The Blog

Huff Radio: Left, Right & Center: The Fort Hood Shooting, Unemployment Rising, GOP Victories, Health Care

2009-11-07T23:20:31Z

The Fort Hood tragedy: the shooter's Muslim faith, military education and his work as a psychiatrist treating vets with PTSD.

Unemployment reaches 10.2 percent: Do we need a bigger stimulus? What do the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey mean for both parties? Finally, the House's historic health care bill: will it pass and if so, why wait until 2013 to implement it?

Rep. Earl Blumenauer: Another Reason We Will Win!

2009-11-07T21:24:17Z

Last night I had planned to leave the office early to read and get a little extra sleep before the big health care day. I am reading Fighting Bob La Follette’s biography, at the suggestion of Fighting Dave Obey, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Around 10:30, my phone rings. “Are you available to talk to the Speaker?” Of course! There is a long pause. And then an even longer pause. Our Speaker is working the phones at 10:30 at night, and I suspect I’m not going to be the last call.

An apology that it’s taking so long.

Speaker Pelosi comes on, apologizing to me for calling so late!

While she comes to the point of her call, it is done in a thoughtful and gracious manner, as if she has all the time in the world to discuss the matter. Luckily, by absolute chance, the last item I had worked with before leaving the office was just what she wished to discuss – health reform. I feel like a fourth grader proudly racing through the times table at the front of the class, or more accurately, being called on in law school to explain a case on one of those rare occasions where I had actually briefed it the day before. I feel a mixture of pride and relief.

The Speaker continues, and I am compelled to ask if there is any other way I can help in her efforts. She responds with three suggestions that are appropriate to my skill set. She concludes on a positive and gracious note and is quickly off the line to the next of, what I imagine is an endless list of calls and meetings. As she moves onto her next assignment, I am brought back to the present and the historic day ahead.

I am thinking about the stunning gap between the image of the sad screamers on the Mall during the week, with the strangest and cruelest depictions with harsh words and how it contrasts with the leadership I have seen exhibited in this House. Despite the most intense pressure ever inflicted on a person in leadership and her office, and with dire national circumstances, the Speaker has lead with determination.

Much has been made of our new President inheriting the most difficult set of circumstance of, perhaps, any president in history; two wars, an economy in freefall handed off to him and 12 consecutive months of job losses. What is not appreciated is that those same set of circumstance that face our President are also Speaker Pelosi’s set of challenges.

She has the task of managing the House of Representatives, the cornerstone of legislative activity, the People’s House. The Senate remains a mystery, even to the Senator’s themselves due to the impact of special interests wildly magnified, the role of a handful of politicians representing a tiny percentage of America, and greatly exaggerated by rule, convention and the structure.

And, for the first time in modern history, Speaker Pelosi has assumed her position with a complete collapse of responsible Republican participation. John Boehner famously declared last winter, shortly after the House geared up for operations, that since they couldn’t impose their will and get their way, it was decided that they were not going to be legislators; they were going to be communicators. They have communicated, in the most inflammatory and unproductive manner. Despite the personal attacks and the pressure, the Speaker continues to have much more favorable rating than Mr. Boehner. Despite the fact that some of her negatives are from the other side of the spectrum by those who wish that she would have been more aggressive and more dramatic in her approach to health reform, she continues to move this country forward.

We have begun what may be a long day or a long weekend to take one of the most important steps in healthcare and government action in history, probably more meaningful than the decision to have government organized and paid-for health care for our seniors or, 44 years ago, government health care for our veterans. This may be even more critical.

It’s time for reform. Let’s get this done. Millions of people have no health insurance and are suffering. The federal budget will be bankrupt if we don’t modernize Medicare. Our families are strugging in these difficult economic times, which means more and more will lose their increasingly inadequate and expensive insurance if we don’t act.

I began this day feeling encouraged and optimistic; encouraged because this year we have put together the most comprehensive health reform in history, despite the pressures. Optimistic because amongst all the leaders that I have been able to work with who have invested so much in this process, there is a Speaker who is tireless, focused, idealistic and pragmatic and is committed to do whatever is humanly possible – and maybe some things that aren’t – to deliver for the American people.

Geoffrey Dunn: Palin Usurped "Concession" Speech

2009-11-07T20:22:24Z

In their new book Sarah From Alaska, Shushannah Walshe and Scott Conroy have provided drafts of two versions of a speech that vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin was to have delivered on Election Night 2008 in Phoenix--if only John McCain and his top brass, including Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter, had allowed her to do so.

Headlines reporting the story in the Los Angeles Times declared "Sarah Palin's Speeches Were Ready but Never Seen -- Until Now," while ABC posted its story as "Sarah Palin's Never-Heard Concession, Victory Speeches."

While Palin did not deliver her concession speech on election night, she did, in fact, deliver most of it, nearly verbatim, only eight days later at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association on November 13 in Miami, Florida.

Here are two examples:

Concession: My fellow Americans, tens of millions of you shared our convictions and gave us your votes. And I thank you for your confidence. For us, it was not our time ... not our moment. But it is our country ... the winner will be our president ... and I wish Barack Obama well as the 44th president of the United States.

RGA: Tens of millions of Americans shared our convictions and they gave us their votes. ... But for us, it was not our time. It was not our moment. But it is our country. And the winner will be our President. And I wish Barack Obama well as the 44th President of the United States.

***

Concession: I will remember all the young girls who came up to me to our rallies, sometimes taking off from school, just to see only the second woman ever nominated by a major party in a national election.

RGA: For years to come, I'm going to remember all the young girls who came up to me at rallies to see the first woman having the privilege of carrying our party's VP nomination.

Walshe and Conroy spin a fascinating account how Palin's concession speech, crafted by former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully and his associate Lindsay Hayes, became a final skirmish in what had become an ugly and open civil war between the McCain and Palin camps during the GOP campaign. It got so bad, according to Walshe and Conroy, that Schmidt ordered the lights be turned off on Palin, fearing that she would still try to deliver the speech and steal McCain's final dignity from him at the close of the campaign.

