Month: April 2007

How Wal-Mart Went Bad.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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Who would have thunk it?

Historically the Walpurgisnacht is derived from Pagan spring customs, where the arrival of spring was celebrated with bonfires at night. Viking fertility celebrations took place around February 25 and due to Walburga being declared a saint at that time of year, her name became associated with the celebrations. Walburga was honored in the same way that Vikings had celebrated spring and as they spread throughout Europe, the two dates became mixed together and created the Walpurgis Night celebration. The main mascot of Walpurgis Day is the witch.

But after the death of Sam Walton, the man who insisted every item in the store be made in America, the children, or shall I say, the spawns of Satan, took over. Once in their control, out goes the American merchandise and in comes all the crap from China. Then, and this is the sickening part, Wal-Mart puts on the bright and shiny face of doing well for America. It is the one corporation that reminds me of the Christian Fundamentalist movement here in America – they are so far from their founding roots they became the thing the preached against.

And with all Pagan holidays, the Vatican stepped in to ruin everything.

The festival is named after Saint Walburga (known in Scandinavia as “Valborg”; alternative forms are “Walpurgis”, “Wealdburg”, or “Valderburger”), born in Wessex in 710. She was a niece of Saint Boniface and, according to legend, a daughter to the Saxon prince St. Richard. Together with her brothers she travelled to Franconia, Germany, where she became a nun and lived in the convent of Heidenheim, which was founded by her brother Wunibald. Walburga died on 25 February 779 and that day still carries her name in the Traditional Catholic Calendar. However she was not made a saint until 1 May in the same year, and that day carries her name for example in the Finnish and Swedish calendar.

Allow me to finish up with a quote from the The Two Towers.

The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And… and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone.

– Meriadoc Brandybuck

Depression Is Real

I suffer from clinical depression and sometimes even when you are working with doctors and therapist it can get away from you.  This is one of the reason we need universal health care that include equal parity for mental health.  We also need better understanding about these issues so that people who are suffering from them are not afraid to reach out to others.
Here are just a few facts about depression:

Depression

Depression is a treatable illness involving an imbalance of brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. It is not a character flaw or a sign of personal weakness. You can’t make yourself well by trying to “snap out of it.” Although it can run in families, you can’t catch it from someone else. The direct causes of the illness are unclear, however it is known that body chemistry can bring on a depressive disorder, due to experiencing a traumatic event, hormonal changes, altered health habits, the presence of another illness or substance abuse.
Symptoms

    * Prolonged sadness or unexplained crying spells
    * Significant changes in appetite and sleep patterns
    * Irritability, anger, worry, agitation, anxiety
    * Pessimism, indifference
    * Loss of energy, persistent lethargy
    * Feelings of guilt, worthlessness
    * Inability to concentrate, indecisiveness
    * Inability to take pleasure in former interests, social withdrawal
    * Unexplained aches and pains
    * Recurring thoughts of death or suicide

Who Gets Depression?

    * Major depressive disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year. (Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005 Jun;62(6):617-27)
    * While major depressive disorder can develop at any age, the median age at onset is 32. (U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates by Demographic Characteristics, 2005)
    * Major depressive disorder is more prevalent in women than in men. (Journal of the American Medical Association, 2003; Jun 18;289(23):3095-105.)
    * As many as one in 33 children and one in eight adolescents have clinical depression. (Center for Mental Health Services, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1996)
    * People with depression are four times as likely to develop a heart attack than those without a history of the illness. After a heart attack they are at a significantly increased risk of death or second heart attack. (National Institute of Mental Health, 1998)

Economic Impact of Depression

    * Major Depressive Disorder is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15-44. (World Health Organization, 2004)
    *
      Major depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide among persons five and older. (World Health Organization, “Global Burden of Disease,” 1996)
    * Depression’s annual toll on U.S. businesses amounts to about $70 billion in medical expenditures, lost productivity and other costs. Depression accounts for close to $12 billion in lost workdays each year. Additionally, more than $11 billion in other costs accrue from decreased productivity due to symptoms that sap energy, affect work habits, cause problems with concentration, memory, and decision-making. (The Wall Street Journal, 2001, National Institute of Mental Health, 1999)
    * Depression ranks among the top three workplace issues, following only family crisis and stress. (Employee Assistance Professionals Association Survey, 1996)

