn’t make any difference. There are widely published reports that desertion rates in the Afghan army runs at 25% and illiteracy rates among soldiers is roughly 90%.

How can a soldier be taught to stand and fight when they can’t read the manual that explains how to load a magazine cartridge into their rifle or clean the damn thing?

Moreover, soldier’s pay is low: Much lower than the $5 a day farmers, who are mostly non-political but whose families are starving, get paid by various insurgents for planting a roadside bomb or two before disappearing into the countryside. And, for the most part, working part-time for an insurgent group is a whole lot safer than being a semi-trained, illiterate, uniformed solider going into battle under corrupt leadership.

Regardless of the President’s strategy, there is disaster awaiting American, Canadian and NATO troops. Just ask Alexander the Great. Genghis Khan. The British. The Soviets.

Political Nightmare

There could be as much of a disaster awaiting Obama at home, where he hasn’t come across as fighting for serious health care reform, more interested in getting one or two Republican votes than in fulfilling a major campaign promise.

“It is extremely dangerous for him to go on alienating his base, which wants peace and prosperity,” Dr. Cole predicts, “with policies that make rightwing Republicans happy – coddling bankers in a jobless recovery and escalating an eight-year-old, increasingly unpopular war. The rightwing Republicans will vote for these in Congress but blame Obama for them, and benefit from Democratic disillusionment in 2012.”

Obama is in the same box canyon politically as he is militarily.

If he doesn’t send more troops, the deadly stalemate will continue and the GOP will have an election issue that could draw independents and moderate Republicans back into the fold.

If he sends more men and women to fight and die in Afghanistan, he won’t have any greater success at stabilising the country yet many Democrats and most progressives will feel betrayed again. Although Obama may enjoy a brief up-tick in poll numbers after his talk, as soon as larger numbers of American bodies come home in flag-draped coffins, and Walter Reed fills up again with the damaged bodies and minds of soldiers whose lives have been ruined, the country will turn against what it thought, in November, 2009, was a good idea.

Blank Checks

Even worse, the GOP will seize on the cost of escalating the war – which is something like $1-million per soldier per year – as an excuse to cut much-needed social programs at home: The public option, education, jobs, rebuilding infrastructure, converting to a greener economy, dealing with climate change, all will suffer as a result.

Moreover, fiscally conservative Democrats in Congress – of which there are far too many – will join in, effectively blocking what sound economists such as UC-Berkeley’s Dr. Robert Reich and Princeton’s Nobel Prize winning Dr. Paul Krugman – among many others – demonstrate is a much-needed additional stimulus to bring down the nation’s unholy unemployment and underemployment numbers, noting that current debt levels can be dealt with later because low bond rates show the market isn’t worried about how much the US owes.

As recently as Monday morning, Krugman wrote in his New York Times column a major new jobs programme is needed, warning that while “(a)ll of this would cost money, probably several hundred billion dollars … (b)ut has to be weighed against the high cost of inaction in the face of a social and economic emergency.”

The question is whether Congress would support such a programme. The House might but it’s likely to get bottled up in the Senate – along with nearly 1,000 other measures the House passed this year but the Upper House has yet to discuss.

Meanwhile, Obama is stuck trying to find his way out of a box canyon that, first, Bush’s neo-cons and, more recently, Gen. McChrystal led him into without getting another 3,000-to-5,000 Americans killed as needed programmes at home go wanting.

The Spirit Of Thanksgiving

Even after 19 years of living in Canada, it seems odd not to be gorging myself on a food fest the last Thursday in November at the start of a four day holiday.

Fortunately, Wednesday Addams reminds all of us of the true meaning and history of Thanksgiving.



h/t to Paul Krugman

Like Leaves, Life Always Drifts Back To Earth

By this time last November, I’d already wrenched my back shovelling. Twice. But this year, November in Toronto feels like May. Of course, May felt like March and August like late October so maybe it’s all just evening out.

