I mean, it’s not like the U.S. has turned Iraq over to the puppet government we installed there after invading the country for lies in the last administration, as if Saddam Hussein (who got hanged years ago) was responsible for 9-11 or was any threat after years of embargo that had hundreds of thousands of Iraqis starving after Daddy’s bullshit mercenary war in the early ’90s. Last I checked, which was this morning, ridiculously overstretched U.S. troops and well-paid mercenaries were still there and still dying.

Nor is it like the U.S. isn’t still negotiating with warlords and drug kingpins in Afghanistan, or that the puppet government we installed there is in charge of anything other than the pallets of cash passed out to those drug lords. And yes, our troops and mercenaries are still dying every day there too. Why, last I checked – again this morning – Obama was still trying to get a troop surge there, despite not having any troops to work with after 8 years of decimating our vaunted “All-Volunteer” force.

Oh… and civilians by the multi-thousands in both countries are still being slaughtered wholesale, while our overstretched troops play the old game of “take this hill today, abandon it to the enemy tomorrow” that lost us Korea and Vietnam. Then there’s Pakistan, which Obama is bombing regularly with drones and slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians we’re not even at war with. And of course there’s Iran, which Obama is threatening daily with carpet-nukes because he doesn’t like their diminutive not-really leader’s rhetoric as our troops surround his nation. Oh, and then there’s Columbia, and Obama’s troop build-up there to ostensibly take on the drug cartels he’s supporting out in the open in Opium-Land.

The whole world is topsy-turvy crazy, and the Nobel committee is leading the pack. Wow. Just… wow.

Wake me up when Barack Obama does anything real in this world to end and/or prevent war. Until then, I’ve just got to consider this as being just what it is. The Nobel Hope-Against-Hope Prize.

In 1980 my brother died in one of those notorious one-car accidents that plague the nuclear whistleblower set. He’d arrived that afternoon with his wife and three children with U-Haul in tow to start a new life. He and my hubby drove into town to get formula and disposable diapers for his youngest, never made it home. By morning he was dead, hubby was in ICU.

It fell to me to deal with the car insurer and health insurer from his last job as health physics site coordinator at a nuke in Georgia, a job he’d quit two weeks before in order to move his family to New Mexico where we’d found refuge, had a job waiting for him building equipment consoles for radio and television stations. Because his insurance was through a rent-a-tech outfit out of Pittsburgh that often shuffled personnel around to different plants for outages and such, it covered him for a full 30 days between assignments and 30 days following termination. It came with a life insurance rider with a double indemnity clause if he died in an accident – $100,000 for his family.

It was the first time I’d lost someone very close, the first time I’d had to deal with reluctant insurers (we’d previously enjoyed purely socialist health care via the US Navy). I made a deal with the car insurer during a meeting in Santa Fe that if they’d go ahead and pay $1500 for his funeral expenses, they could fight it out with his health insurer for the hospital bills. This allowed his wife to pay for the cremation and an urn, which was only fair.

Hubby had no insurance, but the county of Taos had instituted a sales tax to cover the cost of indigent DFHs and mountain folk that ended up using the public hospital, so we didn’t have to worry about that – we never received a single bill. Which was also fair, considering they’d done absolutely nothing for him other than put him in a bed and hook him to a monitor. I was the one who pulled the glass out of his head, cleaned out his holes and butterflied his cuts, the punctured lung reinflated itself, and what can you do for smashed ribs? They didn’t even wash the blood off.

The life insurer for my brother balked, but by then we’d left New Mexico. We stayed only long enough for hubby to regain strength and get sis-in-law settled into a cabin, supplied with wood for the coming winter, and hooked up with food stamps and various support groups to help her transition to widowhood. In the end for my sister-in-law it took three lawyers in two states to get the life insurer to pay (how dead do you have to be?!), and they ate up $60,000 of the $100,000 that was supposed to go to his family.

So I got into the habit whenever life insurance salesmen called of asking if the policies they sold came with a legal rider to cover the cost of lawyers it would take to make them pay when we die. That was as effective at shutting them down as showing up to the door in a saffron robe when the JWs came calling!

My next experience with life insurance was as executor for my mother’s estate when she died in 2002. She’d worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida before retiring, had a $125,000 life policy through their offerings that she’d been paying on faithfully even when she couldn’t afford medicine. When the paperwork was done I was informed that BCBS’s provider had sold the policy when she retired, and the new insurer would only honor $60,000 of it.

