Don't do it. That is the usual advice from "serious" people when it comes to negotiating with terrorists. Sure it's tough not to, and see innocent people get hurt. But if you do it once then everyone becomes more vulnerable the next time around as the terrorists are emboldened to continue their extortion.
This is what has crossed my mind as I watch the unfolding story surrounding a continuing resolution on the budget to keep the government up and running after 10/1. Then there is the issue of the United States paying its bills and not defaulting, which is estimated to occur about 10/17 if the debt ceiling is not raised.
The Republicans in the House are willing to do both, as long as the Democrats in both the Senate and the White House accede to their demands. Defund or delay the President's signature health care reform law, roll back Wall Street reforms, remove the authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, approve the Keystone XL pipeline; these are a smattering of the ransom to be exacted for even a short-term period of keeping the government up and running and paying its bills.
And the GOP is not even hiding the agenda. Paul Ryan, their boy wonder, admitted that the Republicans have to resort to these tactics because they lost the election and there is not another in sight, at least not soon enough for their tastes. So they need to use this leverage to impose their agenda and policies which were rejected by the voters in the 2012 election. I mean every Republican running in 2012 promised to get rid of "Obamacare". The other pieces they are going after are right out of Mitt Romney's economic policy proposals. 
They lost. Romney by about 5 million votes. The Democrats increased their majority in the Senate even though the numbers going into the 2012 election favored Republican gains. Even in House races Democratic candidates outpolled Republican candidates. The GOP maintained their majority only due to the severe gerrymandering that occurred in many states. In fact this is one of the few times in American history that the party that received a clear majority of votes for the House races did not end up winning the majority of the seats.
So basically what we have is this: the Republican agenda was rejected by the voters at the polls; there is no election on the horizon that will allow the Republicans to control both houses of Congress and the White House; therefore the Republicans have to threaten to bring the government and the American economy to its knees in order to try to coerce the Democrats to capitulating to the GOP demands and agenda. 
What's really remarkable is not only that this is seen as an acceptable strategy, that the Republicans are so openly blatant about what they're doing, but that they do not pay a greater price for doing it. The traditional media again is falling flat on its face, providing no historical context about just how brazen and unprecedented these Republican moves really are. That would interfere with the pundit class' meme of always finding balance, even if it's false. Both sides do it is their mantra. 
Not only is the Republican tactic an assault on democratic government (with a small "d" mind you), but the total lack of reporting by the media as to how outrageous this really is, also undermines democracy and our Constitutional system of government.
Good going guys and gals.

My mother is 84 going on 85 and going through a hard time of it lately. She has several issues that have been exacerbated by losing my father about six months ago. He was her partner of nearly 60 years and had become her caregiver. Recently she began losing weight and so has been seeing her doctor on a near monthly basis as he, and her family, nurse her through this downturn.
She had one of those appointments earlier this week. I took her there and accompanied her into the doctor's office for the examination. 
The exam itself was not remarkable other than she is showing improvement and gaining weight. The part of interest though for this community, was the discussion she and the doctor had on their way out the door. 
Now from comments he has made previously I assumed her doctor is very conservative, to the point of being a tea-party sympathizer, if not supporter. Still my mother and father both liked him as a doctor and he seemed to genuinely like them and be looking out for them, so I let his politics and any comments slide.
On their way out we were talking about his being busy enough to have hired an additional physicians' assistant for the office. The discussion continued, took a few turns about modern economic realities of the medical world,  and eventually my mother made a comment along the lines of "who knows what's going to happen now", meaning the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), usually referred to as Obamacare, on medical practice.
That's all the opening her doctor needed. He told her of hearing of a woman who called in because something that had been covered in the past suddenly wasn't. It was not specified whether this was a procedure or a prescription. When she called on it she was told that because of Obamacare, Medicare no longer covered it because she was older than 80 years of age. So Obamacare was cutting costs by rationing care for the elderly, after a certain age you just get maintenance/palliative care. 
The doctor then went on about how if Obamacare wasn't defunded this is what was coming. That there was a panel of 18 people, named by the President and approved by Congress, who were empowered to do what was necessary to cut costs. They could determine what is and isn't covered and it would take a 3/5 vote of Congress to overturn any of their decisions. Sounded like the dreaded "death panels" all over again.

