The scene: two large southern cities in the year 2009.  Main character: 86 year old lady.  Supporting characters: son and daughter-in-law in another city, the chaotic medical community.

My 86 year old mother-in-law has lived alone since her husband passed away in 1977.  She lived in a nice condo in a very good part of town, had sufficient means for a decent lifestyle, had a good circle of friends, drove her Honda Accord all over town and was in pretty good health.  She took no prescription meds and her doctor was generally amazed with her overall health.  Her well-ordered and active life came to a screeching halt in January of this year.

Her son received a call from one of her friends that his mother had injured her leg and needed emergency medical help.  Two days before this call, a friend had taken her to the doctor because of a swollen ankle, but the doctor could find no cause and sent her home with pain killers. Why no xray?  Medicare.  Now, the swelling was cutting off circulation and her leg was turning black.  She was sent to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.  Thus begins the story of the downward spiral toward death of a sweet little lady who depended on and trusted the medical community.

She was hospitalized for 5 days.  Diagnosis was a fractured ankle.  While there, she was administered Oxycontin and a variety of other medications for pain and anxiety. These drugs caused severe disorientation and nausea and propelled her into a downward spiral. The drug literature for Oxycontin states it should be administered with extreme care to the elderly, if at all.  She was discharged to a nursing home for recuperation because she could not put weight on her injured ankle and was diagnosed with dementia.  She had no dementia prior to admission, so this was drug-induced.

The first nursing home was the pits of hell and she suffered indignity after indignity.  She dropped ten pounds in the first three weeks, became incontinent, became addicted to Oxycontin and delirious from the drugs. Daily racking nausea, a reaction to the drugs, weakened her severely.  We knew we had to get her out of there, but she did not want to leave her community of friends to come live with us in another state.  We were on the waiting list for a room at a decent nursing home in the area, her son was traveling back and forth the 450 mile round trip between cities several times a week, with other family members checking on her daily and I was in another city with a commitment for two months and could not leave to assist.  This was not enough to insure her care.  By the time the transfer became available, she was addicted to Ocycontin and so weakened that her life was in danger.

Although the new nursing home was light years better, the prevailing attitude was minimal care, drugs rather than diagnosis, and get her off Medicare.  Medical decisions were regimented and minimalist while Medicare was paying the bills, and we were still out of town during a large part of the week. We knew if we didn’t move her closer, she would die.  She reluctantly agreed that moving to a place near us was the best solution, and after a very careful process, we moved her to a facility near our home so we could be with her on a daily basis to help her bounce back.

We chose a facility with the best reputation in our community.  Her Medicare days were exhausted, so she was now completely private pay.  Her Medicare Advantage plan only paid when Medicare paid. So it paid nothing.  When Part D Drug benefit was implemented, her private company dropped her and she was never enrolled in Part D, so all of her medications were private pay also.  She did not know this. She had a long-term care policy that cost her $200 per month, and it paid $100 per day. We moved here here in May.  The cost for her care for the month of July was over $400 per day ($12,400) , all but $100 per day paid out of her own pocket.  But I digress.

We moved her here May 15. They didn’t have a private room, so they moved her into a room with a dying woman.  Unknown to us, the dying woman also had one of the deadly community diseases, c. difficile. Highly contagious and often deadly in the elderly.  According to all literature, this should never be done.  Residents with this infection are supposed to be isolated so they can’t transmit the infection.  We did not know this and were not told the woman had the infection.  Big problem. Another problem, my mother-in-law was left in the bed for two days while we waited for a wheel chair.  She developed blood clots.  Three days after arrival, she was rushed to the hospital for pulmonary embolism.  Discharged after two days, she was sent back to the new nursing home, where we found out that she had contracted c. difficile.  They pointed fingers at the hospital and tried to cover up the fact they placed her in a room with a resident with the infection when she first arrived.

Thus begins the end game for my mother-in-law.  She would be dead if I did not watch and review every move made by her caregivers in the nursing home.  They were not up on the latest treatments, kept saying “Medicare won’t pay for that” when she was private pay while I am  insisting on more aggressive treatment, using the cheapest least effective drugs and making mistake after mistake in her care.

