To marry or not that is the state's rights question:

Jeff Jacoby is, as most of you probably know, an arch conservative editorialist for the Globe. Mostly we disagree on just about everything. Occasionally, especially on immigration issues, we agree. He is curiously humane, at least to me, on that issue. I email him when we agree and I email him when I adamantly disagree. Today was a disagreement day as he wrote an anti gay marriage editorial entitled “Who decides what ‘marriage’ means.” (Op Ed May 12, 2009 Boston Globe) I enclose the link of that article below. He maintains a states rights approach to that issue. I fundamentally disagree and wrote to him the following:

No sooner could I not believe there were actually humanitarian issues on which I agreed with you, you sanctimoniously and smugly write about an issue that is sure to incur my wrath: gay marriage. You write about it as if it were simply a martial arts class subject to state consideration. You say a state can choose to classify it any way they want but other states do not have to. So now you equate HUMAN rights with martial arts classification rights.

I am going to OPPOSE vociferously what even some black people, often indoctrinated by the church, say and that is that homosexuals cannot be equated with them. I beg to differ. Homosexuals CAN be equated with them and to the discrimination blacks have felt for centuries. I have had profound experience to know that when a child expresses the fact that he or she KNEW her or his affectional preference at age THREE there is something more to homosexuality than a mere adult choice. As gays have said so often who would CHOOSE it knowing in many cases society will either condemn it, reluctantly acknowledge it or EVEN KILL you because of it. I do not postulate it is a choice I ADAMANTLY KNOW IT IS NOT. It is an ascribed status probably made so by genetic determination. It cannot and SHOULD not be changed.

No one would EVER in our culture prohibit nor would a state be allowed to reject a marriage of two people one male and one female with Downs Syndrome. It is perfectly legal for the state to marry both or for one who has Downs to marry another who does NOT even THOUGH it may be genetically ill advised and disadvantageous to society to allow it. Yet their relationship is deemed worthy of marriage. So is, I might add, an elderly couple who, clearly, will NEVER procreate.

I maintain because homosexuality PROBABLY has a genetic determination -- and EVEN if it did NOT -- it is NOT the state's obligation to define what marriage is or isn't with respect to the sexuality of two people who love each other and deny to them the relationship solidification that marriage can bestow. We are NOT talking about commerce, we are talking about HUMAN BEINGS who usually from day one know EXACTLY to whom they are attracted. What business is it of yours OR the state to tell an adult anyone whom they can love and with whom to spend a life? Answer: IT'S NONE of your business and it's NONE of the state's business either. Neither you nor the amorphous blob of the state has to suffer the consequences of a lonely life.

I have to laugh at so called "conservative" state's rights enthusiasts. They are ALL for states rights EXCEPT when they are not when it comes to the rights THEY like which they want federalized such as business rights, religious rights, anti-gay marriage rights or property rights. Then its perfectly right to them for the federal government to step in to tell everyone else which rights they will protect. It becomes perfectly fine for the court to use federal law to protect rights of those who make money, own a corporation or property but not right of the federal government to tell a state you are abridging the rights that civil law should bestow to all by singling out one group the discrimination against whom is sanctioned by the state.

Finally, after nearly 300 years this country decided that the answer to discrimination against blacks in the voting booth was illegal and for a president to decide it was immoral to ask a black man to risk his life and sometimes die for his country in a segregated armed services. The full integration within our culture INCLUDING laws against black and white marriage was NOT I repeat NOT something that could be up for a vote. If in 1957 or 1962 one put integration or black and white marriage up for a public vote it would have been voted down easily. The court, however, said otherwise and should have. Why? Because society advances, grows and understands more about tolerance and, in the instant case, human sexuality. These are human beings and they have the right to control their personal existence and happiness free of governmental prohibition. The tea baggers should know this as they want government out of everything but, of course, not for gays.

Rights cannot and should not be denied because gay people serve in the military, because gay people pay plenty of taxes, and because we KNOW many have died for our country and conclude that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is an unjust law. More than that, however, is that the state -- ALL states -- have no right to discriminate against homosexuals because it is UNFAIR and INHUMANE for one group to commit this injustice against another and for the state to sanction it!

Your wrong on this issue, Jeff. It may not happen in my lifetime that the FULL FAITH AND CREDIT CLAUSE (Article IV Section 1 of the US Constitution) will apply to gay marriage in every state but someday it may and should. I would LOVE to live to see the slings and arrows you on the rancid right hurl and which hurt, be taken away so that you cannot HURT anyone else any more!

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/12/who_decides_what_marriage_means/

Ignorance is NOT bliss

I ask no I PLEAD with you to read the following from Greenpeace AND Newsweek about the spill of the decade. The worst thing our country faces is not its DISASTROUS oil and other bad policies but its our IGNORANCE about them that WILL kill. I don't care WHAT you do but DO SOMETHING! Cntribute to the effort to stem this catastrophe, email, call, or smoke signal your state and especially FEDERAL Congress and our president who made the worst decision of his presidency to give a thumbs up to coastal drilling. Still we do NOT want Republicans as they are worse IF that is possible. It is. Dems can be bad but trust me Republicans are worse they are totally in bed with corporations and are proud of it. They are its true base. DO NOT BE IGNORANT of what these filthy corrupt corporations ESPECIALLY oil corporations like BP are doing to you, the ones you love and to your children and your children's children's environment. We can either live on this planet or we won't. GET INVOLVED and do NOT stay silent!!! Please read the paragraphs below it should take all of five minutes to do so. Then email anyone or everyone you know to get this message out or forward this email as you please. Google Greenpeace or the Sierra Club to find out the TRUE course of these horrific events. IGNORANCE is NOT bliss it is death. If you care about our natural environment which sustains you AND sustains your descendants you MUST care about this.

"Yesterday, Friday May 7, we met a few media crews in Biloxi Mississippi. We got on a boat with one of the crews and headed out into the waters of the Gulf. Rumor has it, and there are lots of rumors, this disaster of a spill is moving but the million dollar question is where is it moving and where/when will it hit the coast. They may be closing another area to fishing to the West of the mouth of the Mississippi so the oil must be going there? Pods of journalists are spread out along the shores looking for the picture they want. One journalist commented the lack of visible oil is good for the environment not good for pictures.

We did see oil (likely mixed with dispersant) quite a ways out from the port. According to maps we were at the edge of the "Zone of Uncertainty" to whether or not the oil would be going there. The lack of pictures of oil slicks coming ashore is missing the point and the spin from BP is good. "Dispersant," besides being toxic in and of it self and more so when it combines with the oil, is giving folks the impression the oil is dispersing and everything will be OK. They're not seeing the oil so maybe there's not a problem. [There IS a problem]! Problem is we've got estimates of over 200,000 gallons of oil per day sitting in the Gulf, dispersed or not. The oil is toxic, everyone agrees with that. The dispersant is toxic everyone agrees with that. Whether in long (un)impressive streaks across the surface or sinking to the bottom it's all toxic. And just because much of it is currently escaping the human eye does not mean it isn't there. One way or another the fish will eat it and the birds will eat them likely killing both.

Clean up measures continue. We're yet to see how this huge structure might work that BP is lowering over one of the two remaining spills still spewing oil into the Gulf. Everyone hopes it will work and that BP can do whatever it takes to stop the oil. Still the fact remains that even though we can't see all of what's happening out there, it is still happening out there. Rick Steiner has said many times over our time here that in the best case scenario with even the best efforts likely 90% of the oil still escapes, and he notes that 21 years after the Exxon Valdez Alaskans are still recovering from that spill.

Greenpeace is going to see what we can do to find out what BP doesn't seem to want us to know about the rest of the oil. Again we hope the measures BP takes to stop the spewing oil works. But the disaster has already taken place. The oil is already in the gulf. Economic and environmental damage has been done. Lives have been lost. The so called "Zone of Uncertainty" certainly can't escape the reality of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Newsweek further reports as INCREDULOUS as it might be: "Just as Louisiana politicians are about to get an up-close-and-personal look at the BP oil spill (it is approaching the shores an hour's drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital), they are considering a bill to "kneecap" all university environmental-law clinics in the state, which have led the way in challenging the historically cozy relationship between state politicians and the petrochemical industry."

High Hopes: The NYT editorial by David Brooks "What it Takes" is SO interesting. (See link below). I found myself shaking my head "yes" as I read it. I am a product of the late 1960's and attended Boston University, the so called "Berkeley of the East," at that time. I keep wondering where all those activists are now. Where are the students and professors I knew then who imbued me with a sense of purpose and hope? It is as if they vanished into thin air. Future generations since that time have never been, it seemed to me, as committed to principle or as vociferous about it. They seemed to simply go along to get along.

Where is that generation that was supposedly going to change the world for the better, of course? I do not see the fervently principled youth today that I saw as a student during those turbulent times. Those years were my BEST years. They were the years I loved the most as I look back on my life. I wish hopelessly for a return. Why? Because we had values that meant something and we were NOT afraid to say or, yes, even to scream what they were.

Elena Kagan seems like she went along to get along BUT my visceral feeling is thus: I think Elena Kagan's values are much like the vocal students of my era although she KNEW that politics is a minefield. If she wanted to shoot for the top one utterance of one's point of view could mean certain defeat.

I am hoping Barack Obama, too, is cut from that same cloth. In the end when it is Obama's SECOND term should he get it and when Elena Kagan IS confirmed should she be, that both will show us the reflection of my generation's values which they have osmotically ingested. I suspect it is only when they both have nothing to lose that they will show their true colors to be that of the gallant liberals I think lie dormant within them. I may be hoping against hope but it is the ONLY hope I have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/opinion/11brooks.html?hp

It's Kagan: Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan, former Harvard Law president to the Sup Ct. I'm happy. For once. She has no paper trail, has written little but balked at ROTC on the Harvard Campus because of the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Clearly she opposes that. Okay, so basically from what I have read she is conservative with respect to strong executive power but perhaps liberal on other issues, hard to tell. I remember once thinking my idol FDR was an example of a strong executive. It was once a rather liberal position. Since Bush and 9/11 it has not been.