Her policy was clear in black and white, she’d never been informed that her coverage had changed, and her payments had never been adjusted. I informed my sisters that it was a complete scam, that we could hire a lawyer and handily win a lawsuit. But it would take at least 5 years and the lawyer would eat more than what the scammers were offering. So of course we had to settle for the $60K, even knowing it was a complete rip-off. That policy represented something my mother had counted on to leave us, so I was glad she wasn’t around to deal with this. I reported them to the state Insurance Commissioner, who of course did nothing at all.

Health insurance is no better these days, nor has it been better for a long, long time. In 1992 our 21-year old son was injured in a car accident. We had a small business policy, $2500 deductible but a million overall. They pre-approved everything, including an air ambulance transfer from Louisiana (where the accident occurred) to Florida where we lived. Then, after his remaining injuries were identified and surgery was deemed necessary, the insurance company decided to rescind the policy and the doctors abandoned our son. Simply told us everything was fine and sent him home. He died two months later when the unrepaired rip in his internal carotid gave way and he bled to death. His doctors of record – five of them – refused to accept him into the hospital.

It took two lawyers two years to make the insurer pay the bills for what they’d approved, two more lawyers and seven years to get to trial in a malpractice suit against the doctors who abandoned him to his death for something that was entirely treatable. When it was all over the lawyers made out like bandits and we were out more than $50,000 for that small modicum of ‘justice’. The practices that were blatantly unethical and in several aspects illegal in 1992 have since become standard operating procedure. Which is where we are today.

Now whenever someone tries to sell me health insurance coverage I ask the same question – does this policy come with a legal rider to pay for the lawyers it’ll take to get you to pay a claim? None of them do, of course.

There’s a lot wrong with our medical system in this country, including some extremely serious problems with the delivery system itself I wrote about previously. Rampant malpractice, medical errors, in-hospital prescription errors, iatrogenic disease, pure negligence, etc. And a lot of that is a result of a class-based rationing system that nobody likes to admit exists, but does. Medicare patients get a different quality of care than the well-insured, the marginally insured get less care as well, the Medicaid recipients get genuinely lousy care, and the uninsured get pretty much nothing. ERs don’t even stitch cuts or set bones these days, they might butterfly your gash (or give you butterflies to do it with), dispense a pain pill, maybe offer a tetanus shot, and tell you to call a specialist who might fit you in in a month or so. The uninsured are routinely charged twice as much or more than anyone else. Nowdays even the insured are driven into bankruptcy by an accident or illness.

The only rational answer to this ever-worsening situation is universal, single-payer health care. Where everyone has the same necessary coverage and everyone receives what they need as best as can be provided. This is not what we’ll get, of course. What we’ll get are individual mandates for private scams and exactly zero oversight of the delivery system that all by itself is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., killing about 200,000 people a year who wouldn’t have died if they’d simply stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

I read today that by the time “Health Care Reform” (whatever that turns out to be) takes full effect in 2019, things will be much, much worse. If insurers are free to continue raising their policy rates at 4 and 5 times the rate of inflation – as has become the annual norm over the past decade and more – a fair insurance policy from a private insurer for a family of 4 will cost as much as $30,000 per year. If subsidies are available so that premiums, deductibles and co-pays together don’t account for more than 13% of Adjusted Gross Income, the government will be paying for all or some of this outrageous cost for every family whose AGI is less than $300,000 a year. How is that in any conceivable economic scheme “reform?” Where is the government supposed to get that much money? IRS fines of $3800 on the few who choose not to buy private $30,000 policies? That wouldn’t pass muster in any 6th grade math class!

Insurers are in it for the profits, not to make medical care available to people who need it. They are corporate entities, profit and profit alone is their job. Politicians are owned by the corporate lobbyists who are spending millions every day to make sure their scam remains lucrative. We’ll see no real reform. This is all just another huge heist and corporate bail-out, amounting to a $10,000-$30,000 tax increase plus a profits-bailout from the government for those who can’t afford the price. Which is the vast majority of us whose income has remained flat for a decade or decreased in the last couple of years.

I am surely not the only person who sees that this is never going to work. So I have grown very impatient with the strange Kabuki that pretends it might.