Palin clearly built her remarks at the RGA around those crafted by Scully and Hayes, whose salaries as speechwriters were paid for by the Committee to Elect John McCain. Virtually every thought or phrase in the Scully-Hayes concession speech made their way into Palin's RGA remarks. While Scully acknowledged that he was aware of their use, Palin did not notify McCain's top senior advisors that she was going to be hijacking these remarks at the RGA (one told me that he was completely unaware), even though they had been paid for by the campaign.

While Palin made a number of small changes to the original concession speech and added many additional comments to her RGA remarks, there was one significant change that she made in the eight days after they were crafted. The original read:

And when a black citizen prepares to fill the office of Washington and Lincoln, that is a shining moment in our history that can be lost on no one.

In Miami she removed what, in the original context, was a rather awkwardly constructed, if not disturbing, racialized reference to Obama, to:

And as he prepares to fill the office of Washington and Lincoln, know that this is a shining moment in American history.

Few people beyond Scully probably were aware that Palin had incorporated the remarks into the RGA speech. "[Palin] was so polarizing," Walshe and Conroy conclude in what is an otherwise surprisingly empathetic portrait of Palin, "that she inspired a civil war within her own campaign during the final days before the election."

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin's Press in spring 2010.

Scott Atran: A Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss

2009-11-07T20:13:21Z

In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said "talk to these people and see if they'll meet." So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof. Margaret licked her lips and laughed: "Well, that's his look, aloof and frail, but he's more playful than he lets on and he'll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you."

I ran from La Bastille to the College de France on Rue des Ecoles and up the steps to knock on his door. He opened it, saw the sweat running down my face and, asked rather coldly: "Monsieur, que'est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?" I said I was an anthropology student from America and had a bunch of questions for him. He was gracious but distant and said, "Ask two."

First, I asked him why he believed binary operators to be one of the fundamental structures of the human mind. He shrugged and sighed and then replied:

When I started there was still no science of mind.

Saussure, Marx, Mauss and music were my guides. Since then things have changed. Psychology now has something to say.

Then, I asked him why he became an anthropologist and he said:

I wanted to be a musician but having no talent I read philosophy and wanted to find out how different one human being's thoughts could be from another and how much of that difference is truly the same. In Brazil, an opportunity came to try to find out, and I am still trying.

He dabbed his nose with a handkerchief, rose from his chair in that regal, crane-like manner of his, thanked me for coming and started walking me back to the door, when I turned to him and said. "Margaret Mead te dit bonjour." His dour demeanor turned into a child's joy. "Would you like to come home to dinner with now?" he asked, with a lightness that belonged to another person, another time. I declined with some idiot excuse because I still stank from running. But I asked him if he would join the discussion with Chomsky, Piaget and the others that I had forgotten to tell him about until then. "Yes," he said kindly, "just tell me when."

At the discussion, which took place over the course of a few days at the Abbaye de Royaumont outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss sat patiently, said nothing as others spoke their piece or pontificated, or pleaded and shouted their oppositions. But his doodles of cats and other real and fantastical animals were stunning, and those he left behind were the objects of a fierce competition among some of the conference's participants, including myself. On the way to our last lunch, Noam Chomsky ─ who had dominated this conference of Nobel-prize winning biologists and world-famous mathematicians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists as I have never seen anyone do before or after ─ walked up to Lévi-Strauss and said in a shy sort of way: "Perhaps you remember me, when I sat in on your class at Harvard with Roman Jakobson?" Lévi-Strauss looked at Chomsky and said: "I'm sorry, but no." Those were the only words he would utter in the conference room.

In an interview the following year, Levi-Strauss was asked what recent intellectual developments he considered to be important. He said that what had transpired at Royaumont was the most significant intellectual event he had thus far encountered in the second half of the twentieth century. He also implied that his time was over: "I imagine myself in the New World with Columbus for the first time," he mused, "a symphony of sounds, of colors, of smells, of desires, and of hopes. Then I imagine myself on the moon with the astronauts, and all I see is gray, dust and barren rocks, and the earth I long for is far out of reach."

Jane Hamsher: NARAL and Planned Parenthood: Ineffectiveness Anti-Choice Democrats Can Rely On

2009-11-07T20:10:58Z

Democrats in Congress have just proudly signed a deal with the Catholic bishops which allows a bunch of old men who have spent the better part of the last century avoiding their own sexual issues to dictate access to abortion services in the House health care bill.

No tax dollars were going to go to pay for abortions, mind you, but now insurance companies that participate in the exchange can't even cover them, thanks to Democrat Bart Stupak. FDL's Jon Walker explains how it works:

If the insurance companies offering plans on the exchange are not allowed to turn down any costumers, it means no basic insurance plan on the exchange could cover abortion. There would be no way to prevent that at least one of the plan’s costumer would be be using affordability tax credits to help purchase the plan. So the effect is no plan sold on the exchange could offer abortion coverage as part of its basic package.

But this isn't news. On July 1, Stupak wrote a letter signed by 19 Democrats saying they would do just what they're doing right now -- holding the bill hostage. And what did NARAL and Planned Parenthood do? Well, they released a lot of statements echoing the President's contention that the bill contained no abortion funding. But that was never Stupak's objection.

The floor of the House is now filled with ostensibly pro-choice Democrats like Rosa DeLauro and Anna Eshoo who don't seem to have noticed there's a problem here (Eshoo was probabaly too busy selling breast cancer survivors out to PhRMA). Honorary veal pen President Jan Schakowsky says, and I kid you not, "this is a great day for women."

Really? Here's Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

If this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have coverage for the procedure.

Yet these women use their gender to give glowing testament to just how great this bill is for women across America. And they'll pay no price.

Why? Because helping the Democrats stay in power by giving them the Official Good Gyno Seal of Approval is what NARAL and Planned Parenthood do -- even when those Democrats do things like voting for Samuel Alito and tell rape victims to take a cab to another hospital if they want to get Plan B contraception.

