Tempest in a Teacup...
Another reason why people who run for office should be surgically sterilized before they enter politics. I give you the following article from the Washington Times:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050406-124141-1831r.htm

Here's the really important stuff the American public needs to know about how Washington works:

1. the press has nothing else to do and very often creates a story where none exists. It's not as if there isn't a war going on in the Middle East or that a Pope hasn't recently died, and therefore, there isn't anything to report. No, our guardians of truth are so bored that they have to start a schoolyard fight between the political parties by asking if someone passed a memo to someone else. Gee, I'm sure two million memos and a bunch of diry pictures get passed between members of the Senate on a daily basis, and no one looks into them.

2. Democrats are still clueless. I love this quote:

"Those who would attempt to influence debate in the United States Senate should not hide behind anonymous pieces of paper," he said in his March 23 letter asking for the inquiry.

Those immortal words were uttered by Sen. Frank Lautenburg (Communist- New Jersey). Let's deconstruct that quote for a second, before we deconstruct the august Senator from the ToxicWaste State.

The people of the United States influence the debate in the United States Senate every day. They do so with pieces of paper, with phone calls, with money, and ultimately, with votes. That's one of the beauties of republican government: the electors, rather than the elected, get to influence the behavior of the elected. Democrats, of course, would like to see that work in reverse, but that's another essay. Second point, since the purpose of debate is, in fact, to influence others so that they see your point of view, I don't understand what the Senator is complaining about. That's what the Senate is supposed to be for --- a place where debate on important issues takes place, and where a consensus on what the right course of action is, is reached. Why the Senator has a problem with this is beyond me. It's his, and every other Senator's job.

If his objection is that the initial (if it even exists) memo came from a republican, then his argument gets even more lame by the minute. Contrary to popular democrat belief, republicans can read and write and make logical arguments.

If his objection is that someone dared to interject themselves into the business of the Senate by presenting a point of view that he does not agree with, then let's be fair. I wonder what the Senator would say if I told him that I don't want the affirmative action lobby, the gay rights lobby or the pro-abortion lobby to have their chance to circulate memos in the Senate either. Why do we only have to blackball the right-to-life lobby? Or do we only have to exclude lobies the Senator doesn't receive payola from?

Senator Lautenburg is one to talk about people using undue influence for dubious purposes; He owes his Senate seat to it since the loser the dems originally tapped for it was such a bad candidate, they had to sue to get Lautenburg on the ballot way after they had actually been printed, forcing a special Senate election in New Jersey. I wonder if there were mysterious memos circulating around then, Frank?

The good Senator then goes on to say, through his staff, that he never saw the memo, but they did lift a copy off the Internet. He never saw it, so what's his beef? Could it be that if said memo is still in circulation it might actually change someone's mind about the whole Schiavo case? To a democrat, independant thinking is a disease.

3. And if there was a memo floating around, and if it was given to a democrat or two, what's the big freakin' deal? Someone was trying to make his/her point with it, and I doubt rather much that the memo in question said "You must agree with me and believe everything in this memo or your family will die a gruesome death." If a mind or two was changed, no problem, the system of reasoned argument worked. If no one changed their vote because of it, what's so bad about that?

4. The article then intimates that the republicans spread the memo in order to pressure democrats to change a vote or vote in their favor, in order to avoid looking bad in the eyes of the public. Naw, would never happen -- I mean, the very notion of someone using an issue to make their political opponents look bad would never, EVER happen, right? Perhaps in this case, the democrats just didn't like the smell of fait accompli that accompanied this issue. Still, somehow the Senate voted 100-0 for the Schiavo bill, and I have grave reservations that a simple memo made that happen. More like a display of enlightened self-interest by 44 democratic senators who did not want to have their names associated with a no-win situation and took the easy way out. God forbid politics gets played by anyone in Washington, right?

5. There's a maturity problem in the hallowed halls of the Senate, and an even bigger one at the Washington Post. This whole thing smells of schoolboys, hopping up and down on one leg like they're bursting for a pee, pointing fingers in order to implicate their rivals in the eyes of the Headmaster. Grow up, all of you.