I might live another seven years and finally get some of that Medicare I’ve been paying into faithfully since I was 16 years old. Then again, given my strong dislike and distrust of the Amerikan medical system, I might not. That’s my karma, I’m okay with it and will take my chances. What I will NOT do is pay a huge chunk of my now nonexistent income so some insurance hack can get million-dollar bonuses for sentencing people to death. Nor will I have the government pay that same insurance hack his million-dollar bonuses FOR me. That might mean the IRS will charge me an extra $3800 on my taxes every year, but since I’m too marginal to pay that much in taxes, so what?

A friend of ours, Gordon Smith, has a good chance of getting elected this November. I’m thinking of trying to interest him in what Taos did way back in the late 1970s, of adding a penny sales tax on goods, a few cents on gasoline, a few bucks on tourists at local resorts and hotels, earmarked to the county hospital to pay for care to the uninsured. Lord knows we’ve got more than our share of DFHs and mountain folk here too (I’m one of ‘em). It worked in Taos, the referendum passed handily even in those dark economic days. I think it would pass here. And it’s a much better and fairer way of covering the actual cost of health care than anything D.C.’s been able to come up with.

[background on the NM adventure at the Institute for Southern Studies]

Last week we (or “current resident”) received a slick 4-color 6×10 card stock mailer that looks at first glance to have come from our NC-11 congressional rep, Heath Shuler. At the top the reverse-on-blue header reads:

“Congressman Shuler Is Fighting To Make Medicare Prescription Coverage Even Better”

and on the bottom reverse-on-red the italicized message reads:

“Call Congressman Health Shuler today at 202-224-3121. Tell him thanks for fighting to improve Medicare without making seniors pay more, and ask him to keep on fighting until we get the job done.”

The wording struck me a little odd. Why would Heath tell me to thank him for his notably atrocious Blue Dog position on health care reform? I mean, it’s not like he cares what Democrats in his district have to say about the issue. So I flipped the mailer over and read on the bottom of the address/postage space:

“Paid for by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.”

Whoa. Billy Tauzin’s notorious PhRMA lobby. The one that got a secret back-room deal with Obama before this issue ever got to committees in the House and Senate. And who are now sending deceptive mailers like this all over the country as part of a $150 million PR campaign to promote their continued obscene profits on the backs of senior citizens, while the mandate to force all citizens to purchase junk policies from the for-profit insurance industry amounts to a ~$12,000 per year (plus steep annual hikes at four or more times the rate of inflation) tax increase on the middle class. Earmarked directly to the Murder-by-Spreadsheet crime syndicate, this porker is uglier than Hogzilla.

FACT: According to an analysis of the proposed Part D changes by the Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that any decrease in average spending on prescriptions by seniors will more than be made up for by an increase in premiums seniors must pay for Part D. CBS News reported that CBO has confirmed seniors will be paying 20% more for Part D coverage by 2019 under this giveaway to Big Pharma.

FACT: The Baucus plan also abets another huge giveaway to insurers by allowing them to charge older people (age 50-64) up to five times as much as younger people for the insurance policies everyone will be required to purchase.

FACT: The per capita (per person) cost of ALL health care in the U.S. per year comes to right about $3,750. That is all care, for all people, insured and uninsured, Medicare, VA, Medicaid, SCHIP and charity. Why would anyone want to pay $12,000 a year for what actually costs $3,750? A government-run single-payer system could be paid for by graduated taxation based on actual costs and those taxes would be far cheaper even to the richest of the rich than the cost of a single for-profit insurance policy.

Links:

NYT: Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars

NYT: How Much Should Older Americans Pay for Insurance?

WSJ: Part-D Offsets

CBS: 20% increase in Part-D premiums

According to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics Shuler has received the following contributions from shady players:

$195,262 from the health sector employees and PACs.
$13,750 from health insurance companies.
$74,800 from Big Pharma.
$77,062 from health professionals.
$27,900 from hospitals.
$10,500 from the nursing home industry.

$399,274 in total. Now, the figures from CRP are what the Blue Dogs (individually) have received since 1989 from the PACs and pools of various health related industries, but Shuler’s only been in office since 2007. So that’s quite the hefty haul over less than three years!

Below is the letter I have written in response to this blatant insult from the Drug Pusher’s Union Propaganda Squad…

__________

Dear Congressman Shuler;

The four registered voters in our NC-11 household were appalled by a slick mailer we received last week from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America urging us to “thank” you for working for them instead of us in the matter of health care reform. This letter is to lodge formal complaint and explain once again why we do NOT want either the insurers or the drug companies writing this necessary legislation.