Depression and Suicide

    * Depression is the cause of over two-thirds of the 30,000 reported suicides in the U.S. each year. (White House Conference on Mental Health, 1999)
    * For every two homicides committed in the United States, there are three suicides.
    * The suicide rate for older adults is more than 50% higher than the rate for the nation as a whole. Up to two-thirds of older adult suicides are attributed to untreated or misdiagnosed depression. (American Society on Aging, 1998)
    * Untreated depression is the number one risk for suicide among youth. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15 to 24 year olds and the fourth leading cause of death in 10 to 14 year olds. Young males age 15 to 24 are at highest risk for suicide, with a ratio of males to females at 7:1. (American Association of Suicidology, 1996)
    * The death rate from suicide (11.3 per 100,000 population) remains higher than the death rate for chronic liver disease, Alzheimer’s, homicide, arteriosclerosis or hypertension. (Deaths: Final Data for 1998, Center for Disease Control)
DBSA

I suffer from this disease and have been having problems for the last few months.  What a lot of the studies do not tell is that you get to the point where everyday activities and life can be completely destroyed or neglected.  With this latest episode, I have exhausted my medical leave and lost my job, my car has been reposed, and I will be with out utilities in the next day or so and homeless in two weeks.  What will happen is anyone’s guess at this point but if you know someone who is suffering or showing symptoms of depression please do not let them slip away from you.  It is treatable and there are medications that can help.

Another FU from Our Dear Leader

By FU, of course I mean that most eponymous of terms fashioned during Bush era, the Friedman Unit, named after Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the billionaire pundit who never met a deadline for progress in Iraq that he couldn’t find some reason to extend every 6 months or so. According to the Los Angeles Times, General Petraeus bought Bush another 5-6 months with his little performance the other day, promising a “progress report” on Iraq come September:

To buy time for his buildup of more than 28,000 troops to show results, Bush asked his commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, to deliver a progress report to the nation in early September.

That helped stave off Republican defections as Congress debated whether to impose a timetable for troop withdrawals. But it also established September as a deadline for clearer military and political progress in Iraq, a tactical concession for a White House that long has refused to accept any benchmarks or timetables for evaluating the war, now 4 years old.

Democratic and Republican members of Congress already are focusing on September as their next major decision point on the war — planning hearings to debate Petraeus’ findings and, in the Democrats’ case, promising new attempts to force Bush to withdraw troops.

By September, the troop buildup will have been underway for more than six months. Unless there is dramatic improvement in Iraq, public support for the war will probably have eroded further. And by September, skittish Republicans will be four months closer to starting their reelection campaigns.

Two things of note: First, how often have we heard that Republicans are ready to defect from Bush over Iraq in the last year or two? Each time after Bush weathers some storm in in Congress over Iraq funding, we get the same stories about how the Republicans are all set to abandon their President if there are no signs of progress in Iraq within the next 4 or 5 or 6 months. Usually anonymous, naturally, because of the “sensitive nature” of voicing opposition to the President “in a time of war.”

I seem to recall we heard the same sorts of noises in the run-up to the 2004 election and the 2006 election, and in each instance House and Senate Republicans fell into line whenever a public display of support of their Preznit was required/demanded by Karl Rove. Indeed, most recently on the House and Senate floors during the debate on the Supplemental Spending Bill for Iraq we heard the same old tired speeches from the Republicans about how the Democrats are destroying the troops’ morale, aiding and abetting the terrorists, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Indeed, they had a field day with Senate Majority Leader Reid’s remark that the war was lost, calling him nothing short of a traitor for daring to speak the truth about Bush’s disastrous, destructive and delusional “central front in the War on Terror.”

In short, I’ll believe in Republican defections from this President on the issue of Iraq when I see them with my own eyes.

(cont.)

Second, once again it appears the Democrats are more than willing to let the issue of continuing this catastrophe of a war slide, after making a largely symbolic gesture in opposition to Mr. Bush.


Let’s face facts. Too many Democrats (and I recognize there are exceptions, but as we all know it is the exceptions which prove the rule) don’t want to end this war right now. It’s too politically convenient to allow the occupation of Iraq to continue through the duration of Bush’s term so that they can hang it like an albatross around the necks of their Republican opponents in 2008. If you had any hopes of a different outcome, the MsNBC Democratic Presidential debate last week should have laid those fading dreams to rest. Only Representative Kucinich and the ancient, and practically unknown, minor candidate Mike Gravel, made any serious noises that Congress should take action to end the war now.