Terrorism that Doesn't Go "Boom!"
Vis-a-vis the mess surrounding Sandy "have scissors will shred documents" Berger, I was reminded of a recurring thought I often have and which I haven't seen written about anywhere. Mind you, this is just a kooky idea I have, and I don't want to start anything like a conspiracy theory --- I'm just clearing space in my brain.

After 9/11, we've been on the lookout for the nastier and more immediately deadly forms of terrorist activity: hijacked airliners, shoe bombs, tanker trucks full of caustic chemicals. But, there are other forms of terrorism that don't seem to be getting a lot of attention, in my view, assuming that anyone actually considers them to be terrorism in the first place.

About four years ago, all we heard about was massive rash of forest fires out west. It seemed the entire Western porton of the continent was due to incinerate and fall off like a cigarette ash. I can't recall, recently, having heard of any major fires. One could make the argument that the Forest Service has gotten much more efficient and perhaps more pragmatic about clearing underbrush and removing the initial contributing factor to those fires, i.e. having all that kindling around. But I doubt it. I doubt because we're talking about the fedral gubmint here and no gubmint agency could be that efficient. I'm beginning to think many of those fires were deliberately set, and possibly set by terrorists, who had three motives in mind.

First, with half the country on fire, rescue and fire resources would be spread thin across the West. Second, it would cause the government to devote resources to fight the fires and clean up the forests, which would be less money and resources available to fight terrorists. And finally, as a distraction to keep attention focused somewhere else on a nuisance issue. Now, three years and two wars later, I have heard nary a whisper about massive forest fires. Just a thought.

The next item on the agenda is the spate of Mad Cow outbreaks in recent years. Why is it that we never heard of Mad Cow before the late 1990's? I'm sure it existed before then, but I'm thinking it was such a rare occurance before then that no one bothered to think about it, except those that were familiar with it. All of a sudden, Mad Cow outbreaks hit Europe (especially England), then the United States and Canada and finally Japan. Why is it that you never hear of a Mad Cow outbreak in, say, India, which probably has more cows running around than anyplace on the planet? How come there is no Mad Cow in Argentina that we know about?

It's my considered, and totally uninformed (I'd like to point out) opinion that the epidemic of mad cow outbreaks in recent years was someone testing an attack on the food supply. Again, I do not wish to alarm anyone or make a mountain out of a molehill, but I find it strange that Mad Cow, and now the Bird Flu, are making the news on a daily basis, but I'd never heard of either before in my life.

And could it be that the forest fires and the lightning strikes of Mad Cow petered out because someone figured it wasn't so effective after all, and all that's left is the residual aftershocks?

Just something to think about, like I do. Mainly because I have too much free time on my hands.

All Good Popes Must Come to an End...
I feel incredibly sad at the passing of Pope JP II. I wil admit to not being the most sincere or ardent Catholic (12 years of Catholic school will take all religion out of you), but it doesn't take a religious frame of mind to recognize a wonderful human being when you see one.

When the history of his papacy is finally written, JP II will most definately have earned the title of "the Great". Here's a man, who stood firm in his beliefs without rancor, without resorting to violence and without the haughty pretense which is supposed to substitute for enlightened discourse these days. He felt himself, simply, as a servant of God and his Church and he did his best to carry out his duty with honor, dignity and grace.

John Paul II was a working Pope. One that made the effort to go to the faithful and preach the Gospel, but who also took the time to listen to what the faithful had to say. He revelled in the war glow of his people and in return, he showered them with love and gave them strength to continue in a world gone mad.

We will not see his like again in our lifetimes. He will be sorely missed.

Requiesat en Pacem....

Open Season on the Disabled...
Terri Schiavo has died this morning.

Her last few weeks sparked debate in this country on several subjects: the rights of the disabled, the courts, the partisan divide, living wills, euthanasia. In this regard, her death has not been in vain because these were all serious debates that needed to be had. What is so sad about this death, more than others, is the very public manner in which it took place. Terri is not the only person with brain damage or, as some doctors and commentators put it, "in a persistent, vegetative state" hovering on the brink of death this day. There are thousands of other Terri's out there and their continued care is now a going concern.

