The Obama Administration has decided to short circuit all the work done to date that would most likely have resulted in a conviction in a military trial. I say that because a good defense lawyer will argue that military evidence can’t for the most part be used in a civilian court. This, of course, will require collecting all-new evidence and redoing everything after eight years have passed.

So much for the pain of 9/11 or the lives taken or the even greater number of lives affected. It looks to me like political correctness is going to displace common sense in this matter. Mr Holder is going to create a three-ring circus and call it a civilian court.

These five terrorists being transferred from Guantanamo Bay are only a glimpse of a very dangerous brotherhood of killers and thugs. Bringing these killers back to the scene of their crime seems to me to be a form of atrocity against the families of the 9/11 attacks and the city of New York.

The return to New York may well cause more acts of violence to be committed as a show of support by fellow terrorists. I cannot understand what political advantage is important enough to risk more bloodshed and carnage.

This question of justice or lack of same for the families of the victims of 9/11 should never have been a political issue. It only proves what I’ve said before, this President and who he does and does not represent is all too apparent. He is a leftist and a socialist, and he shows it more with each passing day. The “Gitmo” terrorists have become sweethearts of Obama’s supporters on the far left. With the changes in how they will be prosecuted, there’s much less chance that they’ll ever be truly punished. Quite a departure from how Timothy McVeigh was handled. Was McVeigh more of a terrorist?

First the bow before the King of Saudi Arabia, and now this, all in the context of a President who spends a lot of time apologizing for his country.  The White House tried to explain away the bow in Saudi Arabia; I wonder how they’ll spin this one.

Obama may not think it’s a big deal, but I suspect most Americans disagree.

There are many people who believe that a central bank is essential to the smooth running of a modern economy.  However, I have personally become convinced that the truth is the exact opposite; that like most government planning efforts, any attempt to centrally control a nation’s currency and banking system is doomed to failure.  In order to understand the problems with a central bank though, one must first understand two things: the purpose of the interest rate in a modern economy, and how the Federal Reserve is allowed to control it via their control of the currency and banking system.

Borrowing and lending are used in a modern economy to finance production by transferring money from the people who have saved it to the people who can use it to create more.  At its most basic level, the interest rate is used to control this rate of borrowing and lending.  When interest rates are low, borrowing is easy and there will be more of it; when they are high, borrowing is harder and there will be less.  Thus, the interest rate is used to control the rate of growth in a modern economy, to keep production steadily increasing while also making sure that savings are never depleted too far.  Ideally, if one were to plot this production increase, one would come up with a linear graph with a constant, positive slope.  However, because humans are imperfect and nobody can know everything about the market all the time, what the graph actually looks like is more of a sine wave focusing on that ideal linear plot.  The interest rate controls the amplitude of this sine wave by becoming higher at the peaks and lower at the troughs.  When the economy is at the peak of the wave, it means that people borrowing too much and saving too little, and the banks must raise rates; when it is at a trough, it means that people are saving more than is necessary and rates can be lowered to increase lending and spur growth.

Now, here is the process by which the Fed controls our interest rate and our currency.  Each bank in the country is required by law to set aside a certain fraction of its money in an account with the Fed in a practice known as fractional reserve banking.  The interest rate, also known as the federal funds rate, is the rate at which the banks’ demand for reserves matches the Fed’s supply.  When the Fed wishes to increase the federal funds rate, it does so by selling government securities, which are paid for by the banks when the Fed reduces the amount of money in the banks’ reserve accounts.  This forces the banks to make up the difference in the reserve account, thus reducing the total money supply.  When it wishes to lower interest rates, it does so by buying back these securities and putting the money into the banks’ reserve accounts, thus increasing the money supply.  The federal funds rate thus sets the tone for the interest rates the banks will charge on their own loans: if the federal funds rate is 5% then the interest rate on the loan you took out for your house may be somewhere between 3% and 7%; if the federal funds rate is 20% then your interest rate may fall somewhere between 15% and 25%.