Now rightly or wrongly I hate to argue from a position of ignorance and I had no facts to engage the good doctor. So I let it ride and we left the office. But since then I burned up the internet tubes checking this out. 
First of all the assertions sounded too ridiculous to be true on their face. If Medicare under Obamacare was going to ration care for seniors it seems very unlikely AARP would have ever climbed on board the healthcare reform bandwagon. Sure enough a trip to their web site found several positives noted that Medicare recipients can expect from the ACA.  
Just to see what it would look like I took the AARP questionnaire at HealthLawAnswers.org. I entered that I was over age 65, already on Medicare, had a household of 2 people, and fell into the middle income range provided (30,000 to 62,000 annual income). None of that is true but I wanted to see what they would tell me. 
I received a 3 page report telling me basically I didn't have to do anything, was not required to get any additional coverage and then enumerating the different ways Medicare is being improved  by Obamacare. More emphasis on preventative care, everything you have been covered for is still covered, can still see the same doctor, if you have Part D the doughnut hole is shrinking so you might save money on drug purchases, and on and on and on...hardly the disaster depicted by my mother's doctor.
I then moved on to the "death panel" claim. I found a post at The Hill that points to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, set up by the ACA as the target of this claim. This group is charged under the law with making recommendations to cut Medicare costs, if the costs rise above a certain level [emphasis mine]. Whatever recommendations the board makes do have to be fast-tracked through Congress (which is different than requiring 3/5 to overturn). But the law expressly forbids the board from recommending reductions to coverage or services to save money, you know, to "ration care".
Now the IPAB is controversial. As noted, it is the source of the "death panel" charge and the charge that this will lead to care rationing for the elderly. Howard Dean wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for it be abolished. Several vulnerable House Democrats have joined with House Republicans introducing bills to strip the IPAB from the Affordable Care Act. The argument seems to be that the board will save money by reducing reimbursements to providers for certain services, which will lead to the providers not being able to afford to perform them. The end result is the same as if you were rationing care by eliminating the service. But the board also has its proponents as being very necessary and not having to lead to rationing of care at all.
But here's the rub vis a vis the comments made by my mother's doctor and that story about "some woman" now denied coverage for something under Medicare "because of Obamacare" that used to be covered. The IPAB doesn't exist yet. It has not been staffed. It has made no recommendations. Not only that, Medicare cost increases have been slowing, so the threshold that would trigger recommendations from the IPAB (if it was operational) has not been met. But as with most things these days involving conservative "thought", why let facts get in the way of a good scare? 
I'll be sure to set my mother straight the next time I see her, she has nothing to fear from death panels or rationed care.  
The real object lesson here though is to stay informed. I know something of the ACA and its highlights. But it is almost impossible to anticipate all the arguments thrown at this or any other issue by the right wing and have the facts all lined up ready for a rebuttal. But it's good to still do the research and be prepared. Of course next time it will be some other nonsense on some other issue.  
 

While perusing the internets tubes today I came across the following quote:

The median male worker is doing worse today than he was before 1980 when America adopted Reagan's conservative economic ideology. Conservatism has enriched the rich, stolen from the commons and deprived America of the public investments needed to compete successfully with China, Germany and other world economies. - blogger Fish Out of Water on Daily Kos site

Now why can't we get a liberal Democratic politician to say that? Democrats should be repeating this every chance they get. Instead they spend more time kissing Reagan's ass than kicking it. I suppose to be appear reasonable and let everyone know how bipartisan they can be.
And if a Democrat did say this would he or she immediately be branded by the traditional media as an out of the mainstream extreme ideologue? Of course they would, even though we get an endless parade of just plain batshit nuts pronouncements from right wing Republicans, many of which are easily debunked by fact checking. But they are reported with a straight face by the media with no hint of how extreme or crazy some of the statements are. And every conservative politician  or pundit is treated with respect and an underlying assumption that we should at least consider seriously whatever it is they are saying.
Liberals on the other hand, and their positions, can be treated dismissively. Why should Louis Gohmert be taken seriously but everyone feel free to laugh at Dennis Kucinich? 
Just sayin'.