For $400 per day, my mother-in-law gets blood clots, bedsores, drug overdoses, bladder infections, bronchial infections, c. difficile and largely incompetent care.  And this is a good nursing home.  I have had to nearly become a physician and challenge every step of her care.  Without my intervention, she would be dead.  Medicated to death in a drug stupor while she dies of treatable, if not curable, diseases.  They would rather treat her pain with morphine than cure a bladder infection with antibiotic.  I even had to demand a urinalysis for this simple problem.

We are at the point of no return with her now.  She is dying. She is too weak to do the tests that should have been done in the first hospital, but were not done because of prevailing attitude and Medicare pressure.  Yes, at 86  she was in the end years anyway, but I wanted some good time with her.  I didn’t want this.  Her treatment in the medical community, largely because of the attitude toward the elderly created by Medicare, has hastened her death.  There is much more to this tale, but you get the idea.

And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A news release is here:  http://snipr.com/ob4dx  [news_prnewswire_com]

I’ve skimmed this bill, and it gives me an eerie feeling.  Sounds good, but..I’m missing something.  Anyone out there read it?

Is this another kiss me?

This quote from Axelrod was the most unbelievable:

“He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely, because there were two principles at stake,” Axelrod said . “One is … the sanctity of covert operations … and keeping faith with the people who do them, and the impact on national security, on the one hand. And the other was the law and his belief in transparency.” 

Transparency?  What about the bailout money?  The list of banks on the watch list.  A host of other Obama projects with the lid clamped on tighter than a tick on a dog.  Transparency is only good when it aids our enemies.

As one former Bush Administration official was quoted as saying, unbelievable.

That’s the reason for my headline, the sin of the desert-knowing where the water is and telling no one. Everyone in a position to act knew, and did not act. In Hebrews 3: 7-19 we are admonished to never again lead people away from salvation, which is precisely what everyone, and I mean everyone, in positions of power did for us prior to and during this crisis.  

I keep reading excuses for our Senators and Congressmen, Treasury officials, leaders.  Statements that we shouldn’t throw the good out with the bad.  How do you differentiate between them?  Who is good if they committed the sin of the desert, if they were too cowardly to speak out?  If they are still too cowardly to speak out?  Who is innocent, after trillions are lost and we elect someone who willingly squanders our heritage and sovereignty?

An interesting chronology can be found here.  This Minnesota organization gives chapter and verse, complete with quotes, dates, players.  Goes back a long time.  Again, how can we excuse anyone?

Here’s another view  going back to 2002.  Where, I say, was the outrage?  Why did no one get this under control.  Who was responsible–why Congress, of course.

To tread water here is not an option.  To keep anyone in power who presided over this is insanity, or worse, complicity in the sin of the desert.  

We should finally stand for something.

Obama Launches Campaign Against White Illegal Immigrants

April 2nd, 2009 Posted By Pat Dollard.

Belfast Telegraph:

The majority of “undocumented Irish” young people living illegally in America come from Fermanagh and Tyrone, the Assembly had been told.

New President Barack Obama intends to tackle the problem, according to Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.

Reporting on his recent week-long trip to the US, Mr McGuinness said the issue came up constantly.

There is an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 illegal Irish in the US, with the majority coming from Fermanagh and Tyrone.

Mr McGuinness said: “The issue of the undocumented Irish came up consistently and persistently at many of the engagements in which we were involved.

“There is no doubt that it is a matter with which the new Administration will grapple.

Continue

True to form, the left is wasting no time getting out in front of this.  The Southern Poverty   Law Center has already organized protests and mounted the usual smear campaign by adding the group to its “Hatewatch” list.  Not to be outdone, The Tennessean headlines above the fold “New Group at VU stirs furor, Critics say Youth for Western Culture is intolerant.”  You can read the online article here.  A Google search will bring up all the usual suspects.  The same tactics appear to be in force at the seven campuses currently hosting the group.