An economic bubble, such as the stock bubble of the 1990s or the housing bubble that just burst, is created when the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates artificially low in a time when banks should be raising the rates to curb lending and borrowing.  This gives investors and borrowers false confidence in the state of the economy, which spurs more lending and borrowing, which increases the paper gains, until some outside event finally serves to knock over the house of cards and sets off the nasty corrective recession.  The purpose of the Federal Reserve is to pop this bubble before it really gets going by raising rates, thus bringing the economy back to normal levels of production.  Or in the words of William McChesney Martin, governor of the Fed from 1951-1970, the Fed’s job is “to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting going.”  The only problem with this is, people like punch.  People like large economic gains.  And there will always be people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, who will insist that nothing is wrong even as the bubble is rapidly taking a nosedive.  Of course, the Fed could (and should) theoretically act to prevent crashes before they happen by preemptively raising rates.  However, not only is it not always easy to determine whether a bubble is forming, but when was the last time you heard a report in the news about a disaster that never happened?  Central banks are deliberately run in such a way as to keep them apart from the political fray because they do a better job when not controlled by political interests, but if the Fed consistently acted to prevent crises that, in the view of the politicians and the people were never going to happen in the first place, they would not be able to maintain that independence long.

The Federal Reserve was created in almost direct response to the bank panics of 1907.  Its formation was supposed to stabilize the money supply and prevent severe financial crises from happening.  We have now had the Federal Reserve in charge of our currency and our banks for nearly 100 years.  I don’t know about you, but between the Great Depression of the 30s, the stagflation of the 70s, and our current economic mess, I don’t think the Fed has a very good track record.  As for the panics the Federal Reserve was created in response to… well, let’s just say that there aren’t very many schools in the nation teaching children about the horrible conditions during the Great Depressions of 1857 or 1873.  And at least if a bank failed in one of those panics, then the only people who were affected were the people who owned that bank or dealt with it.  Does anyone care to contemplate what would happen to our nation today if the Federal Reserve failed?  Or what would happen if the Fed, in order to avert one method of failure, courted another by inflating the money supply?

Well, if you’re not willing to contemplate it, then you’d better start.  The current federal funds rate is at the historic low of 0%, which means that the Federal Reserve has been quite literally flooding the world with dollars in an attempt to combat the recession.  But eventually the Fed will have to attempt to pull those dollars back in by raising inflation rates.  The last time this happened was in the 70s and 80s, when low inflation rates increased our money supply by 13% and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker was forced to pull that money back in by raising inflation rates to nearly 20%.  And if that little fact scares you, then try this one on for size: now that the Fed has increased the money supply by 120%, how high do you think the federal funds rate will have to go to suck all of that back out of the system?

Before the advent of the Federal Reserve, banks managed their own reserve funds and coined their own money according to standards regulated by Congress in accordance with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.  While banks were free to create fiat currencies of their own based on their private specie reserves, these currencies were at least required to be redeemable in specie and any bank that stretched their “bankers privilege” too far would inevitably pay the price for it in the end.  Did the nation experience occasional bank runs and financial panics during those years?  Sure.  But to my mind, the rules of those times had one inestimable advantage over ours: if banks were managing their own money and ended up doing a bad job of it, then at least when their houses of cards fell down those bankers would fall along with the rest of the system.  Given a choice between a system where the people creating our currency are banking their lives and livelihoods (no pun intended) on doing a good job of it and a system where people are deliberately insulated from the consequences of their actions, I am inclined to pick the former.

Referenced work: Economics: Making Sense of the Modern Economy edited by Simon Cox

Hasan displayed the courage typical of mujahideen, targeting unarmed people who had done him no harm. I wonder what would have happened had his victims been in the field and armed with loaded weapons?  But then, being a typical terrorist mujahid, he wouldn’t have picked victims who could defend themselves.  And what irony, that he was brought down by a female police officer.  I wonder if his quota of virgins in paradise will be reduced because he was defeated by a woman?