I do not pretend to know everything about the Schiavo case and was admittedly uninterested in it until the last few weeks. However, it has all the makings of a blockbuster Lifetime movie of the week: helpless woman, ne'er-do-well husband, the other woman, the epic court battles, the distraught family. This, for the time being, will be Terri's legacy --- Oprah will get to make a movie about it and dozens of tabloid-authors will write books about her in the next six months. Her family will grieve, her husband will become rich, the courts will be pilloried, lawyers will make a fortune providing clients with living wills.

However, Terri Schiavo will have an effect on this country in the long term that will be felt for a very long time.

Terri's fight was ultimately about decency. It was about the extra-judicial killing of someone unable to defend herself. It was about the morass the legal system has become. It was about the great divide between the religious and the moral and the secular and the depraved. What was done to Terri was done in the past to political prisoners in Russia and the Jews inNazi Germany; she was dehumanized, made into a political cause celebre and finally starved to death. The difference was that this time the cameras were rolling.

It will only be a matter of time before this ugly scene is repeated in 30 different places in the next 30 days. Another spouse with a husband or wife on life support will go to a court to get permission to remove their vegetative significant other from the apparatus that keeps them alive, avoiding the lengthy and expensive process of maintaining life in that state. Another family will be torn in two, suspended between hope and despair. Doctors will continue to make pronouncements based on very imperfect knowledge that will be taken as Bible truth in a court of law, where a judge who is not qualified to make medical decisions will in truth make them.

The laws will be changed. The judges will be changed. The medical system will come under increased scrutiny. The Right-To-Lifers will see to it. Democrats who insist on fillibustering judicial nominees will be bombarded by hate mail and embarrassed publicly. Terri started a revolution from her bed. It's first victim wil; be Hilary Clinton, who will suddenly start attending church everyday and visiting the the victims of PVS regularly. Even before Terri's body is cold, some democrat has designed a piece of legislation that makes appear as if they care and are fighting for the rights of the diabled. Ultimately, the ploy will fail because people will see it for what it is: grandstanding. Attempting to take advantage of a tragedy in order to position yourself for the mid-term elections.

Terri Schiavo is dead. Her fight, however, will be continued by others -- the fight between the moral and the decadent, the worshippers of life and the cultists of death.

Requiesat en Pacem.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Outsourcing...
Continuing a trend that will, eventually, make the other 1/4 of the world that isn't mad at us yet rethink that position. Here's yet another example of how far some businesses will go to shore up their...errr...bottom line. The following story was lifted from a post to FreeRepublic.com.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1374151/posts

You know things have gotten out of hand when a can't-miss, sure-fire profit maker like phone sex gets outsourced.

In recent years, outsourcing has gotten a bad rap, mostly from people who have been tossed out of work, and I can understand their position. It's certainly not their fault that between benefits and employee taxes and the sheer greed of some CEO's that it's prohibitively expensive to actually hire someone these days. It's a golden rule in business, however, that when you can take advantage of lower costs, you'd be crazy not to. The advantage of outsourcing jobs to a foreign country, is of course, expense. In this case, not only will foreign workers in their home countries work for pennies on the dollar, they don't have any expectation of bennies. Yet.

Eventually, that part of the world that answers the phone for AOL or which makes a whole range of products for Wal-Mart will wake up and realize that while they are being paid a relative fortune now, they will certainly pay for it later. It's not like some guy in Pakistan has a 401(k) to lean on in his old age, or that National Health in India will pay for his Viagra. The workers there will eventually demand parity with what their Western counterparts get, or in this case, formerly got.

The upside to outsourcing from the worker's point of view (and there actually IS one, you know) is that the foreign employee is often not subject to U.S. law, which gets to be a pain in the ass for a company that outsources when it's been robbed blind by a contract employee in Bangladesh. Another upside is that it only takes one "ooops!", and the resultant lawsuit, for the outsourcer to rethink his relationship with the outsourcee. In recent years, this has happened already: I recall a case in Pakistan where a U.S. company that transcribed medical records suddenly realized it had given sensitive, personal information to an organized crime ring who used it for nefarious purposes. Imagine what would happen if the Russian mob got into some American citizen's banking or insurance records and started laundering cash. Don't laugh, it's probably happening right now and no one has noticed.