It’s been in the 50s and 60s – called “double digits” in Canada, which insists on using the totally unfathomable Celsius thermometer – and sunny since Halloween. Knowing that such warm weather this late is like living on borrowed time, my dog and I are taking full advantage, spending afternoons in a nearby off-the-leash park. Prince, a Golden Retriever I adopted a few years ago, romps, stomps and rock-n-rolls with assorted friends – some familiar, some new, but to dogs it doesn’t make any difference and they greet all comers without prejudice. Finally, he hauls his tail over to where I’m sitting on a bench in the sun and lays down, panting, smiling and utterly exhausted.

He rests there contentedly, his white fur flecked with red and orange and brown bits of dried leaves, looking up at me every so often as if saying, “Thanks, pop, that was way too much fun!” If a buddy dashes over for more, all Prince has the energy to do is roll on his back, legs flailing at the air while making gentle, throaty sounds of joy as he plays mouth games with the other pooch. When the dog runs off to find a more active and eager buddy, Prince is content to let them go. At nine, he knows his limits; once he lies down, that’s it.

I know mine, as well, and it’s time for me to lie down.

I know this because, along with incredible weather, November brought me both a birthday and a report from the latest round of medical tests I underwent that had been administered by a long line of anonymous Torquemada’s dressed in identical white coats and pale blue scrubs some 10 days earlier. My cancer is back for a return engagement.

I’ve decided not to undergo more treatment. After I’ve-lost-track of how many rounds of chemo and radiation, plus a bit of surgery stuck in there someplace, enough’s enough. After thinking about it seriously, I’m not going to submit to months of feeling lousy – I mean really lousy – during treatment again only to be told six months later I need more treatment. I’ve heard “… and this should take care of it” one too many times to believe it anymore.

Naturally, my oncologist was beside himself and sent me off to see a hospital social worker. It was a pleasant enough exchange but not so pleasant I want to have another one. I did talk about this at length with my psychiatrist, who sometimes calls himself Flapping Lips, and while urging me to reconsider, he admits he doesn’t know what he’d do if he were in my situation and had lived my life.

I’ve had a great time during big chunks of that life.

When I was only seven, Warren Spahn taught me how to throw a baseball in the outfield grass at the old Milwaukee County Stadium before a Braves’ game. I couldn’t have learned from anyone better: Spahn went on to win more games than any left-handed pitcher in Major League history – a record he still holds today, decades after he retired from the game – and is in the Hall of Fame.

At one time or another, my work took me all over the world. I’ve been to all of Western Europe, much of Eastern Europe, China and Asia, and parts of Africa and South America. I've eaten dinner in the Eiffel Tower, stood in Red Square, played with a lion cub in a South African game preserve, walked on the Great Wall, watched jade traders at a street corner market on a Kowloon backstreet in Hong Kong, seen the sun rise on Bali and set over Phuket. There’s an elegant Chinese expression that, translated inelegantly, says "The same man does not return from a journey as the one who departed on it." I think it is true of all types of journeys and not just those involving travel.

I’ve lived in six great cities in two countries, absorbing bits of each along the way ranging from how I pronounce some words to a more expansive view of the world, and life, and me.

I’ve enjoyed five fairly distinct and generally successful careers; along the way, I was employed by only one place that I detested so thoroughly I couldn’t wait to get out.

I’ve met four US presidents, one in the Oval Office, and two Canadian Prime Ministers. I spent some fascinating time with two different men who played major roles in changing the face of Eastern Europe, and several days with a Chinese premier who turned his nation into the coming economic powerhouse of the 21st century before retiring. I’ve dined with authors, artists, playwrights, actors and artisans.

I’ve also met and written about the downtrodden, the helpless, the throwaway people who lost when life rolled the dice for them. In a few cases, what I wrote brought them to the attention of others who were able to help them turn things around, if even just a bit and for a little while.

I’ve seen the positive glow of pride and self-accomplishment that came into the eyes of more than two dozen adult illiterates I helped learn to read for the first time in their life.

And, since I fancy myself something of a writer, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with a number of them, often on airplanes and typically by accident.

I met Hunter Thompson just this way: The computer assigned us adjacent seats. I seem to be blessed with a peculiar kind of karma with airlines; flights are usually late and the service minimalist, but computers keep plunking me next to wonderful writers. Besides Thompson, over the years I’ve sat next to David Cornwall - John Le Carre - on a flight from London to Paris, Jimmy Breslin on the Boston-New York shuttle and Margaret Atwood from Toronto to somewhere, among others. All were engaging travel companions.