Details keep coming out that prove something could have been done long ago about Hasan, but for the protection people like him enjoy from pervasive political correctness.  Here’s one example from The Washington Post:

Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was supposed to discuss a medical topic during a presentation to senior Army doctors in June 2007. Instead, he lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting wars in Muslim countries.

You can read the slides from Hasan’s lecture here in The Washington Post.

Charles Krauthammer, himself a psychiatrist, wrote in a column published today:

What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre playing down Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

“I cringe that he’s a Muslim. … I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.” While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

For those not up on French, cherchez le juif means “always the Jew.”  That’s a particularly odious inclination on the part of some increasingly anti-Semitic leftists these days.  A Muslim murders innocent people, and by some twisted logic Jews are responsible.  There’s historical precedent for that particular pathology.

Krauthammer continued:

[I]f the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, who National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity. …

Consider the Army’s treatment of Hasan’s previous behavior. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising grand rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital — attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.

I’ve been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia — as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan’s. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers — consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This “really freaked a lot of doctors out,” reported NPR.

Nor was this the only incident. “The psychiatrist,” reported Zwerdling, “said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he’s a terrorist, or is he just weird?”

Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion?

No rational person thinks all Muslims are terrorists.  But the pattern is so clear and has been seen so often, with sometimes horrific results, that we must overcome the political correctness that makes us vulnerable to would-be mujahideen.  All the symptoms were painfully obvious in Hasan’s case, and they were ignored, with deadly results.  That has to stop.

Now we face the prospect of our military personnel being murdered here at home by Muslim terrorist/zealots who use their religion as an acceptable excuse. I note with great disdain the efforts of some to attribute the Fort Hood murders to anything less than premeditated murder. What will be done to stop this kind of incident from happening again?

I notice that our President and Congress did not let what happened at Fort Hood change their plans. Instead, he and the rest of the Democrats used the weekend following the murder of our soldiers to push socialized medicine closer to reality. The cost of this experiment, at more than one trillion dollars, will dwarf all other tax burdens being suffered by America’s working people. Considering the ever rising unemployment figures, how will we pay for it?

The folly of believing so-called green jobs can level out the jobs crisis is a total fabrication that fails to take into account the jobs lost due to industries that will die as a result of so-called green laws. The job losses in the electrical power generating industry and its effect on the coal industry will cause job losses that will take most of the century for green jobs to replace. Non-oil-based gasoline will not only cost more but will have a negative effect on our food supply as we use more grain to make ethanol. Bio-diesel, though cheaper to produce, is still diesel and not a clean-burning source of power. Once again we’re faced with job losses versus green jobs to offset those losses.

Wish it ended here, but wait — there’s much more. Most Obama supporters snicker and whisper about crazy conservatives and rednecks who see boogie men in black helicopters. Could it be that the Obama fans purposely overlook certain things that the rest of us see?

A few days ago Obama announced his intention to change the nation’s education system. In a speech that must have had the NEA (National Education Association, the teachers’ union) seeing red, he vowed to remove, in his words, the firewall that leaves teachers and schools unaccountable for substandard education of our children.

I agree with the need to grade our educators to see that they are up to the task we have hired them to do. What I don’t agree with is how Obama intends to achieve this education reform and the resulting control it will allow the federal government. Based on the old carrot and stick principle, federal funds will go only to those schools that meet federally mandated standards.

I agree that higher standards make for better education, but liberals such as the President tend to use education of young people as a way to instill social values and not things such as math and reading skills. Former DNC chairman Howard Dean warned on Meet The Press several weeks ago that Obama intended to make certain changes in how we educate our children. Stricter/tighter control of federal money for our schools will insure that Obama gets his wish.

The first thing I did was download a student license for the language and head to the bookstore.  I’d been hoping to buy a basic book on the APL language, but I hit my first snag when I discovered that there weren’t any.  Turned out that APL had first been devised in the 70s and hadn’t been revised much since, so expecting the bookstore to carry anything on it was a rather hopeless proposition.  So next, I headed to the engineering library.  This search was more fruitful, turning up both a basic book on the language and a workbook containing a set of exercises designed to ease you in slowly.  The textbook I actually ended up ignoring; the workbook was read through within about five days, which probably would have floored the author if I’d had the ability or desire to inform him of it.  Best of all, by the time I’d finished the APL command lines I’d been reading had been transformed from indecipherable hieroglyphs into something that actually resembled sense.