Our formal complaint is to the information provided in this mailer that you work for Big Pharma and not for us, the constituents you were elected – by us – to represent. This lobby group actually expects us to congratulate you for serving out-of-state corporate donors instead of us. We most certainly do not congratulate you for succumbing to rampant D.C. corruption in record time.

The mailer talks about how Big Pharma’s contribution to the reform effort will help close the Medicare Part D “donut hole” they themselves wrote into the original bill to ensure obscene profits and force American seniors on fixed incomes to pay more for necessary drugs than anyone else in the world. As well as prevent Medicare by law from negotiating lower drug prices, as all other first world nations (with universal, single-payer health care) do and have done so successfully for so long.

In fact, according to an analysis of the proposed Part D changes under HR 3200 by the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that any decrease in average spending on prescriptions by drug-dependent seniors will more than be made up for by an increase in premiums seniors must pay for Part D. CBS News reports that CBO determined seniors will be paying 20% more for coverage by 2019. 20% is very significant to a great many seniors in your district, Mr. Shuler.

Two of the voters in this household – myself and my husband – will be 68 years old in 2019. Thanks to the recent destruction of the nation’s economy by greedy bankers and insurers (whom we and our children and grandchildren were forced to bail out to the tune of trillions in completely unaccountable dollars), our only income will be Social Security, and our only access to health care will be Medicare. So you are going to deliberately rob us further on orders from your corporate masters? That is completely unacceptable.

As proud long-time residents of WNC, registered Democratic voters and active participants in Democratic politics, we will be lobbying hard and very publicly beginning immediately in favor of a primary challenge to you next year from a candidate more committed to both the people of this district and the Democratic Party. You brought this on yourself, as we were all delighted when you were willing to run against Charles Taylor. We would have supported you for a very long career in politics if you’d just been less willing to sell us out in favor of corporations who do NOT vote in this district and cannot keep you in power.

Though they probably can make you rich, so you may wish to go ahead and apply for that post-Congress Big Pharma lobbying job now.

In Sincerely Sad Disappointment,

[the four of us registered voters, address in NC-11]
__________

Wanted: Dedicated public servant and Democrat with an understanding of policy issues that impact the residents of Western North Carolina, to vie for Heath Shuler’s seat in Congress in the 2010 primary.

We’ve been told Obama’s “got this” because he can shoot hoops in the WH basement with skill, and grab flies out of the air like a Kung Fu master. We’ve been told Obama’s playing “multidimensional chess” with his opponents by continuing every single one of the illegal and anti-democratic policies of his Neocon predecessor. And now, with the health insurance reform debate gone all Town Hall during recess, we are told we don’t really need health insurance reform, single payer health care, or even a public option to facilitate the expected mandate we’ll be handed that forces us to pay more money than we’ve got to the murder-by-spreadsheed for-profit industry.

We still have “state secrets” privilege on who’s lobbying in the Oval Office. We still have DADT in the military. We still have two illegal wars going, a new third front opened in Columbia, off-the-books deficits accumulated by the fact that there’s twice as many paid mercenaries in those war zones than U.S. soldiers, we’re still rendering and torturing “detainees” who haven’t been charged with any crimes and haven’t been afforded the status of POWs, and we’re still bailing out Wall Street gamblers to the tune of multiple trillions while not even beginning to address reinstating necessary regulations.

A plethora of Democratic/Progressive activist groups have sprung up to pressure Congress and the White House on these issues as well as health insurance reform, letter-writing campaigns, calls and emails to representatives and senators, mass demonstrations… You name it, it’s being done. And what we get from the WH is insults and dismissals as those of us anywhere to the left of center are repeatedly told to STFU.

Meanwhile, I am receiving between 6 and a dozen pleas for money every single day from various Democratic entities. DCCC, DLC, etc., etc., each one of them extolling me to give more to ensure that “my” interests are represented and protected by people who have amply demonstrated they don’t represent my interests or care about protecting me or my family from the corporatist policies of the Neocons who Won’t Go Away. So I have decided to take a clue from my grandson, who turned 18 last year and registered to vote for the first time. For Obama, of course.

We were originally a little piqued that he chose to register Independent instead of Democratic, but he was adamant and is perfectly happy with his choice. In our state he could still vote in the primary – one merely has to request either the Dem or Rep ballot to vote in one of them, it doesn’t matter what your own registration is. And I notice that he never gets any political mail asking for money he hasn’t got or telling him outrageous lies about what ‘his’ party’s doiing in the state or in D.C.

