Eight Feet Deep

Greet­ings and cal­i­bra­tions on what is a thunder-filled, rainy, Fri­day after­noon in South­east Texas. It’s been a stress­ful week so I thought I’d just throw a few odds and ends out there and see if they stick to anything.

We’re so glad that’s cleared up

After all these years we finally learn who Carly Simon meant when she sung “You’re So Vain.” It turns out it wasn’t War­ren Beatty, Mick Jag­ger, James Tay­lor, Paul Simon, Simon and Gar­funkel, Simon and Schus­ter, Sim­ple Simon or any of the other peo­ple in the enter­tain­ment world named Simon. Instead, it was record mogul David Gef­fen. I sup­pose that back in the early 1970s it would have been nearly impos­si­ble to sell a hit record titled: “You’re So Gay.”

Stick that up your Appalachian Trail

Jenny San­ford was granted a divorce from her hus­band, South Car­olina Gov. Mark San­ford, whose cheatin’ heart told on him when he lied about hik­ing on the Appalachian Trail. He instead had gone to Argentina to visit a long­time lover. The then-rising Repub­li­can star said, in first explain­ing the mis­cue, that he knew it was one of those “A” places he had planned to visit.

Swiss line up for knives in pend­ing con­flict with Libya

The Swiss Army is hand­ing out the famed Swiss Army Knives to its pop­u­lace after Libyan strong man and res­i­dent nut job Moam­mar Gad­hafi threat­ened the long-neutral Euro­pean state with a “holy war” over a 2008  arrest and brief detain­ment of Gadhafi’s son and wife. Experts have said Switzer­land should not worry about an actual war with Libya given the past out­landish actions of Ghad­hafi. How­ever, Swiss offi­cials coun­tered that no one had actu­ally believed the United King­dom and Argentina would have fought a war over the Falk­lands. Or was that Appalachia that fought the UK, asked Gov. Mark San­ford of South Carolina?

Cana­di­ans apol­o­gize for women’s hockey team cel­e­bra­tion and intend to apol­o­gize even more

The Cana­dian gov­ern­ment says it will hold a national day of apol­ogy on Sat­ur­day after some of its women’s olympic hockey team cel­e­brated with alco­holic bev­er­ages and cig­ars fol­low­ing their gold-medal win over the U.S. team. Gov­ern­ment offi­cials in Canada said that it was not suf­fi­cient in the country’s cul­ture of polite­ness to only offer a mea­ger apol­ogy by the hockey team’s gov­ern­ing body. “All Cana­di­ans should feel sin­cerely ashamed and only after a national day of remorse will it suf­fice that we show how much we wish to express our regret,” Cana­dian Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harper said in an address to the nation, adding: “eh?”

Had I known hard times have hit our mil­i­tary lead­ers so much …

This is a mes­sage I received which says it is from Ray­mond Odierno “A MILITARY OFFICER HERE IN IRAQ.”

Actu­ally, Ray Odierno, is in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq. He’s bet­ter known as Gen. Ray­mond Odierno, as in four-star gen­eral Ray Odierno. He was first known to the greater pub­lic when he com­manded the 4th Infantry Divi­sion which joined the begin­ning of the ground war in Iraq although it was some­what delayed because Turkey didn’t want us to land there to invade Iraq.

So, any­ways, I get this mes­sage from Ray Odierno except his email address as sent to me is .es (Spain), the e-mail address in the mes­sage says e-mail him in .sn(Senegal) and not .mil(military):

MY NAME IS COMMANDER RAYMOND ODIERNO, A U.S MILITARY OFFICER HERE IN IRAQ.
I SEEK YOU ASSISTANCE TO MOVE OUT OF THIS COUNTRY,THE SUM OF EIGHTEEN
MILLION FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS WE DISCOVERED IN A BUNKER
NEAR SADDAM'S OLD PALACE PRIOR TO THE
DEMISE/COLLAPSE OF HIS REGIME.
PLEASE CONTACT ME ON raymond.odierno@sunumail.sn FOR MORE DETAILS.
I AM WAITING FOR YOUR REPLY.
Have a nice day
COMMANDER.RAYMOND ODIERNO

Today I have been watch­ing, on and off, the health care reform sum­mit between the pres­i­dent and con­gres­sional lead­ers. It seems just the same old same old. It is clear the Repub­li­cans do not want any kind of reform that is going to cut into the prof­its of big insur­ance. I say, more and more of the major­ity party should sign onto reform through rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.