It's when things like this happen that the whole rationale for outsourcing, saving money, begins to look like a losing proposition. Eventually, the costs incurred by security measures, constant audits, and lawsuits, begin to tell. After that, it only takes one relatively intelligent executive to ask "Are the headaches worth the savings?" and the next thing you know, presto!, they start bringing those operations back "in-house".

My own personal experience after 20 years in the data processing industry have taught me three things concerning outsourcing:

1. At the end of the day, it's all about control. If you can't control your costs and ultimately your product, you start to get nervous. Executives are a bundle of nerves, most being little more than drones with too much to lose when push comes to shove. Rather than lose control over something, they'd rather take it back, no matter what it costs, provided it's important enough.
It only takes one to start a trend.

2. This isn't the first time a round of outsourcing or downsizing has occurred and it will not be the last. What's old is what's new. In my DP days, the mad rush was on to move to mini and distributed systems over mainframes because they were cheaper to operate in terms of power, cooling and occasionally, service. However, when the rush was on, nobody ever stopped to expend braincells on the issue of portability. Could the applications I run now, and depend on, be moved to a different operating system with different hardware and programming and run seamlessly? The answer was: of course not. The original stuff was designed and written to run in a mainframe environment and very often, making it work in the new environment meant massive amounts of money to re-write applications or a huge investment in consultants. Any real savings was virtually wiped out. In the end, everyone that mattered went back to a mainframe. The same thing is now happening with Linux --- the rage is the idea that you can write your own applications without having to license them. The downside is, you have huge costs associated with getting them to actually work the way you want to.

3. Today's outsourced worker is tomorrow's "must-have-guy" who can come back and name his own price. Once those applications, those businesses, are brought back in-house the people who formerly ran them usually get their jobs back and because there is a rush on, you can write your own paycheck. The rationale for outsourcing was to reduce employee costs; once the decision is made to un-outsource, the employee costs come back with a vengeance. Don't believe me? Ask all of those once-out-of-work cobol programmers who made it big again for the Y2K scare. They originally lost their jobs because they were useless mouths, but got called back when it found out that the legacy platforms and apps that were supposed to go with them never did.

Then again, think about this particular case. What happens when, for the sake of example, Western men who regularly use a phone sex service start getting upset by the bad service. I mean, who wants to talk dirty to someone who doesn't speak your language? What happens when the cultural taboos in the outsourcee country start making themselves felt, and millions of highly-paid Indian women suddenly start staying away from the job because they live in a society where a woman cna be burned to death for engaging in such activity? I can tell you what happens --- suddenly there is no longer a phone sex industry in India and the owners of the porn lines start to see their savings eaten up too as they get kicked out. Next thing you know, they'll be hiring all them Western women back just to break even!

Yet More Southern Sheeeeeeit...
The deeper I delve into the culture of the south, the more I learn. Not all of these lessons are happy ones, I'm afraid, but they are nonetheless heard-earned and much needed ones.

For a start, I had noticed some time back that racism, as I would understand it (coming from the north) simply did not exist here, and to a certain extent, this is still true. I see very little in the way of overt racism (there are no more "coloreds only" water fountains, for example), and contrary to popular belief back home, there are not legions of inbred farm folk running around in white sheets looking for someone to drape from the nearest tree. There is certainly not the mixing of the races that is more prevalent in northern parts, but, when black and white do get together here, it is mostly civil.

It's when North and South get together that things get a little dicey.

I'm constantly reminded that I am that lowest form of life imaginable: a damn Yankee. I get it whenever I ask a question that might involve someone having to think real hard, or perhaps, form an intelligent answer. If I don't get some variation on "this-is-the-way-things-are-done-here-and-it's-been-this-way-since-Christ-was-a-Corporal", I get "we're soooooo sorry things aren't what your used to. Might I suggest you go back home?"

It's become apparent that despite the historical racism, being a white guy here ain't all that great either if you're a Northerner. Particularly if you're a northerner.

Now, just what has brought on this venting of spleen, this ferral howling at the moon, this vexated diatribe? Stay still, gentle reader, for about three minutes and I'll tell ya.