Not sure if I'm against that except of course if we get another God forbid like George Bush or any other Republican for that matter. That's the problem.

Three women on the court as long as Ginsburg stays physically okay. She has had her problems that is for sure. This is why the presidency matters.

I'm still grumbling about the spill as my heart still breaks for our environment and the lost jobs of people there not to mention poor Louisiana.

But Would I rather have McCain and the idiot Palin? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

They are floating around another idea to cap it....I fall asleep praying. What me? Yep there are NO atheists in oil spills of this magnitude!

Obama's Fatal Flaw: Prediction: Barack Obama will be a one term president. As I have said before, the oil leak is a metaphor for Obama's Waterloo. It is simply outrageous. Why he gave thumbs up to off shore drilling to make Republicans love him and kiss him I will never know. This will have huge rippling effects and this president has SERIOUS flaws. He is NOT what I thought we were getting. I was willing to overlook all the other sorely inadequate policy such as his civil libertarian erosion and the people he chose for his administration to craft that policy but this spill breaks my camel’s back.

This oil spill is a metaphor for the president’s utterly incomprehensible leadership. His policies have been fraught with error and this spill shows it. He NEVER should have given a thumb up to off shore drilling ESPECIALLY at 3000 feet something that had not ever been done before. Before the drilling took place, if it took place, it SHOULD have been inspected by neutral parties including government who had NO monetary stake in the action. The rig itself SHOULD NOT have gone to a no-bid contractual entity and if it failed other fail safe options under government supervision should have been in place. BP had a bad record and it should have been exposed.

If Bush was an uncompromising idiot Obama, with his superior intellect, is EXTRAORDINARILY too deliberative and INFINITELY too compromising. This was not Harvard Law Review and he is blowing his chance AND FAST to enact lasting social change. At this moment in history his idea of bipartisanship would be LAUGHABLE if it were not so consequentially horrific. His idol should not have been Lincoln it SHOULD have been Franklin and even Theodore Roosevelt. FDR faced a Republican party that loathed him during the greatest economic catastrophe man had ever seen. He didn’t care. In fact, he welcomed the opposition and Obama should have done the same especially with a huge majority he enjoyed in Congress. Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust buster, with anti-trust legislation, broke up monopolies which had a stranglehold on the essence of capitalism and on the people that economic forum is supposed to serve.

Bob Bennett, decades long moderate Republican senator from Utah, is the canary in the coal mine. Utah just nixed him for a tea bag candidate. The moderate Republican is extinct. The American public soon will get what it deserves -- Republican control of Congress which will be Obama's real Waterloo. Will they be different? Oh sure. Just what the doctor ordered like the cancer they are. It will be more of the same but worse. Obama will be stymied at every attempt to substantive enactment of anything.

Corporate stranglehold on government is the problem. Oligarchy is the problem and our debt and deficit are the problems. Republican control of everything again ESPECIALLY by tea bag Republicans ultimately will mean that government will do nothing and allow the always responsible (I wax sarcastic) private sector to rule the day. There will be few government safety nets for the many problems our nation faces that ONLY government can provide.

Obama ruined health care by reneging on the public option. He gave a gift to the insurance cartels. Lyndon Johnson would, by any arm twisting necessary, have gotten it done, moreover, it should have been done AFTER our economic house was in order. In large part I hold Barack Obama accountable for Brown's win in Mass. He came in too little too late just like he did nothing when the tea baggers exploded over health care last summer. Where was his leadership then? He gave it to Congress who could not go up against the know nothings with guns. Our president then was not to be seen.

The FIRST duty of his presidency should have been to stop the economic bleeding on Wall Street AND Main Street, hire Krugmanesque or Elizabeth Warrenesque people in Treasury NOT Geithner, Summers and his cronies Rubin the Goldman Sachs rapists including Ben Bernanke Chairman of the Fed. The president can only be as excellent as the excellent people who surround him. Obama chose Bush light. He is NOT who I thought he was.

I am HUGELY disappointed in much of Barack Obama’s leadership. The HUGE cuts should be in defense spending as even Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (a former Bush appointee) has said. We should be paring down much of our empire to direct our economy where it needs to go to meet the social needs of our people and not our belligerent needs. President Eisenhower's statement on the dangers of the military industrial complex was exactly correct. I am dismayed and discouraged that our president did not know this too. He seemed to know it all in the Senate but not as the Commander in Chief.

The call should go out to everyone in the US or ANYWHERE for MIT-like geniuses to try to get this horrendous oil gusher ruining our coast, our economy and our nation, under control. This is BIG TIME SERIOUS for ALL of us. It is NOT just Louisiana's problem. If you think it is think again. Just wait until the oil starts crawling slowly up the east coast. This is a Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions and our president has a fatal flaw! He does not act. As Shakespeare so eloquently said “The play’s the thing!” Hamlet anyone?

Notes on a Journal: Last Friday was Bill Moyers's last show on PBS "The Journal." I have been an avid viewer taping that show every week. The understatement of the century for me is to say it was a great show. It was that and more. I learned so much playing cerebral ping pong, chewing on so much, and voraciously digesting all that it had to offer. Bill Moyers is one of the greats in television news commentary and journalism. If you have any money lying around doing nothing may I suggest a contribution to PBS? I sent the following thank you note to him, PBS and "The Journal" staff:

Since it is your last show I wanted to send you a quick thank you note describing my not so quick love affair with PBS, Bill Moyers and "The Journal." I have loved you nearly all of my life.

When PBS first came to Boston I must have been all of ten years old. It did not compare then to watching the Lone Ranger, Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. As I grew older, though, until this very day at 61 not only have I continued to love PBS and watch it, it is the one of the few channels that I give my life's precious time TO watch nearly every day.

When my mother passed away I thought I would never be able to take a breath without her. That is how I am feeling now. Bill, you are an irreplaceable man. I will miss you more than my feeble words can convey. I thank you and your staff SO much for the humanity, compassion, insight and to your many guests, too, who reached out to me every week and from whom I learned so much.

You are a priceless gem and I am thrilled to have lived in the ascribed era I had no part in choosing. I thank you, too, for nurturing my knowledge, understanding, and interest in the people and events of this earth we all occupy for much too short a time.

Thank you again!!

Breach of Tort: This is NOT the change I bought into. Each day I grow angrier and angrier at the president for making this DISASTROUS decision to oil drill off the Gulf Coast or any coast. The lapses we expected under the Bush administration and which were routine are the VERY opposite Obama said his policies would be. He said in HIS administration there would be NO negligent implementation of policy by those whom he would put in charge of government institutions whose job it is to enforce regulation to protect the nation against disaster. The disaster that has happened in the Gulf is beyond adequate expression. I am enraged and this story, if true, (link below) makes me weep all the more as the BP rig used in the Gulf drill seemingly was given a regulatory pass.

Some say I should just shut up as what do I want a Republican? NO of course NOT BUT I do NOT want Republican light either. I wanted and THOUGHT I was getting a progressive Democrat. For this and other policies I simply let slide, the president is in breach of tort. Unless he can reverse the severe damage to our waters, ecosystem and the many human livelihoods soon lost by this disgusting spill, he is in DEEP trouble in 2012. People like I am are his base and we want a new product. The president is in breach of tort. In many ways he is NOT the product we thought we were getting!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36956650/ns/us_news-washington_post/

Oil and water do not mix, neither does coal and neither does nuclear power: Please try to support Greenpeace, any other environmental group or any group involved in this horrific oil spill clean up. See link and email below.

It's possible I don't know if it's probable but I have read it is POSSIBLE the leak could be so huge it goes around the Florida coast and eventually up the eastern seaboard. I am hoping that is media hype because in that case WE would be directly affected as if we are not already. It all depends on just how much oil is at the bottom of that 3 miles down ocean floor and so far the weather
has made it impossible to see. It is now LIKE an upside down faucet GUSHING this disgusting crud.

There is NO such thing as, safe oil drilling, clean coal or CERTAINLY safe nuclear power. Nuclear power has nuclear waste. Now I ask you in a country of 300 MILLION people how much nuclear waste will there be the substance of which we CANNOT
get rid of? It is unfathomable. If you think this oil gusher is a disaster our minds cannot conceptualize a nuclear waste spill and the corporate "experts" will say oh don't worry we have the technology. YEAH RIGHT where have we heard that lame story before?

In Massachusetts, because of a water main rupture, people are going insane for water because 30 communities need to simply BOIL their water before drinking it. They are plundering the supermarkets getting all that oh so safe plastic bottled water with, of course, no toxins emanating from that plastic bottle. NOT MUCH! So how many of those people who killed themselves to get the plastic water will recycle their bottle? One can only IMAGINE the insanity that would take place with a nuclear power disaster. WAKE UP AMERICA we live in an oligarchy which is a fancy word for the union of HUGE corporations with government. Add papers please as in the lovely Arizona anti-immigrant law and the word becomes fascism.

Scroll down and see what Greenpeace has to offer and I urge you to support it and support our country by doing it!


http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/05/01/2291388.aspx

UNFORGIVABLE: I, as an Obama supporter and life long Democratic, am horrified to say, THIS HUMONGOUS oil gush is Obama's REAL Waterloo! (See link below) I must call it as I see it. Our president has disappointed me on a number of fronts. I was willing to overlook most of them. I overlooked even ones that overturned the bedrock of my own philosophy when Obama maintained Bush's lack of due process in continuing the Patriot Act and warrant-less wiretaps, even when he obliterated the public option on health care, even when he failed to directly respond to racist teabag shouting matches last summer, even when he put the Wall Street foxes in charge of the sick chickens, even when Attorney General Holder is instructed to continue to go after reporter James Risen when Obama promised to endorse the journalist shield, even when he said there is no difference between Wall Street and Main Street BUT THIS oil disaster I cannot forgive.

