Eight Feet Deep

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.