I'm aggravated. I'm vexed. I'm pissed and my patience ran out a long time ago. At first, I thought it was merely a matter of me making adjustments to the southern way of life, many of which, I was more than happy to make. I understand perfectly that the ebbs and flows, the rythyms of life here are vastly different from what I'm accustomed to and I expected everything associated with my move to be a bit painful, at first.

But then I started engaging in the types of activities that one usually depends on others to either do for you or help you with. Case in point: obtaining employment.

To begin with, I have engaged the services of several employment agencies in Charlotte and now in my new stomping grounds around Greensboro. It was pure logic, in my mind, that when you do not know the job market, do not know what employers are available and furthermore, what positions are available, then you seek professional help. Hence, employment agencies.

Where I come from, obtaining a job is a straightforward business proposition: someone has a position available, they interview applicants who are qualified, they make a decision on who to hire, and presto, someone has a job. I'm sure it works this way on 4/5ths of the planet, but for some reason, once you pass the Mason-Dixon line, this simple business model suddenly disintegrates into a chaotic melee of ignorance, incompetence and, worst of all, nepotism.

I've been at this job search thing for 6 months now. I know jobs are available. U.S. News and World Report has just ranked North Carolina 10th in the country as far as new job creation in a recent issue. I read the local newspapers and everyday it seems, more Fortune 500's are relocating to North Carolina on a daily basis. Anyway, what happens when you engage an employment agency here is the following:

- you will fill in 60 pages of paper which will be promptly filed away and forgotten.
- if you call your agent every other week to ask about progress, you will be told there is none. Call more than once every other week and you will be told "you're being pushy".
- Your agent will most likely refer you to another personnel agency or agencies. Somehow, they all work together, swapping clients and such, and how any of them can make a profit this way is beyond me. They're practically begging you to call someone else while they also try to place you.
- finding a personnel agent who actually understand the industry they claim to recruit for is extremely difficult, unless you're a truck driver, warehouse specialist, cashier or domestic help. If you happen to be involved in a high-tech industry, knowlegable folks are few and far between, and for all I know, might not even exist here.
- if your resume does, magically, manage to land on someone's desk, once they find out you;re a Yankee you get a polite brush-off. "You're over-qualified" is a polite way of saying "get out, ya damn Yankee."
- One manager who actually managed to get my resume actually called me and told me he would not be interviewing me because "I'd be a damned fool if I hired my own, eventual replacement". At least he was honest.
- Your personnel agent, who is working like a (retired) sled dog -- for you! -- will start to tell you about how you should join a country club, attend trade fairs, start going to church, maybe start chewing tobacco, all in an effort to "meet the right kind of people". In other words, you will have to start networking because most hires in the south are the result of "personal relationships". i.e. nepotism. In other words, I have retained an agent who will make an astronomical fee for placing me somewhere, but I will have to do all of the legwork. So then, what is the point of retaining an agent? As I said, I can't see how any of them makes a dime.

And it all boils down to four inarguable, prescient points about southerners:

1. The are incredibly suspicious about anyone from up north. We make too much money, we have funny ideas, we're loud, pushy, obnoxious and argumentative, and this makes us suspect. This from people who eat grits, watch NASCAR, and live in a place where roadkill restaurants actually exist, where wife-beating and incest are the national pasttimes and who, on a good day, might be able to expend enough brain cells to burn calories.
2. Many southern managers I have met seem to be somewhat unbalanced: southerners can be stubborn, quick to take offense, inclined to shun that which they cannot understand, they hold epoch-long grudges for minor slights, and quite a few couldn't tie their own shoes without a government program. Give them a little authority though, and these minor psychological issues overcome any sort of decency or logic they might have in them. They become little dictators, expecting everyone to bow before the august majesty of their authority, and give little thought to what they are doing or how they are doing it.
3. I might be white, but I'm still the enemy because: a) I can get a job most southern men can't, b) I can make a shitload more money than most southern men can, c) I get my pick of the wimmenfolk afterwards. They take it personally.
4. There is a square-peg-in-the-square-hole mentality. If a job requirement lists, for example, a particular software product and you don't have knowledge of that product, but do have extensive knowledge of a similar one, you are automatically discounted. Depsite the fact that in computing, while the methodology or the specifics may differ, the principles are the same. The ability to think abstractly or make exceptions is a major barrier, not only for me, but also for the poor ploughboy who must endure the pain of thinking.