Been a story making the rounds nationally and locally about a program called Nature's Classroom. Basically it's a place (there are multiple locations) where schools send their students for a few days for what is supposed to be fun mostly outdoor based education.
Most of it is centered around the environment and ecological education. But at night there are other programs. 
Each night parent volunteers arrive to eat dinner with the kids and act as chaperones within the cabins where the kids sleep. 
The program that caused some controversy was something called "Underground Railroad". My sons attended Nature's Classroom when they were in the 5th grade along with most of their classmates. This happened to be three years apart. I volunteered and chaperoned one night for each son. It just so happened that both times I went was the night they did the "Underground Railroad". 
Now the experience being reported in the local papers that has parents upset is basically this. Students were pressed into the role of playing slaves in this exercise, including African-American students. The experience of coming over on a slave ship was re-enacted along with the experience of being a runaway slave trying to escape to freedom on the underground railroad. Staff members, playing the roles of overseers, slave catching posses, etc. tried to demonstrate how scary this experience was and were abusive in their language. It was inferred that the "n-word" was directed at the students. Students (in this case 7th graders) felt scared and degraded.
Now I have to say this was not the experience I witnessed. Our Underground Railroad experience had all the students (and there were a couple of minority students in the classes but it was basically almost completely white kids) playing the role of runaway slaves. They were supposedly hiding in wagons under bales of hay and blankets (pretend not actual). The parents along with one or two staff members were the "guides" leading them to freedom. Other staff members were the slave hunting posse who stopped the imaginary wagon and were asking about runaway slaves and acting like they were ready to discover the group at any moment. If anyone moved or made a noise the group was captured and "lost". If they stayed silent despite some yelling and staff members getting very close to them the wagon proceeded and then there was a final mad dash to a safe house without getting grabbed by a last group of staff members. 
I didn't see if anyone was scared by this. But these were 5th graders. Still it didn't seem like that intense an experience compared to what has been described as what these 7th grade students went through last year. I don't think it impacted my sons at all other than they had a chance to walk through the woods and run at the end. 
But then my sons are in their 20's so their experience and the ones I witnessed are far in the past compared to the controversial one that is making the news. No staff member got abusive, and certainly there was no "n-word" thrown around. But like I said it was years ago, and may not have been the same Nature's Classroom site as the one in question.
Still I have to admit to being torn. On the one hand what I saw was nothing like the recent and disturbing experience being reported. But is the experience worth it? We want students to realize that slavery and the abuse (and that is an understatement) of human beings is part of American history. But does this experience really help drive home that lesson? And even if it did, it is not worth scaring or degrading any student to get the point across. 

File this under "Suspicions Confirmed".

