Many don’t even realize that Sierra College has a foundation, raising private sector funds to support student success and increase access to college. If you’re on Twitter, you should be following our energetic Executive Director Sonbol Aliabadi…her driving energy and determination have been a a big reason why the Sierra College Foundation is what it is today!

As the foundation begins its annual campaign, there’s a new way that you can support the mission of Sierra College, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Just go to OneCause.com, set up a quick profile and select Sierra College Foundation as your beneficiary. A long list of name brand retailers will donate a percentage of your purchases directly to the foundation! Retailers like…

• Nordstrom (4%)
• Macy’s (1.5%)
• Amazon.com (2%)
• Apple Store (1%)
• …and many more!

What an easy and fast way to make a difference in the lives of many, and the economic prosperity of our broader community. Get registered at OneCause.com and then have fun shopping!

We’re on a trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (with a few days in Paris on the way) for the purpose of bringing our little girl, Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein, back home to the United States. Spencer is staying home for this trip, and enjoying every minute with Nana, Papa, Grammie and Pop.

If you want to “follow along” on our trip, here’s how you can do that:

• Follow us on Twitter. You can check it out on the web, or to have our tweets sent to your phone, just text follow aaronklein to 40404 (in the United States). Note: Due to the time difference, you’ll want to turn your mobile phone on silent at night. Paris is 9 hours ahead and Addis is 11.
• Follow us on Facebook. Our Twitter updates should be flowing over to Facebook, although once in a while this glitches and they either never make it over there or get delayed. Also, I won’t be able to accept new friend requests while we’re gone. So Twitter is your best bet.
• Subscribe to the Blog via RSS. Internet access is VERY limited in Ethiopia, so expect most of our updates to be via Twitter. We may try out the Twitter Live Blogging plug-in that will create a post for our Twitter messages every day. But do stay tuned to Twitter if you really want to be in the loop.
• Subscribe to the Blog via E-Mail. Whatever blog posts we do manage to post can be delivered to your e-mail once a day if you subscribe.

We won’t have “perfect” access to your responses back to us. We’ll probably get most of our Twitter @ replies thanks to a couple of great friends. Please do comment, respond and tweet back, and at the very least, we’ll enjoy reading them when we return home!

PS: Can I take this opportunity to let everyone know that we won’t be sending out our Christmas letter until January this year? We haven’t forgotten you.

Bottom line: I still think the White House may get their way and “a bill” will pass, because there are 60 Democrats who believe in passing a massive set of subsidies to buy everyone health insurance, and are willing to slash Medicare by $400 billion, and raise multitudes of taxes directly affecting the middle class, to pay for it. At the end of the day, they may water the bill down to the point that they do just that.

Looks like it’s only the hopes and dreams of the rabid left that are crashing and burning.

The ultimate outcome of the subsidized-health-care-for-the-uninsured bill currently crashing and burning in the United States Senate will likely be known while I’m out of the country.

This was my prediction on Twitter back on November 21: “Health insurance bill was dead, WH resuscitated it with two razor thin votes. I’ll predict now: hard left bill won’t pass.”

As it stands today, the public option is gone from the bill. The expansion of Medicare (just another way of doing the public option) is gone from the bill. Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) is pro-life and insists that he won’t vote to start funding abortion with federal tax dollars. Meanwhile, the far left is insisting they won’t vote to reform health care unless it can fund abortion with our tax dollars.

The rabid left has gone even further than that: now, many of them want to kill the bill entirely. Creating a multi-trillion dollar program to give away health care to anyone who can’t afford it isn’t good enough. If they can’t have the government also take over 1/6th of the American economy, they want to take their marbles and go home.

Plan? What plan?

Meanwhile, the White House position appears to be that they would be perfectly happy if Congress passed a law providing enhanced veterinarian services to horses, as long as the name of the bill is “Health Care Reform” so they can claim victory.

The far left has turned on this President with a vengeance. “Mr. President…where are you? Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout,” said talk show host Ed Schultz. “The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers.”

In fact, many of the rabid left would probably find this Google ad ironic given that they are faulting the President for not introducing a plan of his own:

Bottom line: I still think the White House may get their way and “a bill” will pass, because there are 60 Democrats who believe in passing a massive set of subsidies to buy everyone health insurance, and are willing to slash Medicare by $400 billion, and raise multitudes of taxes directly affecting the middle class, to pay for it. At the end of the day, they may water the bill down to the point that they do just that.