Could they whip the pro-choice women to block the rule if they want to? Of course they could. Yank their endorsements and they could cause havoc within the Democratic Party. But they won’t, because Nancy Keenan and Cecile Richards value their own personal position in the veal pen pecking order WAY too much to take that risk. For them, what's good for the Democratic Party is good for choice, even when the party abandons them.

One of the things that made a fight for a public option possible was because there were no “veal pen” validators occupying the health care space. Nobody knows who HCAN is. The White House tried to press the unions and other veal pen groups into service weakening the health care bill to get Republican support, but progressives standing there ready to shoot on sight made othersback away for fear of losing their own progressive credibility.

People think the “veal pen” phenomenon is insignificant, but it’s not. The abortion fight — like the environmental fight — is extremely difficult to wage online, because you can’t activate those who care about the issue if the “brand names,” the issue validators, are telling them everything is fine either by action or inaction. And that’s exactly what the Democrats — from the White House on down to Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership — want right now.

But let’s be clear about this. The only reason that we are in the position where the price of passing health care reform is allowing even liberal Marcy Kaptur to sneeringly dismiss choice activists as narrow class warriors who don’t care about working women is because Planned Parenthood and NARAL have allowed it to happen. They collect millions of dollars in revenue each year. They’ve exacted no price from the Marcy Kapturs of the world, who actually have to care what liberals think of them, and focused instead on anti-choice Republicans who are only empowered by their ire. They have no scalps. There is no price for crossing Planned Parenthood and NARAL. It isn’t a fight that the Democrats want to spend “political capital” on, and these groups insure that they don’t have to.

Forget about the fact that more Americans are now anti-choice than pro-choice for the first time since Gallup has been polling the issue. More and more Democrats in Congress each year are anti-choice. It’s acceptable now. These groups have the lobbyists, the money, the access, and their leadership uses it for their own personal advancement while the cause they purport to defend withers on the vine.

The national Planned Parenthood organization listed $126 million in assets in 2007. Cecile Richards made $385,163 (PDF). The state chapters whose employees put their lives on the line so women can have the right to choose deserve support and protection within the Democratic party that she is not providing.

NARAL paid Nancy Keenan $145,538 from the Foundation (PDF) in 2007, which listed total assets of $4,119,329.

If they really cared about going after Stupak or Kaptur as a lesson to the rest, they most certainly have the resources to do it. Stupak's donors include a lot of PACS that have a heavy investment in consumer branding that appeals to women, companies like Amazon and Ford and Herbalife and Siemens, Sprint and T-Mobile and UPS and Verizon who don't want to be known for financing Stupak's anti-abortion activism.

One can only imagine what would happen if pro-choice supporters started calling them. In short, Stupak and his fellow anti-abortion demagogues within the Democratic Party only get away with this because NARAL and Planned Parenthood let them.

Rep. Patrick Murphy: Why We Can't Afford to Fail: A Blue Dog for Reform

2009-11-07T19:46:12Z

A woman from Bucks County recently lost her job as a copy editor, and the small business her husband works for is unable to afford coverage for their employees. She tried shopping around on her own for a plan but was turned down by insurance companies because of a pre-existing condition she recently discovered: she is pregnant.

Instead of celebrating the news, she and her husband are terrified about how they will afford all of her pre-natal and maternity care bills without any health care coverage. I support health insurance reform because, in a great nation like ours, this should never happen.

Over the past eight months, I've spoken and met with thousands of constituents - doctors, patients, small business owners, folks with insurance and those without - about this bill. After hearing their thoughts and after careful consideration of the bill, I am proud to support this historic and crucial piece of legislation.

First, this bill prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition. What does this mean? If your job offers insurance, you can get coverage regardless of your health status. But if you lose your job, aren't offered coverage through work, or are unemployed and need to buy your own insurance, you can be denied coverage because you're pregnant or have high blood pressure, cancer, or diabetes. An insurer can charge higher rates because of those conditions, or for a host of other reasons, including being female or a victim of domestic violence. Reform would put a stop to this.

Many folks who have insurance report that they are happy with it, but too often that coverage is taken away just when it is needed most. Today, an insurer can look for any excuse to kick you off your plan if you become "too expensive." For example, an insurer could comb through your records, find a bout of acne that you forgot to report, and terminate your plan. Reform eliminates this practice, known as rescission, giving Americans security knowing their coverage cannot be taken away.

What about folks on Medicare? AARP has endorsed the bill, stating that after careful consideration, they are confident that this bill expands and protects benefits provided for seniors and retirees.

Opponents of reform have aimed their worst scare tactics at seniors, claiming that the bill includes everything from death panels to euthanasia. In fact, reform provides the help that Medicare needs to continue providing health care for seniors today and for generations to come. We will finally close the Medicare "donut hole" that leaves seniors paying thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for prescription drugs. Seniors will have access to lower cost drugs, too, as the government will be allowed to negotiate with manufacturers to get better deals on medications. And, seniors will have free preventive care services to help them stay healthy and active.

Finally, as a member of the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs, I believe this is an opportunity our nation cannot afford to miss. Everyone has heard the statistics on our health care spending, but I believe a few bear repeating. The American people and their government spend a staggering amount of money on health care - over 17% of our country's entire economic output. Small businesses have seen their health care costs rise 130% in the last decade, cutting into profits and stifling their ability to grow and hire new workers. And premiums for American families have more than doubled in that time, rising four times faster than wages.

This bill lowers health insurance costs for families, individuals, and small businesses and puts our spending on a fiscally sustainable path. As the MIT economist Jonathan Gruber pointed out, premiums will be lower for families and individuals, not just for those who qualify for federal subsidies, but even for those who do not. According to Mr. Gruber, a family making $93,000 would make too much to qualify for financial assistance, but their premiums would still be $1260 - or 12% - less than under current law.

