CREEPING ARTHRITIS (Poem)

Sometimes sitting in a padded
kitchen chair with arms,
I am symptom free,
No pain,
No discomfort.

I could sit there for ever, but
a chore needs doing.
So I get up knowing
That it won’t be the same
When I return.

There was a big spine operation
of the lumbar in 2004,
Shave the back of the spine
Remove disks,
Add titanium rods

It wasn’t a perfect recovery
after all the pain.
I lived for the time
For another Percocet
Giving some relief.

But I cheated the wheel chair
even could play tennis.
Went on tours of Italy, Greece and Turkey
The Canadian and American West.
The wheel chair just smiled.

In a few years, lumbar symptoms
returned and increased.
“What you need is a spine replacement,”
the neurosurgeon said. “But
“We don’t have them.”

Shots in the spine began to
relieve the pain
“Where is L2," the surgeon asked?
Feel something in your leg?”
“Burning sensation,” I replied.

“Good.  I guess I got it right.”
the surgeon said.
“Worst spine I have ever seen”
The surgical nurse said.
“Could get disability.”

Something called neurostimulation,
giving a buzz,
Might block the pain signals
From the lumbar
To the brain.

In 2011 pain in the right leg started,
gave up tennis.
Deterioration happened weekly.
“You need a hip replacement,”
The hip and knee specialist said.

Recovery is fast compared to
a knee replacement
But don’t kid yourself.
Progress is terribly slow
And takes lots of months.

Inpatient therapy, then
home therapy,
Then outpatient therapy,
But I cheated the wheelchair.
The wheelchair just smiles.

DOUBLE CROSS

Over the last couple of decades Democrats have adopted former Republican stands and have found them to subsequently be opposed by Republicans. A couple of examples are the Individual Mandate and the Line Item Veto.

Individual Mandate

Most recently it is the "individual mandate" in the Affordable Care Act of March 23, 2010 that Republicans first proposed and now oppose. "In fact, says Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, the individual mandate was originally a Republican idea. 'It was invented by Mark Pauly to give to George Bush Sr. back in the day, as a competition to the employer mandate focus of the Democrats at the time.' But Hatch's opposition is ironic, or some would say, politically motivated. The last time Congress debated a health overhaul, when Bill Clinton was president, Hatch and several other senators who now oppose the so-called individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required it."*

.........................................................

"One reason the individual mandate appealed to conservatives is because it called for individual responsibility to address what economists call the "free-rider effect." That's the fact that if a person is in an accident or comes down with a dread disease, that person is going to get medical care, and someone is going to pay for it."*

..........................................................

"Nichols, of the New America Foundation, says he's depressed that so many issues that used to be part of the Republican health agenda are now being rejected by Republican leaders and most of the rank and file. "I think it's a sad testament to the state of relations among the parties that they've gotten to this point," he said."*

"The individual mandate was an outgrowth of a law signed by President Reagan: The 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It requires nearly all hospitals to treat and stabilize anyone needing emergency care, regardless of ability to pay or legal U.S. residency. Critics call it an unfunded mandate. It was part of a budget law signed by President Ronald Reagan." ** "We called this (individual mandate) responsible national health insurance," says Pauly. 'There was a kind of an ethical and moral support for the notion that people shouldn't be allowed to free-ride on the charity of fellow citizens.'"*

Line Item Veto

Another item is the presidential Line Item Veto that was passed by congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on April 9, 1986. Republicans apparently thought they were sure to win the 1996 election and, with a line item veto, be able to eliminate Democratic provisions from bills. The bill was proposed by Senator Robert Dole and cosponsored by Senator John McCain and 29 others (***) including many Republicans such as Senator Mitch McConnell and candidate for Republican presidential for president Rick Santorum (candidacy now suspended). A year later the bill was challenged by a group of Senators including Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, but the case (Raines vs. Byrd) was dismissed. President Clinton (reelected after all) then used the line item veto on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that the Line Item Veto was unconstitutional by a 6-3 vote on June 25, 1998.****

* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123670612

** http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/01/obama-individual-mandate_n_1394705.html

*** http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:SN00004:@@@P

**** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Item_Veto_Act_of_1996

CHIEF OF BEDROOM POLICE DROPS CANDIDACY

So, the chief of the bedroom police, Rick Santorum, has suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination for president. I make no bones about not liking him (See: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/12/tthe-republican-primaries.html). I have to admit that he did a LOT better than I thought he would in winning 11 states. But, for one thing, he was propped up by millions of dollars of free advertising by the news media that was trying to make a fight out of the Republican primary. For another, it shows how scary the most active Republicans are. I can only hope there are a lot of "quiet" Republicans out there that value freedom in our personal relationships. But I must say that for the Protestant Bible Belt to embrace a Roman Catholic candidate for president is another big liberal advance (see one of my favorite posts "In The End Liberalism Wins": http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2009/12/in-end-liberalism-wins.html).

For even more on my views of Rick Santorum see: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/02/where-are-women-against-contraceptives.html; http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/12/tthe-republican-primaries.html

Added April 14th, 2012: For an addition account of the Santorum candidacy by Charles Blow (NY Times, April 11, 2012) see: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/what-rick-santorum-wrought/

NORTHERN VIRGINIA WISTERIA 2012 (Picture by Barbara Mapp)

OSAMA BIN LADEN

It turns out that all the time we thought Osama bin Laden was running around from cave to cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he was actually just screwing around with his five wives in some luxury in Pakistan and fathering four children.