(Of course, it also works the other way ‘round: On a dreadfully long, non-stop flight to Tokyo from Toronto, I endured 14 hours next to an ageing academic who had the pungent aroma of old cheddar cheese and even older moth-balls about him. He had just published a scholarly article on Nietzsche. The premise, he explained in excruciating detail as we crossed the Pacific, was that the brooding, ominous German philosopher’s ideas still can be found underlying many mainstream political theories. Oh, good: The Boys From Brazil are alive and well and having fun in capitals everywhere.)

I’ve covered one war, two major civil insurrections over war, race and poverty in America during the late 60s and early 70s, and three presidential campaigns that ended up being turning points in American history.

A raft of activists, actresses, models, centrefolds, musicians and an actual heiress called me boyfriend at one time or another. So have writers, businesswomen, scholars, shop girls, secretaries, a couple of lawyers and a few single moms.

Ten dogs and one cat have graciously allowed me to share my home and life with them.

On the other hand, parts of my life were overwhelming and deeply disappointing.

None was more so than my sister dying 10 years ago. As hard as it can be to lose parents, one has time to prepare if they live their three score and 10 or more. I saw mine age, lose the ability to do things for themselves that they always took for granted, attended funerals for their friends. But there was no way prepare for watching Janice go from healthy to dead in 11 weeks, of brain cancer. Her loss affected me profoundly, and still does in some ways.

There was a pair of short, disastrous marriages; countless ill-starred, putative relationships with women; one suicide attempt. I was 16 and a sophomore at university, thwarted only because Mr. Donaldson – our retired neighbour across the alley – happened to be awake at two or three o’clock that morning and saw me go into the garage behind our house on Logan Avenue. He was sitting in his darkened kitchen having coffee. Who drinks coffee at three ayem if they’re not working the night shift?

I don’t regret not having children but I do regret never hearing a woman say “I love you” to me and actually mean it. Once, it would have been nice.

I’ve made horrid choices in women, to the point where, sometime in the early 1990s, a friend from my Chicago days recommended that “the next time you meet someone who’s interested in you, run away!” It took another 10 years but I finally realised she was correct and stopped dating altogether. I’m not sure what took so long; maybe it’s living proof of the triumph of hope over experience. Experience finally won.

Experience with my ex-wives contributed but only partly. There also was Elise, the world’s best juggler who managed to hide her fiancé from me - and, I assume, me from her intended - until a week before her wedding; Louisa, the wacky wop; Jacquelyn, the drunken skater; Barbara, the dark creature from hell; Amanda, the bi-coastal bi-sexual who had a boyfriend in New York (me) and a girlfriend in LA; Grace, who was anything but; Holly and Riba and Sera, all of whom thought men were simply gold cards attached to a life support system.

And people wonder why I haven’t asked anyone out for so much a glass of wine since 2003.

Or why I feel disconnected from the world, especially now as my medical situation stares at me blankly, an expressionless reality that has more fight left in it than I have remaining in me.

So it goes.

Death will be patient, if I let it. No oncologist worth the Hippocratic oath will tell a cancer patient how much time they have left because, frankly, they don’t know and the really good ones admit they don’t know. Cancer is an intelligent and clever disease, capable of thwarting brilliant human talent and crackling machines worth millions of dollars. In my case, I’m told, one cell hiding somewhere in my body, invisible to even the most sophisticated of diagnostic tools, is sitting there throwing off cancerous cells that go directly to my colon.

Thus, should I undergo yet another round of debilitating chemo and enervating radiation, that hidden, little cell will lay in wait in some dark, moist place inside me until I’m pronounced “clear” and then start its dirty task all over again.

There doesn’t seem to be much point in playing medicine’s game another time.

Sorry to tell you this Chuck Grassley and Sarah Palin and Virginia Fox and Glenn Beck and the rest of the Teabaggers and people who think the richest nation on earth is doing just fine having one-third of its population uninsured or underinsured: The only death panel is the one inside each of us.

