Beware whenever you the word "Volunteer" coming out of the mouth of a government official. The two President Bushes were very enthusiastic about citizens volunteering to get things done in the community. Of course, if the citizens volunteered to collect the garbage, pave the roads, teach the school children, man the emergency rooms, hand out soup to the starving at soup kitchens, then government would not have to pay people to any of these things, and this was seen as a good thing and wonderful way to serve the people without having to pay for it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually decided to go the other route, by putting citizens on the payroll to do essential jobs, and then, when there weren't enough of those to employ everyone, he dreamed up some less essential jobs, like planting trees, painting murals and doing a lot of things which still have value today, but which in his time were disdained by the wealthy as "make work" jobs. Somehow, though, the citizens elected him to 16 years of office, more than any other president before or since.  

While it took the American public eight years to catch on to the problems inherent in pleading with citizens to do the jobs which government didn't want to pay for, and to see that the Reagan mantra of "Government is not the solution; government is the problem," meant that government when run incompetently really is a problem, but when run well can offer at least some solutions, apparently the idea has floated across the Atlantic like a cloud of marijuana smoke and the current coalition government led by David Cameron has inhaled deeply.

Britain, the plan is, will become a "less selfish" place. The State will be replaced by the Community.  Instead of hiring people to guide tourists around London during the 2012 Olympics, volunteers will do the work, unpaid, intoxicated by the ad campaign: "Ten days giving directions. Ten nights with a sore throat...Have you got what it takes?"

The British government is just giddy with the prospect of all the free labor (not Labour) it will get out of its citizens. Signs which once advertised paying jobs now advertise "Opportunities," to sweep out yoga studios, for free.

Of course, if you are Lady So and So, a little slumming giving directions to the Olympics may prove invigorating, but if you are unemployed, middle class, Lady So and So is taking your job.

It really is quite astonishing, when you think about it. The rich, well supported are asking the much less wealthy, the strugglig to be a good sport and do the work for free, and this is sold as governing smart.

All of this comes as a great relief to me, as an American, because it means the Brits, after all, are at least as stupid as we are,as we have been. So many Europeans pointed to the re election of George W. as evidence the U.S. electorate was afflicted with brain worm. 

Now it appears the worm has spread.

Well, we do have globalization.


Once upon a time there were British fighter pilots who volunteered to save the Empire by flying up to smash the Luftwaffe. But you know, they were paid volunteers.  When you come right down to it, they were government employees with full benefits and pensions--if they could only live to collect them.


But the thing is, government worked for the Brits during the Battle of Britain.

A Come To Jesus Moment

Vanderbilt University is a chimera of North and South. Founded in 1973, just 8 years after the end of the Civil War, in Nashville, Tennessee, the founding Vanderbilt spoke of an institution where the youth of both sections of the country, North and South could intermingle and learn from each other. Until recently few children of the North took him up on his offer. But when Gordon Gee became head man of the university, he directed his admissions officers to seek out bright students from New York City, Washington, DC and Chicago, to bring a better mix of ideas and viewpoints to the campus.

What had been a frat boy/ sorority girl good ol' Southern campus slowly, but inexorably transformed into a campus where a sizable minority of students and a substantial majority of the faculty hailed from the North.

It is in this setting that a faculty member with an Ivy League education called on one of his students, who grew up in Dallas, and asked for an analysis of a knotty ethical/ philosophical problem presented by a passage the class had read.

"What would you do, in this situation? How would you discern the proper course of action, balancing these countervailing moral imperatives?"

The student replied, brightly, "Well, I would ask myself: What would Jesus do?"

Sitting next to this responder, a student from Washington, DC, pulled at the neck of his own Grateful Dead T shirt over his head and groaned, "That's it. I can't take any more."

And that is where this sort of exchange between sophisticated, urban people from the Northeast and their more earnest, if somewhat less rigorous countrymen from the bible belt often ends. Both parties are offended, neither can control emotions well enough to do much more than sputter.