A couple of news items got me riled up today. First there was the report from the IRS the other day that the top 1% of income holders in this country took home the largest percentage of overall income ever. I believe it was 19.3% of all income was "earned" by the top 1%. This is higher than the percentage earned by the top 1% in 1927, which had been the previous high.
There have been three eras in this country's history with high income inequality. They are the late 1800's, the days of the robber barons; the 1920's, the Great Gatsby era; and the present beginning with the Bush years of 2001-2009 and continuing even now under Obama. 
Each of these periods were marked by economic stagnation and eventually resulted in an economic freefall. Economic historians now refer to the years from 1873-1893 as the "Long Depression". Unemployment would have averaged over 14% by modern standards, and income remained flat. But the robber barons built fortunes and mansions in Newport aided by government repression of unions, and reckless and wild speculation over gold and silver and railroad lands. 
The 1920's, where President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed "the business of America is business", and lax laws and regulations allowed wild speculation and overlapping financial institutions under the same corporate umbrella, resulted of course in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. 
More recently the derivatives market speculation, aided by deregulation that undid many of the protections enacted after the Great Depression (as in repeal of Glass-Steagall) and laws forbidding oversight of risky derivatives, led eventually to the great downturn of 2008, the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Up to that point the rules and laws allowed so many Wall Street people and bankers to suck billions of dollars of profit out of the economy on wild speculation, while incomes of the average Americans remained stagnant.  
Which brings us to the second item. Today marks the 5th anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the beginning of the Wall Street crash and economic collapse of 2008. While Wall Street and the banks and the 1% are back on their feet and doing as well as they were before the downturn, most of the rest of the country continues to struggle. Of course the fact that the rest of the country bailed out Wall Street and the large banks to save them from their own reckless losses didn't hurt in that respect. They had grown too big to fail. If they went under they would drag everything else down the drain with them. So out of necessity they were bailed out albeit undeservedly.
But to what effect? Were they chastened? Humbled? Hardly. To the contrary, their hubris is back and they use their taxpayer subsidized millions and billions to lobby Congress and prevent any meaningful reforms or protections from being enacted or enforced. And if any law does makes its way on the books they use their millions of lobbying dollars (and friends in Congress) to water down the regulations and enforcement to near meaninglessness.
So this anniversary has me fired up today. When FDR got into office after the Great Depression he made sure new laws and regulations were enacted that served to protect the economy from too much concentration (too big to fail) and reckless speculation. These rules served us well for about 70 years. They were jettisoned in the 1999-2000 timeframe (combination of Republicans in Congress and "new" Democrats like Larry Summers) and less than 10 years later, voila, there we were again.
So we continue to follow tax and financial laws and regulations that keep moving more and more dollars into fewer and fewer hands at the top. It's not sustainable. It chokes off economic growth and equality of opportunity. And it threatens not only the economy but democracy as well. One of the few reasons why I feel optimistic we will change this is the previous statement "it's not sustainable". It's a house of cards that will eventually fall. The problem is it is the tens of millions of average Americans who will pay the price, not the 1% who will have enough fortune amassed to survive quite nicely. And it's the generation suffering through stolen opportunities who pay the price.

Most, if not all, of my political postings deal with economic issues. But since Syria and the potential use of force, even if only from the air, is dominating discussions at this time I'd be remiss if I completely ignored it.
I'll admit part of me is torn. The use of chemical or biological weapons is supposed to be one of those international, common across all nations and peoples, no-nos. It violates all sense of human dignity and standards of behavior. 
So on the one hand how can it be done with no consequence, with no outcry or punishment from the international community?
On the other hand there is precedent for that. Saddam Hussein gassed his own people (Kurds I believe) in the late 1980's with very little protest from the United States let alone retaliation. After all back then he was our ally, our buddy, our buffer against Iran and the Ayatollahs. Supplying us with oil also probably didn't hurt. Poor Assad, if only Syria had large oil reserves. 
The other side to the story is that America is not as directly impacted by what is happening in Syria as are the Europeans and others in the Middle East. Why can't the Saudis or Kuwaitis with their air forces get involved? We already know the Europeans won't participate, with the possible exception of the French. So why should we be the ones spending billions and potentially putting our people at risk to enforce an international standard nobody else seems that willing to stand up for.
The final question is what will we accomplish and what are we trying to accomplish? A few missiles won't do much. And if we are trying to strengthen the rebel anti-government forces and bring about the fall of the Assad regime, well good luck with that. Easier said than done. And if he goes who takes his place? There doesn't appear to be any good guys in this struggle. On both sides we find many Islamic extremists, so how does that help anything?
So for all those reasons when I'm finally forced to decide 'yes' or 'no' in internet polls this week I put my distaste for Assad and his use of chemical weapons and slaughter of his people, and my distaste of wanting to hand Obama's opponents or the media any reason to dump on him, and vote a resounding "no". 

So in this part of Connecticut Labor Day weekend wasn't that great. It rained off and on all three days. A fitting end to a summer that was not that great from a weather standpoint. We either had lots of rain and cool temperatures, or sizzling heat waves with high humidity. Very little awesome weather in between.