I am a JRE supporter. I do think he remade himself, but I like his positions, his policies and although I think his Iraq vote was an egregious and almost unforgivable error, I did cut him some slack. In an ordinary year I would vote for him in the CT primary Feb 5. Just like I did with Dr. Dean, my all time favorite candidate. I worked for Dr. Dean, gave him as much $ as I could.... blah blah.

But this year is vastly different. I think my primary vote this time might be very important and I want it to matter. I'm not interested in making a statement with my vote: a statement that's anyway just private.

I think both Senators Clinton and Obama are strong candidates. I have visceral reactions to both, which I doubt will sway my vote, b/c I'm too old to let that happen. I'm an m.d. by profession, no longer in practice. I am just a little younger than Senator Clinton and the only thing that pissed me off recently was the media hype about her tears. I also agreed strongly with the substance of Gloria Steinem's op-ed piece in the NYTimes past Monday.

Please help me below:

From today's NYTimeshere

The nation’s food supply is at risk, its drugs are potentially dangerous and its citizens’ lives are at stake because the Food and Drug Administration is desperately short of money and poorly organized, according to an alarming report by agency advisers.

The report, made public on Friday, is the latest and perhaps most far-reaching in a string of outside assessments that have concluded that the F.D.A. is poorly equipped to protect the public health. It was written by three members of the F.D.A. Science Board, an advisory panel that reports directly to the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach. The three authors in turn had 30 scientific advisers.

Surprise surprise. No one is overseeing our food supply for the garbage in it. No one is overseeing our medication supply b/c of big pharma.

Dear Senator Lieberman
I am a long time resident of Connecticut who voted for you every time you ran for the Senate, and the Vice Presidency, except this last time, August 8 2006. I would like to tell you why.

You think people like me, who blog are "so far from the mainstream". Let me tell you: I am a 57 year old Jewish woman, a retired physician, married for 31 years (to the same person), with 2 grown children. My husband and I take one vacation a year, we are modest in our taste, socially liberal, fiscally cheap while trying to see all sides of issues .... .i.e not "far from the mainstream". He was a registered independent until he switched party affiliations to vote against you in the primary. He is even more main stream than I. He doesn't blog. :)

According to Bob Herbert in today's NYTimes, the US should have/ could have put a stop to this carnage shortly after it began. In view of the fact that it is now widely reported that an International peacekeeping force is on the tongues of all the players, and Israel is willing to have them, this all could have been not "over" but diminished had the US told Israel to stop.

I don't know where to begin. What set me off today was having to listen to Bush (on the radio) at his pc in the rose garden and his disingenuous dodging of the issue of the SCOTUS decision. The combination of a pResident who is ill-informed, incurious, demeaning, a bully and a puppet, had me tearing my hair out.

 I just completed Ron Susskind's Book "The One Percent Doctrine". I highly recommend it. It is a substantive look at the way VP Cheney has set foreign policy with a bizarre formulation namely,

"If there's a one percent chance that" e.g. "Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build of develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat is as a certainty, in terms of our response. ....It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence......It's about our response."

Iow, any threat no matter how unlikely is treated as a certainty: the analysis by the folks @ CIA are irrelevant, unimportant and beside the point. Career professionals are side-lined and their hours of grunt and hard work, careful, non-political analyses are just passed over.

I heard this story at lunch today. It depicts the essence of integrity and tenacity. An LA gentleman, whose 100th birthday was yesterday celebrated it by retiring from a job which he had done for 76 years.

There was a party in his honor, attended by about 400 people. It is an amazing story.

Arthur Winston worked for the LA Transit agency's maintenance department for three quarters of a century. In all those years he only missed one day of work, when his wife died. He was not once late for work.

For the first 10 years he was working for 41 cents/hour while White men were making 10 cents more.

In tomorrow's NYTimes book review, the new book by Kevin Phillips entitled,
American Theocracy is front-paged and reviewed by Alan Brinkley. The book is a compilation, well referenced, of the downward spiral of the US because of 3 main problems:1. oil, 2. radical christianity and 3. culture of debt.