But the government takeover of health care appears to be dead. And I will not be surprised one bit if I return home to find that the legislation has crashed and burned entirely.

Ideas for Reforming the Health Care System

The sad part of all of this is that we actually need serious reform to health insurance. The current escalation in health care costs and health insurance premiums is completely unsustainable. If you need some good background on that, check out David Goldhill’s article on the unsustainable design of our system for financing health care.

Here are some of the ideas we discussed on this blog back in October…

• Encourage awareness of costs. Require health care providers to clearly post their rates in a visible location, and have a consistent set of fees for the insured and uninsured, to promote competition and transparency. (via fiddlrts and music2myear)
• Tort reform to reduce malpractice costs. (via Dan Lombard and music2myear)
• Incentivize high deductible plans for emergencies and high-cost services, and go to cash for routine medical expenses. (via music2myear)
• Eliminate regulations to increase competition among health care providers, much like the “Lasik” model and plastic surgery today. (via music2myear)
• Eliminate fee-for-service entirely. (via joshwinn, lots of discussion in this thread)
• Make health insurance like car insurance. Minimum required coverage obtained through a carrier of their choice. (via dukeronald)
• Forbid “minimum required coverage” policies entirely. (via music2myear)
• Allow purchasing of insurance from any carrier across state or regional lines to promote competition and drive down premiums. (via music2myear)

Lots of great ideas in this discussion. I have a couple of my own, and we’ll see if I can get to writing a post about them in the next few days. Airplane time has always been great for blogging in the past.

And now, the giveaway!

I promised to give away a copy of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem by Professor Regina Herzlinger (paper or Kindle edition, your choice).

Everyone who contributed a comment was included in the random drawing, and the winner was music2myear! I hope he greatly enjoys the book, and thank you to everyone for your participation!

Question

So now, it’s prediction time. What do you think the outcome of this bill will be? Will the entire effort fail and nothing passes at all? Or will the basic core of the bill — paying for health insurance for the uninsured — make it out of the Senate? Use the comments below to make your prediction.

As most of you know, we’re in final countdown to leave on our trip overseas. We found out we were leaving just last week and managed to figure out a flight itinerary that got us where we needed to go at a semi-reasonable cost.

We’re in the odd situation of taking a four day vacation in Paris in order to save $6,500. I know. Please don’t feel too badly for me. That was the cost difference between flying directly to Africa on Christmas Eve versus flying to Paris four days earlier. With 120,000 Hilton HHonors points that I’ve accumulated, we’re staying for free on those three nights at the Trianon Palace in Versailles. Do not cry for me, Argentina.

After Versailles, we board an Ethiopian Airlines jet on Christmas Eve to fly into Addis Ababa. I am beyond excited about meeting my eight month old daughter on Christmas morning, and experiencing her native land in all of its beauty — and from everything I’ve heard, it’s an exceedingly beautiful country.

On Sunday and Monday, we leave the bustling capital city to travel south to the small village where she was born. We have a chance of meeting her birth mother there and we’d love to do that.

On Tuesday, we visit the United States Embassy to formalize her visa application. If all goes well, they issue said visa on New Year’s Eve and we embark that night on the 32 hour flight home to the United States with our little girl, arriving home on New Year’s Day 2010 with just a few minutes to spare.

I’m quite confident that, while on this trip, we will taste amazing French and Ethiopian food, drink unbelievably good Ethiopian coffee, see stunning artifacts of history, and experience amazing contrasts of riches and poverty. It will change and shape our lives for many years to come. I can’t wait to report back to you all the things that we have the chance to see, hear and learn.

The best way to follow along on our trip is via my Twitter feed. My posts there usually transfer over to Facebook in a timely fashion. I’m also working on some ways I can have them transfer to this blog too. But both of those methods rely on technology that may or may not be totally reliable, so if you want it straight from the source, check Twitter directly.

Just so you all know, I’ll have zero access to voice mail and extremely limited access to e-mail, especially after we leave France. After we arrive back home with our little girl and have a few days to get re-acclimated, I’ll be certain to respond to you if you’ve sent me a message during these couple of weeks.

Question: What should we “not miss” in either France or Ethiopia? What do you most want to hear about during our trip? Use the comments below to let us know!