The leading candidates, naturally enough, all supported leaving Iraq, but none of them bothered to enlighten us as to what the Congress should be doing now to force the President’s hand. Senators Clinton’s and Obama’s answers on Iraq good examples of this dispiriting reticence on the part of the front runners to promote any real action by Congress to require a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq:

“The Congress has spoken, and now all we can hope is the president will listen,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Clinton defended her initial vote to approve the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying she did the best she could with the information she was given at the time. “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way,” she said, insisting that “the question is, what do we do now?”

“If this president does not get us out of Iraq, when I’m president I will,” she said.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois likewise defended his votes to fund the effort in Iraq but said that should not be interpreted as support for the military campaign.

“I opposed this war from the start because I thought it would lead to the disastrous conditions that we have seen,” he said, but he said he could not vote to cut off funding for troops once they were in the field.

These are the front runners for the Democratic nomination? “All we can do is hope the President will listen?” and “I support funding the war but I don’t support the military campaign? It was in a word, a very depressing performance.

So while we have been distracted by the melodramatic political theater starring those heroic Congressional Democrats versus the villainous White House (or vice versa if you are one of the dwindling number of Bush’s Koolaid Kids), nothing of any substance has been accomplished. The war will still be funded. Our soldiers and Iraqis of all ages will continue to die. The civil war will still rage. Suicide bombs will continue to explode. In other words, the “same old, same old” will continue and continue for as long as our media, military and political elites still have a TV monitor pointed at their faces into which they can utter the phrase “The next six months in Iraq will be critical …”

So I’ll see you in September for another FU from what passes for our nation’s political leadership. Unless, that is, you are currently serving in Iraq, in which case I pray you will still be with us come September to observe another performance in the longest running stage production in Beltway history, the tragicomic farce I like to call Dubya and the Dance of the Sugarplum Democrats. You’ll laugh ’til you cry, I guarantee it.































The "main thing"

Originally posted at My Left Wing

The other day, as planned, I attended the ordination and consecration of Bishop Thomas E. Breidenthal. Well, I didn’t attend all of it–sort of left at “half-time”. But I was there to see them “do the deed”, as it were. Having attended the youth event, where Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was a special guest, the night before, I didn’t really think I needed a whole ordination on top of that. Bottom line, I was tired, and I needed some “sabbath” in my weekend.

But I stayed long enough to hear the sermon, and that’s been on my mind today as I think about the goings-on in this corner of blogtopia (y!sctp!). In particular, Rev. Epting talked about the tension that sometimes exists between doing justice and maintaining unity. Sometimes those principles seem to be at odds with each other, but they are both part of the vows our new bishop was about to take–and they’re part of the baptismal vows of all Episcopalians as well.
Now, I know that we vary here in our beliefs, and it’s sometimes a challenge to convey the essence of some truth without the actual words I choose managing to obscure my meaning.  But there are some commonalities that I think go beyond labels–at least the labels we’re used to using. Maryscott, for example, does not describe herself as a person of faith, while I do. And yet, there is something we have in common. You know what I think it is? I think it’s that we’re both “believers”. We don’t believe in all of the same things, but we believe in something, and that something is more important to us than just “winning elections”. So, I’d like to share an excerpt from the sermon

The important thing to remember, my dear brother Tom, and my dear sisters and brothers, is to try to keep the main thing the main thing. Try to keep the main thing the main thing in the midst of all our busyness and our confusion and even sometimes our near-despair, nothing must get in the way–

Okay, that wasn’t the best place to cut that sentence, but it got pretty explicitly Episcopalian at the end of that sentence, and I didn’t want those words to become the focus.  Rather, I wanted to point out the similar struggle we sometimes deal with–in fact, we could pretty much use the same words. From the sermon:

We often hear said, “You’re sacrificing justice for unity!”

Hmm…yes. I have heard something like that–but not just in the church. We’ve also struggled with this issue in the world of political activism. Calls for “unity” are sometimes used in an attempt to silence any criticism of the current Democratic leaders. Yet we often feel that we must make these criticisms when we see that someone or some group is being denied justice.