Kevin Phillips is a long time republican whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority helped explain how postwar changes in demographics and the economy would shape the politics in the US. People from the manufacturing northeast would be moving to the south and west where a new more conservative Rep majority would rule. Just before his book was published, he joined the Nixon administration.

more below

Dear Senator Kerry,
I voted for you in 2004 and will do so again in 2008 if you are the Democratic Nominee. How on earth could you seriously call for a filibuster of the voting on the confirmation of Samuel Alito while you are in Davos, Switzerland socializing with business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum?

I know of course that from a techical standpoint distance is trivial. Really. But you are flying home one day late. You eviscerated your call to action, by doing so from a Swiss resort. I simply do NOT comprehend this. I am just an ordinary citizen, not a politician.

If you have strong beliefs and convictions, you must act on them with your body and soul. Not just your mouth.  What were you thinking?

I hope beyond measure that the Democrats manage to carry this off. It had only a measly chance of success to begin with, a chance that was, I fear, dashed by the way in which you called the party to action.

No matter how good our politicians are, no matter how "right" they are or how charismatic, we have a huge barrier in our way: Ignorance + Religious Belief.  In the metro section of today's NYTimes, there is an article on a large exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History, focused on Darwin: his ideas and his life. In the course of reading about the exhibit I found the following humdinger of a sentence, "According to a CBS News poll last month, 51 percent of Americans reject (emphasis mine) the theory of evolution,

more below

As a life-long liberal (who was registered as an Independent until 2000) I have been pondering the issues that are increasingly dividing our country. The thing that interests and puzzles me most, is the acquired conservatism that I see around me. It is my suspicion that one of the leading forces driving this conservatism is the inability of many people, both young and old to comfortably negotiate the modern, technological "culture".

Continued on the flip.

David Brooks has a scathing piece on Harriet Miers in today's NYTimes. Basically he says she cannot formulate in writing a coherent thought that is concrete.

I have been thinking alot about the health care system (I am a retired m.d.). There are some thoughts I have about how to approach some of the issues surrounding health care.
As reported in Kristof's op-ed piece in today's NYTimes, 13,000 m.d.'s around the country have signed on to the idea of a single payer (the government) system: "Physicians for a National Health Program". I will let the policy wonks work out the details, but there are some fundamental issues which should be part of any single payer system.

1. Free Disease Prevention clinics
   
2. Free Exercise / Walk clinics
   
3. Government has medical liability i.e. mds do not have to pay outrageous sums for malpractice. The government either picks up the tab, or....better yet has a payout system for "errors".
   
4. Free Smoking Cessation Clinics
   
5. Free Weight loss clinics
   
6. Free Drug & Alcohol cessation clinics

Kos' post taps into some complex issues having to do with what we stand for, keeping our "essence" without selling out & simultaneously trying to appeal to ........."others" who vote esp. republican. In today's Hartford Courant (my NYT was late) I read an op-ed piece by Jennifer Moses, who wrote the piece from which I will quote, for the WaPo.

 It is entitled: "Why Baton Rouge Is Still Bush Country".
I have been trying to figure out why people who are so hurt by Bush's policies continue to support him. My answer based partly on "What's the Matter with Kansas" and Moses' piece has more to do with fear and being left in the dust and the dark than anything else.

The following story was the foundation of Bob Herbert's Op-Ed piece in today's NYTimes.

A synopsis:
Methodist Hospital lies in the eastern part of NO, which was very badly damaged; "There were bodies floating in the water outside the building, and our staffers had to swim through that water to get fuel to the generator"....so said Carl Warner, chief engineer at the hospital. Those waters were filthy, with water mocassins floating around the first floor of the hospital, snipers shooting, rats and "even a 12-foot alligator were roaming the treacherous area just outside the hospital doors."

Today, after voting at about 8:00 a.m. for Howard Dean and seeing the low turnout in West Hartford, CT, I was wondering how we could go about starting a nation-wide petition to have a single primary for the entire country. I'm sure lots of people didn't come because it was/is a foregone conclusion that Kerry would win. It made me feel like my vote really didn't/doesn't make much of a difference. It should not be that hard to start a nation-wide petition, as I think it would have quite a bit of support. How does one go about doing this? I also wonder how we could accomplish a ballot with 2nd & 3rd choices. Anyone have suggestions, comments, opinions?