So I eagerly sat down to begin programming, only to run smack into more problems.  Turned out that APL, unlike C++ or Matlab, didn’t really “like” algorithms or loops.  It preferred to parallelize things by putting them in matrices and operating upon entire arrays at once.  That, combined with the fact that the very process of writing in branches and loops was tricky, occasionally necessitated some serious creativity on my part.  On the other hand, if the arrays got too large, that also tended to slow processing time, so you had to be careful of that as well.  Also, the language had some problems with memory limitations.  It turned out that, once numbers got beyond a certain size, the language really had trouble remembering what was supposed to be inside the variable.  Since some of the numbers in question were a hundred digits long, you can understand how that might have become a problem.  And then there was the fact that the interface was just odd.  Because APL used symbols almost exclusively, you had to pick the ones you wanted with your mouse from a toolbar at the top of the screen.  While there were key shortcuts for most of them, first you had to memorize them and then they had to work.  Finally, because the language simply carried out all operations from right-to-left, rather than from left-to-right or according to the mathematical order of operations, you had to triple-check every line of code to make sure that the answer you got was actually the answer you wanted (or indeed, that you got any answer at all).

Despite all of these obstacles, I eventually managed to come up with a workable contest entry that answered all the questions within the contest limitations.  In fact, without going into the nitty-gritty I think it would be safe to say that I came up with a couple of tricks that were rather unique.  By the time I submitted my entry (a couple of days before the contest deadline), I was even feeling fairly pleased with myself.  So, tired but satisfied with my month’s work, I leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on the desk, and set about waiting for the contest results.

I lost.

But as it turned out, I didn’t much care and I’ll tell you why.  Winning the contest was never really the point of entering.  Sure, it would have been cool to get some prize money, or to travel somewhere to talk to others about what I’d done.  It would have been lots of fun to be able to tell people about my awesome accomplishment of going from absolute scratch to master programmer in the space of 30 days.  It would have been a great talking point on my resume and a cool summer story to wow my friends with when they all got back from break.  But in the end, what did any of that really matter?  Whether I got paid for it or not, I still managed to learn the fundamentals of a brand-new language in the space of a month despite having absolutely no prior experience.  In a mere thirty days I was able to create and submit, not a token entry with just enough work in it to qualify for the random prize drawing, but a full and complete entry with a fair shot at placing on the winner’s list.  Not only that, but the experience expanded my programming abilities in even my old languages by forcing me to think about programming and problem-solving in new ways.  And win or lose, I was still able to add a new and unusual skill to my resume.  I might not have gotten any recognition or prize money for my efforts, but in every way that mattered, I won.

The moral of the story?  Winning isn’t everything.  Or at least, whether or not you’ve won depends not so much on whether you get a prize as on how you define the terms.  If you’re in the game for fortune, fame and prize money, then you’re probably playing for the wrong reasons whether you end up winning or not.  But if you’re playing the game for yourself alone, with the occasional recognition of merit by others serving merely as icing on the cake, then not only are you going to get a lot more out of it even when you don’t officially win, but you’re probably going to win a lot more often than the person who cares only about the prize.

The Air America article begins like this:

The Catholic Church successfully helped deliver a crushing blow to the abortion rights movement on Saturday by insisting that abortion restrictions be inserted into the newly passed House health care bill. But this isn’t the first time that a religious organization has used its power, money, and influence to merge dogma with public policy.

Well, damn it all, they’re almost absolutely right!