Placating Republicans by turning over on drill baby drill is UNFORGIVABLE. This spill may make Bush's Katrina debacle look like child's play. SOMEONE did not pay attention to the minutia of safety factors concerning this UNIQUE 3000 foot under-the-ocean drill. No one in the administration screamed at Obama the error of his ways so he could consider both sides of the off shore 3000 foot never done before deep drilling issue and all of its attendant risk?

Not only is this Obama's Waterloo it may be ours as well. Between Wall Street and Obama's unceasing placation of a toxic Republican agenda, the reversal of solid Democrat policy surrounding off shore drilling just may be the camel back-breaking straw I cannot endure. He is losing my support. The question is not only whom did we elect but who else could progressive Democrats in 2012 elect instead? Unless this spill can be contained, the damage stopped and the fault determined then I say to Rahm Emanuel who said the president's base does not matter, I AM the base and I MATTER!

What has he done to our country in his feeble attempt to play a mating dance with Republicans? Since we are on the dance card what will this do to all of us? Maybe the president should consider dancing with the ones who brought him to the dance in the first place!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fix-20100501,0,323202,full.story

Five Words for Drill Baby Drill Gulf Coast Oil Spill

MONUMENTAL DISASTER OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS!

Give to the animal clean up rescue as well as human business devastation any way you can. Just be careful if you choose to give whatever you give to is absolutely legitimate.

Two I would check out are The Sierra Club and Greenpeace. I am sure the major news networks will have a list of what you can do or where you can give IF it is as bad as so many think it will be.

I am hoping against hope that the winds will die down and that some brilliant minds somewhere will figure out a way to cap these leaks. One wonders why this was not thought about in the first place.

Time will tell who is responsible for this nightmare and like the Wall Street gluttons they will reap what they have sown!

The Arizona Colossus of Madness: The Arizona law is the closest I have ever known in this country of a fascistically tyrannical state and a national mindset in blind rebuke of the civil libertarian Bill of precious Rights our Founders so presciently bestowed upon us. Our Founders three centuries ago KNEW the threat behind the power of the state. This law reflects the mean, rancid, nasty, cruel, inhumane, disgusting, nature of a particular segment of the American psyche. We should be hiding in shame because, we know what fascism REALLY is and we have OUR dead in their graves in France on the shores of Normandy to prove it. What did we fight for? The US stopped the cancer of Nazism death in its tracks in Europe only to see our own country fall short of its own free thinking promise.

Arizonans have BETRAYED the very nature of HOPE that is the essence of this country's DNA -- the possibility of a better life for everyone no matter who wants it and wants to work for it ..... WHAT HAVE WE BECOME? Like the Dorian Gray picture, PART of us has morphed into an UGLY, SICK, corrupted face. I do not recognize the nation I knew. In five thousand years THIS was the ONLY place a Jew could feel safe and now MILLIONS of decent, hard working Hispanics will go back to the poverty from whence they came reminiscent of the 1939 ship the St. Louis portrayed in the film "The Damned" when its cargo, a boat load of Jews, was rejected from American shores only to return to the ovens of Auschwitz. So many Hispanics, struggling people wanting only work will return to the heat of the desert to the poverty they knew and the possible early death that may await. So many are good people, hard working people, loving people, some even married to US citizens but leaving them nonetheless because that rancid bill does NOT discriminate -- it attacks ALL of them if they happen to be brown. This is tragic!

I shake my head in disbelief from the anti-human Arizona law, to the bloaviating imbeciles carrying pictures of a half African American president pictured as a Hitler. How stupid, how illogical, how insane and how insulting they are. What has happened to my country, indeed? This is a sad time, and more sad times lie ahead as an immigration law of ONE STATE may spread like a virus to another tying this nation's hands and fitting our heads with the tyranny of a crown of thorns.

I remind you of the poet Emma Lazarus who wrote in 1883 her famous poem about Lady Liberty and our land engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside our Statue of Liberty:

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
""Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

YES, I want my country back, THAT country, the country of promise, the country of humane thought that for a time lit the world.

To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate THAT is the Question: PBS’s Frontline showed a segment on childhood vaccinations. As many know whether to vaccinate a child for the various so called childhood diseases is a controversial subject today. One woman interviewed in the Frontline documentary said that we had not had a case of wild polio in this country for decades and that wild polio is all but eliminated from the planet so she saw no need to vaccinate for that here. I differ with her STRONGLY. Polio is NOT eliminated from the planet. She is making, in my opinion, a HUGE error because we are a globalized society. There IS wild polio still remaining in some third world countries. In addition, there are global areas which are at war, areas of turmoil and areas which present different religious obstacles preventing (hard to believe as it may be), immunizations. All it takes is one unvaccinated person entering this country harboring the virus and settling in an area where there are numbers of children and even adults who are not vaccinated against this dreaded disease for that child to create an epidemic which will spread to the unvaccinated. This is unacceptable, it is immoral and, in my opinion, it is wrong.

I speak unfortunately not as a scientist or physician but from personal experience. I contracted polio in 1954 at five years old, six months before a vaccine was available. If the vaccination had been available then and I had not been vaccinated, I would have later thought it criminal not to have been vaccinated against it.

There are, of course, other aspects of this complex problem. Perhaps SOME of the diseases within vaccinations could be eliminated or injections spread out more evenly or the other substances within the vaccine itself could be examined BUT, in my opinion, it is UNCONSCIONABLE with respect to polio in particular for anyone to say that because wild polio has not been seen in this country that this disease is eradicated. Polio is NEVER ERADICATED UNLESS children are immunized with the polio vaccines to prevent it. It CAN return at any time and WILL if children are not immunized against it.

I can testify to the fact that polio is a life long horrendous, deformative and expensive disease. I was considered "lucky" at that time as it completely paralyzed only my right leg. My left leg was functional but is still somewhat compromised. Polio for me meant constant hospital returns, three painful surgeries to ameliorate its after effects and it meant paying for expensive equipment to this day.

After mid life when bones become weaker it meant THREE successive FEMUR fractures of my polio leg. That leg is extraordinarily fragile. It has meant additional hospitalizations as an adult taking one year per each fracture to heal because that leg does not heal quickly. The risk to that bone is significant as now, falling is a regular occurrence. Aging makes life even more difficult for a post polio survivor. Fracturing that bone a fourth time could be life altering or even life threatening!

Polio is a life long, utterly deforming, and an EXPENSIVE disease. It has caused UNTOLD hardship, psychological damage and as an adult it has cost me my stamina that others of my age still possess. Polio has had HUGE complications in my life and it is, in my opinion, UNFORGIVABLE for a child not to be immunized, at the very least, for that. Life is a risk. The risk of acquiring polio is much too great and the benefits of vaccination to prevent polio are much too good, not to vaccinate. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate that is the question. The answer for me is abundantly clear. For THAT disease, it is an absolute and unequivocal YES!

The Sickest Slick: I am in another hurry this a.m. so this is off the top of my just awakened brain. I am SICK SICK at heart about the drilling oil spill off our coast as I have iterated before. I feel like I want to cry. If I were a believing person with SO much disaster I have never seen SO much disaster in the world from economic to climate, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, climate change, tsunami's, mine disasters and so much more I can't keep track of all of it and now THIS disaster I might think Revelation is at hand. Don't worry I'm not a believing person in THAT anyway but it is HORRIFIC. I just KNOW they won't contain this spill for weeks if not months and I just know it is oozing more probably much more as the Coast Guard says today AND worse they have to burn it sending HUGE toxic plumes of ugly disgusting poisonous smoke into our air. A reporter said the wonderful smell of salt water is obliterated there and replaced by the cancerous smell of oil. I won't even mention the eleven humans dead and many injured from this rig explosion.

Do I want to say Palin with her drill baby drill is the idiot of idiots? YES but why why does this brilliant president in whom I had SO much faith WHY would he EVER on planet earth EVER decide to lift the coastal drilling ban when EVERY good mind who KNOWS about drilling oil knows it's risky, dangerous and whatever we get WON'T be enough. It just delays what we REALLY need to concentrate on and that is clean energy. WHY DID HE DO THIS? I simply do NOT get him. I love him but he is still the enigma to me he was when he began his run. Something is undecipherable about this president and I just don't know what it is. BUT who would care about that if his policy decisions were what I thought in the beginning they would be and if they did not impact us so hugely! This oil spill I will say it again is just an AWFUL AWFUL thing. Drill baby drill around our coast should be HALTED IMMEDIATELY and Sarah Palin should put a sock in her moronic mouth!

Barack Obama WHAT are you doing, who are you? Where is the progressive senator I knew and loved? I'm am sick at heart, saddened and disappointed beyond belief. Our beautiful coast and all the animals, birds etc. are at grave risk. The poor innocent beautiful things. Please anyone out there if you are working on this and can save those gorgeous animals do and save us while you are at it. IF this slick hits the shores of LA, FLA, and Mississippi or WORSE they won't know what hit them and neither will we!

Goldman's Gold: I see the Goldman Sachs' actions as both a CRIMINAL matter AND a civil matter. The SEC, of course, filed only a civil complaint so far. In a civil case we are simply talking about monitory remuneration. A criminal case is really a much more serious matter requiring a proof from the state of, in this case, the breaking of federal laws against most especially fraud by the defendants. I believe what has been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and largely innocent public is SO serious that not only should Goldman pay monitory damages to their clients commensurate with the perpetration of this fraud but I also believe a criminal case should be brought as well. Goldman’s actions were so heinous and seemingly so illegal that the “I know it when I see it” Supreme Court measure for pornography SHOULD apply to this as well. Someone(s) should pay for these malevolent and destructive acts not only in money but in jail time as well.