Further, the bill meets a fundamental requirement I stated at the beginning of this debate: that the bill does not add a dime to our federal deficit. In fact, H.R. 3962 actually goes beyond deficit-neutrality, reducing the deficit by $129 billion. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, which will see millions of new paying customers, have committed to contribute hundreds of billions in savings toward the cost of reform. And a large portion of the bill is paid for with a surcharge on income over one million dollars, a provision which would impact 1/3 of one percent of households.

It has been 64 years since President Truman declared before Congress that "[m]illions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health...[t]he time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection." It has been 16 years since Congress' last attempt to attain those goals. Since then, over 700,000 people have died because they lacked access to affordable health care coverage. Every day, 500 Pennsylvanians - and 14,000 people across America - lose their health insurance. We simply cannot afford to fail again.

For these reasons, I stand with the AARP, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association in strong support of this crucial, fiscally responsible and long-overdue legislation.

Alexander Vreeland: At Kawolo Hospital

2009-11-07T19:41:51Z

At Kawolo Hospital, in a suburb outside the capital of Uganda, I looked around a group of doctors, nurses, mothers and children and I found myself surrounded by people who understood my story.

Shortly after the birth of my daughter Victoria, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The second time that she got severely sick, Sandra and I immediately took her to the emergency room at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. After a preliminary examination the intern on duty told us that it looked like PCP, the AIDS pneumonia. He was right. Over the next days we discovered that Sandra, Victoria, and our older son Reed had HIV. My life changed dramatically on that fall day in 1988.

In Mukono Health Clinic #4, we sat in a cleared out maternity ward. The walls of the ward were pealing and the small windows were cracked. I shared my story with the small group that had assembled, and numerous people in the room offered us a window into their lives as well. They stood up, one after another, and in soft, broken English talked about their lives. I could relate to their stories: a tall, elegant woman in a green, tribal pattern outfit spoke about her fear of revealing her HIV status to her own family; a seventeen-year-old girl in a white and navy blue school uniform talked poignantly about choosing to change schools to avoid the social pressure and stigma that she was faced with once her classmates discovered her diagnosis; an inhibited, college-age man wearing glasses shared that he had been near death several times and that he struggled to be consistent taking his medication; a social worker talked to the group about trying to find the words to help a teenager discuss his HIV status with his girlfriend.

At the clinic I also heard the stories of those who were not able to readily express them: I saw a stunned mother, standing over her day-old twin daughters--they had just been told that they had HIV; I heard the story of a child who was caring for his mother as she was suffering from repeated cases of PCP and numerous opportunistic infections. They stood up one at a time. Most were able to speak in English, while others needed to be translated from their native tongue. Even though they were likely invited by the clinic's organizers to share with the group, I could tell from their expressions that they did not expect to be speaking to people who had actually lived very similar stories.

The stories and medical realities in these poor African Hospitals today are not so different from my first experiences in the Pediatric AIDS clinics at New York Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in the late '80s. At that time the only medicine available were capsules of AZT, and they were not yet available in children's dosages or in a child-friendly format. PCP was still a death warrant for most children. No one knew how long anyone with the virus was going to live, but we knew lists of people who were either about to pass away or had already left us.

My time in Uganda made me extremely proud of what the Foundation is doing. I can still remember attending a board meeting in the late '90s when it was announced that a research project, in part funded by the Foundation, had discovered that Nevirapine had been found to block the transmission of HIV from mother to child in about fifty percent of cases. The board embarked upon an entirely new facet of our mission. With funds from the Gates Foundation, we started to implement the treatment in the countries with the greatest need.

My concern at the time was that helping to block transmission during birth was only one small part of what we needed to do to combat the virus. It seemed inhuman to me to diagnose a mother's HIV status, help her have an HIV-free baby, and then walk away. She probably had a husband and other children who were living with HIV. They surely needed medicine, most probably counseling, and possibly even a little help to keep their kids in school.

Well today, the Foundation's program in Uganda is helping with all these issues and many more. They are confronting the complexities of this illness and bringing help to afflicted families, partly by giving families tools to help themselves.

In 1993, Alexander Vreeland founded Kids for Kids, an annual fund-raiser for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, which over the years has raised over twenty-two million dollars for HIV treatment and research. He first served on the Foundation's Advisory Board, and then joined the Board of Directors of the Foundation between 1998 and 2003. He currently lives in Paris, France with his wife, Lisa, and their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia.

Andy Borowitz: Congressmen Admit They No Longer Remember Which Health Care Bill They Are Voting On

2009-11-07T17:32:17Z

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - A new wrinkle has complicated the eleventh-hour attempt to pass a health care reform bill in Congress as a growing number of congressmen came forward today to admit that they no longer remember which bill they are voting on.

"Maybe I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I can't for the life of me remember whether this is the bill I liked or the bill I despised," said Rep. Rand DeVane (D-OH). "I'm only human."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was reportedly working around the clock to remind congressmen which bill they were voting on, but according to one aide, "Quite frankly, she's not entirely sure, either."

Memory lapses among members of congress are not uncommon, according to Professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota's School of Government: "A lot of these people can't remember if they had affairs, either."

In other news, a new poll of anti-health care protesters shows that they are really angry about not getting laid. More here.

Christina Patterson: Why Negative Thinking Makes the World a Better Place

2009-11-07T16:29:02Z

Some years ago, I went on a "positivity" course. My sister had died, my father had died, and I'd had cancer, and a broken heart, and I wasn't, quite frankly, feeling that cheerful. Perhaps, I thought, I could brainwash myself into feeling a bit better.

And so in a central London hotel, with cream walls and a blue carpet, and tables with those pump-top coffee flasks of sour filter coffee, and sad little plates of biscuits, I tried. Paul McKenna did his best. And it's worked for him! It's clearly worked for him. The man who has learnt to "turbo-charge" his brain with "the Power of a Positive Perspective" has, apparently, thought himself into being very successful (or at least very famous) and very, very rich. Assuring us that we could "Master Our Emotions and Run Our Own Brains" and "Design Our Destiny" and unlock "The Secrets to Inner Happiness and Contentment," he had us making pictures in our mind, and taking part in orchestrated laughter, as if laughter can blow the problems of the world away.