Perhaps we need to be a little smarter when we launch countermeasures to the Podesta/Soros machine.  A good launch strategy and PR program could prevent the left from marginalizing these good groups before they get a foothold.  In any event, these groups are a strategy we must embrace and support.  I’m not too sure I would have chosen Bay Buchanan as my launch speaker, but then maybe they didn’t have a campus advisor.

Redstate can develop a PR strategy, think tank and support group for this type of effort, or do we have one?

Way back in 1991, I placed a phone call to a fellow in Texas who was well-known for his spunk.  I left a message with his secretary that if he organized an army to try to fix Washington, I would be a soldier.  The now famous Texan was Ross Perot.  The movement was government reform.  The need still exists, but what happened to the 19 million people who stood up and said “Enough Washington”.  Well, that’s a good question.

As with all reform movements, there are two good reasons they fail – Democrats and Republicans.  These disfunctional entities are so corrupt at the top that reform is impossible.  Any threat to their respective power base and the thugs in both parties get moving.  They brand opponents as crazy, radical, corrupt.  Even this esteemed group has rancor for reformers, harboring anger and bitterness for the effort.  But what is the alternative?  Look what being a conformist has wrought.

In 1996, it was the Democrats sending in Trojan Horses to gum up the works in the Reform Party and insure the re-election of Bill Clinton.  In 2000, it was the Republicans sending in The Buchanan Brigade to protect the election of George W. Bush. There were even  classic union busters threatening to break kneecaps.  All in the name of preserving the status quo–the public trough.  Today, we have third party efforts labeled subversive, potential hotbeds for domestic terrorism, and what have you.  Same thing, different decade.

To give you an example of what we can do without interference from the entrenched we go to Nashville, Tennessee.   In 1994, a group of citizens successfully petitioned for a referendum on term limits on the Nashville Metro Government Council.  The voters of Davidson County, Tennessee approved the referendum by a comfortable margin.  This effort was spearheaded by United We Stand America, a civic group founded by Ross Perot, and The Reform Party.  Three times since 1994, the Democratic Party in Davidson County has tried to overturn term limits, first by a court challenge and two times by forcing the issue on the ballot.  The heavily Democratic citizens of Davidson County Tennessee have rejected these ballot challenges, deciding every time that term limits work very well.

The primary reasons this effort was successful in Nashville – it was under the radar, there was no George Soros buying everyone in town, and the council members had scandal, corruption and incompetence issues to rile the voters.  Nashvillians were at the wall and angry.  Almost immediately, though, across the country you saw bills and laws enacted making it nearly impossible for similar efforts to succeed.  The entrenched further entrenched.

So today, we are at the brick wall,  our nation has been looted and an election influenced by bandits unknown.  The Democrats and Republicans together are responsible and we are on the verge of collapse as a nation.  What are we going to do.  We are far worse off today than 1992.  And Ross Perot isn’t crazy..he saw this coming.

Tune in to this week’s episode and you find Rush Limbaugh as the titular head of the Republican Party.  Or not.  Enter Michael Steele, who is challenging Limbaugh for the titular headship.  For comic relief, we find that Limbaugh is actually an entertainer and Steele is actually the head of the Republican National Committee.  Is this for real?

How much more embarrassing can this get?  We have an entertainer fighting with a politician for space.  I thought that only happened in the Democratic Party.  Let’s just all get suckered into this tacky DLC strategy and self-destruct on CNN.  Maybe even mud wrestling to determine the winner.

Limbaugh goes too far and to hang our hats on his rack is a mistake.  Steele goes too far the other way and needs a dip in the cold pool for a sanity check.   We are doing so much damage with this brainless exhibition.  All this while our house of cards, created by yet another cast of buffoons, cascades into a terminal tsunami.

Will a real leader please stand up?

I’ve been really suspicious of this “Perfect Storm” scenario of a cratering housing market, wipe-out stock market, wildly gyrating oil prices and Russian gamesmanship. I do not think any of this is accidental. The timing couldn’t have been better to create an earthquake in the American economy and political landscape.