But let's for a moment imagine you are the professor--how do you get the class by this moment?  On the one hand, you recognize the responding student had simply used what he thought would be a perfectly socially acceptable dodge to avoid having to face the thorny issue. So this sweet and commonplace response is really a lazy man's substitute for thought. And what's more aggravating to the Northerner is that simpering smile on the face of the bible thumper, who expects everyone to applaud his dodge as some sort of brilliant and commendable effort.

From the point of view of the bible thumper, his was an honest and earnest response, an attempt to ground his approach in a bedrock tradition and to move forward from there.

As the professor you might ask, "But how on earth would you know what Jesus would have done in this situation? Here you have a man who asks a surgeon to perform an operation to transform him into a woman, while the surgeon has good reason to believe the patient would  commit suicide once the deed is done and the patient now has to live with the result. And the surgeon has very solid basis for believing that  before, and even more after, the patient  would be a high suicide risk.  Now did Jesus ever confront a dilemma like this? Did anything he ever faced or said offer any guidance in such a situation?"

Or, you might say, "Well, what makes you think Jesus is such a moral authority that you would abandon all of your own individual capacity for drawing moral conclusions and simply say, 'Well, whatever Jesus says, I'll go with that. Ditto that for me,' Why would you abrogate your own individual capacity to decide the right and wrong by ceding the decision to someone else?"

And if he says, "Well, because I believe the source of all goodness is God, and Jesus is my Lord and so I go back to Him for all decisions when it comes to right or wrong."  Then what do you say?

But how do you know the mind of God?

And if he says, "From reading the Bible."

And if you ask where in the Bible is there a passage about transgender surgery, he responds there are parallel parables to inform you, and you ask which ones, then you at least get to the problem of trying to look to sources of authority for answers, whether it's a holy book or a Nobel Laureate or a parent or anyone other than yourself.

At least, you have had a substantive discussion about a process and a set of values.

Not to say all the pre packaged drivel comes from the right.

Look at Bernadine Dohrn and the Weathermen and the SDS. The Weathermen said they worked for a world in which U.S. imperialism was destroyed and a classless society would emerge.  As if there can ever be a classless society, with its implication people will be able to live without looking down on someone and up to someone else.

And, of course, when you think you can make a perfect world, that there is some imperative for you to try to make a perfect world, what sort of action do you wind up justifying?  For Bernadine Dohrn, it was saying the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate by Charles Manson's clan, who stuck forks in Tate's belly, "Dig it!...Far out." For Bernadine, it meant placing a bomb at a non commissioned officers' dance and killing unsuspecting, defenseless people is a laudable act of revolution.

And that's where the revolutionaries of the 60's lose me. They were the jihadists of their time and these true believers were not much different than the guys on the airplanes who were interested in claiming their seven virgins in heaven. 


They were just coddled white kids who were just playing at life.

They were English majors, or political science majors, kids who never had to compete in those high stakes organic chemistry classes for a spot in medical school, kids who had time to sit around dorm rooms for all night bull sessions, talking  about life and the suppression of the underclass or the third world.  

They were sitting at tables, doing drugs, having group sex, which is fine, but not exactly difficult. 

Pre medical students,  and engineers did not have time for such games. 

Kids who were not in college at all, but who worked the third shift at the factories did not have time for these children of privilege who were so concerned about the pigs who suppressed the factory workers. 

The SDS and the Weatherman were doing  revolution from the top down, and since they really didn't have any skin in the game, because they could (and eventually did) go back through all those doors which their lawyers opened for them, the doors back to their townhouses or ranches or suburban sun lit lawns, they were just play, make believe revolutionaries. They were suburban housewives riding on the back of motorcycles pretending to be rebels.


I think it's the language which is the give away: Dig it? When you have undergraduates from the University of Chicago saying "Dig It, Far Out, " you have a phony. You have someone slumming, playing at her new identity.


Now, if you have people who say, you know, how different are we from those Germans, who knew millions were being killed just out of sight, when we can see people on TV every night, being killed by American soldiers and we do nothing to stop it?  But we can speak out. The issue is how much do you have to do to feel your conscience is clean?


I hated Lyndon Johnson and those he was a war criminal. But what I could I do? Set off a bomb at the capitol? If I were really convinced it was my responsibility to end the war or I would be complicit, would I have not been required to try to assassinate him?  And how effective would that have been? Did we not have an election which over turned the government? And the new government, under Nixon, widened the war and invaded Laos and Cambodia.