Sometimes, it can. Real, spontaneous, cheekbone-aching laughter can blow the problems of the world away, at least for a moment. But forced laughter can't and pictures can't. Or at least, they can't for me. I sat through the weekend, and drank the coffee, and ate the biscuits, and even listened to the CDs, but it didn't make any difference. I still felt sad.

It was, actually, a relief to stop trying. Just as it was a relief, when I told friends the results of the biopsy, and they looked me in the eye and told me it was awful. What wasn't a relief was the handful of people who said, "Don't worry, you'll be fine!" Oh, really? So you're psychic? Or you've secretly retrained as an oncologist? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel better?

There's a lot to be said for negative thinking. Not only because it spares people the tooth-grinding irritation of Pollyannaish predictions of eternal sunshine based on precisely nothing (and usually coupled with the aggressive assertion that they're "good") whose chief aim is to imply that you're rivals in a competition that they're winning, but simply because it makes the world a better place. It makes the world a safer place and a nicer one.

And the experts, apparently, agree. "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts," says a professor of psychology in this month's Australian Science Journal, "negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world." People "in negative mood," he concludes, can cope with more demanding situations than their sunny neighbours and are "less prone to judgmental errors, more resistant to eyewitness distortions and better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages."

Well, I could have told him that! Who started the Iraq war? A man who told Vanity Fair, after his first "election" to office, that he was "not really the type to go through deep wrestling with [his] soul," and who, in his new incarnation as a motivational speaker, told an audience at Fort Worth last week about the rug he picked out for the Oval Office to reflect his "optimism." And a man who, according to his Rottweiler-in-chief, Alastair Campbell, "had this extraordinary ability whatever was going on around him to put a smile on his face and go into his room and make people feel better about being there." But not, perhaps, the soldiers whose limbs have been blown off in the conflict, or the wives of the soldiers who've been killed, or the people in the country he set out to save, who have watched more than 100,000 of their compatriots die.

And who wrecked the global economy? Men and women (but mostly men) who sold mortgages to people with no credit rating, or savings, or sometimes even income (beyond their welfare check) and then, when it all went a bit pear-shaped, wrapped up the debt in a nice velvet ribbon and sold it on. And thought it would all be fine. It would all be fine because they said it would, and because they said it loudly, everyone believed them.

No wonder "Dr. Doom" is doing rather well, aka Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the global financial meltdown and whose economic forecasting is proving the hottest new thing in town. Bad news is the new good news as the boys who suffered a (mercifully only momentary) blip in their bonuses force themselves to listen to the boring bust stuff so they can quickly boomerang back to boom.

Some of these people, frankly, deserve to be disemboweled. Most people who are, however, don't. Of 71 patients who were, according to a recent study, because they had cancer of the colon, 41 were told that they could have surgery to reconnect their bowels while the others were told that they couldn't. The ones without hope were, apparently, much happier. They just got on with their lives. Perhaps they knew, as the Bible says, that "hope deferred makes the heart grow sick," and perhaps they knew that Dante's exhortation to the entrants of hell, to abandon all hope, was actually the key to a kind of heaven.

Tom Vander Ark: How Social Networking Will Transform Learning

2009-11-07T14:47:52Z

There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.' Leading theories focus on people, schools, policy and community. Nonprofit ecosystems develop around theories, they ebb and flow with foundation interest. Although seldom discussed, leading levers differ substantially in terms of risk and return.

People. Teach for America was an early leader in what is now commonly referred to as the Human Capital agenda in education. With increased federal and foundation attention, alternative certification programs have achieved some scale but still train a fraction of all teachers and leaders.
• Problem addressed: weak talent distribution
• Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement
• Risk: low risk especially with proven recruiting and training programs
• Return: low leverage for teacher programs (one announced this week costs $70k/placement), moderate leverage for leadership, potential for sizable impact with sustained investment over time
• Example: Advance Innovative Education, New Leaders for New Schools, New Teacher Project

Schools. Charter schools are the leading representative of the view that 'good schools will improve the system.' Proponents usually add a dose of competition and choice to theories about scaled impact. While market share in 14 communities exceeds 20%, national market share of the burgeoning new school development sector serves less than 4% of US students.
• Problem addressed: obsolete school designs with restrictive rules
• Key assumption: good schools are sticky--once they develop a constituency, they'll be around for a while
• Risk: low risk especially with proven models and operators
• Return: low-moderate leverage (funders bet on moderate returns given optimistic assumptions about competition, scale, and diffusion)
• Examples: Achievement First, Aspire, Green Dot, KIPP

Policy. A growing number of think tanks and advocacy groups are attempting to nudge the Gordian knot of policy in a slightly more positive and coherent direction.
• Problem addressed: three-tiered mess of American education policy
• Key assumption: a smart investment in advocacy can yield big returns
• Risk: high risk of little or no progress, possible unintended consequences
• Return: high leverage if successful; opportunity to change the opportunity set for millions of students
• Example: EdTrust, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Equality Project, EdSector, ConnCAN

Community. A small number of diehards attempt to organize community support or community services for better schools.
• Problem addressed: underserved communities are disenfranchised
• Key assumption: organizing creates power for change (and/or schools can't do it alone)
• Risk: transitory support and high risk of bureaucratically thwarted efforts
• Return: moderate-high leverage if support can be built around key opportunities
• Example: Communities in Schools, Parent Revolution, PICO, Parent Organizing Consortium

You could add 'data' to the lever list, but given the wide recognition of its importance, better data is usually incorporated into strategies in each category. You could add 'systems' approaches but they are usually cobbled together bundles of these four--more community for the left-leaning foundations, more choice for the right.

One problem not addressed by these theories is the lack of innovation diffusion in education--a good idea won't cross the street. Weak improvement incentives and strong bureaucracy have created a lousy marketplace for products and ideas.

In other sectors, platforms have proven to be a big lever: iTunes for music, Wal-Mart for consumer goods, Windows for computers. Platforms combine a set of technologies--including some we didn't know we needed that instantly become indispensable--into a disruptive value engine.