Two things: 1) Their naming of the “Catholic Church” as the culprit is a bit questionable — Evangelicals do deserve a big share of the credit; and 2) while they are correct that abortion restrictions are based solely on religious dogma, they are also correct that this isn’t the first time religion has influenced government actions (same-sex marriage restrictions are now, thanks to religious influence on government, imposed by most states and are fully supported by federal fiat.) They are not right, however, when they suggest that the health care bill should have no restrictions on abortion. Taking religion out of the equation, abortion, in the majority of cases anyway, is a completely elective procedure and, as such, neither abortion or any other strictly elective procedure should be paid for by U.S. taxpayers. (Of course if sanity prevails, there will be no Federal Health Care bill and this discussion will be moot.)

What about those conservative values that deserve my reconsideration?

After just a bit of investigation I quickly discovered that I am not a textbook conservative, but I’m not far off. Conservapedia — the conservative version of Wikipedia — lists 19 specific conservative agenda items that a true conservative is supposed is supposed to embrace:

- Classroom prayer *
- Prohibition of abortion *
- Abstinence education
- Traditional marriage, not same-sex marriage *
- Respect for differences between men and women, boys and girls
- Laws against pornography *
- The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms
- Economic allocative efficiency (as opposed to popular equity)
- The death penalty
- Parental control of education
- Private medical care and retirement plans
- Canceling failed social support programs
- No world government
- Enforcement of current laws regarding immigration
- Respect for our military … past and present
- Rejection of junk science such as evolutionism and global warming
- Low taxes, especially for families
- Federalism (less power for the federal government and more for local and state governments)
- A strong national defense

The four asterisked (*) items above are where I personally take my leave from this particular set of values; allow me to clarify my reasoning. Conservatism is, to me, a strictly political realm, and while this list reflects a great set of personal values, those four asterisked items, in my opinion, have no place in the world of laws or politics. You may have also noted that these items are near the top of their list — a clear indication of how religion has already perverted political thinking.

My bottom line is this: Religious values are important to many (or most) people but they properly belong only where people willingly accept them — in the church, in the home, possibly in some microcosm of the community (where they are accepted by all members of that community) and, in general, in the lives of those who embrace them. They should not, however, have the force of law. Our great nation is not just populated by Christians or Jews or Hindus or Moslems or by any other single religious group, and our laws should be strictly secular — not reflecting the beliefs of any religion.

There are, of course, logical exceptions to a general statement like the preceding and they are, without exception, already codified into all of our laws — restrictions against causing physical harm, taking someone else’s property, etc. These may all be religious values, at least in most religions, but in the context of law, they are the rules of any civilized nation.

One final note on abortion: My view, embraced by those people who are falsely labeled pro-abortion, is that an unborn baby is not subject to the laws of the United States (or any other entity) until it is born. People who believe this are pro-choice, not pro-abortion; they recognize that abortion does indeed terminate a potential life and that act (or “sin” for you religious folks) is the responsibility of and the rightful decision of the woman carrying the unborn child and the man who took part in the conception. That’s called “choice” and an individual’s choice is far more valuable than the religious proclamations of any religious or government body. You can “damn a woman to Hell” for her choice, but arbitrary laws should never be able to prevent her from making that choice. That would be (or should be) completely outside of the realm of government.

We seriously need to keep the gate closed between the worlds of religion and politics — not doing that will, eventually, draw our system of government closer and closer to theocracy.

(This article was also posted at My View from the Center.)

That respect needs to be maintained beyond Veterans Day, however.  As Jan Barry highlighted yesterday in Dying on the Home Front, many veterans aren’t getting the health care and other support they legally and morally deserve.  This is an obligation to veterans that the nation must meet, and it must be a higher priority for politicians and average citizens alike.

Sometimes the question arises as to who is actually a veteran.  In the broadest legal definition, those recognized as veterans are people who have served on active duty for at least 90 days in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard.  Those who served only in the reserves or in the National Guard must have six years of service, unless activated for at least 90 days on active duty.  Service in all cases must be honorable, of course.

Among these are a smaller number who served in combat, facing an enemy force and under fire.  The distinction may be made that these are the true veterans, the ones who have “seen the elephant.”  As a professional soldier with 30 years service and a combat veteran, I object to distinctions of that sort.  Anyone who serves in the armed forces, whether as a draftee of years past or as a volunteer, offers himself or herself in service to the country.  The fact that most are not called to engage in direct combat doesn’t diminish the importance of their service.