If I had to boil down the pure essence of the problems I'm having, it would come down to people being prejudiced against my northern heritage, the seeming stupidity of the people I'm dealing with and the cultural barriers peculiar to a place where the 21st century has yet to arrive. Despite these setbacks, I'm still determined to make a go of it here because despite the presence of southerners, this is still a wonderful place to live, once you get used to not being able to pick up a pack of cigarettes from the corner store at 4 a.m. For a start, there is no corner store. The conveniences of Yankee life, as I've said before, simply do not exist here. It's merely a matter of getting used to it.

But I'm getting pretty sick and tired of being called a Yankee and being treated like dirt because of it. As I was recently telling a black friend of mine, when it comes to how I'm treated by the rednecks, I now know what his people suffered through for four centuries.

Kangaroo Courts...
Re: Terri Schiavo and something I've noticed happening with regularity elsewhere: the courts in this country are screwed up beyond all belief.

The sticmking point, for lack of a better term, in Terri's case, seems to be a black-letter reading of the law. In this case, Terri's husband Michael is her guardian by virtue of marriage. In every true legal sense, he is/was authorized to make the request that Terri's feeding tube be removed seven years ago. Because there can be no verification of what Terri's true wishes might have been at the time (i.e. she was unable to make them known, there was no living will, etc.), a judge was bound by the law to order it. Medical evidence notwithstanding, there was no question that Michael was empowered to ask the judge to do so.

Thus, the legal battle to keep her alive comes down to somoething that has been engraved in stone since the inception of the legal system: the right of a spouse to make medical decisions for a disabled husband or wife.

However, such a decision discounts common sense and humanity. Get the "right" judge, the "right" experts and the 'right" venue, and you can argue that a ham sandwich has more mental firepower than Terri Schiavo. Extend that argument just a bit, and you can argue that the ham sandwich should have it's life terminated, since it's not a living thing. Terri, in the minds of many, is no longer a living thing.

One gets the impression watching the courts work on this case that the judges involved, all the way up to the Supreme Court, wishes this woman would just die already and save them from the embarrassment of having to defend a point of law that, in this case, makes the entire legal system look heartless. The courts are punting in order to save an established premise of the law in order to avoid making a decision that might one day come back to bite them on the collective ass with unintended consequences.

But courts create unintended consequences every day with some of their rulings.

When sanctuary laws lead not to protecting the innocent and oppressed, but instead to exacerbating the illegal immigration problem, that's an unintended consequence. When the recognition of gay marriage by one court in one state leads to another potential Terri situation in another state that does not recognize such a union, that'll be another. The discovery of new, unintended rights in the Constitution on a daily basis leads to many uninteded consequences: abortions are performed, criminals avoid punishment, the foundations of society such as marriage and the family, are altered beyond recognition and under assault.

Many have complained for decades that our courts are runaway trains, hijacked by radicals intent on destroying the very fabric of American society. Instead, I'd like to think that perhaps our courts have been hijacked by people with a profound lack of common sense. They hide behind the authority and the respect of the law and wash their hands of the consequences.

Part of this is our fault. In the past we have glorified the law and elevated the lawyer to heights so lofty that they appear to be something from a Cecil B. DeMille movie. We very often take what is said by a judge or a lawyer as if it had been handed down from Mount Sinai and don't stop to take the time to think about what a decision might mean for the rest of us.

Perhaps it's time to start holding our judges to account. No more semantic arguments about the intracacies of the law. No more interpretation of the Constitution in the loosest terms. Perhaps it's time we pass an amendment to the Constitution stating that judges be elected, instead of appointed. Stop lifetime tenure for Supreme Court judges. Some will argue that if judges have to run for election, they might start skewing their legal decisions to satisfy a constituency and therefore, make bad law. In response, judges are not supposed to make law, only interpret it, and secondly, perhaps if judges feared losing their jobs when making indefensible decisions, they might start applying common sense to their decisions. Since our system allows appeals to a judges decision, anyone that feels they got a bad rap from a judge could always seek remedy.
While we're at it, let's take a look at the entire legal profession, top to bottom. I'd like to know what the ABA talks about in smoky rooms on a daily basis; it has a direct effect on the public. I'd like to see more transparancy in the Supreme Court --- perhaps C-Span could create a new Supreme Court channel. After all, if cameras can be placed in a courtroom for a murder trial, they can be in place for a case regarding the amendments to the Constitution. The courts, in my opinion, have gotten away with murder (in this case, literally) because they enjoy anonymity. Their inner workings and personalities are often shielded from the public because we usually don't care unless the case is a juicy, celebrity murder.