I cer­tainly think Obama has got huevos let­ting all the steam rise in full view of the pub­lic. At least the Repub­li­can lead­er­ship is being afforded the oppor­tu­nity to help forge a work­able deal with the major­ity to reform the sys­tem. It seems they are con­tent to “just say no.”

While the politi­cians go through the motions of our health sys­tem at the macro view, I have seen it this week on the micro level. My expe­ri­ence has been both with social­ized med­i­cine — at the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs — and in reg­u­lar civil care at a local hospital-system owned minor care clinic for an on-the-job injury. One might think one type of care may be prefer­able to the other. One might be right. And, one might be wrong.

With the VA. I some­times have long waits. That is for both for a sched­uled appoint­ment and for sched­ul­ing an appoint­ment. My wait at the doc-in-the-box clinic was two hours plus an hour to see a care giver, have a lab sam­ple taken and to get an X-ray. All of that took another hour.

Today, I tried to get in touch with two VA med­ical spe­cialty clin­ics in Hous­ton. It took me an hour of unan­swered phones, voice mail­boxes that were full and could not accept calls. This type of activ­ity, try­ing to reach one spe­cial­ist or lab or billing at the VA, is the norm and not the exception.

I will have had three med­ical vis­its — so-called “doctor’s vis­its” — this week by the end of tomor­row. I will not have seen a doc­tor in any of the vis­its. One visit will have been with a physician’s assis­tant, another by a licensed coun­selor and the other a nurse practitioner.

There is no doubt in my mind that these para­pro­fes­sion­als do rea­son­ably good jobs at what they are allowed to do. How­ever, I believe that these care providers exceed the bounds of what laws intended them to perform.

I like my PA, the care and the knowl­edge that per­son has of my med­ical sit­u­a­tion. I would just as soon keep that PA because I know if some­thing comes up, my VA care giver will seek assis­tance from a med­ical doc­tor that is over­see­ing that care. The care that I received at the minor care clinic is a dif­fer­ent story.

The nurse prac­ti­tioner I saw clearly believed she was med­ically a leg­end in her own mind. The doc­tor was just a name on the sta­tion­ary they use to write notes for work or school. I spent three hours at this clinic for a sprained ankle and strained back. The back prob­lem was in my tho­racic region — mid back between spine and under­arm — and she ordered I wear a splint and use crutches. It only took 30 min­utes of using crutches that both my foot had been blis­tered by the splint being too tight and the crutches aggra­vat­ing my back strain.

I got into an argu­ment with the NP before leav­ing because of the word­ing that was used on my back-to-work note. It clearly wasn’t what she had told me it would be and denied say­ing what she told me. Of course, when you talk to any med­ical pro­fes­sional or para­pro­fes­sional, their word is always accepted, not the patient’s.

I have been to doc­tors many times in my life, prob­a­bly more than many peo­ple. I think now, here I am at 54 years old and I have what seems to be a lot wrong with me, yet here I am pretty much fully func­tion­ing, though not as phys­i­cally able as I was. I chalk that up to hav­ing been to a doc­tor so many times — both through their health care and because of their health care.

The Obama side of the health care debate is that a num­ber of Amer­i­cans can­not afford that care. The Repub­li­can side is pretty much, we’ve got ours, period. The GOP says loudly and proudly that we have the best health care sys­tem in the world. The whole World Wide World! But some­times, you have to just step back and ask your­self, do we?

Way gone are the days of the doc­tor mak­ing house calls. What? Doc­tors did that? They didn’t in my life time, at least they didn’t for most peo­ple in places I have lived dur­ing the past half-century. I have seen doc­tors, a good num­ber, but increas­ingly I have seen non-doctors. This goes for even vis­its to specialists.

Per­haps you can chalk up a lot of the care by non-doctors to my depen­dence on the VA for health care. But it’s not just the VA.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that doc­tors are all that one should see when they “go to the doctor.”

Espe­cially in smaller prac­tices, com­pe­tent PAs and nurse prac­ti­tion­ers are cer­tainly qual­i­fied to pro­vide decent, lim­ited, med­ical care. But the thought of doc­tors being the Wiz­ard behind the cur­tain that you never see is both unwel­come and unhealthy. That is just one con­cern I have with our med­ical care but there are more.

Maybe we need to look at the whole of med­i­cine in coun­try and look at some of the gaps that make us ques­tion whether our care is truly the best in the world.

Please excuse my crappy cell phone pic­ture, but I took it just after air­ing my front tire plus hav­ing expe­ri­enced the shock of find­ing a con­ve­nience store that charges 25 cents for their air and water machine.