We are, I think, talking about billions of investments, securities, derivatives and other very complex investment instruments which were packaged, cut up into pieces unknown to mortgage holders as well as securities purchasers alike and sold by Goldman and others as sterling products. Customers were in essence duped into thinking this investment was a good thing to purchase when, in fact, these securities were toxic garbage and, I believe, Goldman itself KNEW they were garbage and sold them to their unsuspecting clients. Compensation for those fraudulent investments is more than warranted due to the massive quantity sold and the dire effect it had on the country and, indeed, the world.

If Goldman’s acts are not criminal then I do not know what criminal is. In the instant matter a crime of HUMONGOUS proportions was committed against innocent people who lost their hard earned 401Ks, pension funds and other heretofore thought stable investments. I dare say lives were lost often by suicide as jobs and even health insurance were causalities of Wall Street hubris.

I watched four hours of the Goldman Sachs Senate hearing. Goldman testifiers looked SO bad yesterday bobbing and weaving as if they were children being asked if lying about a school yard prank was the wrong thing to do but not really figuring out how to make sure their answer was the right one so they would not be punished. Instead they were asked the serious seemingly simple question should the customer have faith in the investing institution or any institution to which the customer gives its money. Is it a bad thing if an investment firm represents one thing to its customers but in reality knows what they are selling is junk but sell it as if it were gold? Moreover, the firm KNOWING it was selling junk and that the instrument would fail bet against its own sale by taking out insurance (credit default swaps) on those very instruments. The house would win even if they lost. Those sanctimonious immoral jerks before the Senate could NOT give a decisive answer to those simple childlike questions. Goldman was not MERELY a "principle" just acting as a conduit for savvy investors. Goldman sold these junk securities to anyone whether they were savvy or not. That is NOT the point. Goldman’s conduct was shameful, it was immoral and, I believe, it was illegal.

Compounding the matter was the rating companies like Standard & Poors which were hired by the investment firm itself to rate the securities and were paid by the very firm that was selling the securities. That would be as if I hired an evaluator of my home and gave them instructions to rate it high and sold it off to a buyer who took their word for it. Do I see a conflict of interest here? Emphatically, YES!

Goldman actions are an abridgment in tort law and it should be one in criminal law too. It is my opinion that the customer of an investment firm relies on that firm in good faith for advice because one often does not have the expertise to do so oneself. If one buys a product one should have the reasonable certainty and expectation that the product is what the seller SAYS it is. In this case Triple A rated investments which were in reality junk. That is basic in tort law. Goldman did not sell the security thinking it was a good product. They sold it thinking it was a terrible product and in fact a “sh*&^%” product (as a Goldman employee said in his email) and shorted it i.e. bet against it unknown to the ones to whom they sold the rotten product in the first place.

It is NOT the bet here that is the issue. Everyone knows that if you go to a horse track and you bet you COULD lose but not everyone knows IF a horse is lame or doped. If one knew that one would clearly not bet on that horse and, in fact, doping is illegal and if the track bet AGAINST a doped horse well need I say what would happen if found out? If that doesn't move you maybe the Black Sox scandal rings a bell? Betting is bad enough but when you bet against your own team failing when you KNOW they are going to throw a game? Need I say more?

Credit default swaps or insurance taken out on bad securities sold to customers by Goldman as good securities should be both civilly negligent and criminally prosecutable. Their actions and actions by many others caused innocent people HUGE harm, probably forever, and still is affecting the country and even the world adversely.

ALL of those who knew about these fraudulent monstrosities should be indicted, tried, convicted, fined in civil law and tried criminally as well. If there is not good case law AGAINST what these unconscionable excuses for human beings have done then there ought to be BUT I suspect there is. I am hoping the best legal minds that the government can employ FIND it and find it FAST as CLEARLY Goldman’s product was NOT as good as gold!

CAN I JUST SCREAM? CAN I JUST SCREAM AS I SEE EXACTLY WHAT I KNEW WOULD HAPPEN WHEN THE PRESIDENT OPENED UP OUR COASTS TO DRILL BABY DRILL FOR OIL? I'd like to hear Sarah the Idiot Palin scream that now. Proof positive as the wet lands of Louisiana, Mississippi and even Florida are, as I write this, at risk as if they were not already by slimy, putrid, rancid oil. This is the cradle of a civilized environment which will take generations to revitalize IF ever as oil will most likely hit the shore at 42,000 gallons of the crud a DAY!

Honest to God if I believed in a God I surely would not blame Him for spewing out revenge for some of our country's (and other's) most disgusting policies which hurt humanity and are perpetrated over and over and over again here and around the world. Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again thinking you will get different results. You won't. What will it take? What? Does anyone care about our gorgeous UNIQUE planet? Does anyone care about their children? Does anyone care about their grandchildren and if you don't have any of those as I do not just care about the sweet animals that are at risk including the perpetrator of the madness -- us.

I am sickened by the oil spill but the trees, flowers and birds of that beautiful wilderness will be sickened much more than even I or you could imagine.

I STILL Don't Know Jack: UNBELIEVABLE performances by Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon, Brenda Vacarro, and John Goodman in "You Don't Know Jack" an HBO film about Dr. Death i.e. Jack Kavorkian and the incendiary issue of human euthanasia. They all were simply fabulous in their respective roles.

Pacino, though, takes the proverbial cake. This has Golden Globe written all over it and he should get an Academy Award for best actor too. I have never seen Pacino in a better role to the point where I stopped thinking it was Pacino and began to think of him as the actual Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He was BRILLIANT!!

This film was absolutely riveting. I am still left, however, with the feeling that I do NOT know Jack Kavorkian not really. I am suspect OFTEN of seemingly altruistic human behavior. I love it but at the same time I know people do things often for their own reasons. So be it. Could I do what Kavorkian did? Not on your life pardon the pun. Do I think in some instances euthanasia is absolutely in order YES I EMPHATICALLY DO! I believe it is the person's right to extricate him or herself out of suffering and misery any way he/she can. It's up to, in my opinion, the individual and if he wants to be Kavorkianed I understand. I am NO fan of pain and suffering either.

Still, if I had the proper doctor credentials I could NEVER do that to anyone. I can't even court the prospect we may have to euthanize our 19 year old cat. It makes me cringe, cry and want to walk away. Despite the seeming humanity of it I STILL could not do it. The question is WHY Dr. Kavorkian can and did. Damned if I know. The film, while great, left, for me, that question unresolved. If you are interested in viewing it see HBO for details.

Toxic Shock -- Moving Towards Solutions: Today, the news from Louisiana is that the drilling for oil explosion idiocy has turned toxic. Hopeful, with the Obama victory in 2008, my hope has turned to disappointment, despair and sadness as the policies he touted in his campaign become weakened almost beyond recognition. My one time hope, Barack Obama and a total Democratic control of Congress, turned his one time opposition to drill baby drill into now near Sarah Palin policy. I am sickened. I predicted the leaks would happen when he lifted the drilling coastal ban. I knew it ultimately would be leaking into the ocean which it now is doing. Soon we will see gorgeous seagulls and all they represent covered in oil muck and sludge struggling to survive but dying a sad death along with the ecological system they represent unless humans can save them first. Our beautiful earth is being squandered for political expediency, money and power.

I just began viewing the tape of the "Garbage Warrior" on the Sundance Channel. See the link for it below. I urge you to see it. What a marvel it is. I was always supportive of most of the environmental movement's goals beginning in the late sixties but must admit, ashamedly, that the environmental movement did not catch fire in my psyche until the realities of global warming, which most quality environmentalists have been predicting for decades, are quickly taking place. I did not listen much three decades ago but I am SURELY listening now.

Michael Reynolds's architectural commitment to our beautiful earth shows it CAN be done if the right people do it. I thank him for his efforts and hope he makes a HUGE impact on environmental movement policy. Instead of seeing this film on Sundance I wish it were shown on the major networks for EVERYONE who does not have the luxury of cable to view. What he has done NEEDS to be seen.

It is a wonderful film. Maybe even our president will view it!

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/index.php

Collective Madness: A few thoughts in the a.m. to be refined later due to time constraints. I have to get my basic thoughts out because of the deep horror of what transpired in Arizona by an Arizona legislature enacting and a moronic governor signing a putrid, inhumane, anti-immigrant law. What a ROTTEN UNCONSTITUTIONAL, anti-democratic, anti-due process, racist anti-immigrant law it is. Police now can pull you over even if you LOOK like an illegal immigrant --usually Hispanic-- brilliantly determined by the "right" kind of hair, dress, or shoes and ask you for your papers! What papers? Your birth certificate or the paper you wrote in 5th grade? This will cost the state of Arizona big time money (I FERVENTLY hope) by those boycotting the state (please do if you are thinking of going -- DON'T and urge others not to as well). Not only that it will cost the police in BIG TIME lawsuits. Even most of them hate this law.

I am going to write something and incorporate a world (including nature) gone wild, no parameters, no boundaries whether it's sex, language vulgarity, political extremism, tell all movie stars, anti immigrant fever, pedophilia, religious fanaticism, global warming caused by man or Wall Street. It's all similar. There are FEW restraints on human behavior. It is cerebral, physical and even natural anarchy brought on by man's greed, gluttonous and pathologically uncontrolled behavior. This is humanity run amok. We have, as a species gone, I believe, collectively MAD and deserve, in my opinion, whatever nature dishes out. More to follow when I have time. I'm sure you can hardly wait.