THE SAD STORY OF HIGH LEVEL RAD WASTE STORAGE

The following is modified from a post on Motley Fool, Investment and Analysis Clubs/Macro Economic Trends and Risks (March 29. 2012):

The sad story about the Nevada Test Site - Yucca Mtn.* and high level waste disposal is as follows: To get Nevada to allow the Federal government the right to put high level nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site which is after all, Federal lands, the Federal government was going to give Nevada $125 million (a sum I thought was chicken feed) and Nevada, which had not officially complained about the nuclear device test (i.e. bombs) was all for it. Then some bean counter said that $125 million was too much and it should only be $25 million. At this point, Nevada called "Foul" and turned against it. I believe that the sum was eventually even lowered to zero.

The state of Nevada hired some real smart scientists to find things wrong with the Yucca Mtn. I know because one of my class mates hired was one of the smartest it not the smartest. He was a real talent. The Federal Government then rolled out some real smart scientists who were put on the job of showing that Yucca Mtn. was all right. I know because I was the boss of some of them for awhile. And then the war started.

So there were arguments that a volcano coming up right in the heart of Yucca Mtn. was a possibility. No, all the volcanism in that area ceased long, long ago. A glacial age was quite likely in 10,000 yrs,* and the water table would rise to cover the nuclear waste and destroy the containers. No, it is unlikely a glacial age could start that fast, and beside, the badies in the waste would be nearly all gone. What if we had a retrograde society where everyone had forgotten what radioactivity was and they dug this stuff out by mistake? Just how many people understand radioactivity today so you wouldn't have to lose a lot of talent to be retrograde. And on, and on, and on. So the smart guys in the Federal government tried to counteract the smart guys from Nevada and this went on for years.

Then just when the Federal government was going to ask to submit Yucca Mtn. to be licensed, the senior senator from Nevada and leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, asked the president for a favor to refuse the request. Plop.

I can't describe the disappointment. Scientists had spent their whole careers on this. It was like the Bridge of the River Kwai** all over only the construction plans and data gathering went on for decades not weeks or months. Even I felt it, and I got out in the late 1970s because I thought I saw where things were going. For the record, I was a proponent of granite for a storage media, but Eastern congressmen killed that because there is a lot of granite is in the East, and they don't want the repository there. We actually got a contract from the Canadians who were less squeamish (but who also abandoned granite) to work on granite which I did for awhile.

Be that as it may, I came to believe that Yucca Mtn. was a good experiment for high-level rad waste storage. And it was storage as the plans were that it could be recovered if necessary, though with difficulty. I think we might be able to forecast climate for a thousand years, but beyond that who knows? To guarantee it for a million years is silly.

So we are left with high level radioactive waste spread all over the country. Maybe that is not so bad as a successful terrorist attack would only have a limited effect. But it certainly is not ideal.

It is a terrible, terrible story and environmentalists had little to do with it, even if they didn't like it.

*http://www.yuccamountainexpose.com/Y47.htm; http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/06/dig_deeper_into_yucca.html

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_on_the_River_Kwai

TOWARD U.S. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE?

A big part of the game of politics is for the opposing political party to blame the president for anything that goes wrong while refusing him credit for anything that goes right. Not surprisingly with the gasoline prices going up, we see President Obama blamed for these rising prices though he can do little about them (Short of reimbursing consumers something per gallon of gas to effectively lower prices consumers pay, something that I doubt the opposing party would agree to as it would run up the Federal deficit. There are countries that do this however.). Democrats did the same thing to President Bush in 2008 so it is just bi-party fun. If you were to read one article on the oil story, the article by Clifford Krauss and Eric Lupton in the March 23rd issue of the NY Times is the one you should read (http://www.cnbc.com/id/46831786). As they point out, the facts are that oil production in the U.S. is up from 4.95 million barrels/day in 2008 to 5.7 million barrels/day.

And as Krauss and Lupton (2012) point out, this increase is largely due to an environmentally controversial law and tax breaks passed by the Bush Administration plus the high price of oil today. At the same time, imports of oil have fallen from 60% in 2005 to 45% today (Krauss and Lupton). As good as this may be, any knowledgeable person will tell you the gasoline prices have nothing to do with U.S. oil production. But this progress in lowering imports of oil has come with damaging local environmental consequences. Thus it is a tradeoff.

Furthermore, the Republican Party loves to tell the price of gasoline at the time that President Obama took office, but they carefully don't mention that nearly four months before the president was elected and six months before he took office, oil was at an all-time high , a record that stands through this date of blog publication. Subsequently the Great Recession caused the price of gasoline to plunge. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil hit its all-time high in July of 2008 at $145.29/bbl [or in inflation corrected terms $151/bbl (Krauss and Lupton)] and the price of gasoline also hit its all-time high in that time period [$4.11/gal or $4.30/gal in inflation corrected terms (Kraus and Lupton)], records that still stand as of this date (See chart below from http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx).

Incidentally, although the standard quote for oil in the U.S. is WTI, the price of oil produced in various places in the U.S. vary markedly from around $80/bbl for North Dakota sour crude (http://crudeoilpostings.semgroupcorp.com/) to around $130/bbl for Louisiana light sweet crude (http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USCRLLSS:IND).

Regarding the XL Pipeline:

Contrary to the way the topic is put by politicians, the XL Pipeline in the U.S. is very complicated and the best I can do is recommend you read the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline. And the lawsuits against the pipeline are not just from environmentalists but from refiners as well. I personally don't know how President Obama could approve the whole package until he is presented with either a final route for the pipeline or several recommended routes from which he could pick one. The part President Obama seems ready to endorse is the route from Cushing, OK, south and any route chosen from north of there is going to end up in Cushing anyway. So connecting will need be no problem. As far as the rest of it is concerned, I'm sure the XL Keystone pipeline will be built, one route or another. At any rate, it certainly has nothing to do with the price of oil now. The owners of the pipeline say they will sell to both Asia and the U.S. What does that mean? They will sell to the highest bidder? Getting congress involved in technological and scientific projects is scary.