The photo was taken ear­lier today at Crawdad’s Con­ve­nience Cen­ter on High­way 62 South in Mau­riceville, Texas. The store — in Cajun Texas — is part of an area con­ve­nience store chain although I do not know if the other stores charge a solid quar­ter for air and water.

The only thing bet­ter would be free air and water like in the olden tymes. But con­sid­er­ing most stores charge at least 75 cents and some more, I feel this Crawdad’s deserve an “Attaboy.” How you say dat attaboy in Cajun, chere? C’est tout.

“Tastes great! Less fill­ing! Tastes great! Less filling!”

I sup­pose it to be some­what flip­pant to talk about the after­math of yesterday’s sui­cide plane crash in Austin in terms of a beer com­mer­cial. But then, some of the dis­cus­sion bounc­ing around as to whether the inci­dent was solely a crim­i­nal act or an act of domes­tic ter­ror­ism is about as weighty as the 1980s Miller Lite com­mer­cials.

There is no doubt that some minds and hearts were filled with ter­ror when 53-year-old Joe Stack of Austin flew his single-engine Piper air­craft into a multi-story North Austin build­ing that housed almost 200 IRS employ­ees. The crash and result­ing fire injured more than a dozen and killed an IRS employee as well as Stack.

Much is to be exam­ined and digested in the after­math of this act which a man who appar­ently had years of rage bot­tled up, over the IRS, Catholic Church and other insti­tu­tions he felt wronged him, came uncorked. But seem­ingly one of the least impor­tant mat­ters, it seems to me, is whether this act should be labeled just a crim­i­nal act or a case of domes­tic ter­ror. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters yes­ter­day at a press con­fer­ence to pick one when it comes to a word describ­ing the intended crash as crim­i­nal or domes­tic terror.

Today, Fox News, which in my mind is about the most pissy news orga­ni­za­tions around, had an online story titled: Austin Plane Crash: Crim­i­nal Act or Domes­tic Ter­ror­ism? The answer is, to para­phrase another old TV com­mer­cial  tagline, this one from Certs breath mints: “It’s two, two, two acts in one.”

Yes when Stack went on his ram­page and dived into the build­ing along U.S. 183 near Loop 360 in Austin he cer­tainly com­mit­ted a crime, most likely sev­eral. That is not to men­tion inten­tion­ally set­ting fire to his own home before head­ing to George­town Munic­i­pal Air­port to launch his airplane.

What Stack did Thurs­day morn­ing like­wise fits many def­i­n­i­tions of what an act of ter­ror­ism is. As left-leaning blog “Crooks and Liars” writes: “Huh? Since when is attempt­ing to blow up a fed­eral build­ing not an act of domes­tic ter­ror?” How­ever, I’m not cer­tain the build­ing or build­ings in the office park where the crash hap­pened were actu­ally “fed­eral” build­ings rather than just com­mer­cial build­ings leased by the gov­ern­ment. But until I read the C & L  piece I had, quite the oppo­site, felt Fox was try­ing to hang the ter­ror label on the inci­dent in order that the right may use it to claim Obama and his min­ions are soft on ter­ror and let this hap­pen. But I see I had mis­taken Fox’s motives. They are still pissy.

What does it mat­ter though, I mean, really? The act was ter­ror­ism in the legal sense as Crooks and Liars points out in their link to the FBI’s ter­ror­ism def­i­n­i­tions:

**Inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism inves­ti­ga­tions are con­ducted in accor­dance with “The Attor­ney Gen­eral Guide­lines for FBI For­eign Intel­li­gence Col­lec­tion and For­eign Coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence Inves­ti­ga­tions.” These guide­lines set forth the pred­i­ca­tion level and lim­its for inves­ti­gat­ing U.S. per­sons or for­eign nation­als in the United States who are tar­get­ing national secu­rity inter­ests on behalf of a for­eign power.

The act was one which did noth­ing but hurt peo­ple. It didn’t solve any prob­lems. You can call it a “sui­cide bomb­ing” or as Fox News used to say, while duti­fully kiss­ing Pres­i­dent Gee Dubya Bush’s ass, a “homi­cide bomb­ing.” I can’t see any earthly rea­son why it mat­ters if this be couched in a par­tic­u­lar term because any term cov­er­ing this cow­ardly, crim­i­nal, rep­re­hen­si­ble, ter­ror­is­tic act seems just about apt.

It was all a big waste, was what it was.

Cov­er­age of the plane crash in Austin today has kept me pretty well riveted.