The Murderous McVeigh: Rachel Maddow began last evening a series about the home grown right wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the murderer of 168 people in the Oklahoma City Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, as a remembrance of the 15 year anniversary of the sad occurrence. I paste its link below. If you have time, it is, I believe quite interesting but more than that I believe it is imperative, especially in our time, to understand as best one can, what jet propels a sociopath into action. It is important because we MUST know -- left and right alike -- that our words matter and that the advocacy of violence to achieve ends has no romance behind it. Violent acts whether perpetrated by the government or individuals in opposition TO government have ugly consequences for REAL human beings. The price is paid in the blood of innocents who cruelly have their childhood and their lives stolen from them by one hideous act. Lives are lost and bodies twisted forever which go unseen on national news or forgotten the next week, the next month, the next year, the next decade unto eternity. I offer, too, yet again another piece I wrote on April 7 entitled "Tree of Blood." which deals with the subject of the nature of the violent overthrow of government.

http://natalierosen.blogspot.com/2010/04/tree-of-blood-one-of-front-pages-on.html

I believe MSNBC's reenactment of the Timothy McVeigh's homegrown terrorist crime complete with hours of authentic audio tapes made by McVeigh himself answers directly to an often dormant seed within the American psyche in which violent people use to their advantage some seemingly lofty other goal as an excuse to do that which they enjoy doing and that is killing. Why they do this is the eternal question. If you are interested the interviewer of McVeigh, Lou Michael, has written a book entitled "American Terrorist." The link for the interview, crime reenactment and the audio tapes is:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#36650511

Quotable quotes: I was researching some quotes I love. Unfortunately, I know them when I hear them but to bring them up to memory sometimes is difficult. Still I thought I would place some I do remember on my blog simply because I love them.

One was given by Robert Kennedy told to a group of African Americans he met on his campaign trail for president in 1968 several months before his own death. He had just found out about the assassination of Martin Luther King and did not know how to break the horrific news to them. He tried to calm the crowd by trying to relay that he knew how they felt since he had a brother who was killed too. He knew that kind of grief. He quoted from one of the many classics he had read trying to understand his brother's death. He quoted from Aeschylus's play Agamemnon and said:

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

The other I love was his quoting from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at the Democratic National Convention, August 27, 1964 in remembering his brother Jack. He said:

"Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."


I believe those quotes are simply gorgeous. Shakespeare, especially, one can say certainly had a way with words. Ah to be young again when memorizing things comes much more easily. So now I still try but my goodness there is just too much to know and not enough time in which to know it which is why I love Robert Frost's quote from the last stanza of his poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Frontline: Behind the Lines of the Taliban -- The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan: Despite the seemingly disgusting nature of this particular Frontline I think it captures just what we are dealing with in Afghanistan and god knows how many other places on earth as the utlra religious yet again show us the HEIGHTS and DEPTHS their behavior can reach AND sink.

No one BUT NO ONE can crow about their own religion or culture being immune as we see so evident in so many religious orthodoxies in our midst. We need only pay witness to Pope Benedict's utterly pathetic and anemic effort to deal with the MOST egregious behavioral sex abuse, usually of young boys, in the Church. We see it too in orthodoxies OF ALL SORTS including, I am disgusted and ashamed to say, a few I have only read about in the New York Times concerning the ultra orthodox Jewish sects in New York where again sex abuse often of young boys goes UNREPORTED only to be "dealt with" in secret by ONLY men, of course, from the particular sect involved. The foxes indeed guard the coop. It's NOT the children the religious elders care about. It is the shame heaped upon the institution itself which is their main concern. They do not realize that when these acts finally see light, as they now often do, the religious institution itself is the entity that is besmirched the most by its Herculean efforts to hide the abominable behavior.

Exposure of these INEXCUSABLE acts on ALL fronts is the ONLY thing that turns night into day as it sheds light on the crimes as the only disinfectant for their viral contaminant. When you ask for whom the bell tolls it most certainly tolls for ALL of us as when one becomes a victim, I believe, we all do. I suggest you either watch or tape Frontline as it has been taking us "Behind the Lines of the Taliban." Scroll down to see the link and previews of its content.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/?utm_campaign=Various&utm_medium=Bulletin&utm_source=Main

Before I post below I want to add that I LOVE Rachel Maddow. I think she is the next Edward R. Murrow but even MORE brilliant. She is a scholar and it shows. Having said that for the first time I took issue with one small particular segment at the end which she sometimes does. It does not have the gravity of nuclear war but still I decided to write her the following:

Cocktail Anyone? There probably is NO ONE in television cable or otherwise who could make mixing a drink an interesting story. Rachel did. I am about as interested in drinking as I am in someone washing port-o-potties but at the end of the interview watching the two young woman from the Angostura Bitters Co. explain the alarming shortage of bottles making Angostura bitters impossible to get I thought why am I interested in this story? Who cares? It really shows the saturated-with-talent of Rachel Maddow who could make an utterly irrelevant story interesting.

Still, my first criticism of her: I am not wild about the real cocktail moments i.e. the ones that concentrate on REALLY mixing a drink. Why make drinking seem so, well, sheik and fun. It would almost be like your having someone on roll a very expensive tobacco or cigar from Cuba and making it look just dandy. Sure, most people (I think but what do I know about the subject) drink prudently but drinking really is responsible for a LOT of ruined lives not to mention death on the highways. Why give it a forum which makes it look oh so inviting? I admit, if the liquor industry depended on me for their profits they would go bankrupt. I really think though, Rachel, you can do without that particular segment.

How about doing or repeating a "Cocktail Moment" segment with a really comedic segment by someone like the one John Stewart did of a complete satire on Glen Beck. It was the greatest comedy segment I have ever seen since the 1950's. It stands with the greats like Sid Caesar's "This is Your Life Uncle Guppe," or Carol Burnett's Gone with the Wind parody her plantation staircase descent dressed in a curtain which was HILARIOUS!

Something, anything would be, in my opinion, better than mixing a drink on TV where millions could be at that moment convinced drinking is oh so kool, go out and buy the ingredients, get drunk, get behind a wheel and kill themselves or somebody else. Whiskey or tobacco is not advertised on TV for a reason.

Just my opinion but we STILL will ALWAYS watch and love Rachel although if Angostura Bitters went out of business tomorrow it would be a who cares moment for me!!!

NB: My post from yesterday "Silent No More" about objectionable comments made by a Bishop in the Vatican was itself commented on by a historian, Gabriel Wilensky. His comment is excellent as he does so from a historian's viewpoint. Scroll down and click on the comments section of that blog if you are interested.

He has also written a book entitled "Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings about Jews Paved the Way to the Holocaust" His web site is: http://www.sixmillioncrucifixions.com/Home.html

Silent No More -- My Letter to the Vatican:

Bishop Emeritus Babini, was quoted as saying: "They [the Jews] do not want the church, they are its natural enemies." He goes on to say "Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers." The writer in the British newspaper The Guardian quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism [of church pedophilia], considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is."

This is UNACCEPTABLE from anyone let alone a higher-up of the Church itself even IF he is a retired one. He denies that he made the statement OF COURSE, but Babini as stated in The Guardian, "has previously been quoted on the Pontifex website accusing Jews of exploiting the Holocaust, as well as criticizing homosexuality." This statement DEMANDS an apology from the Pope, himself, anything less is inadequate and will be received with insult and anger by the Jewish people and many others in the world who value intellect and reason as man's greatest tool against stupidity and its bestial cousin cruelty.

This is yet another delightful peek into the joys of two thousand years of anti-semitism still safely tucked away in the Vatican residing with this Pope Benedict aka German Cardinal Ratizinger and his merry man Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto. Not only does the good Bishop blame church pedophilia scandal on the Jews but he blames homosexuality for church pedophilia as well. Yes, moronic insanity is alive and well everywhere ESPECIALLY in the Vatican.

There is NOTHING I repeat NOTHING that enrages me like the age old canard of deicide i.e. the Christian accusation of the alleged killing of the Christian God i.e. Jesus by Jews. I, as a Jew, am ALWAYS vigilant because this moronic TRIPE is STILL with us and comes out of the mouth of a Bishop. I thought the Pope and the Vatican are fully aware and can control the most dastardly millennial infused lie many in its ranks still perpetrate on the Jewish people. The Vatican still, despite Vatican II, plagues the Jew and the words uttered by this Bishop are the example of its cancer on humanity. It is why we as Jews and ALL men of conscience WILL NEVER forget and WILL NEVER surrender, to that toxic brew. This indelible stain on the Church is still there and, if we allow, it will fester and grow as it did for two thousand years culminating in the wholesale murder of the six million. I submit some in the Vatican Church and perhaps even the Pope himself with his Hitler Youth past ingrained within him will not rest until every Jewish belief is nullified. This truth is why the Jew CANNOT and WILL NOT let it go and is silent no more. I expect a complete apology from the Pope for his wayward Bishop anything else is simply NOT enough!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/11/catholic-bishop-blames-jews

Lest I Not Be Clear: When I wrote my last small post late last evening, I was tired, and my body is invaded by a relentless rhino virus. Lest I not be clear, if you do click on the link below you will see the direct quote that began the spark that drew the my volcanic eruption. Bishop Emeritus Babini, was quoted as saying: "They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers." The writer in the Guardian (a British newspaper) quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism [of church pedophilia], considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is."

This is UNACCEPTABLE from anyone let alone a higher-up of the Vatican even IF he is retired. He denies that he made the statement OF COURSE, but Babini as stated in The Guardian, "has previously been quoted on the Pontifex website accusing Jews of exploiting the Holocaust, as well as criticizing homosexuality." I rest my case for now but I will have a more cogent response I hope later! This statement DEMANDS an apology from the Pope, himself, anything less is inadequate and will be received with insult and anger of the Jewish people and many others in the world who value intellect and reason as man's greatest tool against stupidity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/11/catholic-bishop-blames-jews

Prelude to a blog: Well, it's too late now to write on the link below. Just cut and paste into your browser for yet another delightful peek into the joys of two thousand years of anti-semitism still safely tucked away in the Vatican residing with this pope Benedict aka German Cardinal Ratizinger and his merry man Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto. Not only does the good Bishop blame church pedophilia on the Jews but he blames homosexuality for church pedophilia. Yep, moronic insanity is alive and well everywhere ESPECIALLY in the Vatican.

