January 29, 2005 - We are consistent in our misunderstanding. We confuse elections with democracy and democracy with responsible responsive government. As we observe the results of the makeshift electoral process being spun out in Iraq we should remind ourselves of our own history. It is not long ago in this country that had the question of strict segregation of the races been submitted to the electorate a proposition excluding Black Americans would have carried overwhelmingly. It is not that long ago that the people’s elected representatives in State after State reinforced the social acceptability of overt bigotry in America. Freedom and Liberty were then absentee values in this Constitutional Republic and too often remain conspicuously absent today....click here for entire article.

January 25, 2005 - 48 million Americans receive a Social Security check each month. For one third of them that check is 90% or more of their income that month. For another third the figure is 50% or more. For only one third of the 41 million will other income from investments, private pensions, or continued work exceed the amount of their benefit checks. Each month Social Security payments pump $41.5 Billion to fuel the consumer economic engine. As those dollars are spent they generate 7 times that amount in economic activity. Economists call it the “multiplier effect”. That is what we are talking about “reforming”.....click here for entire article.

January 22, 2005 - On Friday the Bush Administration reinforced the trend transferring medical decisions managing chronic illnesses from patients and their doctors to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. It did so when it published the final rules that will govern the 41 million people covered by Medicare when the new drug benefit goes into effect on January 1, 2006. Under the rules insurers providing coverage under the plan will establish a list – called a formulary – of preferred drugs and may refuse to pay for medicines not on the list. Insurers are required to provide what the rules call “adequate coverage” for drugs treating the chronic conditions of age including high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease. A formulary must include at least two drugs for each condition. The rules do not designate specific drugs that must be includes in the formulary but Medicare officials say that the rules do permit the bureaucrats to designate specific drugs that will be identified in the future....click here for entire article.

January 21, 2005 - Freedom!  Liberty! Those are words that stir action in times that try men’s souls.  But what do they really mean?  A man dressed in knee britches and a cravat seated at a mahogany desk in an elegant mansion in Western Virginia wielding his goose quill desk in a battle of words had one meaning in mind when he wrote.  Those words had another meaning in the cabins of Montpelier’s servants’ quarters.   Those words had quite different meanings to each of two men born just months and miles apart in the hills of Kentucky – they meant one thing to the Mississippi planter and quite a different thing the Illinois lawyer who each led his people to war in their defense.  Freedom and liberty are quite different things to a single mother eking out a living on the hospital housekeeping staff and to the cardiac surgeon’s wife planning her daughter’s wedding....click here for entire article.

January 19, 2005 - How much torture is permissible to extend the blessings of liberty to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Waterboarding seems to be permitted – at least permissible if used by the CIA against aliens overseas. Stacking naked and hooded detainees up for the cameras apparently crosses the line if you are a Reserve MP non-com. Beyond Waterboarding we don’t know how much torture is permitted because, as Alberto Gonzalez told the Senate today in his written response to questions, if we say what interrogation techniques we consider to be torture then the enemy will know what torture is and that may strengthen their anti-interrogation training to resist it.

We used to know what torture was. That was when THEY were the torturers and we decried the use of torture on humane and moral grounds. THEY were the Nazi supermen of the SS and the Gestapo. THEY were the Godless Communists of the KGB in the USSR behind the Iron Curtain. WE were the moral people dedicated to a nation Under God. What degree of torture is it that God tells us is godly?....click here for entire article

January 15, 2005 - The sticker price of a college education just went up 7% in Illinois yesterday. The University Of Illinois Board Of Trustees raised tuition, fees, and room and board in a University dorm to $15, 278.00 per year. That doesn’t include luxuries like clothing, transportation, books, equipment and supplies. Those cost extra. The Board called it the “sticker price” because many students receive financial aid to assist them in meeting the costs of going to school. That increase is made necessary because Illinois is not able to increase its state spending on higher education. The state is still digging itself out of the fiscal hole that the Ryan administration and the Bush economy left it in two years ago.