The reason the Germans were guilty was not that they did not succeed in overthrowing Hitler. The reason was they were shouting Zeig, Heil, and raising their arms to him and singing Hosanna! It was not that they remained silent; they were screaming, "RIght on!"

When did the Weathermen ever do anything really difficult?

How difficult is it for the bible thumper to smile beneficently and say, "Well, I would just ask what Jesus would do." 


I suppose that's my complaint. My Come to Jesus moment.  When you are in a position where you are in rebellion  because you have nowhere else to go, then you are a revolutionary; when you invoke Jesus, after you have considered all the options, then you are a true believer. 


Being real is almost always difficult. It usually means doing the hard thing. That's my rant, and I'm sticking to it.

Cheerios, Lies and the American Way

My Cheerios box says, "Every Box Can Help a Heart," which I do not take too literally, thinking the box can somehow help my heart, but what Cheerios meant to say is what is inside, namely the Cheerios cereal itself can help your heart, presumably by lowering your cholesterol, a claim I recall from previous Cheerios boxes and this box does say, "Free Cholesterol Screenings," so I guess Cheerios is still tying itself to happy cholesterol tydings.

Examing the box, looking for the reference to the medical journal with the article which showed the beneficial effects of Cheerios in lowering the blood cholesterol in human beings, I could find no such reference.  Not to be deterred, this being the 21st century, I popped on the internet and keyed in "Evidence Cheerios lowers cholesterol" and found nothing except a series of articles about the FDA reprimanding General Mills for making false claims about the cereal's ability to lower cholesterol, which, by the way is not exactly the same as preventing heart disease, but it's a step in the right direction, provided it lowers the LDL cholesterol, not the HDL, which is to say, we'd like to know Cheerio's is lowering the right cholesterol.

Presumably, somebody did some study Cheerios can hang its hat on, although for reasons I'm about to explain, it would be a huge surprise if Cheerios lowered blood cholesterol in any clinically significant way.

The reason dates back to Dennis Burkitt's original observations that in West Africa, where people in the bush eat a very high fiber diet, so high it makes their stools into cow pies, there is very little coronary artery disease and presumably, the natives have lower blood cholesterols. (He did not measure the natives' cholesterols--but he speculated, a wild guess he said, that maybe the fiber accelerated the movement of gut contents through the gut enough that the gut didn't have enough contact time with the cholesterol in the diet to actually be able to get the cholesterol out of the food and into the blood. Increased transit time, he called it, might result in decrease absorptive time. ) But the dietary fiber had to be high enough to change the stools, into cow pies and to increase the transit time of food through the gut. Cheerios does not do this. Kellogs Original All Bran, can do this, and it's the only cereal on the shelves of the American supermarket I'm aware of which can do this.  Presumably, General Mills does not want this getting out, that Kellogs has the better fiber cereal, the only fiber cereal actually, but Cheerios started it with the false claims. (Personally, I mix the two. All Bran is like eating cardboard. Cheerios are fun. Cheerios are fun, tasty but not any better for your health than celery, maybe less.)

But taking a conjecture and turning it into a marketing campaign is what American industry advertising  is all about. American politics, ditto.

It is a free country; there is a First Ammendment guaranteeing free speech.

But you can't cry fire in a crowded theater, and there are or ought to be limits on free speech.

The question is, can commercial speech, i.e. advertising, be held to a higher standard?

If you are making money from what you say, is it not reasonable to require you have to provide evidence of its truth, when challenged?

As for the reasoning behind fiber as a potential healthy thing, I'm attaching below a copy of a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, which provides a little fleshing out for anyone interested.

Correspondence


Dietary Fiber and Colorectal Cancer

N Engl J Med 1999; 340:1924-1926June 17, 1999

Article

To the Editor:

The fundamental flaw in the article by Fuchs et al. (Jan. 21 issue)1 concerns the definition of what constitutes a high-fiber diet. I was lucky enough to attend one of Dr. Denis Burkitt's lectures in London in 1972 and vividly remember how he defined a high-fiber diet. It had nothing at all to do with the calculations of Southgate et al.2 or any other calculation; whether a diet was considered to be high in fiber depended on the effect the diet had on the stool.