(Feed and e-mail readers, click through to the post for the audio.)

My father’s family farm was a novel to me. It was another place and time similar to Charlotte’s Web. I was a city girl from southern California, and I was nothing like Fern. Yet the few times I got Nebraska dirt under my fingernails were opportunities of discovery. The years may have altered our family farm, but the lessons I learned there were timeless.

Grandma and Grandpa Bell were strangers I knew from a black and white photograph. They were pictured next to three year old me as they witnessed the grandeur of the Pacific Ocean for the very first time. They were linked in my head to shoe boxes of homemade Christmas cookies and twin sized quilts with my name embroidered on them.

In a world where I struggled to fit into the image displayed for me to strive for, here were people who seemed to treasure me without really knowing me. Their love was evident in the quilt colors especially chosen because they were my favorites. My shoe box was wrapped and only for me, each cookie frosted and specially made with love.

Even with having spoken to these mysterious grandparents on the phone, along with being the recipient of their kind gifts, it was a shock when I finally remember meeting them. Traveling for days in the car, with my father and one sister, while listening to my mother complain about the trip was confusing to my young mind. I tried to mesh the negative remarks about country people with my prior positive associations of quilts and cookies. When I arrived, I suddenly was thrust into stardom. Over and over I was introduced as their pride and joy from California. The amazing thing was I hadn’t done anything to earn their affection.

Grandma Bell had been a pioneer of her time. Her family was limited to her husband and two children, and she chose to work outside of her home. Having birthed my father in 1917, she was not only a farmer’s wife, a full time job in itself, but also the teacher of the one room school house. She taught with my father as a toddler in her classroom. She grew and canned all their produce in see through glass jars. In addition to several others she made each of her eight grandchildren two quilts, every stitch by hand.

She was the essence of a teacher: years after retirement she still encouraged and taught me the value of seeing beauty in everything. She pointed out the complimenting of colors in a quilt and the splendor of the fall leaves. She didn’t waste anything. In the quilts I could find matching pieces that were scraps from the aprons she had made us or from my grandpa’s shirts.

My first exposure to a garden was in Nebraska with her. I loved the smell of the soil that was richly composted by her care. Grandma’s firstborn, my Aunt Eleanor, lived nearby on another farm. I distinctly remember being invited by her to help shell peas and my amazement that they didn’t come from metal cans or the frozen food section! Being sent into the garden to find a ripe tomato was the scavenger hunt I had never before experienced!

Then there were the cousins. My Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Rich had six children and four of them were girls! They were all in the kitchen with their mom and our grandma shelling the peas, laughing and working together. There was uniqueness in their interacting with one another, and I hungered for that type of intimacy with my sister.

I found it in the freedom of the Nebraska country where California city girls could relax from the pressures of being perfect like Hollywood said we should be. Grandpa Bell gave us permission to ride around in the ancient tractor with my older sister driving. I realize now he kept an eye on us as he leisurely smoked his pipe. But at the time, as a little girl, it was just my sister and me on a great adventure with not a care in the world. We drove for hours through the fields. The culmination was a trek through the cherry orchard picking fruit from the trees as we whizzed by…who could believe anything could taste so good being plucked off a tree? Didn’t cherries come in cans? How could you have so much fun outside? Who would believe that sisters could be friends?

Even in paradise there can be some thorn bushes. I discovered this when Uncle Rich, Daddy and I visited the barn to see the new litter of piglets. What might have been offensive to some held a wonder for me. The crunch of the straw beneath our feet, covering the dry crusted mud floor, was something my eyes had never beheld. I was a city gal with sidewalks and grass. To my delight was an enormous stinky sow with a dozen piglets at her side. The cutest little one had no teat to be found, and my uncle in his country ignorance declared this one to be the runt! Country ignorance because he did what a farmer had to do – not what was fashionable to a little girl. I wept for hours after hearing about the injustice to my favorite piglet. I proceeded to then punish my uncle by refusing to speak to him for the remainder of our trip. I suspect he worked too hard to even notice.

This newly discovered family from Nebraska was a different breed of people from the theys within my limited scope. My concrete sidewalk, grass yard, frozen food, clean life depended on the theys to determine my aspirations and self-worth. “They are wearing this, they are doing this, they are going here, they are staying there.” In Nebraska amongst the real soil, real food, and real life I discovered real people who enjoyed working hard. They took pride in the results of their labor and accomplishments not simply their acquirements.