If the end product of this health insurance charade turns out just as it looks very strongly to be turning out, I am changing my voter registration from Democrat to Independent. Figure that the party hacks who don’t care about what I think or want can do what they do without my support or my money. They can just cross me off their list, and my email will be much more manageable. In writing this, there’s a small chance that others might consider the idea to be pretty good, and perhaps a few of them will change their registration too. If the idea catches on, a lot of people might decide to change their registration to reflect something real that nobody in D.C. seems to have noticed.

The Republicans are now marginalized to a regional sub-party status, claiming less than 20% of all voters and dominant in only 5 states. Libertarians are stronger than that. They’ve a few leftover power brokers in D.C. stonewalling all things necessary to save the country, but Democrats dominate. Dems now calll themselves the “Center-Right” party, telling us that the 79% of Americans who are center-left to progressive are insignificant. We don’t deserve representation. If they were to actually LOSE that 79% – or any considerable fraction of it – they just might have to start doing the jobs they were elected (by us) to do. And if not, we can go ahead and field candidates of our own and have a real chance of winning.

We are all the way to a single-party system in this country, all possible challengers relegated to 20% of the electorate or less. Except for the left-leaners in the dominant party, who have been told to STFU. Well, okay. We can split that coconut rather dramatically, and end up with a larger portion than they’ve got left.

Or not. I won’t be holding my breath for other progressives to catch a clue. I’m changing my registration and getting my name off their fundraising list. After more than a week of battling swine flu, it’ll make me feel much better, I’m sure. Wish me luck!

Iatrogenic, adjective
a medical disorder caused by the diagnosis, manner or treatment of a physician.

Iatros is the Greek word for physician. -genic means induced by. Iatrogenic disease is a disease caused by a physician. Given the sheer complexity and technological wonders of modern Western [allopathic] medicine have led to some stretching of the strict meaning of the term, which is now applied to ANY adverse effect associated with ANY medical practitioner or treatment. Thus it can be used to describe the cancers caused (years down the line) by radiation and radioactive isotopes used to treat initial problems, prescription errors, hospital-contracted infections, problems caused when a surgeon leaves an instrument or two in the patient, a chiropractor who breaks the patient’s neck, etc., etc.

When I was busy educating myself as much as possible when my daughter determined to have her baby at home, I discovered that the nations that have the best statistical outcomes – fewest maternal and infant deaths or injuries – actually encourage home births because hospitals are dangerous places to both mothers and infants. They’re dangerous places for anyone these days, it seems. According to statistics compiled by OurCivilization.com, there are 8.9 million “unnecessary” hospitalizations every year in this country, which lead directly to 1.78 million “Iatrogenic Events.” Of 7.5 million “unnecessary” procedures ordered annually by physicians, another 1.3 million patients suffer direct harm. That adds up to 16.4 million people channeled into a harmful situation by their medical providers every year, and 3.8 million cases of direct harm to those people that they otherwise would not have suffered.

The same source estimates annual deaths caused by various leading iatrogenic factors, reaching a total of 783,936 deaths at a cost of $282 billion. Every year, and that’s not the highest estimate available. A simple extrapolation on the statistics gives us a projected 10-year death rate of 7,841,360 people, more people than have been killed in all the wars the United States ever fought over its entire history.

Medical insurance reform – which is the most we’ll ever get from Congress, and that’s likely to be a simple mandate to buy junk insurance – does not even begin to address what’s wrong with the health care system in this country. All it will do is put more people in harm’s way, given that medical care is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S. The American iatrogenic Association [AiA] is working to make the truth known to the general public, and to promote policies that will begin to address the serious issues. I encourage everyone concerned about the health care situation in this country – both access and quality of care – to check out their website and the collection of articles, essays, studies and book excerpts they offer.

The Truth is that at least 12,000 people die every year of unnecessary surgeries. Another 7,000 die to medication errors in hospitals. 20,000 die due to other errors in hospitals. Hospital-acquired infections, many resistant to known antibiotics, kill another 80,000. 106,000 die of those nifty “bad effects” of drugs their doctor prescribed, often for no better reason than that some hypnotized medically-obsessed junkie saw it advertised on TV and just HAD to have it. Only heart disease and cancer beat the medical system in this country on number of victims every year. You can bet that many of those the medical system kills were there because they were diagnosed with one of those issues, but their doctor or hospital killed them before their disease could.