Of course, it’s in my state, I have friends in Austin, spent tons of time in Austin and love all things Austin pretty much except for its traf­fic and Ashe juniper, or moun­tain cedar, to which I am extremely aller­gic. Also, since the act by the pilot allegedly seems inten­tion­ally aimed at the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice def­i­nitely sends some chills up my spine. I’ll tell you why, but first a brief an account of what I’ve heard about this so far,

A man from North Austin allegedly set his house on fire this morn­ing before tak­ing off in a small plane from the George­town, Texas, Munic­i­pal Air­port and crash­ing the plane in a North­west Austin build­ing hous­ing a num­ber of IRS employ­ees. From what I have heard on TV, the pilot report­edly died — cer­tainly not unex­pected given the state of the building(s) dam­aged by the plane and from the fire that resulted — two oth­ers were injured and one is missing.

The pilot of the plane, Joseph Stack, left a ram­bling state­ment and appar­ent sui­cide note on his Web site rail­ing against the IRS. The Austin American-Statesman, which has some excel­lent cov­er­age, dis­plays Stack’s rant on one of the news­pa­per blogs. The post omi­nously raises the specter of a vio­lent act and is signed by “Joe Stack (1956–2010):

“I saw it writ­ten once that the def­i­n­i­tion of insan­ity is repeat­ing the same process over and over and expect­ing the out­come to sud­denly be dif­fer­ent. I am finally ready to stop this insan­ity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try some­thing dif­fer­ent; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

Since this has just hap­pened there is lit­tle known else about this man who, hope­fully, has only man­aged to kill him­self despite caus­ing a spec­tac­u­lar crash with result­ing dam­age. The Los Ange­les Times reported Stack was an Austin soft­ware engi­neer who expe­ri­enced a num­ber of busi­ness and tax prob­lems in Los Ange­les in the 1980s and 90s. The FAA reg­is­tra­tion for Stack’s plane, a single-engine Piper, showed his address as an apart­ment in Lin­coln, Calif., a sub­urb of Sacra­mento. This reg­is­tra­tion was dated 1998. News reports indi­cated that Stack’s wife and daugh­ter were trapped inside the house when it was torched but they were saved by firefighters.

This is not the first time an Austin IRS facil­ity has been tar­geted for attack. Under­cover ATF agents arrested a Tyler, Texas, car sales­man, in 1995 for plot­ting to blow up the IRS build­ing in Austin. Charles Ray Polk was sen­tenced to 249 months in fed­eral prison for a num­ber of charges includ­ing attempted use of weapons of mass destruc­tion. A sum­ma­tion of the events lead­ing up to his arrest are noted here in a deci­sion on an appeal before the 5th U.S. Cir­cuit Court of Appeals.

As I noted ear­lier, the events in Austin today are chill­ing. While we don’t know the details that went into plan­ning this act — whether it was a wider domes­tic ter­ror act — or just “Another Lone Nut” as was the name of a HBO spe­cial by come­dian and actor Richard Belzer, it is def­i­nitely scary. Scary, I say, because some­one can appar­ently just hop in the ol’ fam­ily plane, fire her up and crash her into any pop­u­lated build­ing. He could have crashed into one of the high rises down­town, the UT Tower or the beau­ti­ful Texas State Capi­tol.

It is like­wise scary that peo­ple whose minds are filled with hate or are ter­ri­bly dis­turbed think so lit­tle of their fel­low human beings that they either don’t care or intend to kill oth­ers as well as those who are in their way. It is espe­cially dis­turb­ing to those who work for the gov­ern­ment, some even part-time, who see less and less  coop­er­a­tion by the pub­lic in mak­ing our fed­eral sys­tem work.  There are a lot of gov­ern­ment haters out there these days. Hope­fully, more of them won’t snap.

I have to say a word about cov­er­age today. I’ve been check­ing out, of course, the Austin-area news out­let Web sites and watch­ing CNN. I must say CNN’s anchor­ing has been mostly weak, espe­cially watch­ing Tony Har­ris and Rick Sanchez. Even when Wolf Blitzer’s “Sit­u­a­tion Room” comes on it won’t be the best, but will be bet­ter than other shows today. Thank­fully, CNN still has resources to pull of good break­ing news coverage.

Today is the day after the first day to early vote in the Texas pri­mary elec­tions. Whoopee.

You notice my lack of an excla­ma­tion point. That is because noth­ing about the Demo­c­ra­tic pri­maries excites me this year. I am curi­ous as to how the Repub­li­can pri­mary will turn out, mainly between Gov. Rick “Good Hair” Perry and Sen. Kay Bai­ley “the aged cheer­leader” Hutchi­son. Of course, I won’t be vot­ing in that primary.

While this crop of elec­tions are begin­ning to get under way one would think the Gen­eral Elec­tion is next week, or per­haps Judg­ment Day, if you lis­ten to the polit­i­cal and cable news media.