I’ll keep working and writing as much and as well as I can for as long as I can. When I think the time has come, then Prince, Sparky – my 10 year old cat of unknown and highly suspect origins – and I will cross the Rainbow Bridge and go together into the great void, returning to cosmic dust.

This appeared originally at QOR, a site that carries my work and whose contributors discuss culture, and modern life and living in words, images and music.

The Remake Of Pelham 1-2-3: Why So Many Movies Today Are So Lousy

I just saw The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 remake so I could better understand the inevitable sequel, The Putting Back of Pelham 1-2-3 Right Where It Belongs, and to compare it with the 1974 original, which spelled out the numbers in the title because audiences had longer attention spans back then.

The original, done in the pit of New-York-as-Hell era of filmmaking, was a crackling film packed with sturdy performances: Walter Matthau as the Bassett Hound subway dispatcher who deals with the hijackers; Robert Shaw as a steely-nerved soldier of fortune; Lee Wallace as a whiny, flu-plagued Mayor Ed Koch. But the real star was New York: Grim, shabby, broken, peeling. It looked like it smelled of uncollected garbage and bum’s socks.

Yet the movie was great. Everyone loves a crisp heist-and-caper flick, especially when you don’t know how the crooks will escape – or get caught. Add seasoned actors who knew how to inhabit a role and a director who lets the story tell the story instead of some jacked-up FX computer monkey doing it in the edit suite, and you had a superb, edgy film.

The remake is noisy, hyperactive, bright and incessantly vulgar.

We know the bad guy is bad ‘cause he shouts "Fucker!" frequently and "Motherfucker!" even more often. No, hold on; the good guys say that, too. Well, the bad guy is bad because he's an unhinged killer with a gripe, which is much more theatrical than Robert Shaw's deadly menace. With John Travolta, you know you're getting the former heart-throb, greased-up dance master, in his "I love being bad" persona first displayed in Pulp Fiction. After only a few scenes, we look forward to his death. You wanted Robert Shaw to get caught; you want Travolta to get shoved under a train.

But that's just part of the horror. Tony Scott is a hyperactive director who cannot hold a shot anymore than a frat boy can hold liquor; his enthusiasm sloshes and staggers and gets the spins, hurls left and right and up and down, and bears no resemblance to reality.

It exhausts, it annoys. It seems afraid to do anything else. By comparison, Transformers is The Sorrow and the Pity.

I just curled up in a ball and waited for the punches to stop.

UDPATE 7: Reviewing Goofy Sarah’s Goofy Book

Thanks to a friend at an on-line book seller, on Friday morning a courier delivered a preview copy of Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s latest gyration in her bizarre, on-going odyssey into fringe folk-lore, self-promotion, and an increasingly pathological need to keep yelling “Look at me! Look at me!” like a whiny eight year old trying to get attention in a room full of grown-ups.

“If anyone else had written this,” read a note from my friend that I found in the envelope, “they’d be shipped off to a shrink and put on heavy meds. Instead, Palin is getting rich. Life’s not fair!”

The book is as unevenly written and, in parts, mysteriously unfathomable as Palin herself – despite having wordsmithing help from a sub-editor of an evangelical religious magazine. For example, the very first paragraph of the book includes a sentence declaring, “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.”

Huh? I hope publisher Harper-Collins didn’t pay ghost-writer Lynn Vincent much money for whatever it is Vincent did with Palin’s text.

More to the point, beyond turning on the same McCain campaign that plucked her from obscurity and propelled her to the infamy that led to a $5-million advance for her memoirs, Going Rogue reinforces the well-earned perception of The Wicked Witch of Wasilla as so devoutly anti-intellectual, so thoroughly uncurious about the world, and so totally convinced that the fake blue collar image of her life means she knows all there is to know and only God knows all the rest, as to make her popularity among the remains of the Republican Party truly frightening.

Sadly, the book only increases her appeal to that very base of the shrinking GOP while leaving moderate Republicans, independents and anyone else who actually thinks about things out in the Alaskan cold.