This unacceptable situation SHOULD inform us that more access to the system for more people is not going to cure what ails us. All that is just more money for the players in that nasty futures market in human suffering. I read about a woman the other day who had her baby taken away from her because she resisted a doctor’s insistence that she submit to C-section (dangerous major surgery), at a hospital with a C-section rate approaching 50% of all births. What the hell kind of quality control is going on there? C-section is medically indicated – to save the life of mother or child in an extreme situation – for fewer than 6% of all births. I for one do not consider a doctor’s tee-off date to be an extreme situation threatening the life of mother or child. I DO consider unnecessary surgery to be a direct threat to life and limb, and so should everyone else in the world!

So when your least-favorite WingNut starts ranting about “ObamaCare” and euthanasia for poor old Granny, respond with some REAL statistics about what’s way more likely to kill off Granny and everyone else in the family before their time – that which passes for “health care” in this, the supposedly richest country the world has ever known. If all our government can do is offer more citizens the ‘right’ to access the killing floor, we’re better off without it.

So. Just wanted to continue with a theme, because I think it’s extremely useful as a means of keeping our heads about us while dealing with clinically insane bizonker-birthers who can’t tell their asses from their outhouse in this so-called “Health Care Debate.” Nobody anywhere is really doing anything about what’s actually wrong with health care in this country, and they will continue to do nothing about it until we’re all dead of it (or maybe just old age). NONE of them are addressing the problems.

CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

The last day job I held was in the period after 9-11 when DHS became the designated troublemaker for Americans of all kinds. My problems started when Human Resources was informed that my birth certificate didn’t qualify as “proof of citizenship” for me to have gotten the job. So I responded that my state driver’s license and Social Security card should suffice if HR couldn’t manage to read the line that designated US citizenship for both my parents and myself on that Philippine-issued birth certificate. They told me I had to get a birth certificate from a state here in the US. So I asked them which state they’d suggest I pretend to be born in, thinking there must be a racket in California or somewhere that provides fake birth certificates for people like me who weren’t actually born there. They were not amused.

Then they found a “discrepency” on my Social Security card. Seems I had used the name I’ve always gone by in addition to the first name on my birth certificate, when I had the last name changed after I got married back in 1969. I was informed they could no longer make my pay checks out to my legal name (which WAS on the card), and which is the name on my bank account. The bank then proceeded to tell me it couldn’t cash my checks! I was informed I’d have to take unpaid time off work – for which I’d get in trouble because no one would approve it – to stand in line at the SS office to have the name changed again. So I could work. I began to get the very strong feeling they didn’t want me there.

So I wrote a nice missive to HR telling them that I’d been paying taxes for more than 35 years under the NUMBER on my SS card, and that the IRS – a duly authorized agency of the federal government – had never once complained or refused my money. I further wrote that when I got married, I had my named changed to his on that card, and nobody ever asked to see a court order or required me to get one that “legally” changed my last name. In fact, I had dropped my given middle name entirely and used the first initial of my original last name on all legal matters from that time on. Also a CUSTOM, not something for which I ever had to go to court. I further said that if I were to be required per DHS’s audit to legally change my name, they were going to have to go after every single married woman in the country who had ever taken her husband’s name or used their maiden name’s initial for their middle. That’s about 55% of the entire population, not something this nation had the money to accomplish while spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I did end up quitting that job just because I know when I’m not wanted. Now write full time freelance, and my boss has never asked me to prove I’m a citizen or argued with me about what name I care to attach. Oh… and he uses direct deposit to pay me, in the account with my terrorist name attached.

I call it my “terrorist” name because DHS was supposed to be chasing terrorists, not messing up the lives and livelihoods of lifelong American citizens and taxpayers in good standing. Thus they must have believed I’m some sort of terrorist. I prefer the title “Terrierist,” since I’m quite fond of small dogs. You’d think these folks would have better things to do in the wake of 9-11, perhaps going after real terrorists or something. Guess that’s what I get for thinking.

I presume these crazy wingnuts would be doing this same weird Dervish Dance if John McCain were President right now. I mean, he absolutely wasn’t born in the United States, while Barack Obama absolutely was. And while they’re at it, they should make a new law that says the wives of military officers stationed overseas are forbidden to visit them or live with them, on the off-chance a baby might be born somewhere outside of Kansas. Sheesh!

Most of these idiots are so dumb and so ill-educated that they can’t even find California on a map, much less Panama or Philippines or Iraq. Why are they being given time and attention in the media? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of the morons among us, the fact that they represent a good 20% of our population? Is that inbreeding, environmental toxins, or just insane?