We’ve had a bunch of national security wonks crafting theoretical models to game the system – including the financial system. They’ve commented often enough since 9/11 that a prime target is the US financial system. Well, game over. It’s been done. With the full cooperation of Congress, Wall Street and world markets. Can this masterful meltdown me traced solely to Wall Street greed, or did we have a little help from our “friends”? You decide. I think this was planned. Thank God for good ole American capitalist greed and goverrnment (Congress) intervention in the subprime housing market. It was a necessary ingredient in the perfect storm. And it seems some of our “friends” saw an opening and now the rest is history.

I don’t know if this guy, Shah Gilani, is a kook, or if there is something to his prognostications. But I am very alarmed. Here’s what he has to say about derivitives:

Some might consider financial derivatives to be a form of “Russian Roulette” that’s played for fun and extreme levels of short-run profit by a very small number of financial elites and academics. As you’ll see, these high-stakes games are played at the potential risk of total destruction of all the functioning financial systems on Earth. Perhaps this is why Warren Buffett repeatedly calls them “financial weapons of mass destruction” or something similar.

I have a great deal of respect for the opinions of both Mr. Soros and Mr. Buffett and it is my intention to show you; 1. Why they feel as they do about derivatives and 2. the potential scale of the threat posed by derivatives and other similar forms of “financial innovation”.

To help gain a “big picture” understanding of derivatives markets, one must start with a diagram. Here’s one I created to help lay the groundwork to convey my understanding:

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/images/2008/stable-financial-model.png

There is a sobering preview of things to come in this article.

I’m wondering if the Market Oracle is trying to give us heart attacks, or if there is more truth to their predictions than alarmist rhetoric. An analysis of government intervention is here.

Can we get out of this without massive unrest and upheaval?

Mitt Romney, what do you think? I mean, what do you really think.

I want to know what happened to Sheldon Adelson. Who holds his paper? What went wrong there? He is a friend to conservatives. Where are the wealthy liberal benefactors going belly up?

What or who is manipulating the stock market?

This is all just too convenient. Looks like everyone was complicit in something tawdry.

I still want some heads. No, I’m not mad, I just want to get even.

This is a bad situation and correcting our election mistakes and focusing on 2010 elections just seems to be more fiddling while Rome is definitely ablaze. More drastic action is needed.

My friend, James Hooker, is never at a loss for emotion on 9/11. Enjoy his thoughts.

Things are seared in my memory about that day like no other event in my lifetime. I was driving to work after a business breakfast. I happened to notice the sky was filled with planes seemingly in a holding pattern on approach to the commercial airport. I was stunned at the numbers of planes and thought I had missed a major event in the works. Unusual for someone in the news business to miss something. I was listening to a tape and not the radio, so I was unaware of any breaking news.

I get to my office to find everyone gathered around the television sets. Only then did I learn what had happened. I remember hearing someone say that there was a plane heading to either the Naval Academy or Camp David and I felt as if someone had knocked all the air out of my lungs. One of my children was a Midshipman at the Naval Academy. For the next hour, I experienced a small measure of what the victims’ families felt, the hell of not knowing. It could have been much different for me as we later learned that the Naval Academy was one of their top ten targets.

For a very long time afterward, and even now, I worried about my family in the military. It has forever changed how we look at the world. Our sense of peace and safety is undeniably violated.

Many of my friends and business associates experienced the same shattering of peace. One of my major healthcare clients was attending an investor conference in New York at the World Trade Center. They were staying in the Marriott at WTC, and were scheduled to begin the conference at 9:00 EDT. They had gone in a group for breakfast a few blocks away, and were returning to WTC when all hell broke loose. Talk about change. They lost all of their belongings in the destruction, but thankfully not their lives.

For the better part of the morning, they wandered around in the chaos. Finally, they found a minibus driver and persuaded him, for a significant sum, to drive them the nearly one thousand miles back to their company headquarters. They’ve never been the same.

The paradigm of what is possible is changed. We can’t underestimate what any enemy will do.