I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement.

In the coming decade, most middle and high schools will adopt some version of 1:1 technology, online learning will play an increasing role, and learning experiences will be conducted and coordinated on social learning platforms. While adoption won't be simple and smooth, it will cut through the typical barriers that block other reforms.

The platforms that get big will have a business model behind them. Foundations will contribute to niche platforms and apps, but the big platforms will be dot coms not dot orgs. There's no stopping it and that's the beauty of disruptive innovation.

Tara Stiles: Relaxation: The Art of Doing Nothing (VIDEO)

2009-11-07T12:00:00Z

Our minds are occupied with so many useless thoughts that cause tension. When we try to relax we aren't even aware of how to go about releasing the tension that we are gripping, because we don't fully understand why it is there. It happens to all of us. Stress and tension are complicated physically and psychologically. Soothing pictures of sunsets, calming music, and meditation won't help much unless it points us in the direction of understanding our obsession with activity, the cause of our tension.

Have you ever been in an argument with someone who told you to relax in a raised tone of voice? It seems like the most ridiculous command in the moment. You can't yell at someone to relax and expect a calm, steady, and in-the-moment result. The same happens when we tell ourselves to relax. We tense up even more.

When I can't relax I'm usually obsessed with the outcome of a project, or tense about finishing a deadline. When I get really wound up my mind has a hard time focusing on the tasks I need to finish. Room for creativity shrinks and I'm left with a pile of energy that is useless to me. I've learned from reading and listening to the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, Krishna Dass, and other great teachers that all that stuff will get done because you are doing it. You can drop the stress. I've also learned that this lifetime, this moment, this second, is so fast and it's best to enjoy it and be thankful for what you have, and not to worry about what you don't. Worrying won't make it happen, or make you happy when you get or don't get it.

We have the ability to put everything in perspective, reconnect with ourselves, our compassion, and our ability to help others instead of being worried about our wants and desires all the time. Putting your attention toward helping others, by the way, is a great relaxation technique. Deep thoughts aside, tension is in the way of our efficiency. We don't have to relax the tension, we just have to drop it. Let it go. Use what you need. Rest what you don't.

If you're relaxed on your day off it's probably not because you are sitting around commanding yourself to relax. It's probably because you have given your mind and body a break, a necessary activity for recharging and allowing inspiration to surface.

All that tension is like a clogged drain, keeping what we don't need from dropping away, standing in the way of our potential. We need to dig out all the sludge. Take a good long look at it, learn from how it got there in the first place, put a proper filter on the drain, and let it go. Of course the sludge will probably come back. But with the new filter in place, we have the proper tools for dealing with it.

Don't let the sludge take over your life. Get a filter.

This routine is designed to chill you out and release tension in the hips, hamstrings, and spine. Try it out whenever your drain is clogged and hopefully you'll be feeling nice and relaxed soon.

Loraine Boyle: Fighting Myeloma with Laughter

2009-11-07T04:27:54Z

In her book, "The Year of Magical Thinking", Joan Didion defined for me what it is to lose your husband. Her book helped get me through the hell of losing my husband of 29 years, Peter Boyle, who died nearly three years ago of an incurable blood cancer called myeloma.

Certainly I took time to work though the grief with my family and friends, but I also felt the need to help others just as Joan had done with her book. I'm not the type to hide my head under the blankets. Cancer is unfair and brutal. I wanted to get back at the deadly disease that robbed me of my soul mate.

Years ago when I first met Peter in Los Angeles, Joan Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne invited us to dinner at their Malibu home. While she chopped vegetables, I told her that I was bored with being a rock'n'roll writer but didn't know what I wanted to do next. She said take a break, do something else, learn to cook. You'll figure it out.

So I did take cooking lessons in Italy with the amazing Marcella Hazan. Hanging out at rock clubs and interviewing musicians became a thing of the past. Peter and I settled down and had two beautiful daughters. But I had to do something more and that something was being active in my local community and at my daughter's schools. I focused my energy on running fund-raisers and serving on boards in my local New York community.

When Peter and I first heard his diagnosis of myeloma in 2002 we didn't even know what it was. A relatively rare blood cancer, it's on the rise due in part to our exposure to environmental toxins. Firefighters, for example, have some of the highest incidence of the disease as do people living in the smog filled Los Angeles basin. In the past the disease affected older people but now myeloma is showing up in a younger ones.

When Peter finally lost his fight, I believed that I had to keep up the battle against myeloma. The International Myeloma Foundation's president Susie Novis had sustained us with her knowledge and compassion throughout the course of the dread disease. Its chairman, renowned researcher, Dr. Brian Durie treated Peter. Myeloma killed Susie's first husband so she became my sister in sorrow. When she asked, I accepted her challenge to help the IMF find a new way to raise money for research and patient support.

We decided to replace the usual boring rubber chicken benefit dinner with something in keeping with Peter's spirit, a comedy show. Although Peter played monsters and villains in many movies, his roots were in improvisational comedy. Laughter to fight disease made sense. Peter's old friends, colleagues and admirers volunteered to perform onstage at the Wilshire Ebell Club and Theatre in Los Angeles. This November 7 as always our dear friend Ray Romano takes up hosting duties. The 3rd Annual Comedy Celebration for the Peter Boyle Memorial Fund of the IMF has a spectacular line up: Jason Alexander, Dana Carvey, Brad Garrett, Jimmy Kimmel, Doris Roberts, Bob Saget , Fred Willard and a special musical performance by Tenacious D with Jack Black and Kyle Gass. Seeing these great performers supporting Peter's memory makes life a little easier for me and my family.

In life we do have a choice to either deal with what's given us in a positive way or else let it undermine the rest of our lives. The first way pays tribute to those whom we loved and the second leads to despair.