There’s no question that our armed forces, especially the Army, are better and more professional since the draft was ended in 1973.  I wouldn’t go back to conscription except in an emergency, but I sometimes wonder if we haven’t lost something by eliminating the obligation that young people serve the country that provides them the opportunity and advantages inherent in being an American.  Military service is a broadening experience, an awakening of sorts, that would be beneficial for today’s young citizens, many of whom have grown up to expect much without giving anything in return.

Those in uniform sometimes suffer the sneers and insults of a few people whose ideology makes them incapable of respecting the service of others.  But far more often, we’re thanked for our service by strangers whose sincerity is obvious.  To all of you, on this Veterans Day, I want to say that your kindness and respect are far more valuable to us than you’ll ever know.

She discusses everything from Nancy Pelosi’s performance as Speaker of the House, health care reform, health care in other countries, and Obama’s decision on Afghanistan to Richard Dawkins on atheism, the study of anthropology, pop music, Madonna’s latest escapades, and more.  As always, it’s worth the time to read.  A few excerpts:

On Pelosi and passage of the House health care bill:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.

It was a stunningly impressive recovery for someone who seemed to be coming apart at the seams last summer, when a sputtering, rattled Pelosi struggled to deal with the nationwide insurgency of town hall protesters — reputable, concerned citizens whom she outrageously tried to tar as Nazis. … Pelosi’s hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.

On the House health care bill itself:

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices. They’ll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. … Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it’s printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites! …

Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities.

On comparisons with health care systems in other countries:

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what’s the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. …

On paying for the bill by cutting Medicare:

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind. …

On President Obama:

The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan — another rats’ nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama’s flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall — which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president’s principal advisors. And Obama’s muted response to last week’s massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden — a prize that can become a curse.

On Richard Dawkins, atheism, and religion:

I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on — lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) — as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. …  As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need — which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

“On this Veterans Day we should not only honor the nearly 500 soldiers who have died this year in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the more than 2,200 veterans who were killed by our broken health insurance system,” Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in releasing the report this week.

Himmelstein added that the proposed health care reforms being considered by Congress would do little to change the situation for veterans too young for Medicare, not making enough to afford private health insurance and not eligible for VA care, which is restricted to military service-related health problems. “These unnecessary deaths will continue under the legislation now before the House and Senate. Those bills would do virtually nothing for the uninsured until 2013, and leave at least 17 million uninsured over the long run,” he said.

“Like other uninsured Americans, most uninsured vets are working people – too poor to afford private coverage but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard Medical School professor who coauthored the study. “As a result, veterans go without the care they need every day in the U.S., and thousands die each year. It’s a disgrace.”

The Harvard study analyzed the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey data on Americans asked about insurance coverage and veteran status. It found 1,461,615 military veterans between ages 18 and 64 who were uninsured and didn’t receive health care by the Veterans Administration in 2008. That includes about 10 percent of Vietnam era veterans aged 55 to 64.

Based on a recently published report in the American Journal of Public Health that found being uninsured raises the odds of dying by 40 percent, causing nearly 45,000 deaths in the United States annually among those aged 17 to 64, the researchers estimated there were 2,266 preventable deaths among uninsured veterans in 2008. More than half that estimated death toll was among Vietnam veterans aged 55 to 64.

The Harvard study on veterans followed an earlier study of health data on all Americans called “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” published in September in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. These studies are pointed to by Physicians for a National Health Program as reasons for health care system reform.

Dr. Andrew Wilper, who worked on the larger Harvard Medical School study and now teaches at the University of Washington Medical School, said, “The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health. We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

Dr. Woolhandler, co-author of both studies and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Mass., noted: “Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance. Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives” annually.

For more information:

Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance, PNHP

Harvard study finds nearly 45,000 excess deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage, PHHP

(This article was also posted at EarthAirWater.)