Daddy always reminisced about the simple life in the country. As an executive at an aerospace corporation, it appeared he had come too far west to return. There was a time mother and he discussed the possibility of moving our family back to Nebraska. Grandma and Grandpa Bell desperately wanted the land to stay within the family. The idea wasn’t entertained very long. My father settled with planting a garden in the easement behind our backyard, but his heart always longed for the country life.

I am guessing I only visited my country family three times before my Grandmother died. Our last family summer trip was taken because we knew she wouldn’t last another. The same long ride, the same complaints, yet my innocent eleven year old heart was thrilled to be visiting again. The sadness in my Grandfather’s eyes was like a summer storm cloud hanging over the stay. I remember him emptying the basin into the garden soil after my Grandmother had vomited. The effects of cancer could not be hidden, as hard as they tried.

Even in her suffering, she was delighted with me and had kind things to say. This behavior was still baffling to me. She complimented my drawing and the use of colors together. “You could make beautiful quilts someday.” Then she took me to the parlor with the built in knick-knack cabinets on each side. She instructed my sister and me to each choose something from it to remember her by. My sister, by now a teenager, chose a beautiful crystal piece.

Still a child, in an environment with no one to pressure me, some might think I had chosen foolishly. There were a set of little cast iron people dressed in black and a small old fashioned flat iron. They were insignificant, older, and chipped. This will remind me of my grandma, I thought.

Years later, as an adult, I traveled back to the old farm: a place that awakened much of who I have become. I was surprised to find the drive long and caught myself complaining. The house still stands; now belonging to strangers and rented out. The acres of farmland are gone. Instead of row after row of corn there are now row after row of tract homes. The cherry orchard is still standing in neat and tidy rows. I am comforted by the presence of all those trees, we have a secret; they know me.

I realize now the little cast iron people dressed in black were an inexpensive keepsake that Grandma probably acquired when visiting Amish country. Yet, they were a very wise choice for me. They speak to me each day as they are displayed on the corner table. They speak of simpler times and the lessons learned in that Nebraska dirt. I can still see traces of it under my fingernails. I suspect it has become a permanent part of who I am.

What memories do you have of family when you were young? How have those experiences with the “older and wiser” generation shaped your life? Use the comments below to share your story!

The New York Times has more on the ineffectiveness of the $787 billion dollar stimulus package to stimulate much of anything except either government employment or temporary jobs.

When Congress approved the $787 billion federal stimulus package this year, Mr. Reed hoped it would help hard-pressed cities like his. But so far he has been underwhelmed.

In Washington last month, Mr. Reed delivered his message to White House economists and an audience at the Brookings Institution: the design and implementation of the stimulus package could not have been worse for Silicon Valley. The money it doles out in the short run has arrived in a trickle, too slow to do much. And for the long run, it does little to help generate permanent jobs.

“We have only received and spent six or seven million dollars,” Mr. Reed said in an interview last week. “You can’t expect a very big impact out of that.”

Ah, but there’s more. Here’s what that $6 or $7 million bought.

Officially, the audits say, 250 full-time equivalent jobs have been created. But 240 of those positions reflect 900 part-time summer jobs that were created for area youths. Since those were summer jobs and winter is nearly here, the jobs are already gone. The other 10 full-time equivalent jobs were part of an airport project to improve the screening of checked baggage. The city has spent $3.3 million of its own money on that project and has yet to see a dime of the promised reimbursement.

I am not predicting that the economy will not recover, or we won’t start having job growth at some point. I think the American economy is so resilient, it can recover in spite of almost anything Washington DC can throw at it.

But I can think of almost 787 billion other things to have done with this money.

So, without further ado, the winner of the one month of DreamBox math games for K-2 kids is Sara Joy Marie Gill! Her mom left an inspiring story on the blog about Sara’s support for her family during tough times. (I’ve gotten to know her mom a little bit via Twitter, and this is one special family.)

Enjoy the month of Dreambox, Sara! Details on the way to your mom in an e-mail within a couple of days.

(E-mail and RSS feed readers can click through for the video.)

Almost every one of us knows someone who is between jobs during these tough times. What are the best strategies we can use to help friends find their next job? Or if you’re one of the searchers, what strategies are you finding most effective to secure one? Share your thoughts in the comments.