Burkitt began his lecture with a slide showing a stool of a typical Western, “civilized” person, a sausage-shaped thing, familiar to most of us, in a toilet bowl. His next slide was of a stool of a typical rural West African, which looked like a flat cow pie. Burkitt postulated that the West African's stool moved more quickly through the colon, giving carcinogens contained on its surface less time to be in contact with the mucosa — thus less time to induce carcinogenesis.

During the question-and-answer period, many questions from the audience concerned how one determined whether or not a diet was high in fiber in the sense Burkitt meant. Burkitt shook his head at all the salads, cereals, and breads offered as sources of fiber. He showed a slide of the staple cereal eaten by West Africans, which looked, in its wooden bowl, not too different from the stool that came out the other end. The only thing the study by Fuchs et al. proves is what anyone who heard Burkitt's lecture already knew: the American public has been sold a sugar-coated misconception.

Veritas

I don't believe in owning movies, but, of course, I do own movies and all five seasons of The Wire. . I play the DVD's while pedaling away on my exercise bicycle or running on the treadmill, doing my hamster thing.

I recite the dialogue along with The Wire, I've watched the episodes so often.  And Band of Brothers ,  but I cannot speak all those lines, which is okay, because the dialogue is not as important there. Those are the mainstays.

Then there's Infamous which is fascinating because the actor playing Truman Capote really channels him and I can suspend disbelief and think I'm really watching Capote as he creates In Cold Blood which is, as Capote explains to Harper "Nell" Lee, is a nonfiction novel. She does not understand what he means by this non sequitur , but I do, implicitly. 



There's also Dances with Wolves, Full Metal Jacket,  and Apocalypse Now, which I watch less often because they are fiction masquerading as non fiction, and it is the false parts of these fictions which has begun to ruin each of these for me. 

Then there are two works of fiction, which I accept as showing a type of truth very much like The Wire , sort of the flip side of the non fiction novel, the fictional documentary. These are fiction which frees the author from the legal and journalistic difficulties and limitations imposed on the non fiction author, so the author can simply state the truth as he knows it without having to footnote or reference.

And then there is fiction as truth which is not borne of direct experience, but of imagined experience set against a background of lived experience, and these are Master and Commander (Russell Crowe) and what is for my money, the most romantic movie ever made, The Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis.)

In Master and Commander, there is a splendid scene in which the captain of the English ship, Lucky Jack, continues to instruct the midshipmen on the use of a sextant as the French warship bears down on his own ship from his stern, the cannon balls splashing all around, and the midshipmen are, understandably distracted, but the captain continues to turn them back to their task of learning, despite the furious distractions. The midshipmen cannot help but look back over their shoulders, but their captain insists they continue to sight through their sextants, straight ahead, eyes to the bow.  That was a scene I have lived in the hospital, as patients were arresting and resuscitations were launched but the professor of medicine would say, they've got that in hand, what we are learning here is so important we cannot be distracted. It's the way masters impart their precious lode of learning to puppies and the way they convey the importance of that work. There is a truth in that fiction which is pure enough.



There's a sort of psychological verisimilitude in The Last of the Mohicans, which rises from fiction to truth in the scene in which Cora, the tough minded woman straight from the mother ship, just in from England, confronts the deerslayer hero, demanding to know why he had not stopped to bury the slaughtered family they had found and left in place.  He explains they were being tracked by warriors who would have picked up their trail by a tell tale burial, and then he gestures to the stars spread out above them and says, that is the best memorial for that family, the sky they had looked upon, knowing they were neither subject nor servant to any king or any master.  He says he understands she cannot know what he's talking about or be much moved by it, but that's the way it is out here in this land she cannot hope to fathom.  And she replies, quite calmly and completely the master of her own mind, she understands completely, and in fact has never been moved as much by any other place or culture.