There is NOTHING I repeat NOTHING that gets my ire like the age old canard of deicide i.e. the Christian accusation of the alleged killing of god i.e. Jesus by Jews. Sure, that's old hat. Went out with the ovens of Auschwitz. MY posterior it did. This is EXACTLY what I mean when I say as a Jew I am ALWAYS vigilant because this moronic TRIPE is STILL with us, it still plagues the Jew and it is a cancer on humanity. It is why we must NEVER forget, we must NEVER surrender, we must ALWAYS know that it is there and if we allow it to it will fester and grow as it did for two thousand years culminating in the wholesale murder and slaughter of the six million. I urge you to either click onto this link or paste it into your browser as testament to this truth as to why the Jew canNOT and WILL not let it go and be silent! Silent no more. Good title for my next blog.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/11/catholic-bishop-blames-jews

Statistical Folly--A Fair Deal in the Balance Jeff Jacoby's statistical reductionism in his Sunday, April 10, 2010 Boston Globe article "Support for Israel runs on party lines" which states, simplistically, Republicans/Israel YES, Democrats/Israel YES but less so is absolutely INANE. What do these statistics mean? In reality nothing. I submit President Obama may be perceived as somewhat less hostile to Arab/Palestinian interests and slightly more equitable. How can this perception hurt when the perception of unequivocal Israeli support no matter the behavior nurtured by team Bush brought constant discord?

Our president FINALLY is smart and is TRYING to present a more equitable stance which not only serves Arab/Palestinian interests, but, in my opinion, serves the Interests of the Jewish state as well. There can be no peace, it seems to me, if the peace broker is seen by the Arab and Palestinian side as solidly in the Israeli camp. What fairness is there in that? The constructing of the settlements during Vice President Biden's visit to Israel was, in my view, insulting to Vice President Biden and the Obama administration which wanted a temporary halt to settlement construction while in the middle of delicate peace negotiations because the construction of settlements is contentious. Settlement construction done with a wink and a nod by Prime Minister Netanyahu threatened the peace process itself but, obviously, he did not care or it would not have commenced.

Either one wants peace or one doesn't. The road to peace MUST be paved by at least the PERCEPTION of an equitable mediator. If one were to litigate a mediation in our courts and the mediator said okay I'll mediate but you must know I have unwavering support for party A but I'll try to be fair to party B, that would be ridiculous.

The President has stated unequivocally his support for the Jewish state many times. I, as a Jew, believe he meant it. We who love Israel and want peace have waited for it for over sixty years. Peace, in my opinion, can happen ONLY when both sides think the mediator will be fair so a fair deal can be honed. I believe our president is trying his best to craft a perception that says just that!

A Letter to Virginia Governor McDonnell:

Governor McDonnell: Your elevation of the confederacy to remembrance status by proclamation is DISGUSTING. It would be like an elected official in Germany remembering Nazi dead. Yes, I think that is an APT simile because the southern states wanted to allow the perpetuation of a heinous racist system, and it was a revolt to do just that under the guise of a so called states rights philosophy. Let's call it by its REAL name. It REALLY WAS a treasonous attempt to wage war against the union which WAS the United States of America. I do not care how you dress this proclamation up. Yes, the so called confederacy was a radical attempt at OVERTHROW of the United States of America and the attempt was instituted through rebellion and war. That most of the southern traitors were not thrown into jail is a testament to the BRILLIANCE of Abraham Lincoln. He really DID want to unite the nation unlike you who want to divide it yet again. As Barack Obama said, paraphrasing, we are ONE nation not a nation of red states and blue states, not black and not white … . We are ONE America the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Moreover, that you did not mention slavery as the premier cause of the Civil War was NOT an omission it was purposeful. You KNEW once you did this accursed thing there would be voices angrily opposing it BUT that is just what you wanted. You KNEW some in your state and others in the nation would cheer yet again over two hundred years later a damnable thing which, with great regret, occurred in our country.

Damn you and those like you who want a remembrance of the confederacy to help destroy or split this nation yet again. You are still, two hundred years later, fighting the Civil War. Yes, the war was about many things but SLAVERY and its extension into the western states and territories was the largest issue. Slavery was a mean, cruel, nasty SHAME and slaughter of men perpetrated on a nation whose early revolutionary documents set aside tyranny and proposed freedom. The fact that slavery existed then is our albatross and hypocrisy which malfeasance has taken hundreds of years to undo. This patriot does not see the confederacy as a "cause." This patriot sees the confederacy for what it was – a treasonous war waged to undo by force the United States of America and in doing so perpetuate a horrific institution which caused black human beings to be treated and owned as property. It was this nation's most contentious issue and it has caused much pain and much death.

Governor McDonnell, SHAME on you! Your nostalgia for some romantic notion and remembrance of the confederacy brings SHAME yet again on this nation. The south LOST the war. Get used to it! The confederacy is NOTHING to cheer about or want to remember and if you were born black you would surely know that!

Tree of Blood: One of the front pages on Huffington Post was about the rebellion and possibly toppling of the government in Kyrgyzstan. It is an ugly bloody picture but it is what toppling a government looks like. Just in case any right wingnuts or ANY wingnuts think it is so romantic to overthrow a government it emphatically is NOT. Invariably a government it replaces is WORSE than the one toppled. It is NEVER clean and simple. It is brutal and harsh. Our country is a country of 300 MILLION. It is amazing that it runs as well as it does despite the nasty epithets thrown by the right AND the left against many people who possess power.

Much as there are those in our country who say otherwise, our government really DOES have an avenue to change and it has many times for over three centuries. Our Civil War cost us over 600,000 lives. That is A LOT of lives for the US population then with the crude armaments it possessed in comparison to what we now have. Rebellion is NOT pretty and it is NOT romantic. Rebellion hurts and kills only to find the government it replaces is just the same or worse as the one before. Witness the falling of the Vietnam Diem regime which was replaced by Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky who were despots. When they were overthrown upon US exit from Vietnam they were replaced by Communist Ho Chi Min and his Viet Cong. If one wants to see REAL tyranny look to that or to the Cambodian Pol Pot who rivaled some of the worst despots who ever lived. There are, of course, many other examples.

Our government is not perfect but we have one where, at the very least, our grievances can be addressed. It was not easy to get here and we have changed for the good at times despite or maybe because of the diversity of our numbers. Think about it when you think that picking up a gun and using it to maim or kill your fellow American whether on the political left or the right is a dandy thing to do. Making the policy of a government which would control a country of over 300 million people is hard to do. Policy is made through the torturous art of compromise which does not make for viewable media highlights.

When we do not like the policy we should CHANGE it, peacefully, through the avenues we already possess. We should not threaten to pick up a gun to water the so called “tree of liberty” since the water that tree is asking for is our fellow citizens’ blood and, ultimately, will not give us liberty but WILL surely give us death.

The Collective Millions: My anger at the Church goes far beyond the sex scandal although that is the mirror image reflection of Vatican corruption throughout the years. What, of course, makes my blood boil is the fact that at this time of year, ESPECIALLY, the Jews of the Diaspora particularly in Eastern Europe had to hang their heads low HOPING that they would not be the target of the Christian populous' venom. Many Jews were harassed, assaulted and killed during Easter for none other than the trumped up centuries old alleged crime of deicide. It is this that stands alone which planted the toxic seeds of anti-Semitism with its roots in New Testament theology and to this day is an issue as Benedict returns to the Latin mass a prayer hoping for the conversion of the Jew. I ask in what fantasy does this pope with his Nazi Hitler Youth past live?

I discussed this issue and this Pope Benedict with someone of intellect. She, I thought, made an astute observation. She said he smiles BUT there is no smile in his eyes. She thought they remained steely cold and I agree. There is that steeliness in him that I believe harbors the worst anti-Semitism with its etiology in his youth. It is because of this that he returned after many years the Latin prayer asking for the conversion of Jews, it is because of this coldness that he wanted to reinstate Bishop Williamson and others in the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X even though Williamson is a Holocaust denier, it is because of this that this pope wanted to make a saint of Pius XII who did LITTLE and could have done much from the pulpit when so many Jews faced the horrors of their final hours. Pius XII was a right wing anti-Communist who liked the Nazis more than he liked the Communists and whom Benedict thinks is deserving of, what, a promotion?

In MY world many popes, the Catholic Church and Christianity in general have MUCH for which to answer. This Jew lets NO ONE get away with anything anti-Semitic anymore. We and those who understand the Jewish plight must scream NO from OUR pulpits as we have paid TOO high a price for silence. Six million dead is TOO much to forgive anyone of anything lest we ever forget the collective millions of Auschwitz.

Accusations against Benedict like Anti-Semitism -- REALLY? What a pile of utter manure for Benedict's personal preacher to equate the criticism of Benedict in the sex abuse scandal to the "collective violence" suffered by the Jews. Yet again this Vatican never ceases to use an opportunity to enrage the Jewish people. That statement is repugnant and an INSULT to Jews in all centuries who had to REALLY suffer the onslaughts of anti-Semitism for ALL the untruths against Jews that Christianity both Catholic and NON Catholic had to offer. Ultimately it became a necessary precondition for the slaughter of Jews under fascism.

THIS pope, like some others, blindly looked the other way to protect NOT their flock's children who were molested by some priests but to protect the Church itself. Oh yes, just like antiSemitism MY posterior. In HIS case the slings and arrows hurled at him are TRUE. He owes yet ANOTHER apology to Jews everywhere. Wonder if we will get it. Don't hold your breath!