No more judges under the impression that they are Solomon, or even worse, God.

Cradle to Grave...
Liberals have long been accused of wanting to implement and enforce Cradle to Grave Socialism in this country. I've always thought that too, until the Terri Schiavo case got me to thinking.

In the American liberal's worldview, no one is entitled to a cradle --- should your mother decide to treat you in the same manner as she might treat a malignant mole on her back, you won't need one anyway. Abortion, you see, reduces the need for cradles! Of course, if your mother makes the incorrect decision and decides to carry you to term anyway, the government should pay for that damn cradle, figuratively and literally. Because we have abortion, there should, theorhetically, be more cradles to go around, once Hilary gets into office and begins putting "our children" first.

On the other hand, just as the enlightened feel they are all-powerful and omniscient, and know instinctively who should be allowed to make it out of the womb, they also hold the portfolio of death in their mighty hands. They can decide who dies, too, thus handing you the second portion of the equation.

Who dies? Certainly not murderers, rapists, certain Senators from New England, or Terrorists. However, if you're a Texas Christian, a fetus, or someone deemed incapable of enjoying some soon-to-be-rigidly-defined "quality of life", you might be just about ready to enjoy your government-provided underground condo. That is, of course, unless the ovens Hilary ordered in preparation of her coronation are delivered in time.

This, they claim, is the utopia we've been promised. True cradle to grave protection, Democratic party style.

Al Sharpton, Republican...
Caught Reverend Al on TV the other night, talking about the danger to scoeity caused by gansta rap. Al is now on a crusade to get the FCC and the record companies to clean up their respective acts.

The catalyst for this new agenda was a shooting outside ofradio station where two gangs of rival rappers were booked on the same show. They were obviously booked together in order to create some kind of incident, and thus, more interesting radio. Al objected, vehemently, and is now set to use the power of market forces to hammer the genie back into the bottle.

Al Sharpton suggesting that a market regulate itself? How did that happen?

What Al suggests, simply, is that the companies that promote the violence for the sake of a dollar, be attacked from within. Instead of having the government do something, or resorting to his usual tactic of starting a riot, the Rev now suggests that the "community" become shareholders. Shareholders have power. When shareholders are upset with the corporation, they can use their ownership to force changes --- they have a voice in how the company conducts business. Makes perfect sense.

It also brings up an interesting point very often overlooked by liberals and their fellow travelers int his day and age: we're now, for better or worse, a shareholder society. Millions of us have 401(k)'s, IRA's, own shares in mutual funds, own stocks, bonds and annuities. The numbers of black Americans with the above has been increasing for over a decade. These, by the way, are the very blacks that would never vote for Al Sharpton --- they actually own something they'd like to keep.

So Al changes his tune, yet again. He takes up a conservative issue (i.e. the dreadful morals, message and activities of some rap artists) and applies a conservative remedy: use the marketplace to clean the industry up.

Yep, every day we get more republicans in this country. Although most of ours have better haircuts.

Terri's Deathwatch...
Terri Schiavo will die sometime in the next week, I believe. It is inevitible now that the 11th Ciruit Court in Atlanta has decided that removing her feeding tube, as ordered by a host of Florida courts, is the right thing to do. Right, in this case, being narrowly decided on the basis of legal semantics and a manipulation of the letter of the law, while disregarding morality and anything approaching humanity. The appeal is being made, but it too, will fail and ultimately the Supreme Court will refuse to review the case.