Tonight, I don’t really have a conclusion, but wanted to put this out there for reflection. What is the “main thing” for you? And how do you keep from being sidetracked by petty crap, or from getting too discouraged?

A Non-Impeachment Trial in Congress?

There is one benefit, and probably only one benefit, to laboring under the Bush administration. We are forced to learn all kinds of things about how the government actually works…or is supposed to work. We have to do this to understand what the hell is going on and what can be done about it. It involves a lot of homework.

For example, we all know that congress has the power to compel witnesses and documents under the threat of a charge of Contempt of Congress. But what about the enforcement of a Contempt of Congress charge? If someone refuses to comply with a subpoena, who does something about it?

Under ordinary circumstances, Congress refers the matter to a U.S. attorney who, according to prior court rulings, is duty bound to refer the matter to a grand jury. However, as Kagro X has recently pointed out, there is at least one precedent for the Department of Justice refusing to refer such an incident to a grand jury. It happened in 1982 and, while the witness [an EPA official] did eventually reach an accommodation with Congress, the Justice Department declared, “a U.S. Attorney is not required to bring a congressional contempt citation to a grand jury when the citation is directed against an executive official who is carrying out the President’s decision to invoke executive privilege.”

So, for example, even though the House Oversight Committee authorized a subpoena last week to compel the testimony of Condoleeza Rice, it’s possible that she will refuse to testify, be charged with Contempt of Congress, the matter will be referred to a U.S. attorney, and the U.S. attorney will simply refuse to do anything about it. There are other subpoenas floating out there that bear directly on the activities of the Justice Department that may provide even richer possibilities for a showdown between Congress and the DOJ.

So, what could Congress do if faced with such intransigence?

It hasn’t been used since approximately 1935, but there is a provision called inherent contempt which Congress could use to overcome administrative stonewalling. But it would get ugly.

Under this process, the procedure for holding a person in contempt involves only the chamber concerned. Following a contempt citation, the person cited for contempt is arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms for the House or Senate, brought to the floor of the chamber, held to answer charges by the presiding officer, and then subject to punishment that the House may dictate (usually imprisonment for punishment reasons, imprisonment for coercive effect, or release from the contempt citation.)

Concerned with the time-consuming nature of a contempt proceeding and the inability to extend punishment further than the session of the Congress concerned (under Supreme Court rulings), Congress created a statutory process in 1857. While Congress retains its “inherent contempt” authority and may exercise it at any time, this inherent contempt process has not been exercised by either House in over 70 years.

Using the example of Condi Rice, under the inherent contempt provision she would be arrested by the Capitol police (acting under the authority of the Sergeant of Arms) and brought before the floor of the House of Representatives to answer charges (a trial) of contempt. She would then be imprisoned for not longer than the remainder of the session (in this case, December 2007) unless or until she agreed to satisfy the dictates of the original subpoena.

Seems like a pretty extreme measure to take against a sitting Secretary of State. It would make for some interesting theater, but it would also demonstrate an almost unprecedented level of dysfunction in our government. This procedure seems more likely to occur to compel the testimony of less luminous personalities in the Justice Department or the Republican National Committee than it does for Condoleeza Rice. However, things could, at least in theory, come to that.

There is also a civil procedure available to Congress, but it seems to have limited applicability to members of the executive branch.

If the administration continues to defy subpoenas for witnesses and documents, we may see the ‘inherent contempt’ provision make a comeback after a 72 year hiatus.

Rep. Brad Miller of North Carolina, in his capacity as chairman of the Science committee’s Investigations and Oversight panel, has encountered the same sort of intransigence from the Bush “administration” that is threatened over the investigation into the U.S. Attorney firings…

So as Rep. Miller has become increasingly pessimistic about the chances that the “administration” will relent in his case, he’s been consulting the same Congressional Oversight Manual, and was dismayed to learn that the enforcement options are indeed quite limited. Inherent contempt, he’s discovered, is perhaps the only way Congress will be able to enforce its subpoena power with this “administration,” and he’s been talking with CRS experts to explore how a modern inherent contempt procedure might be established. Even better, he’s been sharing that information with Rep. Linda Sanchez, chair of the Judiciary committee’s Commercial and Administrative Law panel that’s handling the subpoenas in the U.S. Attorneys matter.

Yep. Things could get interesting. Especially in light of this and this.