The Church turns a deaf ear: The New Your Times article on the Wisconsin deaf children abuse case is beyond belief. If you haven't already read it do so at the link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36063186/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/. It will curl your hair. Not only did the abused 200 boys -- maybe more -- and parents of them report it they reported it to MANY of the church hierarchy who did NOTHING but cover it up including the Pope. It reinforces my previous blog entitled The Abomination -- The Pope in the Cross-hairs. I include THAT link below

You may ask why do I care. It is the hypocrisy I care about coming from an institution that is supposed to be about anything but. Moreover, the sins of this institution against my people, the Jewish people, are, over a period of two thousand years more often than not despicable. Worse they lead ultimately to the Holocaust. The Holocaust could not have existed without Christian anti-Semitism and Pope Pius XII did little from the pulpit to stop it although Benedict wants to make him now a saint.

Beyond that a church and a Pope so utterly in the midst of horrific pedophilia has the gall and the nerve to be responsible in part for California Proposition 8 which denied ADULT homosexuals who merely loved each other and many of whom were NOT Catholic the right to be like everyone else and marry. That my blood boils is an understatement and I believe it is my responsibility as a human being to speak vociferously about this brutal case of hypocrisy. I could not live with myself if I did not.

http://natalierosen.blogspot.com/2010/03/abomination-pope-in-crosshairs-writer.html

Frum the Right: I am sure most of you have heard about the firing of David Frum from the American Enterprise Institute a formerly respectful conservative think tank and an intellectual arm of the Republican Party. What happened to Frum is nothing less than chilling and it shows, I submit, WHY it is so important NOT to lose sight of the November elections to make sure the Democratic Party, the party of diversity of thought and free speech, prevails in Congress.

I am a life-long Democrat BUT I know a respectable conservative voice when I hear it and David Frum is such. I certainly I do not agree with many if not most of David Frum's ideas BUT he is bright and he is a good man. The tea baggers, I believe, in the form of Limbaugh-like clones cut off his legs by having AEI fire him directly after he articulated the error of Sen. Jim DeMint's Waterloo comment against the President. Of course, they trumped up other falsehoods and rationales to offer reasons why they did fire him and If you are interested in what happened to David Frum I offer his own explanation at: http://www.frumforum.com/so-what-happened#comments.

I do not think I am saying this frivolously: the tea bag movement and its usurpation of power within the Republican Party resembles the beginning of a fascist-like right wing nationalist movement. It is mind numbing and violent. It seems clear that ONE disagreement, one march to a different drummer in that lock step and you are OUT. Limbaugh and those like him have more clout than an individual like David Frum who is smart and has contributed much over years to AEI and its cause. The powers that be in the tea bag movement will ask -- NO they will DEMAND -- one utters nothing which questions their ideology. One cannot tell them things they do not want to know or hear but things that may be, nevertheless, true.

The Democratic Party relishes diversity and its accompanying ideas. The Democratic party does not stifle speech and DEMAND one take only one position. As much as I am opposed to the anti-choice position of Representative Bart Stupak I am GLAD in other ways he can still remain a Democrat and welcome him. He brings with him more members devoted to other tenets the Democratic Party holds dear.

The Republican Party has become SO mean spirited, SO pathological in its behavior and speech and SO unwilling to court a chorus of voices who can actually get elected. I submit RACE is a HUGE factor in the vitriol as well as our economic hard times which force that racism, always subliminally there, to the surface. It has happened before in other frightening historical eras in other countries. The Republican Party I hope is sealing its own fate by becoming a party of utter extremists who will not tolerate ANY other views but the extremist ones of the tea bag party movement. The American people are NOT extremists and I hope the this movement will lead the major force of the Republican Party to its doom.

Therefore, if we take seriously free speech we MUST keep Congress in Democratic hands next November and work hard for it to do so all around the country. I plan on supporting Democrats in other states in hope that we can ensure Democratic victories in November. I ask you do that as well.

Violence on the Right: The article by Paul Krugman today in the NYT is EXCELLENT (link below). No, we do not have rationality of thought ruling most especially the airwaves and the computer media. The appearance of anonymity allows in some cases the speaker and writer to think he/she can say almost anything and get away with it. I continue to wonder if it has always been this way and if American politics was infused from the beginning with a kind of lawless OK Corral, Wyatt Earp, Old West mentality. I think that is the case, at least, in part. OK Corral and Wyatt Earp, though, stayed part of historical lore. No one REALLY knows, to this day, the truth behind it and certainly the whole nation at that time did not know instantly about it. Our age gives instant verifiable vulgarity which EVERYONE can read, see and hear from Kansas to Pakistan in a nanosecond. There is a big difference between an age in which communication was primitive to the sophisticated media of visual experience and sound today. The kind of lethal weaponry we posses in this era, too, was not seen even in the Old West.

In my opinion, the most vituperative epithets are being hurled by the right wing against the party in power occupied at the helm by a black man. I do not remember the left wing, supremely critical of George Bush, resorting to the threat of secession and revolution despite George Bush leading a nation into a war based on lies with the attendant killing of over 4000 of its finest youth and the decimating a foreign nation for nothing.

In my opinion, there is a basic humanity within American leftist thought in which the violent ends justifies the means philosophy is iterated by only a very few. The right has as its essence an anger and mean-spirited violence which does NOT have a basic humanitarian ideology at its core. The only message from the right, to me, is hate MOST especially if the opposition is composed of many who are not white.

The extremist right wing is the most dangerous of political movements I have seen in my lifetime. It spawned the Oklahoma bombing, NUMEROUS so called lone wolf killings and anti-government actions stretching over decades. With guns as its love and its militias as its force, I believe, we have reason to fear many on the right including their institutional leaders who cheer them on.

However, I believe the right should be careful. They should not think their opposition will be nonreactive if assaulted most ESPECIALLY if, God forbid, anything were to happen to its leadership. As Japan said about America in 1941, America it is a sleeping giant. For now the giant on the left sleeps but it can be awoken at a moment's notice. The incendiary rhetoric and violence of both political wings should STOP and stop now before that giant awakens and the ramifications of that become much more serious for our nation and everyone who lives in it!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/opinion/26krugman.html

A Letter of Thanks and the Passover Principle: A GOOD day has come. Passover, a holiday celebrating the joys of freedom, will soon be upon those who are Jewish and celebrate it. Even if one is secular, like I am, one can still appreciate its significance and be thankful for the momentous accident of birth to have been born free and thankful to have lived through such incredible historical and social change.

I thank our President for his sterling efforts in securing this momentous health care win. It was not all we wanted but it is a HUGE start. I think he with the other Democratic greats of the Congress will be responsible for the saving of many lives. A mere thank you is not good enough.

We need to now know and the Brown election teaches we can NEVER take our power for granted. We must always be vigilant. I am hoping that the sages of entertainment news predicting a Republican win in Congress in November are monumentally wrong. I think they may be overstating with their right wing vituperative malevolence their coming successes as the Democrats now have the opportunity to concentrate on banking regulation and most importantly on creating more jobs to take the economy out of the ditch into which the Republicans drove us!

I thank the President, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reed for their wonderful efforts, hard work and brilliant leadership. I have hope again. We must go forward. YES WE DID, YES WE CAN, AND YES WE WILL AGAIN!!

God bless you all and God bless our country which allows us all to breathe free!!

The Abomination -- The Pope in the Crosshairs: A March 25, New York Times editorial says, among other things indicting the Catholic Church for the most recent European pedophile monstrosity, that "The Pope’s expression of “shame and remorse” for the Irish scandal is not to be doubted." Really? Well, I do doubt it. Are you kidding me? The Pope WEAKLY criticizes the legion of sex abuse in Ireland but says nothing about the horrific abuse actions in his own country, Germany, not to mention pedophile sex actions perpetrated on 200 DEAF young boys in Wisconsin and pedophile actions committed by priests around the entire continent of Europe! This is unconscionable and if the Pope were a regular citizen of any country he may face arrest and jail for aiding and abetting a KNOWN pedophile, transferring him to other parishes where even the psychiatrist who treated him said he would be dangerous to place among children and could commit these heinous acts again and did!

The hypocrisy of this Pope and the Church in general is mind numbingly staggering. Sure, voice at the pulpit against gay marriage between two adults who love each other but PROTECT your Catholic children against predatory priests NOT SO MUCH even when it is among the Vienna Boys Choir! This Pope Benedict is up to his eyeballs in trouble within his own Church. The buck stopped with him as an Arch Bishop in Germany, Cardinal Ratinzger head under John Paul II of the so called Doctrine of Faith (you know the entity that formerly brought us The Inquisition) and now as Pope, he passed it failing to punish the priests involved. Where have we heard this story before?

Institutions are about power and money and they are about protecting it at all costs even when that cost means that young boys will have to suffer torments that will affect them disastrously for the rest of their lives at the hands of priests they trusted and the abominable illegalities those priests perpetrated upon them. SHAMEFUL is too weak a word for what this pope and the entire church itself is guilty.

That this hypocrisy of shouting the sin of homosexuality from every pulpit and then committing the most egregiously illegal sexual sins against mostly male CHILDREN by priests without a hint of conscience is an abomination that cannot be doubted. The pedophilia in the Catholic Church is NAUSEATING and systemic. The cover up by its officials of it and the back turning of some of its laity is UNFORGIVABLE. If there is a God I only HOPE He cannot forgive it either!

Faded Brown: Well, I can see my small shred of initial hope in Senator Brown despite his Republican association was short lived as he tries to set up his reelection by saying Rachel Maddow, the progressive host of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC will be his opposition in the 2012 senatorial election. Rachel Maddow revealed the total untruth of that. One wonders, though, why the good senator picked her as the threat supreme. In truth she is BRILLIANT. Few can hold a candle to her intellect and that includes most definitely Senator Brown. Thankfully, she is not running. We need her on the airwaves to expose the Republican Party's infinite capacity for telling downright lies to put their toxic agenda across -- an agenda which nearly bankrupted our country because of greed gone wild, banks unregulated and killed its youth in wars based on unequivocal lies.