Whatever it is, I’m glad I’m not one of them. And I think there should be an IQ test administered to all employees of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure we don’t have to actually deal with any of these defectives in our day-to-day lives.

1. “American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant and affordable energy.”

Actually, it was not until the rural electrification efforts of the 1930s – which were financed largely by the government as part of the infrastructure make-work provisions of the New Deal – that electricity became available outside major cities. In many states of the west-southwest, the CCC and Army Corps of Engineers worked in tandem with the rural electrification programs building dams and hydroelectric power plants to supply energy to those rural grids. Most of these RECs were cooperatives, owned by the customers who purchased the power, and governed by boards drawn from those small communities.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: This is Socialism in action.

2. “There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!” + something about destroying the economy.

Actually, as so graphically demonstrated last summer when the price of gasoline was arbitrarily jacked up to nearly $5 a gallon so oil companies and traders could make a literal killing, a reasonably high cost of energy that reflects its serious environmental effects, the expensive wars we are fighting to secure it, etc. leads directly to conservation efforts instigated by the people themselves rather than imposed by the government. Consumption of gasoline suddenly got cut in half as people stopped driving two blocks to the bar or convenient store, car-pooled to work, learned how to walk again, etc. It’s good for people to pay the actual costs.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: The economy is already destroyed. Did you not notice? We did. These legs are made for walking. Or riding a bike. A truly reflective cost of gasoline – which other countries have been paying for decades – will spur investment in alternatives that will be more environmentally friendly, will bring much-needed crop price relief to farmers, and will generate jobs as more and more people are out of work with no chance of ever going back to the old ones.

3. “In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.”

Massive unemployment in the energy sector began just weeks after Saint Ronnie the Reagan took the oath of office. He ordered the wells in the booming oil and gas industry in Texas and Oklahoma (where I was at the time) immediately capped. Then he dramatically increased our dependence on imported Middle Eastern oil, no doubt to justify foreign policy adjustments that have led to current illegal oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s under those caps is now “reserve,” as we struggle to use up as much of the ME’s supplies as possible.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: The increased cost of doing things the old way will spur investment in new ways. Those acre-size factories dotting the landscape can install solar panels on their huge roofs to offset their costs. Wind and water storage systems can help provide night supply, but most such factories don’t run at night anyway. That’s jobs in the factories, jobs in support industries (like installation and maintenance), jobs in production, and electricity in the grid. This won’t be done so long as energy is artificially cheap. Real costs will lead to real changes.

4. “Of course, Alaska is not the sole source of American energy. Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source. Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.”

Again, America’s producing oil and gas fields expanded dramatically during Jimmy Carter’s “energy crisis” and ordered capped the moment Reagan got into office. They’ve been capped ever since. These are wells already drilled, were already producing. In order to increase our dependence on foreign supply so we could use it up and make vassals of those nations later on. Obviously, home-grown energy independence is NOT a Republican value or a “supply-side” tenet.

I live in Appalachia. I was in southeastern Kentucky last weekend and Mountaintop Removal is the absolute ultimate in environmental rape for fewer jobs and more poverty. I’m big into making a law through NC’s legislature that would forbid Duke and others from using coal mined in this way. In Tennessee there are once-beautiful communities still devastated by the massive fly ash spill, and increasing nasty health effects nobody’s attending to. There’s no such thing as “Clean Coal” – those scrubbers have been required by law since the 1970s and are STILL not installed because all coal plants get a waiver!

As for the most expensive and dangerous form of boiling water ever conceived, don’t get me started… I can go on for months. All those “secret” scram failures, failed fuel incidents and big ass dumps that have been going on since the early 1950s have killed and injured generations of Americans and are STILL not being adequately addressed. NO NUCLEAR, and I mean that most sincerely as a one-time health physicist who has seen it up close and ugly. We will NEVER be able to afford it, in any possible way.

Note to Sarah’s Ghost: Name the forum, baby. I’ll bring my real cost-benefit analyses, my technical details, and some very sick survivors. You bring your ignorance, your propaganda and your lies. Then we’ll let the People decide, m’kay?

The way we do energy in this country must change. The change will indeed cause some trade-offs, that’s why the government is going to have to subsidize some things. Like offsets for the poor, low-cost financing to the low end of the middle class (that still own homes) to refit with supplemental power generation capacity and backwards meters, revamping the grid to recover some of the 30% of generation capacity we now lose to inefficiencies of transmission, etc., etc., etc.