After you become a widow, people don't quite know what to say. The worst question anyone can ask me is "How are you doing?" How can you be "doing" after such a profound blow. But I learned that I can and have to be doing something positive. Our private feelings are just that -- private -- so sharing them with well-meaning people isn't my way. But I have learned that turning those feelings into a positive plan of action is the way towards healing. So now I can answer, with what not how I'm doing and that's working towards finding a cure for the currently incurable myeloma.

Mona Gable: A Lesson From Barack (and Malia) Obama

2009-11-06T23:43:59Z

I know this isn't nice, but I was secretly pleased when the President outed Malia for getting a C on her science test. As a parent I found the news immensely reassuring. Why, the elder First Daughter has as much trouble juggling homework, sports and her social life as my kids do! I marveled.

Granted, Malia lives in a much grander house and vacations in places like Russia as opposed to spending the day at the local grubby beach. If she needs one mom and dad also won't have to pony up $50 an hour for an algebra tutor.

But she also has the Secret Service accompanying her to sleepovers and nosing around her Facebook page (Like she probably even has one. Remember Dad's fight to keep his BlackBerry?). And she's under enormous pressure to succeed in school, all while living under a
microscope every second.

It can't always be fun having a dad who's President, a best-selling author and a Nobel Laureate. Not to mention one who occasionally spills your secrets to the entire world. (Thanks, Dad!) Then there's mom, a crack organic gardener, international style icon, Harvard Law grad, who's as popular as Taylor Swift. How's an 11-year-old to top that?

Appropriately enough the occasion for this betrayal was an education speech at a charter middle school in Madison, Wisconsin. The President was spelling out what schools need to do to win grants from the Department of Education's $4.35-billion "Race to the Top" fund. He wasn't in a particularly forgiving mood. Referring to public schools, he said there should be "no excuse for mediocrity."

Given Dad's high expectations, maybe the C wasn't entirely surprising. It certainly wasn't terrible. (Although I would have hated to be Malia when she told her parents. You know how the President gets that stern look.) As it turns out, Malia quickly bounced back, earning 95 on her very next test.

Here's how Dad explained her turnaround in the Los Angeles Times: "What was happening was she had started wanting it more than us."

And that's the real lesson I think parents should absorb from this. That no matter what your ambitions are as a parent, you can't control how motivated your children are or what they achieve. It has to come from them.

I learned this the hard way. Despite making sure my kids did their homework in elementary school, going online to check their assignments in middle school, emailing their teachers when there was a problem in high school, all the while trying not to be the noxious helicopter parent, they occasionally did not meet my standards of excellence.

In middle school I remember lining up in the cafeteria to talk with my son's teachers about his "progress report." Talk about the line of shame. It was a dreadful ritual. Invariably I'd be right behind the parent whose 13-year-old had perfect citizenship and straight A's. All of which I'd have to hear about while my son looked around anxiously and fidgeted. Knowing that he did not have such grades. Knowing that I'd be angry with his Bs and Cs and missing assignments.

I did not see then that my son, with his ADHD, his charming personality, his prowess at skateboarding and music, had other gifts. Gifts that his overcrowded public school and overtaxed teachers did not necessarily appreciate, much less have the resources to cultivate. I had to accept that he was probably not bound for Oxford.

My daughter has hit similar bumps in her academic career. Last year it was the dreaded English poet Milton that did her in. "I hate poetry," she would fume every night, as she sat poring over phrases in Middle English. "I don't understand it. I don't get why we have to learn this." Her teacher, who could not get enough of Milton, alas, was not particularly sympathetic. Thank goodness she's taking women's studies this semester!

This month she's sending out her college applications. Like a good parent, I'm trying not to ask, "So, how's that essay coming?" every five minutes. A few months ago she broke the news that she would not be applying to Berkeley, her mother's beloved alma mater. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, mom, but I don't want to go to a school where I'm too stressed out." (Not incidentally, we've had similar conversations about the fact she will not be entering journalism, like her parents. Which only goes to show how smart she is.)

My daughter is not me. What a shock. And I suppose this goes without saying, but neither is my son. If I can get out of their way and let them make mistakes, learn from them, grow up, they'll both forge their own distinctive paths.

Just as Malia Obama will, Dad.

James Zogby: Reflections on Fort Hood

2009-11-06T23:29:39Z

I landed in London at 6:30 am (GMT) and turned on my BlackBerry to find it flooded with emails sent while I had been in the air, flying home from the Middle East. Looking at just the "sender" and "subject" lines, I observed that some were "news alerts," others came from various members of my staff at the Arab American Institute in Washington. The last group included statements and press releases issued by other Arab American and American Muslim organizations.

My curiosity piqued, I commenced reading these emails in the order they had been received. The "news alerts" began mid-afternoon providing, at first, just the bare outlines of the horrible murders of what was thought to be 12 military personnel at Fort Hood, Texas. Reading on, the story unfolded with new details emerging and erroneous early reports corrected as facts became known. Early on, for example, I read that there were thought to be three shooters, before it was established that there was just one. At one point there was a report that the lone shooter was a Muslim, possibly a convert, and that he had been killed. Only later was the killer's identity established and it became clear that he is an Arab American 39-year-old Army Major. He is Jordanian-Palestinian, born in the US. It was also established that he is a psychiatrist counseling returning soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Next came a flurry of missives from my staff writing to me or to each other, copying me, reporting on their handling of this crisis and what they were hearing from reporters who were calling for reactions or from the community seeking guidance. (The earliest of these was sent at 8 pm EST, the last after 3 am). My first reaction to this particular set of emails was a pang of guilt. My current staff, though extraordinarily talented and dedicated, is quite new -- new enough not to have been on board when we last faced similar crises. I know the pressure they are under dealing with demands from all sides: statements needing to be prepared, as do talking points for community leaders around the country, and they would need to put in place mechanisms to deal with the hate or threats that might come (one such call, I learned, had already come into the office shortly after 6 pm), and much more.