She is not trying to impress him, or seduce him or even connect with him. She is simply setting him straight, and calling him for his arrogance to think only he and his people could appreciate this land, the free life and the strong gravity all this exerts on the people living in this New World.  She says you may think you know me for a pampered and superficial female, but I'm quite strong enough and perceptive enough to grasp all this. End of discussion, now let's get past this. It's a statement of such power and passion you can only hope some day you will meet a woman like that, and if you are lucky, maybe you already have, but that's the woman you want.

There is a truth there about what makes a woman desirable, magnetic and important which no essay or psychological analysis or philosophical treatise could ever approach. It's all there, simply stated in a few lines of dialogue following thirty minutes of breath taking action.

Then there are those stories where the author loses you, because he's more concerned about the marketing than the truth.  You never ever have that sense with The Wire, but you see it in Dances with Wolves . Here you have Lt. Dunbar narrating the line about the noble savage, the people who live in perfect harmony with their environment, killing only as many buffalo as they need and not damaging the herd while the white man slaughters the herds, rapes the land and destroys the environment. 

As we learn in S.C. Gywnne's Empire of the Summer Moon, the plains Indians, especially the Comanches, but likey also the Lakota Sioux who Dunbar runs with, were  savage, but not what most of us would call noble. They used rape, mutilation, enslavement as their preferred methods of intimidation and domination. While they may have lived in harmony with nature, they regarded white people and all enemies as less than the animals they killed. They tortured other people, they only killed animals. So that work of fiction becomes hard to watch once you know its flaws and you lose faith in the authors.

Flaws of sentimentality despoil the truthiness of Band of Brothers where Richard Winters is depicted as tormented by guilt over having shot a young German soldier, a SS soldier no less, and he cannot get it out of his mind.   Richard Winters was appalled by this depiction and said he never regretted killing a single German.  Fortunately, there's enough unvarnished truth in the rest of the episodes to carry you by the Stephen Speilberg goo, but it's a close thing. Truth is a perishable commodity and once the fruit gets a rotten spot, the whole thing is in danger of going bad. 

As for Full Metal Jacket  and Apocalypse Now   they rely on that suspension of disbelief--you know they are just fiction but you know there is a strong element of truth in the depiction of the psychology of institutional killing. The language, the Marine phrases, which are the lingua franca of the movie, signal if the authors know the language this well, they were probably there, they lived the experience they are writing about, even if specific situations are imagined, and you can trust what they are saying about the culture of lean mean fighting machine marines who are all bravado and very little real toughness. The sniper girl they finally manage to kill is tougher than the whole bunch of them together.  Theirs is a phony toughness; hers is the real thing. 

The narrator of Apocalypse Now tells you enough you already know is true to keep your faith in him, even if you know the story is fiction. But the Playboy bunnies and the French woman on the plantation are thrown in for marketing and that shatters the feeling of truthiness and you lose faith pretty quickly. Thankfully,  these women made the director's cut but not the movie as it was shown in the movie houses.

So truth lately has become transcendent for me. Don't ask me why.

I suppose it has something to do with Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, for whom truth does not seem very important. They are looking for an effect, for marketing effect, for the wow power of saying something they expect you to react to rather than for the simple statement of truth which does not care how you respond. 

Neither of them is Cora. They care too much for what you think and not enough about the truth.

Too little, too late?

Just when I was getting really depressed about the Sharron Angles, the Christine O'Donnells, the Kelley Ayottes sweeping aside their Democratic opponents, just when I thought our Country could not look any worse, I turned on C-SPAN-2 watched Prime Minister's Questions.

If you want to know what real despair is, just watch those English politicians go at each other and then think of what political exchanges in America are like,  and you will want to slit your wrists and jump out the window.


When did we acquire all the mutants?  Why can the Brits, who don't even have a constitution, do democracy so well when all we can do is dumb ourselves down even dumber than before?

But then, a ray of light.  What followed that hour of erudite, spirited, funny and substantive exchange in the British Parliament, was our very own American President, speaking to a rally in Columbus, Ohio.  


If only Obama were running against Sharron Angle in Nevada, or Christine in Delaware, or even Kelley Ayotte, here in New Hampshire.  He would sweep the floor with them.

I know the pundits are saying all the Dems have to run away from Obama because he's so unpopular now, and he is a stain on them.  But he has finally re emerged as the guy who can speak the truth and expose the scoundrels. Given 'em Hell Harry Truman was a piker compared to Obama in full. 