Payback Time

Aside from the snippets of her life in Alaska – much of it true, some of it clearly part of the carefully-crafted storyline created about her by Palin’s handlers in the McCain campaign – the book is mostly a loosely-linked chain of self-aggrandizing, petulant slams at McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt and a handful of other professional pols who were trying to get their ticket elected against very long odds.

She comes across as an eager player in a blame game – something she’s been doing ever since high school, according to published accounts of people who’ve known her since her prom queen days.

Equally important, she polishes her campaign persona of “hockey mom” triviality. She confesses to being unfamiliar with the Middle East, the Iraq war, Afghanistan or Islamic politics. “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes at one point, “to the extent that most Americans did.”

Oh? Better tell that to Rush Limbaugh, who claims Going Rogue is one of the best policy books he’s ever read. I gather this means what it implies: He doesn’t read many policy books.

And, anyway, “most Americans” don’t want to be vice president of the United States and aren’t manoeuvring to become a major party’s nominee for president next time around.

Just as astonishing, Palin argues without explanation that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

Anti-Everything

Palin writes that she and Todd are perfect to represent America’s Joe Six-Packs because that’s who they are themselves.

“We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she boasts. “We know what it’s like to work union jobs ... We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

One problem: The very economic policies she touts in the book, at her Facebook page, when she Twitters little nothings in the ears of her followers, and on the stump during the campaign have been killing union jobs and ordinary Americans since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Elsewhere, she writes about creationism, proudly confessing that she doesn’t hold truck with “the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” She knows as much about anthropology as she knows about the Middle East: Monkeys climbed into trees first, before learning to walk upright. Oh, and studies have shown that nearly all primates are “thinking, loving beings.”

But to Palin, God is in charge of everything in her life, a sort of personal concierge. “My life is in His hands,” she testifies. “I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

I doubt whether Palin knows it, but that statement is the best argument I’ve read to support atheism. Surely, a caring, loving, all-knowing and all-seeing God would never give a Sarah Palin such a platform so there's almost a prima facie case that a God doesn't exist.

RedState.com’s Erick Erickson’s Head Officially Explodes

It was bound to happen sooner or later to poor Erick Erickson.

He runs the right-wing fringe website RedState.com and, after 10 months of increasingly pulsating throbs like a character in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon with every move the Obama Administration has made, Friday morning his head absolutely exploded.

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has the audacity to return America to the rule of law abandoned by George Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen. Instead of a kangaroo court at Gitmo, the Justice Dept. will have Khalid Sheik Mohammad and four co-defendants in New York standing trial in federal court on terrorism charges relating to his role in planning and plotting 9/11.

In a frantic, fear-mongering, mass e-mail sent Friday morning, Erickson screams out his warning:

“In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, (emphasis his) including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.”

In other words, Erickson is aghast that an American president will use the American legal system and American rules of evidence to prosecute people who broke American laws.

In RedState’s view, apparently, Mohammad should have an unfair trail governed by no lawyers representing him, keeping secret evidence against KSM so it can’t be used in his defence, and prosecutors should use information obtained through torture.

That’s the true American way, according to this goofball who seems to have as solid an understanding of the Constitution, US laws and treaties, as those great legal scholars from the Bush era, John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

Uhm, I remember seeing videos of Osama bin Laden and several al-Qaeda spokesmen publicly stating after Sept. 11 that the group wants to destroy everything America stands for. Well, it seems Erickson is all in favour of letting the terrorists have their way, going so far as to demand Washington finish the job those four groups of highjackers started by destroying the rule of law.

Shouting Not To Be Heard

Before urging recipients to call members of Congress to object to bringing KSM or any of his cohorts to the US, Erickson dips into the bizarre.

“At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists' sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.”

Not only does Erickson not understand the principles underlying America and its system of laws, he’s busy trying to rewrite history.

The Gitmo tribunals sent up by Donald Rumsfeld at the urging of Dick Cheney met the very definition of “show trial.” Clearly, Erickson hasn’t read much history of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1930s, Josef Stalin’s frequent purges kidnapped hapless victims before dragging them in front of rigged courts after being tortured in the Lubyanka’s cellars. For good measure, they could neither see any evidence against them, question state witnesses or mount an actual defence before being either shot or sent to die in Siberian forced labour camps.