Now, I’ll bet money if you contact Google they will tell you that their search is pristine and can’t be manipulated. I remember when I did a Google search on Bush lied. That is when I knew Google was a whore for the left. Sorry about the language, but after today’s news cycle, I am testy.

The frenzy to throw dirt, to disable an opponent, is wildly out of control. Somewhere along the way, the criminally insane have started running giant media concerns, public relations agencies, and campaigns.

For example, take today’s serving of candidate stew. Fox News is reporting from Alaska this week. Greta Von Susteren is in Anchorage and Wasilla doing serious investigative journalism for On the Record. She mentioned tonight that she has run into six National Enquirer reporters scouring the state for “dirt” on Palin, as well as operatives from the Democratic Party and every major news outlet in the country. Greta went on to say that she has not found anyone with a negative opinion about Palin. She offered that, to her knowledge, the National Enquirer has found no dirt. One of the comments that struck me was that everyone was up there looking for dirt, except Fox News, doing its job producing a balanced story.

So far, the news(and I use that term loosely) we have been fed about Sarah Palin has ranged from outright lies about a baby, to a non-scandal about a non-existent affair, to yet another non-scandal about expenses, to a spin story about a jet not really sold on Ebay.

And we now have lunatic foreigners on our soil participating during awards shows, and a British Prime Minister telling us who to elect.

This is tragic for our country. We, the voters, are responsible for this. We pay all of these salaries by our consumption or vote. It’s time we exercise some control. I have had enough.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A Note To My Readers
09 Sep 2008 01:00 pm
Thank you for your many emails of concern. For the record, I’m absolutely fine, nothing has changed with this blog, no one is pressuring me to write or not write anything, and I spent part of the day yesterday with my husband soaking up the last moments of summer together.
Permalink :: TrackBacks (0)

Who writes his commentary? By definition, a husband is a male married to a woman. Andrew can’t change history.

He starts out innocently enough, talking about how uniquely American this election is, how “lovable” this has turned out, what with the “American Rainbow” and the four “American Rebels”. Then, he turns vicious on Sarah Palin. Get this:

It’s a refreshingly upside-down composite picture: The African American candidate is the most conventional of the lot, with his Columbia-Harvard pedigree and his elegant Princeton-Harvard wife and their picture-perfect children. It’s the gal from Alaska, Sarah Palin, who reminds us of how messy the real world is, with her special-needs child passed from hand to hand, her pregnant teenage daughter and the hockey-star boyfriend/father who looks, weirdly, like he just won the lottery.

And this:

I’m sorry, but this is an American family portrait I like. I know all the reasons to be worried. Palin is breathtakingly unqualified to be president, and the idea that we would have someone in the White House who wants to overturn science and teach creationism in our public schools is, well, terrifying. McCain is too old and too prone to zingers to be an ideal commander in chief, his bravery and sense of honor notwithstanding. We need a president who knows how to settle conflicts honorably, as opposed to starting new ones.

And then there is this, the “insults” heaped upon the Democrats:

As for the Democrats, they’re vulnerable, too. The rap that Obama is a charismatic celebrity has traction because in some ways it’s true: He takes sang-froid a step too far; he is so cool he’s unnerving; and it’s still too hard to be sure how he would govern as president. The most normal of the lot is Biden — how odd is that, that the lifelong senator would be the average Joe?

I don’t need to analyze this for you Red Staters. This is what the MSM calls journalism.

Something must be akilter in the media vs. real world. The frenzy denying media bias is now almost as pervasive as the media bias. Take this column from Chuck Raasch.

Chuck is a Gannett writer. His column appeared in The Tennessean today with this headline: Charges of media bias are off base. So of course, I shot off a correcting email.

I directed Mr. Raasch to the AP article about Sarah Palin wherein his newspaper edited out the positive and changed the headline of the original article. Just one small example, but The Tennessean is my daily hair shirt of media bias for the local scene.

The real mystery is why can’t these guys detect media bias and why they think a teenager’s pregnancy is legitimate fodder for attack?

Rotten, and they can’t smell it.