The President of the United States, exhibiting his compassion for the left behinders in our society, proposed yesterday to increase the maximum Pell grant to needy college student from the present $4,050 to $4,500 per year – gradually, of course, as befits a fiscal conservative reaching the higher figure in 2010. What generosity in the face of new eligibility regulations adopted by the Bush Department of Education that will reduce the number of students receiving Pell grants by 20%. That reduction in the program will produce part of the spending savings that make it possible to let parents whose children don’t need Pell Grants keep more of their money at tax time....click here for entire article

January 14, 2005 - There are millions of us; people of faith who do not believe that God commands us to bar the door against any of His children. There are millions of us; people of faith who do not believe that we have been called by God to create a just society by cleansing it of dissenting voices. There are millions of us; people of faith who believe that God calls us to serve Him by lifting up the least of His children; by clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and sheltering the homeless. There are millions of us; people of faith who believe that God commands us to love our neighbor with outstretched hands and not with raised fists. There are millions of us; people of faith who believe that when torture is used in our name it is a moral issue; that when people are cast into perpetual prison without trial it is a moral issue; that when we value a rich man’s gold more than the widow’s mite it is a moral issue.

When we are willing to ignore our promise that our neighbors will enter old age insured against want so that the money changers of Wall Street may prosper, then that is a moral issue. When we are willing to eliminate programs to lift up the least of our neighbors that we may spend billions to beat an alien people down it is a moral issue....click here for entire article

January 13, 2005 - For those of us who grew from childhood surrounded by the tales of Nazi brutality and the cruelty of the Communists our country was the humane example to the world of what a democratic society could be. Behind the walls of Gestapo headquarters, in the dank cells of KGB prisons men and women were tortured. Enemy prisoners in America custody were treated humanely. That dichotomy drew the distinction between what they were and what we strived to be. They represented the cruelty of repressive, totalitarian regimes. We represented the promise of mankind’s better instincts returning, as we were taught, good for evil. That national naiveté began to erode when tales of tiger cages in the jungles and the bitter amenities of the Hanoi Hilton were balanced by the images of prisoners thrown by helicopters at 3,000 feet as an interrogation technique. Watching that kind of death focuses the survivor’s mind most wonderfully.

Congressional conferees this week stripped out language that would prohibit America’s intelligence agencies from torturing prisoners. The White House opposed the measure as it had opposed an earlier provision that would have prohibited the military from using torture. The scrapped language authored by Illinois Senator Dick Durban was opposed because it would have applied to the treatment of such high level detainees as Abu Zubaydah seized in Pakistan in 2002. Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) one of the conferees said, "If there are special circumstances around some intelligence interrogations, we should understand that before we legislate."....click here for entire article

January 8, 2005 - "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State." James Madison the Federalist Papers # 45.

“CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich., Jan. 8 - President Bush concluded a week of campaigning to overhaul the nation's civil justice system on Friday by urging swift Congressional approval of legislation that would sharply limit the steadily growing number of lawsuits by workers and others who claim to have been injured from asbestos.” New York Times, January 8, 2005. The President thus concluded his one week campaign to alter the nation’s legal system that he commenced in Collinsville, Illinois on Monday. In Collinsville his target was medical liability lawsuitst....click here for entire article

January 4, 2005 - Can America afford to borrow $350 Million for the Southeast Asian people whose lives have been devastated by Mother Nature’s vivid reminder that it is she that rules the planet? I use the word “borrow” instead of “spend” because in the Bush economy every new dollar of government spending is borrowed money. This month the Administration will ask the Republican controlled Congress to borrow another $100 Billion to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – wars that have already claimed almost as many lives as Mother Nature took last week and promise to take more. The Congress will also consider changing the formula by which American workers Social Security benefits are calculated so as to cut back the benefits the United States promised by one third. It is the first step to borrowing $1 Trillion to siphon off 4 percent of Social Security revenues to Wall Street. In that context borrowing a paltry $350 Million seems insignificant....click here for entire article