These peo­ple who have to have con­tro­versy for their shows to thrive, who must have con­flict, are like the lit­tle kids sit­ting in the back seat on a vaca­tion trip  scream­ing: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Take, for instance, this poll by CNN. The poll says that 52 per­cent of Amer­i­cans sur­veyed say Obama doesn’t deserve reelec­tion in 2012. Uh, don’t miss the last word in that sen­tence. It says he doesn’t deserve being reelected in 2012. This is, what, Feb­ru­ary 2010?

The president’s job approval has slipped some, the sur­vey says, with 49 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say­ing he is doing a good job and 50 per­cent say­ing he isn’t. What about those who believe he is mostly doing a good job? I’m in that category.

But Barack needs to shape up, or rather, needs to shape up his admin­is­tra­tion. It seems as if Obama was bank­ing on a lot of Amer­i­cans being behind him what with his elec­tion and a Demo­c­ra­tic con­gres­sional major­ity. Lit­tle did he know that the Repub­li­can and oth­ers of the right-leaning have pulled out the stops to build a very effi­cient pro­pa­ganda machine.

It seems that the GOP have found that out­lets such as Fox News work so well at get­ting out their mes­sage that they can use all of the nation’s politically-oriented media to their advan­tage. The Repub­li­cans and those who might tear away from the GOP such as the Tea Partiers have dis­cov­ered that the 24-hour news cycle thrives on con­flict, so the right is fight­ing every­thing that the Democ­rats are try­ing to do. Ta-da! We have conflict!

The sit­u­a­tion for Democ­rats, at least for their Novem­ber elec­tions more than nine months away, looks grim. That is even though, most signs point toward the Democ­rats retain­ing their House major­ity and most likely the one in the Sen­ate. Of course, there is that “throw the bums out thing” that seems to be run­ning pretty strong. The CNN poll says 44 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers do not feel their mem­ber of Con­gress should be returned to office while 51 per­cent would return their con­gres­sional mem­ber. There also have been some con­gres­sional mem­bers, on both sides, say­ing they won’t run for another term. The most recent, and appar­ently most shock­ing, was Demo­c­ra­tic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana.

But these polls are aver­ages at best. There are all kinds of vari­ables when it comes to vot­ers who elected their rep­re­sen­ta­tives to Con­gress. Also, it can’t be stressed too much that 2012 is a ways away for the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Let’s see who would the Repub­li­cans have as their can­di­date as of now? Sarah Palin maybe? Gives me chills! No, I don’t think so.

Are we there yet? No. We are not. We are not even close to elect­ing a pres­i­dent for the next term. That doesn’t mean that Obama shouldn’t make some improve­ments. His first year has been lack­lus­ter in many respects. But that doesn’t mean it has been dis­as­trous. It doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

Are we there yet. No. We aren’t there. We aren’t even close when it comes to the future in pol­i­tics. We still have miles to travel.  And stop pulling your lit­tle brother’s ear.

This story off the Fox News Web site proves how noth­ing is too petty when it comes to car­ry­ing the pro­pa­ganda water bucket (per­haps a lit­tle water board­ing?) for the right wing.

“Hillary Clinton’s plane was grounded in Saudi Ara­bia Tues­day, forc­ing the sec­re­tary of state to hitch a ride on Gen. David Petraeus’ plane, out­rank­ing him in the process.”

The arti­cle sup­pos­edly is about Sec­re­tary of State Hilary Clinton’s air­plane need­ing repair in Saudi Ara­bia and how she hitched a ride with U.S. Cen­tral Com­mand leader Gen. David Petraus. But Fox, ever the right wing tool, made the story about how Clin­ton “out­ranked” Petraus, mak­ing it seem as if she made the gen­eral sit on the plane at the lit­tle kids’ table. The arti­cle like­wise men­tions a sec­ond time that once the sec­re­tary of state boards the plane, she out­ranks the gen­eral. How­ever, never does the story pro­vide any­thing show­ing why that lit­tle nugget — since Petraus’ chain of com­mand doesn’t include Hilary Clin­ton the valid­ity of the claim is ques­tion­able — is in any way important.

Finally, Fox exhibits how right-wingers should at all costs should avoid humor.

“Since Petraeus is going to be swing­ing by Wash­ing­ton, D.C., he could sched­ule some meet­ings but that still is up in the air.”

Haw, haw! Did you let the clean­ing lady write that? Oh, I’m sorry I’m sure the clean­ing lady could do a much bet­ter job and per­haps even man­age to be funny.