As I have said at least a million times: America, the Republican party is NOT I repeat NOT about most of you. It is about the top 2% wealthiest of this nation. The fact that they should share a small amount more of health care is nothing but infinitely fair. Mr. Brown to say you are a man of the people, while you say you will vote against reconciliation which gives people hope, is a lie. So far you are everything I thought you would be feeding the American people the big Republican lie that you are about them. You are what I initially thought -- a BIG mistake and that the people of Massachusetts were duped into thinking YOU would do anything for them.

David Brooks in the March 23, 2010 "New York Times" tries to explain why he became alienated from the Democratic Party. He says "The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs ..."

I say the David Brooks of the world do not see the reality when it hits them in the face and forget almost instantly when those entrepreneurial forces with their Ayn Randian laissez faire economic essence are almost singularly responsible many times over for the death of a nation and its people. These grand entrepreneurs, the Gatsbys of our culture, run with the train of greed until the train goes off the tracks and they are left emotionally, monetarily and spiritually bankrupt. They leave those around them in utter devastation and chaos but call upon the people they nearly destroy to clean up the mess.

The average Joe's of this country, the ones who make it mechanically work, are catapulted into the abyss by the rancid actions of the unregulated marketplace and in times past there was no safety net to catch them. Many died. FDR changed that, thank God, and since then there is a semblance of economic life preservers instituted by Democrats which stop an economy and most of its people from entering the dust bin of history.

Still, these adventure capitalists persist duping the American public into thinking they are for them and America, some of it, continues to buy their snake oil. I have said many times the Republican Party, the party of sink or swim policy, is NOT about us. They are for their individualist Gordon Geckko greedy selves. No matter how rich they get it is never enough and they will do ANYTHING an economic anarchy allows them to do no matter how many they crush. In 2008, without ALL the help from government and all the FDIC security, its too big to fail CEO’s STILL nearly drove the world into an economic Armageddon because those regulations were disastrously loosened by men of greed only to offer near repeat of the 1929 collapse.

Now we have health care so that not just the Donald Trumps or the Bill Gates of the world can certainly get the best of the best health care to ensure THEIR lives go on with no fear that illness will bankrupt them but also us, the little guy, on whose backs they depend for their economic security, to live.

Thank God for the Democratic Party, David, they have saved our posteriors AND YOURS!!

I condensed my previous blog and added some thoughts into one I sent to the Metro West News:

The Cancer Curse: Why some of us have the ability to empathize with the poor, the sick, and with those who have had to endure such virulent racism from some of our body politic and others cannot I do not know. Why are we so different politically from each other?

I am ardently for the passing of this historic health care legislation and surprisingly if it takes a strong anti-abortion part of the bill to pass I am for that too despite the fact I am, of course, pro-choice. This bill is too important. It is not perfect but it hopefully will improve over time IF it passes. The insurance companies with their tyrannical for profit hold on whether we live or die cannot be allowed to continue with business as usual. They must be held accountable. They have done this to themselves by their policies which hung an albatross of contemptible actions and death around our necks.

Why can some of us empathize with those who need care and others can do nothing but hurl unconscionable racist epithets catapulting this nation back into another century in which we fought a bloody war to create a more just nation. Why, too, is health care linked to this despicable racist spewing against a gentlemen supreme like Representative James Clyburn and Representative John Lewis? It was sickening to watch. It makes me wonder what really is the etiology of our profound political differences. Is it cultural or is it systemically in one's DNA?

The racial epithets the health care protesters sling show them to be exactly what most are: racist bullies who if they had their way would take us back to the 1850's except then they would be calling for secession. They are the embodiment of the grave sin of a nation. Those who would utter such things are sick, perverted and disgusting know nothings. They prove it time and again. Spitting on a man like Representative Clyburn is unconscionable. They could not shine this dignified man's shoes. They are NOT protesting health care but are using it as an excuse to protest a black man who is president. These people who express such racial hatred are the curse of our nation. Their views are a sickness within our body politic and a systemic cancer we need cut out before it kills us and fast!

A Curious Curiosity -- WBZ, a local television network, asked viewers to write what they are curious about. I wrote the following:

I am curious as to why some of us have the ability to empathize with the poor, the sick, and with those who have had to endure such virulent racism from some of our body politic. Why are we so different politically from each other?

I am ardently for the passing of this historic health care legislation. It is not perfect but it hopefully will improve over time. The insurance companies with their tyrannical for profit hold on whether we live or die cannot be allowed to continue with business as usual. They must be held accountable. They have done this to themselves by their policies which hung an albatross of despicable actions around our necks.

Why can some of us empathize with those who need care and others can do nothing but hurl unconscionable racist epithets catapulting this nation back into another century in which we fought a bloody war to create a more just nation. Why, too, is health care linked to this despicable racist spewing?

It makes me wonder what really is the etiology of our profound political differences? Is it cultural or is it systemically in our DNA?

BINGO: CBO: This health care bill will cut the deficit by $1.2 TRILLION over the next ten years. BINGO.... It's a WINNER and so is Obama!!! He is a WINNER today. Yes I was critical BUT my goodness one whole year listening to such obnoxious opposition and Scott Brown in Teddy's seat to boot. How much can one little progressive take? Hard DIFFICULT work, determination, COURAGE, amazing, kudos when they are due and they are due NOW!!!!! I didn't believe it because I did not want to be disappointed yet again!!! I am ON BOARD!! Our McDonald's country wants everything yesterday. I am included. We MUST learn big things take time!! Of course it's not passed yet so when he signs it maybe on Sunday I will celebrate. I'm almost there. This is a good day for our country ... so far!

An Allergic Reaction to Thought: This week as stated on the Journal web page, Bill Moyers talked with John Sexton, President of NYU, for a wide-ranging conversation about religion, the role of higher education in a globalizing world, and the troubling disintegration of civil discourse in today's society. Sexton suggested that America increasingly exhibits what he calls an "allergy to thought" and that universities are the key to restoring nuance to public discourse" I responded to it on the site. See link below:

It is a tragedy in our culture today that the complexity of life is reduced to 10 second sound bites. It is as if our McDonald’s dietary habits reflect the fast food mentality of our intellectual life. Much contributes to this and a discussion, which I am sure Dr. Sexton would agree, must include great complexity. There is not time to do that here. I can say, though, that Dr. Sexton’s thoughts were fascinating. I could have listened to him for hours and would have loved the opportunity to ask him my own, hopefully, thoughtful questions as well.

I keep trying to think if I allow for complexity of thought and an exchange of ideas even when those ideas are diametrically opposed to my own. I think I have tried. I have also fallen short. I in essence, at 61 years old, have given up. I am a progressive Democrat who lived through the late 1960’s. I formulated my basic philosophy at that time and although I wavered throughout the years, I have basically remained left of center. I believe, my position and other progressive attitudes on the issues of the day are SO important and so unequivocally correct that I cannot often even listen to the opposition. Worse, I consider them my enemy. How can I be a progressive, thoughtful person and consider right wing Republicans actually an enemy? I am sickened by this. I am, without a doubt, sure they think of me as their enemy too. It is sad.

I think it terrible that I have gone from a person more than willing to debate to a person of cemented positions and often a cemented heart. Why? Why can I not be like Dr. Sexton? The issues of our day are so personal and so threatening to me that I simply cannot compromise them. I do not know if it is the election of Barack Obama, a gifted man of thought and compromise, which was the reason for my solidification of thought because of the utter disgusting racist spewing so constantly thrown from the other side at a man of good will. How can I compromise with this utter idiocy? Both sides are hardened and the reflection of what we see is a Congress immovable in thought and unwilling more often than not to compromise either. If the right is so unequivocally mean, hateful and violent why should I give their points of view credence? Why should I not defend MYSELF against what I perceive is their insanity and threat to me?

My enemy believes NOT in science but in myth. It believes there should be a mixing of church with state, does not allow for choice with respect to abortion, and would love to discriminate against homosexuals whom they believe have chosen who they are and therefore are not worthy of equality. It believes, too, in war, even peremptory war, forgets the civil libertarian Bill of Rights from which this country was honed and it loves its guns. They love taking this country to wars of revenge even when based on lies and even when based upon nothing, do not care about wars which our country has waged AFTER World War II which have killed thousands, displaced millions and destabilized the political climate of worst parts of planet earth. Moreover, they think global warming is a hoax and probably will even when New York City is under water. Their views are hardened in the irrationalities of religious superstition, uncompromising and extreme supernatural beliefs and a desire to impose those beliefs upon everyone else. They most certainly do not believe in government protecting human health. As I see it they are a threat to life on this planet. Their beliefs are so utterly repulsive to me that I cannot even listen nor stand to debate the non debatable. Evolution is fact, global warming is fact, religion upon which they want to base national policy is more myth than fact and goes against the most sacred of our Constitutional creeds, the separation clause. How can I compromise with that which is uncompromisable? (Yes, I crafted a new word.)

Dr. Sexton’s lofty thoughts in the classroom make for sweet talk and make him, indeed, a likable man. I am sure he had to be such to arrive at the position he attained. In the final analysis, though, I think that decisions must be made, choices must be arrived at and the prolonging of debate of certain issues causes the destruction of human life and, indeed, compromises ALL life on planet earth.


I am not happy with who I have become but I refuse to compromise with those who eschew most lofty intellectual thought, think reason is not for them, calls the left effete intellectual snobs and causes Susan Jacoby – a one-time interviewee of Bill Moyers – to write a book entitled “The Age of American Unreason.” I cannot entertain the thoughts of those who carry grotesque, insulting, racist pictures of our president as both Hitler and Stalin as if one person could be both polar opposites. I cannot compromise with those who occupy the extreme right wing of the political spectrum in which there is a litmus test now for membership in the Republican Party. Perhaps if it returned to the party of Rockefeller or Ford I could.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2010/03/do_americans_suffer_from_an_al.html: