Stella Tremblay: New Hampshire's Very Own

 Thank God we have at least ONE state representative from the state of New Hampshire who is willing to stand up for justice in defense of truth, and to face the powerful NWO sellouts who will pillory and vilify her without mercy, until she is driven from office, Mark my words, her removal is already being planned. Soon, Zionist dollars will flow prodigiously in an attempt to to create a ruse to push her from office with a recall election, or failing that, they will insure her defeat with unlimited funding to back a suitably compliant opponent in the next election. Tremblay, first elected in 2010, was born in Italy .Maybe that's why she's willing to speak her mind and do the job she was elected to do. Thinking Americans, who realize the grave danger we now face, need to rally to the support of any state or federal politician who is willing to speak the truth and stop this treasonous sedition in its tracks....] By Jim Haddadin jhaddadin@fosters.com



Where is Gail Collins when the Granite State needs her?
Or The Onion? Or Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert?

Really, does any state, even South Carolina, have anyone to match the Republican Representative from  Auburn, New Hampshire?

Ms. Tremblay recently made a name for herself on national websites by claiming the Boston bombing was actually a federal government black ops plot, that one of the victims, shown in a wheel chair holding what was left of his left leg (the fragment of his tibia clearly visible), did not look to be in pain, which was, Mad Dog can only guess, meant to suggest his injury was bogus, despite the photographic evidence, and that those victims who wound up in various Boston hospitals were all part of some grand government plot, a grand fiction, like the moon landing and President Obama's Hawaiian birth.

The website, "Granite State Progress," lists Ms. Tremblay's votes in the legislature and there are no surprises here:  Votes to require the University of New Hampshire to investigate every student who might be an immigrant to be sure they are not illegal, votes to endorse the Arizona immigration law--with its racial profiling--votes to de-fund Planned Parenthood, votes to de-fund any hospital which is in any way connected to abortions, which would cost New Hampshire billions in federal matching funds.

She is the genuine Tea Party, frothing Free Stater, on-what-planet-do-these-people spend-the-majority-of-their-time article. 

And she's all ours. Actually, if Mr. Haddadin is correct, she was born in Italy, but she is as American as apple pie and Olive Garden.

Mad Dog has been moved to pick up that splendid volume by Richard Hoftstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which demonstrates, if nothing else, that Ms. Tremblay is nothing new, only freshly amusing. 

She is also a prodigious historian, who has rendered opinions about Frederick Douglass and his opinion of the allusion to slavery in the U.S. Constitution, and opinions about Woodrow Wilson, who, she says, believed with Hitler in the destiny of the Aryan race to rule the world. Actually, if you read Howard Zinn, you might find something to this portrait of Wilson the racist.  It is curious how often the Tremblay sort of mind alludes to history.  It is as if by talking about a version of history which is different from what we all learned in high school she can make claim to an insight the rest of us lack, an insight which should inform our understanding of where we are now.  So, if we know that Frederick Douglass actually believed slavery, then we can believe what the government and the media are now telling us about the Boston bombings is untrue.

Ms. Tremblay informs us, in somber and pregnant tones, that we really need an independent inquiry into the so-called Boston bombing, because we cannot believe what we've been told thus far, and it really was, presumably, all staged on a back lot in Los Angeles, and nobody was actually blown up, and all those hospitals and doctors are just actors or part of a vast conspiracy.

Can you imagine what her living room must look like? Can you imagine what Auburn, New Hampshire must be like?  Mad Dog may have to drive out there and spook around.  It's probably crawling with federal agents on their cell phones to the black helicopters circling overhead. 

Can you imagine how much fun it would be to simply follow her around with a microphone?  Why hasn't anyone done this?  

Where is Michael Moore, when you need him?

Richard Hofstader, Columbia University

 

Economics 101

Paul Krugman, Who Knows of What He Speaks

Don't know much about economics, other than what I read in the New York Times, the New Yorker and what I see on "The News Hour."

Economics is not like biology--it is not an experimental science. Oh, we do economic experiments all the time, but we cannot hold enough variables constant to call it a science. It is not clear that, for all the numbers economists throw around, you really need to understand those numbers to understand the basic economic forces and concepts.

It must mean something  that Mad Dog can now watch a discussion of economic policy and Mad Dog can finish the sentence of each participant. It must mean we are hearing the same arguments over and over again.

Last night, on the "News Hour" they had some stooge from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and a man from some Boston institute discussing our economy. The Boston guy says, "When you have a recession, an economic slow down, that's when you do not want the government to stop spending. The national economy is not like a family budget. Sometimes deficit spending is a good thing. It's an investment in the future. You get people working, repairing the infrastructure,  paying taxes, spending and then you can back off, pay down the deficit and restore balance. But if the European experience shows anything, it is that cutting government spending at the beginning or in the middle of a recession just makes things worse." 

To which the American Enterprise Institute guy replies: "Deficits are bad. When you allow the deficit to grow to over 45% of GNP you simply run out of money to spend. This Kenseyian argument, that we should spend our way out of a recession, is a recipe for disaster." 

This very same argument has been going back and forth since at least the years when Andrew Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury arguing that a Depression purges the system of bad blood, bad, lazy people and is just what the doctor ordered for a country which needs discipline. He was Herbert Hoover's secretary. Hoover said all along there is nothing government can or should do in hard times. Hoover lost that argument to FDR and the Republicans lost the White House for the next 4 elections.

Republicans ever since have argued the only way Roosevelt got America out of the Depression was to get into a world war and unemployment went from 20% to close to 0% in a year.  And, of course the implication of that was--war is bad, so anything associated with it must be bad.

The fact is, what that wartime government spending  demonstrated is economically, the effect of government hiring vast numbers of people was capable of pulling us out of the Great Depression and that good economy persisted for decades after the war, with deficits going down when people were working and paying taxes.  May have been we put a lot of undeserving people who were wicked and mean to their children back to work, and we rewarded an undisciplined American population, but it sure was good for the economy, and government spending did not result in disaster but relief and prosperity.

So why, Mad Dog asks, are we still debating this issue?

Do we really still need to debate whether or not the heart pumps blood to the brain?

Do we need to discuss whether or not metal airplanes can fly or whether or not metal ships will sink?

Do we really need to listen to David Stockman, people from conservative "think" tanks proffer these antediluvian ideas on national TV, radio and newspapers?

When will we get tired of listening to idiots?

Hal Rogers: When Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant

Hal Rogers, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee

Sometimes Jon Stewart is simply indispensable.
Tonight was one of those classic examples. 
First, Stewart runs a montage of Fox News bimbos saying the Sequester turned out to be a big nothing--proving we can cut government spending drastically and nobody notices because government does nothing important. There's an air head blond saying, "It turns out to be a 'No-questor," and grinning, very pleased with herself.

Then Stewart shows the irate reaction of the chairman of the House Appropriations committee, a Republican named Hal Rogers, who is grilling the head of the FAA about the furlough of air traffic controllers which has inconvenienced Congressmen trying to fly home to their districts. "Why didn't you tell us this would happen?" the Congressman demands.  

So Stewart rolls a montage of Obama official after official warning of this very outcome, of news people warning about air traffic control trouble if the sequester is allowed to go forth.  Then he plays the Congressman intoning how outrageous this is, nobody told him!  Stewart observes he must be one of those people who complains nobody told him the gun would go off if he pulled that trigger.

Then Stewart shows Susan Collins speaking on the Senate floor, all giddy that Congress was able to pass a law which returned all the air traffic controllers to work. "See how we can work together. We can cross party lines to get things done!"

To which Stewart replies, "Oh, we should be so happy we have a Congress which having created a problem for the many, has been able to solve one small part of that problem for the few, namely themselves, when the problem affects them."

He then sends correspondents out to soup kitchens, cancer treatment centers which have had to close their door because of the sequester. 

So there we have it--Congress as the ultimate example of the old adage: The worse thing for a bad product is good advertising.

 

Peggy Orenstein: When a Disease Becomes a Cause

Peggy Orenstein has written the article Mad Dog would like to have written, but thought it was too politically incorrect.

For readers of Mad Dog Democrat, the idea anything is too politically incorrect for Mad Dog may come as a surprise, but this topic is so incendiary and requires such tact, Mad Dog knew it was simply beyond his talents.

The problem here is: Is anyone rooting for breast cancer? Does anyone not wish to see an end to breast cancer? So any time you question or undermine the efforts of a group which is trying to end breast cancer deaths, you have to tread lightly, something Mad Dog has not mastered.

Ms. Orenstein writes an article which embraces the complexities and the successes and the lack of successes in a very adroit way.

The problems with the Susan Komen organization and others like it is they are focused on raising awareness of breast cancer, on the psychological impact, on making breast cancer socially acceptable to talk about, to acknowledge you've had, but at some point we all really have to accept, okay, mission accomplished when it comes to marketing and name recognition and attitude change: What we really need now is some good, effective science and technology.

Breast cancer, as she points out is not even one disease. There are different types of breast cancer (estrogen receptor positive, estrogen receptor negative, Herc positive, triple negative--the list expands as molecular genetics identifies new types.) There is even a pre-breast cancer which may or may not ever develop into breast cancer, DCIS.

As Ms. Orenstein points out, delicately, women almost never die of breast cancer which is confined to the breast; what they die from is metastatic breast cancer, i.e. breast cancer which escapes the breasts and implants in liver, brain, bone, lung and elswhere, seedlings in the wind, taking root, becoming the ultimate invasive species. 

The big problem is this process may occur before there are enough breast cancer cells to see on mammography, so even if you remove the breast cancer you find by imaging, by mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, you may still be dealing with a mortal illness--you just won't know it for some years.

When Mad Dog was an intern at Memorial Sloan Kettering, he admitted dozens of patients every week who told the same story: "They told me they got it in time. It was so small. I was cured."  But here they were, 10 or 15 years later with breast cancer growing in vertebrae, femurs, ribs, lungs, liver, brain and all stops in between. Dying of a disease the doctors thought they had cured.

It was this realization, that microscopic, invisible tumor cells escape early and may be growing in distant sites which moved the researchers in Milan, Italy to try chemotherapy to flow in the blood and kill the invisible metastases at the time of the original breast surgery and that study was done in the early 1970's. American doctors came later to accept this concept and now protocols include chemotherapy to get those sleeper cells.  

But chemotherapy does not kill every cell in every patient and patients are still dying from widely metastatic disease despite all the protocols, years later.

And mammography may not have made much of a dent in this process. 
But when various scientific groups, recognizing the futility of screening mammography for various groups of patients--e.g. women less than 40--have recommended mammography start later and not be used annually all hell breaks lose because breast cancer organizations--who have a stake, financially, professionally and emotionally--oppose these recommendations, not because the science is flawed but because they have other motivations.

Consider this example, which Orenstein quotes:  Suppose you have 100 women who have a mammograms at age 67, are found to have breast cancer and treated but they all die 3 years later at age 70.  The 5 year survival in that group is 0%. Suppose now, you have 100 64 year old women who have a mammograms and gets treated but the treatment doesn't work and they all die 6 years later at age 70 The 5 year survival for these women  is 100%. Looks like a great victory for mammography: You've improved 5 year survival by 100%!  But what have you really done? You've made the women in the first group aware they have cancer three years earlier and they've had to live with that knowledge but they have not lived a day longer for it.

The fact is, funding for research is competitive: If the National Institutes of Health funds breast cancer at $100 billion dollars there is not going to be $100 billion for melanoma. And with diseases acquiring advocacy groups, AIDS, prostate CA, testicular CA, decisions may rise or fall based on who has the best paid lobbyists in Washington, rather than who has the best scientific arguments in Bethesda (where the NIH is.)

And what happens to testicular CA if it's major poster boy falls from grace for doping while he was winning the Tour de France?

Is this any way to run a railroad?

Ms. Orenstein has written a very important public policy, public health article. It is one every citizen ought to read, in the quiet of his or her own home, preferably after a Valium or a good glass of wine.

Jefferson Davis Lives

On Jefferson Davis Avenue, in New Orleans, stands a statue of the man, "Profound scholar of the constitution, In judgment sound, in morality firm, in resolve steadfast" or words to that effect, but most of all, "Patriot."

In Cabin John, Maryland, stands the Union Arch Bridge, which, legend has it, was dedicated by Abraham Lincoln in 1860.  In 1861, Lincoln sent a detachment of calvary to remove a plaque from this bridge because the plaque listed various officials who had part in the construction of the bridge: Montgomery Meigs, of the Army Corps of Engineers and Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War.

Apparently, Mr. Lincoln disagreed with the idea Mr. Jeff Davis was a patriot.

There must be a difference between traitor and patriot.

Some would say it's all in your point of view.

Others would say it's in where you stand now.

Lindsey Graham: South Carolina as the American Chechnya

Far as Mad Dog can see, there are parallels and then, there are parallels.

In the case of the "War" on "Terror" both war and terrorists have bullets and bombs and there are deaths and innocents (non combatants) are killed and maimed. 

Of course, in the case of the war on terror, there are no armies, no capitals, no flags, no actual battles--and as Carver once said of the "War on Drugs" in The Wire , this isn't even a war. Why not?  "Because wars end," Carver replied.

This is a subtlety lost on Senator Graham, of course. Many things are lost on Mr. Graham.  Mr. Graham does not approve of people who hail from places which are in rebellion against a power which they feel has been imposing its will over them, not respecting their local traditions and values, a place like Chechnya, for example, or say, South Carolina.

Of course, you cannot compare the Chechnya rebels to the rebels of South Carolina. They were both rebelling against a stronger neighbor from the north which insisted a separatist movement would not be tolerated, but the Confederacy had an army with uniforms and canon and they fought out in the open and they were Christians, praying to a Christian God.  In fact, these rebels were so upright and upstanding Mr. Graham's fellow South Carolinians fly the Confederate flag over their state house to this day, just to show the guerrilla spirit is still alive and well in South Carolina.  

Chechnya knows all about guerrilla spirit. Apparently bombs go off every week there, and no police station is safe. 

The Confederates in South Carolina might just admire that, if those Chechnyans were Christians and wore nice gray uniforms. 

But now we have the Confederates back in positions of power and when they are United States Senators they invoke hell fire and brimstone against the unholy, unwashed terrorists from foreign places, and Heaven Knows, we don't like foreigners and we ought o re examine our immigration policies which allow undesirables like Russians or Chechnyans or people who don't speak English at home from unloading their baggage here in the United States. 

In fact, when the Russians point out a potential trouble maker and the FBI investigates and that trouble maker subsequently makes trouble, well the FBI has dropped the ball on the one yard line. Fumbled, I tell you! The FBI ought to be able to predict human behavior. What have we been spending all those hard earned tax dollars down at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia if not to be able to read minds and predict future behavior by nasty, ill meaning violent revolutionists? 

Mad Dog can see where Mr. Graham is coming from. Same place he is always coming from.  South Carolina.

Lindsey Graham and Tsarnaev: Almost Racist

A friend who worked for the U.S. government in an agency which oversaw international trade once remarked, with a Cheshire smile, "We worry a lot about whether or not we are racist in this country; we don't hold a candle to the Europeans."

He spent a lot of time in England, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia, so I thought he probably knew of what he spoke.

Today's New York Times carries a stunning article by Jonas Hassen Khemri, the first generation son of an immigrant to Sweden. 

He details what is was like growing up dark skinned in Sweden: being stopped on the street, questioned, asked for government ID, thrown into the back of a police van, then told only , "You may go now." Listening to government ministers defending racial profiling blandly by saying, "Oh, well, they are the guilty ones." Watching his father sweating out interrogations by Swedish officials, who looked at his government ID dubiously--this guy says he's Swedish, well he doesn't look Swedish. Hearing of friends beaten up in police vans. Followed about in stores by security guards with walkie talkies, who assumed if you are dark skinned, theft must be afoot. 

It all sounds like stuff we have put behind us in the United States, having faced our own different modes of racism forthrightly. Of course, until now we haven't succumbed to that special terror of government power--the National ID--which some of us remember from the old movies in which the Gestapo stops Lauren Bacall or some other heroine and says, "Unt now, I vould like to zee your papers." Red staters rage about the indignity of background checks for gun purchases, but they have no reservations about the indignity and huge leap in government control embodied in a national ID card. You want to see real terror and oppression: Just vote for a national ID card.

We've gotten by that sort of thing here in the USA. Well, mostly.

Of course, not all of us. When the Boston bombers turned out to have been born in Russia, and, damn it, one was dabbling in Islam, well, Lindsey Graham is right there with the "Suspend the Constitution!" cry.  Hey, why should we give this ungrateful foreigner any rights? Let's just hang him now without a trial (a South Carolina specialty) or put him away for life.

Well, there's precedent for life imprisonment, no trial--Gitmo.

And also Stop and Frisk in New York City, the city of Michael Bloomberg a semi liberal mayor, who apparently is not disturbed by racial profiling, if it happens in zip codes where people don't have much money or power. Mayor Bloomberg worries about allowing people to drink gargantuan soda pop but he does not worry about people thrown up against a wall by his own police.

Mad Dog would like to humbly suggest: The reason we go through the dance of doing things within the Constitution is not out of respect for heinous criminals; it is for ourselves.  We do not take the pains and expense of trials for the sake of the accused, any more than we do funerals for the sake of the dead. We do funerals for the sake of the living and we do trials for the sake of the citizens who do not stand accused, that we may all demonstrate our respect for a little mentioned and oft ignored idea: The Law.

We are better than the guys who set off bombs and blow legs off people because we think hard and long before we do harm to anyone.

Having cared for wounded accused in emergency rooms and on the wards, Mad Dog was struck by how surprised they were by the kindness, or at least by the absence of hostility they saw in the nurses and doctors rendering care.  In some cases, Mad Dog had the impression these men had never experienced human kindness and it was disturbing to them.  They were suspicious at first, then tentatively responsive, but often they withdrew again, as if they knew responding to kindness would make them vulnerable, so they retreated into indifference. Some of them could not help themselves, however and they were the ones most often psychologically damaged--by all the respect and fairness.  So Mad Dog doesn't buy the approach of the Lindsey Grahams of the world. Just beat those miscreants like dogs.  No, if you really want to make them suffer, treat them with respect and they begin to feel a connection to humanity. That's the greatest pain.

You want to really inflict pain on the surviving Boston bomber?  Once you have him reasonably stable and comfortable, once you have shown him care and concern and made him feel well again, bring around one of those girls who knew him in high school, or from college, one of those girls who called him a "sweetheart" who thought of him as a kind, funny, caring person, and simply allow them to visit; allow him to return to that person he once was. As Mephistopheles says in Faustus, the greatest hell is remembering happier times.  The greatest hell for this 19 year old will be remembering the person he was before he was transformed. 

So, with our system of laws, of treating the accused as innocent until proven guilty, we honor not the accused, but ourselves. We worship at the alter of "justice." 

Well, mostly--unless you are a villager blown up by a mistaken drone attack.

But, at least, most of the time, outside of Gitmo, and drone attacks and Stop and Frisk, we try.

Nobody's perfect.  

One way to feel better about yourself today: Consider Lindsey Graham. Consider his whole ridiculous state. If you have done something lately you think was pretty stupid or ill considered, just think of Lindsey Graham.  Compared to him, compared to the several million people who voted for him and live their smug little lives in South Carolina, you are a tower of intelligence, discretion and moral fortitude.