Look now for a tidal wave of copycat cases in the immediate future in which every inconvenient relative from the child with Autism to the grandma with Alzheimers to the old-timer with a colostomy bag, parapalegics who run up tremendous medical bills, people lying in comas for more than a week, etc., are now killed or have their life support turned off.

The simple facts in this case seem never to have been taken into consideration: here we have a woman, who is quite unable, at the present, to speak for herself. Her husband (only in the sense that he married her once) tells a judge that his wife once told him not to prolong her life by artificial methods. As far as I can tell, no one else has ever heard her say any such thing and there is no other documentary evidence to gainsay him. Sixteen judges in Florida, and now ten judges in Atlanta, have decided that, all of a sudden, hearsay evidence is now admissible in court, provided it pertains to disposing of a brain-damaged person.

Terri is alive. She breathes on her own. For all we know, she is aware of her surroundings, but unable to react to them or communicate her feelings. According to the doctors who have examined her, her prognosis ranges from "possibility of rehabilitation" to "deader than a doornail". We're dealing with the human brain here, which any doctor worth his salt, would admit is still foreign territory in this day and age, and nothing is certain. She may snap out of this condition tomorrow or she may stick around, making no progress whatsoever, for the next 70 years. The only thing we're sure she cannot do is swallow and thus eat. The only "life support" system that she is on is an intravenous drip that provides her with sustenance. No repirator, no iron lung, no other machinery keeping her internal organs artificially functioning. By every measurable standard, she is alive.

However, there are those that will tell you that she has no measurable brain activity, and therefore, she's as good as dead. I remind you that Ted Kennedy has no measurable brain activity, but somehow, he's not only allowed to continue living, but is also allowed to be a Senator.

So, how do we measure life? How do we measure the "quality" of life? I can point out a few hundred people personally known to me who will often despair that "life sucks", yet they are perfectly capable of getting themselves a cheeseburger in order to prolong that sucky life or overdosing on heroin to end it. The only difference between them is that Terri is unable to do either for herself. Some would tell you that the inability to feed yourself is a reason you should be killed. These same folks will then extend the argument to include being unable to kill yourself is a reason why you should be killed. Some folks are just fascinated by death, I guess.
To some, being able to die (or kill off an inconvenient spouse who just won't kick the bucket on her own) is a matter of "choice". There's that word again, choice.

Choice, to this crowd, pertains to the right to kill anyone who is inconvenient, even before they're born, but not to smoke, own a gun or drive an SUV. The choice of life or death, of course, always falls on someone else's shoulders (a pregnant mother, a husband counting the malpractice settlement, the government, a convicted child molester, etc) but never to the person directly involved --- an unborn child, a murderer's victim, Terri Schiavo.

Should Congress have been involved in this process? Beats me. We're talking about the legal minefinds here. The bill that finally passed will be debated about forever and will rear it's ugly head in courtrooms all over the world. It is now precident: If you want to save the life of anyone, you can now go to your Congresscritter and get a law passed. That we should have to have a law passed in order to maintain the life of the brain-damaged is a sure sign that civilization will soon end. My only question regarding Congressional action is why can't they move that quickly to fix the nation's problems: immigration, eliminating federal waste, confirming judges, making English the chief lingua franca, throwing out the tax code and the IRS, making it easier to kill a convicted sex offender with a pack of wild dogs. I understand the necessity of playing to the right-to-life crowd in terms of politics, but I do not understand why Congress is able to posture easily enough but not accomplish the everyday business of the country. I don't feel a law should have been passed in Terri's case because she is obviously alive. I do, however, understand exactly why some in Congress, the ones who actually acted out of convictions, did what they did.

However, this particular Congressional action may have some unintended consequence. When, for example, a mother decideds to abort a child she knows will be born with physical or mental handicaps, against the father's wishes, does the father now talk his senator into introducing a bill? It will happen, soon, mark my words, and what was a fabulous gesture on behalf of the living will now turn into yet another campaign issue --- something that will be forever debated, but never solved. Kept alive (no pun intended) for the sake of having something to talk about for the next three decades. Like social security reform.

I pray for Terri Schiavo and her family. I thank the truly engaged for the efforts they put forth to save her life. I cringe when I think of the appeals court that dithered and then washed it hands, probably hoping she would die before a decision needed to be made.