Someone Else's Words

I'm lamenting my paucity of words tonight then I find these words from Kevin Hayden (via Jon Swift's Best Blog Posts of 2007 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves)), Kevin's post entitled "The unnecessary death of Nataline Sarkysian … or is it murder?" Yeah, she's the woman CIGNA Healthcare refused to pay for her (available) liver transplant saying the care plan chosen was "experimental".

The Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm” has evolved into “America can’t afford some of its lives.”

And I have questions that rise above the presidential campaign that goes to America’s clergy and the “values voters” who dominated the headlines a few short years ago: “You fought so hard for the continued life support of Terry Schiavo, so where your voices and energy for Nataline Sarkysian?

Are you telling us that Terry’s husband could not make decisions in Terry’s interest but some graysuit beancounter in the insurance racket gets to decide that Nataline Sarkysian must die???

Conservative republican right-wing evangelicals, I've but two words for your worthless selves - guess which? A god that calls you assholes "righteous" is a god I know to be the "other guy" thereby proving your "religion" is the same as what I just flushed an hour ago (minus the corn). Damn your worthless eyes.

What Good Is A Soapbox...

...if you do not use it? It's obvious to me why so many webblogs grow dark & dim over time, although there are many who can do a good job of stringing together words with proper punctuation, there are but a select few who can successfully do this over time. In some ways Digby over at Hullabaloo (see sidebar) is a hero to me, over the years I have never found a post of hers to be less than thought-provoking. (Not that my writing skills could ever approach hers, the main thing we seem to have in common is that we both write in the English language) There are of course others whose posts are more profound or more provocative but many of those people are writers in their daily lives and their blogging seems to be more an extension of their daily lives and not as much a labor of love as Digby's. Still, having been a longtime blog reader, when I decided to create this here joint, I resolved to fill it with a sufficient number of regular posts that would qualify it as a 'true' sixth-tier blog - don't mind being yet another "voice in the wilderness", feel very much like one of those already in my day-to-day...

Kind of a melancholy time at the manor these days. Found out my ex father-in-law died 24 November 2007 or thereabouts. I married his child in 1988 but eventually had to file for divorce in 1999 as my spouse's mental health issues had gotten to a point where they were not simply unmanageable; my efforts to help and assist this person to cope with their stuff were actually making things worse. After we divorced, their goddamned psychiatrist then and only then consented to the hospitalization that my now ex-spouse had required for years. It's been now, what, 8, almost 9 years? And over this time, I still send my ex- xmas & bday gifts as my ex- is on SSDI and the little help I have to offer is greatly appreciated. While we will never get back together, I have never stopped caring about this person either and never will, I guess. So it was kind of an expected shock that he finally died and I must say I've been having premonitions about this for most of this fall. He was 88 years of age and was married to his sweetie for 62 of 'em. Served in the Philippines during WWII, a seabee I believe, where he met his wife.

Have some good memories of him, some times we shared together. A funny one was him painting over tiny cigarette burns in the vinyl of the kitchen floor of the house I bought for his child and me back in 1992 - if you know where to look, you can still see his handiwork. My favourite? An afternoon we spent removing foliage from the bed outside of the front windows in order that flowers could be planted there instead., digging & tearing nasty scraggy bushes out of the ground, roots and all.

Dog bless you and keep you, H. Paul _

Back In The USSR USA

Good trip, but also good to be home with the kitties, missed those little guys a lot! Trip uneventful save entering the USA was no fun at all. Compared to entering the UK or the Netherlands, reentry here was a bear, even for those of us with nothing to declare - the lines were way too long and the immigration folks seemed hostile & somewhat suspicious. It's done, however, and I'm back...

The tabloids in London were horrid, for a week it was all about the 'teddy bear teacher' - what a sensationalized load of rubbish! That ate up 4-5 days worth of the news cycle then it was the 'mysterious canoe guy'. Again, what a bunch of excrement! Not a peep as to how many people were killed in Iraq or how many US soldiers died or injured, no, that stuff one had to dig for. The US media is pretty sorry these days but I feel for those in London as theirs is worse. Yipes.

As usual there were way too many stories back home (and quite a few writers far better than I to explain them) but there was one in particular that got my attention - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) did some digging into GW's use of executive orders and popped out a bombshell of a speech on December 7^th, unfortunately December 7^th was a Friday so of course his speech missed the media for the most part but Ms. Marcy (among others) nailed it pretty well - Sen. Whitehouse had a pretty good summary near the end with regards to GW's concept of what the law is and how it applies to GW as president of the United States of America:

In a nutshell, these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this:

1. “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”

2. “I get to determine what my own powers are.”

3. “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.

10 years ago the US was gripped with hundreds of special counsels investigating uncountable numbers of Clinton Chronicles Crimes including the 5^th or 6^th investigation of the Vince Foster suicide. Today we are investigating exactly 0.000% of GW's bushwa, can you believe it? And now we have GW & his bunch reinterpreting Marbury vs. Madison, a Supreme Court decision I thought was settled back in 1803. Assuming you know about GW's celebrated Unitary Executive philosophy, can anyone out there tell me it is any different from 1933's famous Führerprinzip? The claim to fame of the USA was always that we were a nation ruled by laws, not by men. What happened between 1945 and 2007, eh? Or more contentiously, who really won WWII or the Cold War?