He says the Republicans are counting on amnesia. They put us into the worst recession since the Great Depression, massive unemployment, unregulated banks who were so busy lining the pockets of their board of directors and CEO's they didn't care what they did to the country, and they didn't care if insurance companies raped their customers or what the credit card companies did and the Republican response was give tax breaks to millionaires and let's go back to trickle down, and let's get the rich richer so they can give jobs to the middle class they've been starving out for decades. 

Whew! So why didn't he say that before? And why isn't that speech playing every night during all the baseball play off games and during every football game and in every bar room and airport lounge? 

What have the Democrats been thinking?  

You got a star. All they got is John Boehner and a bunch of women in bright colored dresses.

democrats man up

The candidates debate. Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada vs. who?

Harry Reid and Chris Coons.

Where do the Democrats get these whimps?

It's no news Harry Reid sounds and looks like the anemic priest of a small, forgotten parish, which deserves and desires obscurity, and his  little wisp of a mumbling voice. It's not his fault he's a frail, kyphotic old man, but there's no way he ought to be the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He's simply too spent and gasping to lead anyone.


So Sharron throws a punch to his gut--You live in the Ritz Carleton and I live in a middle class neighborhood in Reno, and he cannot slip the punch and, worse yet, he cannot even counter punch.

Then she accuses him of being on the take--How'd you get so rich coming to the Senate poor and now you're a millionaire? And the best he can do is whimper about that being a low blow.

For anyone who has watched the news for the past year and seen Harry Reid approach the podium with all the force of a kitten and deliver his near whisper of a response to the thunder from the right, you just have to ask--are we really sad to see the Democrats getting swept from the field?

Now Christine, is a different matter, and more of the same. She is the perfect example of Shakespeare's, "In speech, there is logic." That's a phrase I did not understand and my father had to explain it:  Simply saying something, that something takes on a reality. You can say, 'The sky is red," and people will nod.  You can say, "Every wrong with this country is the Democrats' fault," and people will nod. If it's a lie, it doesn't matter, as long as you stick to it, keep repeating it.

Or, as that wonderful philosopher from The Wire, Slim Charles, tells Avon Barksdale, the drug kingpin, who has got into a war with a rival drug lord and is now realizing the pretext was all  wrong. "That's the thing about war: Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then you fight on that lie."

Now Christine can calmly explain why she likes the idea the people who donate to her campaign can remain anonymous. You see, it's like this, people who contribute to me are contributing to an unpopular cause, so they get harassed. This allows them to send me money with worrying about recriminations from their fellow citizens."

So, it's scoundrel time again.

But does the Amherst educated Chris Coons, blow her out of the water?

Does he says, oh, for example, "So, what Ms. O'Donnell is saying is that people who support her should not have to show the courage of their own convictions. If their motivation is to injure the strength of this country, of the United States Senate, then they should be able to do this with perfect impunity. Good Lord, we do not allow United States citizens to make contributions to Swiss bank accounts anonymously because we know that secrecy can be used to hide pernicious behavior, can launder money from drug sales. And now Ms. O'Donnell is arguing for the laundering of money, the turning of possibly ill got gains into political clout, at worst, and at best her stance is she wants to allow the fat cats in the Republican party, who have never wanted to admit they use their money to keep everyone else down, she wants to protect these closet oligarchs from exposure."

No, he whimpers.

And when they try to do a Katie Couric on Ms. O'Donnell, by asking whether or not she can name a single Supreme Court decision, she slides by with a smiling endorsement of her hero, Clarence Thomas, well, whatever he says, I'm for that and I'm against those he voted against.

Shouldn't be hard to top that, right? But is Mr. Coons prepared? Nope, he can't think of a Supreme Court decision either, except the one they've asked about earlier having to do with allowing for secret campaign donations.

What about Bong Hits for Jesus? Or if you cannot come up with a case, at least say, look, when I can predict how John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will vote on any given case with social implications--Well, Thomas is easy, he just dittos Scalia--but when I can do that, is there any doubt this is a court with a social agenda, doing just what conservatives like Rush Limbaugh have always complained about--legislating from the bench?