This is what Erickson thinks the US should emulate?

While I’m sure that calling Obama’s decision one that would be made in a “third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime” managed to rouse his readers – if they know what he meant – Erickson should have checked dictonary.com before using such big words. There are two definitions:

Klep-toc-ra-cy – [klep-tok-ruh-see]
noun, plural -cies

A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.

A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.

While this sort of behaviour was not just tolerated but rampant during the Bush years – in Washington, on Wall St., at outfits like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater, and among defence contractors – so far, Pres. Obama hasn’t shown much tolerance for thievery.

Instead, he and the Democratic Congress increased spending for veterans by the largest amount in history. He’s working to bring health care to the one-quarter of the population who are either uninsured or underinsured and impose some semblance of rules on the health insurance cartel. He’s urging Congress to pass legislation that will allow workers to vote in secret ballots to form a union without management peering over their shoulders taking notes and naming names. He’s sort-of started cracking down on kleptocratic defense contractors who stole billions from the Treasury during Bush’s reign of error. Democrats in Washington are trying to re-impose rules on a resistant financial services industry rules to both level the playing field and give consumers a break.

Who’s Taking A Leak?

Finally, Erickson has his boxers all in a bunch because, he insists, a trial will make New York a target for more terrorist attacks and because KSM will see classified evidence that he will then leak to other terrorists.

Alas, dear Erick sees only red when the world is a bit more shaded than he wants to admit.

For openers, Erickson out-does even his own wing of the Republican Party in hyperbole by declaring there have been “occasions” – which was once – when “terrorists' sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.” Actually, one lawyer passed a personal message to an acquaintance of a defendant she was representing. No information. No secrets. No plans. And there was no evidence that the person who received the note was a terrorist, only that they happened to be of Middle Eastern origin and a Moslem.

Oh, silly me. In Erickson’s world that’s a prima facie argument they were a terrorist.

If RedState and the other right-wing grandstanders who shoved their way in front of TV cameras Friday afternoon are so concerned about leaks, like the self-promoting Joe Lieberman, why don’t they stick a sock in the mouth of Rep. Pete Hoekstra who gives away intelligence every time he grabs his BlackBerry and sends out a Twitter message? Especially since Hoekstra is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Why does Erick Erickson hate America so much?

Billionaires Serenade Michelle Bachman’s Insane Capitol Rally

Our favourite group of indolent n’er do wells, Billionaires For Wealthcare, showed up at Michelle Bachman’s rally on the steps of the Capitol last week to serenade the crowd. Then, they marched into the halls of Congress itself to sing for Senators – you can spot John Kerry in the crowd – Representatives and staffers eating lunch.



In between songs, the group stood in the crowd shouting "Stock options, yes! Public option, no!"

To Hell And Beck

We’ll take as a given that Glenn Beck is crazy, in the same league as Michelle Bachman and people who show up at police stations wearing aluminium foil hats demanding the cops make Martians stop beaming radio signals into their head.

Who besides Beck would invite PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk on television to join him in criticising Nobel Prize winning former Vice President Al Gore for only cutting back on the amount of meat he eats, not eliminating it from his diet entirely, and then using this as the basis for lashing out at Gore’s new book, Our Choice?

Who other than His Nuttiness would praise nurses for their knowledge, care and understanding when they tended to him after he was hospitalised following botched hemorrhoid surgery only to turn on them a year later for supporting health care reform so people who don’t have Fox News’ lush group plan can get insurance?

Who else would provide Jon Stewart with such rich, delicious fodder for parody on a Daily Show segment? Beck’s emergency appendectomy this week gave Stewart an opening to tear out his appendix using a scalpel of satire.



Yet another reason why Stewart provides the most-incisive coverage of news on television.

Another Great Swindle: Doctors, Hospitals, Pharma As Much To Blame As Insurers

Six months ago, in a long-forgotten article, I quoted a Cleveland physician complaining that health care reform will cut his income so sharply he will be forced to curb his lush standard of living.

… a physician acquaintance in Ohio who is a highly regarded specialist with a seven figure income … complains to me that any of the current health reform proposals will cut his income in half, at least, as if his life would disintegrate if he had to live on only five or six hundred thousand dollars a year. Better 47-million people not have access to his training, skills and expertise than he drops one of his two country club memberships because of personal financial hardship.