As yet another indication of the over-the-top Obamania, the group that recorded “Barracuda” is whining over use of their song at the Republican National Convention. Cease and desist even. Sony involved even. Want some cheese with that whine?

Coupled with Oprah’s fear of Palinmania, and outright ban so far of any appearance on her show, I really think its time to get the FEC involved. Like that would do any good, ha.

Contrast this with the gracious response of Brooks & Dunn and writer Don Cook when Obama stole Bush’s campaign song to conclude the Sermon on the Mount:

Gracious Conservatives

Since they buy the feed and the stories, they get to edit to their liking. The Gannett version left out the last five sentences, in effect, editing out every positive comment.

Here is the full AP version:

BY MATT APUZZO
WASHINGTON — With the speech of her life looming tonight, a burst of new revelations has raised more questions about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and how carefully she was scrutinized by the McCain campaign.

For one thing, it was reported that she accepted at least $4,500 in campaign contributions in the same fund-raising scheme at the center of a corruption scandal that led to the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens.

The contributions, made during Palin’s failed 2002 bid to become Alaska’s lieutenant governor, were not illegal for her to accept. But they show how Palin, a self-proclaimed champion for clean government, has been part of a political system in Alaska that now is under the cloud of an ongoing FBI investigation.

It’s the latest in a string of disclosures that has raised questions about whether John McCain’s presidential campaign sufficiently investigated the background of Palin, 44, a governor new to the national stage.

Palin stunned delegates at the GOP convention Monday when she announced through the McCain campaign that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant.

With the convention still abuzz, the list of potentially embarrassing details grew Tuesday:

• Palin sought pork-barrel projects for her city and state, contrary to her reformer image.

• Her husband once belonged to a fringe political group in Alaska with some members supporting secession from the United States. Palin herself never registered as a member of the party.

• A private attorney is authorized to spend $95,000 to defend her against accusations of abuse of power.

• She has acknowledged smoking marijuana.

And this: Bristol Palin’s boyfriend, Levi Johnston, plans to join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the convention.

McCain said Tuesday ”the vetting process was completely thorough.”

Campaign advisers said Palin filled out a survey with 70 questions including: Have you ever paid for sex? Have you been faithful in your marriage? Have you ever used or purchased drugs? Have you ever downloaded pornography?

McCain’s aides maintained that Palin was a finalist from the start.

But a senior Republican familiar with the search said Palin had all but fallen from the radar until late in the summer when McCain — apparently unsatisfied with his working list — asked for more alternatives.

Suddenly, she was a finalist.

When she was introduced as McCain’s running mate last week, Palin portrayed herself as a political maverick in McCain’s mold: ”I’ve stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies and the ‘good old boy’ network,” she said.

In the brief piece, the author quotes Professor of Law Robert Bennett,

“The Electoral College is badly out of date,” he said. “There are some land mines in the process that could do a lot of damage if they exploded.”

Wow, I thought. We’ve been teetering on the abyss for 232 years. Better look under the hood. The author cites Bennett’s book* “Taming the Electoral College”* as a font of information on this messy Electoral College conundrum in case you want to find out where they’re headed with this.

Apparently the real angst is the 2000 election. Bennett, according to the author of Rethinking the Electoral College promoted an idea after the 2000 election called a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, where the states must decide that their electoral votes go to the winner of the nationwide popular vote rather than the statewide popular vote.

According to Benito, four states have signed onto the compact. One of them is Illinois.

Disturbing to see our higher education system tampering with the design of the founding fathers to such a degree.

It’s pretty condescending to conclude that Sarah Palin is any less qualified than Barack Obama. I look forward to this debate.

Here’s a sample from My Man Mitt:

Let’s review the minefield that Team Obama/Biden must navigate with Palin on board. Palin has more executive experience than Obama himself (having run a company, a PTO, a town and then Alaska). WARNING: Bring up the experience issue at your own peril. SAMPLE: “When Senator Obama started his first run for local office I was already a two-term mayor. If you simply count the years of experience, I win, frankly.”