These two women are angry, and they don't care much whether or not what they say is a distortion or makes any real sense.  All you have to do is pinion them.

But these two men, Democrats sans balls have either been listening to advisers who tell them never to appear angry, or they are so bereft of testosterone maybe they should not be sent to the Senate after all.

The fact is, the one Democrat with balls who comes to mind is  Barney Frank.   I'd have preferred to see him on stage with either of those Republican beauties.

Can you not just see him listening to Sharron Angle ranting on about how the Senate has no business creating jobs--that's up to the private sector? And can't you just see Barney Frank, erupting with one of his, "On what planet do you spend the majority of your time?"  Are you not the lovely lady who wants to privatize Medicare and eviscerate Social Security? Do you really want to deny children health insurance coverage because of pre existing conditions? Do you really want to throw a kid, just out of college, still looking for a job, to the wolves of the insurance industry who won't give him health insurance? That's what you call, "Obamacare." What you want is no care, except, of course for people like you, you who have government health insurance.

That's what Barney Frank would have done to Sharron Angle.

Well, maybe this upcoming election is something which will help the country, ultimately. You'll sweep out the mice among the Democrats.

Unfortunately, we'll have a bunch of Republican Senators, Angle, O'Donnell, and don't forget Ayotte of New Hampshire, who'll be voting on Supreme Court nominations and they'll be putting more Scalia's in place, guys who'll  be there doing their nasty best to keep those in power in power, for the next two decades.And they'll be giving the millionaires their tax breaks so they can dominate the national life and discourse and buy whichever Senator or Congressman they wish, confident of the secrecy of that buy.

And if you thought the Supreme Court could not affect national politics, being a group of learned professors of law who simply stroke their chins and look august in their black robes, remember who put George Bush in the White House in 2004 and who put the money in the campaigns of the lovely ladies of the Senate.

Christine O'Donnell vs Chris Coons

Watching the Christine O'Donnell debate was excrutiating if you, like me, wanted to see the monster unmasked.

In fact, it was a little like watching O'Bama try to deal with the slings and arrows thrown his way during the Presidential debates--you wanted to see him throw a few of his own, but he simply seemed incapable of anger and you wanted some anger.

But Obama really didn't have to say anything because the economy was tanking and all he had to do was no harm.

In the O'Donnell debate, she was the voice of rage and all she had to do was to say she was angry and what her hapless opponent had to do was to show why he was angry back at her, but again, like Obama, he struck me as meek and weak and never really got the point that you have to be a little angry right now at all the people who are angry.

I've been taught not to respond to anger from my patients with anger. The soft answer turneth away wrath. The patients are frightened, angry and have a right to be; as the physician, you are in a position of power and should be parental and not get angry.

That, of course, is wrong. If a patient is abusive and angry, I get angry and put them in their place. And that often makes me feel better, makes them feel better and makes their family members, who are sitting in the exam room, the audience, understand who is and ought to be in command.

Christine O'Donnell responding to the question about whether or not the contributors to campaigns ought to be identified or allowed to conceal their contributions in anonymity said her contributors have been harrassed and ought to be protected.  Chris Coons never said, "No, they ought to have the courage of their convictions. If they are for you, they ought to take the heat for being for you."  But he hardly responded at all.

Then came the question about don't ask don't tell. Christine O'Donnell is prepared for this, as both candidates should be: She says if the military says it's okay, okay, but the military not the courts or legislature should be calling this shot. So then Wolf says, but the Chief of the Joint Chiefs says it's okay. She's been prepared for this, as any candidate should be: Well, she'd like to hear it's okay from the head of the Navy, the head of the Army. Then she adds, the military already has rules governing behavior: No adultery,  no sex between commanders and subordinates. 

There is the perfect opening to jab through: Are you saying that a declaratio of homosexual preference is the same as committing adultery? Is adultery not a moral failure? Is homosexuality a moral failure?

But Chris Coons sits there like some dumb kid who can't think of a thing to say.

Very frustrating.

Is Chris Coons the best the state of Delaware can produce to deal with a slick demagogue?

If the Democrats get voted out, it's because they weren't smart enough to stay in.