Putting it off another decade or two won’t help, as more and more cities find themselves under water and massive population relocation kicks in due to increased global warming. Eventually it’s just time to pay the piper, and now is our time. Go back to Alaska and take care of your kids. They need you, we do not.

Despite beauty queen-like blustering, circular speech patterns full of airhead nonsense, and empty threats against bloggers (like me), Sarah Palin’s hilarious family soap opera got even funnier over the past week. It’s not “Troopergate” that finally ended her quest for national prominence and the highest office in the land – from whence she could dictate how the rest of America’s families should be just as dysfunctional as her own – it was that lovely free house she got in exchange for a cushy construction permit way back when she was just the Mayor of Wasilla.

Seems that fancy big sports complex and hockey rink built with ample taxpayer Pork looks suspiciously like the lake house hubby Todd says he built with his own two secessionist hands (with a little help from some ‘builder buddies’) used building materials ordered at the same time from the same suppliers by the same company that ‘won’ the contract for the complex. Same siding, same windows, same roofing, etc.

And while my grandson who voted for the first time last election thinks that’s rather a nifty perk for being a politician, we did have to explain to him that it qualifies as a bribe – quid pro quo – and is illegal and always has been illegal. As in breaking the law, even in Alaska.

Thus did Sarah hold a hastily called press conference on the weekday federal holiday we euphemistically call “Independence Day” and announce that she will not be finishing out her first (and only) term as governor of the Great State of Alaska. Her reasons were several, they are disjointed, they make no reasonable sense, and if the boredom factor is in any way true, she’s got no business ever having gotten into politics in the first place.

Palin struck out at the media as enemies that finally defeated her, but the old adage “if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the fire” comes readily to mind. Nobody gets to be a serious contender for national office in this country without having to run the media gauntlet, since it’s the Fourth Estate’s JOB to vet these people and ask uncomfortable questions. If you can’t handle them, you should remain a private citizen and do something else for a living.

I will admit that I am sorely disappointed, having wished most fondly for a Palin-Limbaugh ticket in 2012. But then again, I’m a clown by trade, and the promise of comedy fodder for years to come was just irresistible. A Sanford-Limbaugh ticket is also off the table due to the South Carolina governor’s love affair with a foreigner and penchant for secretive trysts that had him out of the country for over a week without telling a soul where he was going. For wannabe morality dictators, these Republicans are a sorry bunch, for sure!

Whether or not Palin has to answer criminally for her free house, her political career is now O-V-E-R. Now she can go back to keeping books for Todd’s snowmobile dealership and take care of her kids. I wish her the best of luck with that, and thank her for all the laughs along the way. I never would have been aware of her at all had John McCain not decided – or, his handlers decided – to elevate her to a sickly heartbeat away from the Presidency. At which point she could not have simply called the press and rambled on endlessly about non-reasons for stepping down. Thereby joining the exalted ranks of disgraced executives that includes such luminaries as Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.

Thanks, John McCain, and thank you Sarah. It’s been fun!

Events in Iran following the outrageous actions of losing candidate Ahmadinejad (try to say it three times fast) and the supreme Ayatollah against massive street demonstrations in Tehran and across the country have turned violent. Though the secondary Ayatollah, the Iranian military and about half of the elite Republican Guard are supporting challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, or at least staying out of the fray.

Six members of the Iranian national soccer team wore green armbands in solidarity during the first half of a World Cup qualifying game yesterday (June 17). The government has tried hard to cut off all lines of communication to the outside world, but sporadic cell phone service has allowed text updates and cell phone videos to be distributed. Twitter put off scheduled maintenance to keep its service going during this dramatic confrontation, incoming posts at #iranelection.

HuffPo’s Live Blog has incoming information day and night, the University of Chicago has opened a dedicated Iran fax line [at 1-888-308-3025 for incoming] as cell service gets more unreliable. Various volunteers have been receiving cell videos from Iran and posting them to YouTube.

Here’s how you can help, and many people have set their computers up for proxy to cover individuals reporting from Iran. Election challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi is posting regularly on his Facebook page, which can be read in English by clicking that version at the bottom of the page. He has called for a national day of mourning for “those killed in post-election clashes” June 18.

The whole world is watching, President Obama said the other day, and it’s true. So wear some green, try to keep up, and let’s all hope for the best outcome.