Though I wanted to be with them, to provide whatever guidance I could, as I continued to read their emails, I found that, for the most part, they had the complex demands of this situation well in hand. Since some had sent questions to me (not knowing when I would get them, or whether I would be able to respond in time), I used my wait in the airport lounge to give my best advice on next steps: what a follow-up statement might include; what messages to avoid (I noted that among the emails I had received were statements for some other groups with headlines condemning the killings and warning against anti-Arab or anti-Muslim backlash. My advice was "don't go there." This is not about us right now, it's about the victims and the pain of their families. If it were to be about anyone or anything else, it shouldn't be about the potential this horrible act poses to Arab or Muslim American groups. Rather, concern should be shown for the challenges all this will pose for the thousands of patriotic Arab Americans currently serving with distinction in the US military, some of whom, may now unfairly be targets of suspicion.); how to log and deal with threats should they come, and who should do what before I return.

In the more than three decades I have been engaged in this work with my community, we've weathered many storms -- from hijackings and terrorist acts (some of which were perpetrated by Arabs, while in other cases there was a rush to judgment wrongly accusing Arabs) to wars, some involving our country fighting in the Middle East, others involving Israel, but with our political leaders and many in the media behaving as cheerleaders. In each of these instances we've had to face down challenges.

In our media age, where news is omnipresent and instantaneous, we don't just read about stories as detached observers, we live them. We become caught up in unfolding dramas with each new morsel of information becoming "breaking news," and the subject of endless commentary. As a result, more than being just a story, a crisis becomes an event in which we become participants. It draws us in directly and drives our emotions.

I have been here before, riding this rollercoaster -- forced to live these stories but wondering what it would be like to just watch them: to be able to just mourn the senseless loss of life without having to look over my shoulder because someone holds my community responsible and may strike out, or at least create fear by threatening violence. To not have to, as one of my staff members wrote in an email "hold my breath and pray that it's not an Arab involved" -- because we know that if it is some may hold us all responsible.

Of course, what was different this time was that I learned about all of this from afar, feeling it unfold while reading about it on my Blackberry in the London Airport lounge. I then boarded a plane, lost in reflection about the trauma and the fear that captured so many, and wrote about this all the way home knowing that once back I would, no doubt, become a participant once again in wherever the unfolding story would be upon my arrival.

G.A. Bradshaw: Of Pachyderms and Paratroopers

2009-11-06T22:37:39Z

"Last Sunday, a television program showed helicopters shooting down African elephants. When I saw those huge peaceful animals falling, I broke down. It's been forty years since I was a gunner in Vietnam. I did and saw the same thing with people".

We are not so different from elephants. Science shows that we share comparable brains sufficient to make the gentle giants vulnerable to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Elephant and humans minds both falter in the face of life-threatening violence. But the real lesson goes deeper. What veterans have learned and elephants know makes them formidable allies in helping solve what has become a problem of epidemic proportions.

War trauma afflicts 20% of our soldiers in Iraq and a staggering 40% of National Guard and reservists. Moreover, the trauma of war extends to soldier's families and healthcare professionals who are exposed vicariously to battlefield violence: a topic of concern in discussions surrounding the recent Fort Hood shootings.

In response to this debilitating condition, the U.S. Army has cast aside its historical unease with psychological injury and boldly launched a Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. Increasing emotional resilience will do much to help soldiers on and off duty with the barrage of everyday stressors. However, warding off war trauma is more complex than achieving mental fitness or implementing a regime of anti-depressants. Veterans reveal that the mind cannot always be readied for the challenges war brings.

Veteran John Fisher confessed, "I never wanted to hurt anyone. Not even in the war. My nature is to give service for health and healing. . . [but] I was given a rifle and the training in how to use it. Then I used it--a lot." Body and mind may have been fit for duty, but Fisher's decades-long battle with PTSD began when his nature collided with military nurture.

Further, survivors and psychiatrists maintain that causes and treatment of PTSD cannot rest on the shoulders of soldiers alone. Former Green Beret Lee Burkins' PTSD derived as much from "society's acceptance of war" as from his own acts, and Fisher's restoration only started when he returned to Vietnam, where, in the "land of my nightmares," he used his skills as a chiropractor to heal broken bodies of former Viet Cong and re-build a sense of community.

How then is war's PTSD to be addressed? If, as often is the case, we look to nature for understanding, we find more questions before answers. For example, if healing requires community, how is it that elephants, our psychological kin renown for family values and cohesive herds, succumb to PTSD? And isn't some psychological fallout the inevitable cost of natural aggression and the Army's fitness program making the best out of a bad situation?

Not according to science. Modern warfare is not natural; our bellicose human habits violate long-evolved prosocial norms shared by animals everywhere, including the mighty, brainy elephant. Elephant society only fell victim to "soldier's heart" when culls, poaching, and habitat destruction shattered social structures that provided young elephants inoculation against trauma. Human culture, not elephant nature, is responsible for the onset of wildlife mental breakdown. Our aggressive excesses are no longer justified by saying, "nature made me do it." Human trauma is organic to human society.

Consequently, when the gunner wept as elephants fell, he might have recognized something more than commonality in deed. Perhaps, genetic memory stirred recollection of a time before economics and exigencies of industrial hostilities made war culture; when elephants and humanity put right before might and chose to live in peaceful co-existence. In this light, soldiers' PTSD emerges as a natural response to an unnatural violation of values we hold in common with the rest of the animal kingdom.

To stem widespread PTSD, we are advised by listening to the veterans who served, survived, and suffer from the ravages of PTSD, and the elephants who never raised arms. An Iraq veteran maintains that: "the only way to help us is to end war." Lee Burkins speaks of veterans' search for a reality that does not require trauma to justify its existence, "As damaged in soul as we were, each one of us wanted never to do violence again. . . many of the men passed on because of their frustration they experienced at not knowing how to bring an end to the ongoing violence in the world."

Their vision and lessons, and those of the elephant, must be used to shape concrete social programs that actively partner the military, public, and nature. The path is clear. It just takes thinking like an elephant.

G.A. Bradshaw is a psychologist and author of Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity, Yale University Press. Ed Tick is a practicing psychotherapist specializing in veterans with PTSD and author of War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.