Today is December 19th. and I'm feeling a little mentally weighed down. I’ve found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year as you know. Maybe they need to adjust my medication or something. For the first time in perhaps years we are actually just above the "normal" rainfall for the year. There are hints of more rain to come.
Of course people are wondering as they go to Christmas Eve services next week, “How can they light a candle for peace on earth with the world in the state it’s in”? If I were a preacher I’d try to feed you a bunch of bullshit. The answer is that each and every one of us needs to work for peace on earth every day. And we can do this by being kind to our neighbor and everyone we meet, like the song says. We need to wish people we don’t know a Merry Christmas. But one thing our leaders need to work on is this whole torture thing. Thom Hartman says that torture just does not work. That Al Qaida guy we thought we got information from from waterboarding- - it turns out that we got all the good information before we began water boarding, and from them on the information we got rapidly deteriorated. This is what happens. People will admit to anything to be done with the torture. Thom says that the Romans only tortured people after they were convicted of a crime and not before. How Cardassian of them. I’ll comment further on this later. People use torture according to Hartman, not to gain the information but to instill terror in the population at large. If everybody knows a neighbor who was arrested and tortured they will think twice about doing whatever it was they were going to do. Of course Jews were tortured in the Nazi era. One Jewish woman says she owes her life to the fact that people who knew of her father while he was being hidden from the authorities did not rat him out but held their tongue, even unto death. This is what a brave people do. On the other hand Hartman says that the Germans who were captured by our forces sang like song birds because they knew which side their bread was buttered on and they had sided with the wrong country in the war. George Washington treated captured “hetian” mercenaries (Germans) hired by the British with kindness and later they became the most loyal of American citizens. There is still a place for Christian charity in this world. And as the Bible says “By being kind to your enemy you shall heap burning coals upon his head”. (Maybe that’s a bad example)
People blame the democrats in congress for getting nothing done this year. And yet there have been 63 filibusters held by republicans to hold up badly needed measures to help out the American public. This is needed legislation that’s already in many cases passed the house but it’s only the log-tight jam in the senate blocking it. This level of 63 filibusters is approximately double the rate of the next highest record of 61 for two years in 2002. Back then republicans were threatening the “nuclear option”. I don’t know why they don’t revive that talk now and dust off the regulations and put them in force. Can’t they just take a vote and abolish the filibuster? Of course in the old days with Jimmy Stewart in the movies you actually had to keep talking during a filibuster and not “yield the floor” but they’ve done away with all that formality.
One of the ideas whose time appears to have come is single payer medical insurance. I’m not totally sold on the idea but I agree the current system sure as hell isn’t working. There is a 25% administrative overhead factor. This of course is besides the high profits the drug companies are making in this country alone. Many have suggested that we need “consumerism” in the medical field. People should use discretion in deciding whether or not to have that needed operation. Can they perhaps wait a year or two on that pancreatic cancer until the prices drop or they have a sale or something? Obviously people don’t have that sort of relation with their doctors, even if they do use the internet a lot. Hartman has said that medical insurance and health is so important it’s an area where society needs to pool its sources and “share the risk” among everybody. Again I’m not totally sold on this. Before Halloween of 1997 it had been years, if not decades before I had seen a doctor. I don’t necessarily think avoiding a doctor is going to kill you. But life expectancy is getting longer as “the bar” continues to be raised on what constitutes good health. Yesterday’s behavior is unacceptable today.
People are wondering whether George Bush is a war criminal. Now it seems that the aid to Mucasey is also hedging on whether he thinks water-boarding is torture. Of course Hartman pointed out that one reason why they destroyed the tapes is because they would have had to admit that torture didn’t do the job advertised. I still disagree with Hartman on an awful lot and none more strenuously than public financing of campaigns. I think it would be an awful idea. Hartman says that perhaps if they had laws about who could say what during a campaign that the Swift Boat people never would have come out against John Kerry. I am inclined in this case to “eat the chicken and throw away the bones” metaphorically speaking. I accept what they say about what John Kerry did in battle, but I do not go along with their editorial remarks about betraying our POW’s afterward. I think candidates need to be exposed to mud slinging because this prepares them for the real job of being President, which isn’t all flowers and rainbows. If the average church pastor had to fight as hard for his job as a politician, we’d have a lot tougher, and may I say “worthy” lot of them than we have now, where the spectre of the hot house orchid Christian is alive and well. I’m sticking with Huckibee myself because I think he’s the best candidate in my party running. Among the democrats Obama is starting to look better to me. If he “finds his bearings” like Jack Kennedy did and hits his stride at the right time, he just might go far in this race.
I wanted to take up again this idea of
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