While the health insurance industry’s immoral, amoral and, sometimes, illegal treatment of policyholders is an appropriate prime culprit and target in the current push for reform, the fact is that physicians, hospitals and drug companies are getting an undeserved pass by much of the media. They are as much to blame for health care problems and out-of-control costs as Aetna, the Blues, Wellpoint and other insurance companies.

Trouble is, not only is the media letting them off the hook, so is Congress.

One of the original key goals of health care reform was to lower the obscene cost of getting sick and recovering in America, whose citizens pay far more for everything from a simple visit to the doctor to complicated tests to prescription drugs than anyone else in the civilised world. Yet neither the likely House version nor the current Senate version of reform give cost cutting more than a flicker of attention.

So Kaiser Permanente chief executive George Halvorson showed Ezra Klein of the Washington Post a series of revealing and extremely disturbing charts, comparing the cost of similar medical services in the US and five other Western countries plus US Medicare.

Kaiser is the largest managed care organisation in the US, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry Kaiser, and consists of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and regional Permanente Medical Groups.

Since it insures some nine million people as well as operating not-for-profit hospitals and clinics, Halvorson has horses running in the race – but on both ends of the betting line. So while he is in a unique position to see the issue two ways.

Office Visits

According to Halvorson’s charts, it costs the typical patient in the US anywhere from $59 to $151 to see a doctor. In countries with a national health plan, the price is a fraction of what it is here. In Spain, the cost to see a doctor is $15; Germany $22; France $31; the Netherlands $32; and Canada $30. Under Medicare, it is $72. In Canada, for example, the fee for a doctor’s visit is negotiated between the government and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in each province; in the US rates are whatever the doctor can get away with charging, except when treating Medicare and Medicaid paitents.


Yet Congress is backing off trying to control even a portion of the cost of an office visit by refusing to roll back scheduled increases in what Medicare pays physicians to see each patient. No wonder the AMA gave its full-throated endorsement of the House bill – and reform generally – yesterday: Its member’s income won’t be affected one bit so my physician friend in Ohio will be able to keep both of his country club memberships.

Complex Exams

Nothing in the human body is more complex than the brain yet there are enormous spreads in the cost of a CT head scan between the US and other countries. In America, with “the greatest health care system in the world,” a CT head scan cost ranges from $950 to $1,800. In Canada, where I’ve had such a scan, the cost to the system ranges between $41 – really! – and $530. Germany is the most expensive of the six countries compared yet its cost per scan is one-third of the low end of the US range.


Prescription Meds

It’s just as bad in the US after the tests are done and a patient walks from the doctor’s office to a pharmacy across the street to fill a prescription.

Lipitor is a widely-advertised and often-prescribed medication for lowering cholesterol. In America, the pharmacist will collect anywhere from $125 to $334 before handing over the prescription bottle because drug prices are not regulated.

In one of Congresses most disgraceful sell-outs, in 2005 it prohibited Medicare from negotiating with Pfizer for what will be charged patients for the drug. Yet in each of the five other nations surveyed – where government negotiates the price of all prescription medications – patients pay a tiny fraction of what Americans must shell out.

What happens when the price of Lipitor is negotiated? It plunges. I mean plunges: In each of the other five countries, the cost per prescription is anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of what Americans shell out for the exact same medicine treating the identical ailment.


Yet Big Pharma got Congress and the Obama administration to agree to not set up a system to negotiate drug prices. So, every time any American needs to have a prescription filled, the pharmaceutical industry and member of Congress will make them wish they lived somewhere else. No wonder so many people in the US buy medicine in Canada.

As WaPo’s Klein notes, “There is a thudding consistency to the (charts): A series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.”

There is a reason why American health care costs so much more than in any other country: We pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained to Klein, and both university studies and consulting companies confirm repeatedly, if you leave everything the same – number of procedures, days spent in hospital, number of operations done – but plug in prices Canadians pay, America’s health care spending falls by 50%.

This is more than enough to cover every uninsured person in the US.