Free Staters and Freeloaders

I missed it and I'm bummed. There was a presentation by Zandra Rice Hawkins of Granite State Progress about  the Free State Project at the Hampton Dems meeting, attended, I am told, by about a dozen regular Democrats and an equal or slightly higher number of Free Staters.  But I figured, this is the internet age: I can just go on line and read about the Free State thing and, sure enough, there is a Free State Project website. Problem is the website is all about how to join the FSP, how to move to New Hampshire, but I already live here. There is next to nothing on the website about what these people stand for (other than some vague notion of "Liberty in Our Lifetime") and not much about what they want to see changed.

What I want to know is what, exactly, do the Free State folks believe? I'm less interested in their plans to get 20,000 people here, as a critical mass, so they can take over the state legislature (which has 490 Representatives) and create a new Promised Land of Liberty and bliss. What I wanted to know is: what do they think this paradise will look like and consist of?

As I understand it from some who attended, the Free State brethren believe government is BAD.  Government should not do much of anything, including public schools, public roads, maintenance of infrastructure, police, public safety, fire fighting, public health, crime fighting, building bridges, inspecting food, protecting clean water, public libraries, maintaining the internet.  

It does seem a bit mind boggling.  Government does so many things we take for granted, it's hard to imagine what life without it would look like. My mind drifts to apocalyptic fantasies, of men riding around with guns taking over supermarkets and food supplies, sort of like what they've got in Somalia now. Or maybe parts of Syria.

I mean, this group may be taking anti social to an extreme, don't you think?

Because I drive across the state line to Massachusetts to work every day, I can sort of understand the man looks with some approbation who at the Spanish speaking immigrant from the Dominican Republic, one of twelve children, whose parents could not support any of them, so he moved to the Commonwealth, where he gets free drugs and health care through Mass Health, where he does not work but gets unemployment and where he seems to live entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers, on the public teat. On the other, I do not resent this man, and certainly do not envy him. This is a life I'd not wish on anyone.

But that is the other extreme. Most Granite Staters do not live on the government dole. Far from it.  But they do need their government.  They like driving on roads, having clean water, electricity, internet, public education, public beaches, some assurance our food is not contaminated and grocery stores.  

As far as I can see, the Free Staters are an East Coast version of those little bands of families in the Badlands who try to live "off the grid."  

There seems to be more pathology here than philosophy.  Is living with other people so very difficult you want absolutely nothing to do with them?

Shocking, just shocking! Planned Parenthood from Fox News

Looking at youtube for the interview which shocked the Congress wherein a Planned Parenthood doctor and director of fetal tissue acquisition discusses the details about how to gather tissues from abortions for sale to medical research institutions, one sees immediately what a bonanza this photo-shopped, edit clip has been for anti abortion advocates and for all Republicans in Congress who want to establish their anti abortion, pro life, pro fetus bone fides.

What is particularly galling to non medical folks who watch this video is the doctor who is talking about how best to approach the fetus to ensure no vital organs are damaged, so they can be useful to the researchers buying them is that the doctor is talking about all this between bitefuls of Asian food, picked up and popped into her mouth as she talks about body parts. Whenever you want to make a villain look really heinous in a movie, you show him talking about the gruesome crime while eating and enjoying a meal, because it shows how little regard he has, how completely separated he is from connection to mayhem. "So, Guido, you chop off his head? Or What?"  [Stuff spaghetti  in mouth]  "Yeah, those heads bleed a lot. You gotta let the blood drain from the neck. You know what I'm saying here?"  [Glug some wine.]

Of course, doctors talk about things like this over dinner all the time. Around our table, where we have three doctors and a nurse, we often forget about the musician and the architect sitting there, who don't have our world view and we gross them out, until they object and we have to tone it down. Over time, actually, the architect and the musician have tuned out the talk and they continue eating without objection. I can only imagine a secretly recorded clip of our table conversation at home. 

But listening to the doctor talk about how you can move the fetus around so the forceps used to grasp it does not injure the liver, which someone wants to buy is pretty startling to the average non medical listener. It's a little jarring even for a physician who is not an obstetrician. 

And as the Judas goat interviewer prods the doctor about how bad it would look if it looked like Planned Parenthood were selling body parts and she agrees, casually, without adding, "Because we really are not interested in the money. We need those tissues if we are every going to wipe out type 1 diabetes, but we have to cover costs. It's a lot of work to harvest and preserve this stuff." It looks bad. In fact, if the New York Times is correct, she did say all that, but the operative who recorded her cut that out and she looks completely mercenary.  

Actually, having heard really mercenary doctors talk, she sounds pretty mild to me.

My own son used to talk about "harvesting" organs for the transplant service at the university hospital where he went to medical school, in New York City. They would page him out of class and he would get in the transplant van to Teterboro Airport and climb into a private Leer Jet and fly off to wherever--as far as Florida, get to the operating room where a young "donor" had just died of head wounds from a motorcycle accident or from an asthmatic attack, and they would remove his kidneys and pack them in ice and place all this in an Igloo ice chest or something like it and then go off to the airplane and fly back to the OR at the university hospital where another team put transplant it into a patient. If there was some delay at one end, they would go out to a restaurant on the transplant service's dime. He was delighted with that. Free food for a medical student cannot be beat. 

Did they sit around somberly talking about how badly they felt for the "donor" for the poor kid's parents who had signed to donate the organs having just been told their son was brain dead? You can bet the transplant harvest team did not have that conversation. They did not want to think about that part.  It was bad enough seeing the donor splayed out on the OR table. They had to concentrate on the work entailed in removing the kidneys without damaging the blood vessels and preserving them so they would live again in another patient. But a video of these harvest people at a restaurant would have had Congressmen clamoring  for the microphones all around Capitol Hill. 
"Oh, the horror! Oh, the callousness!"

And now you can just see the gleam in the eye of every Republican in Congress, who wants to show what an upstanding, moral and righteous citizen he or she is by crying out in shock about this horrific, murderous, inhuman callousness.  

"Oh, the shame! Oh, the horror!"

We told you all along these abortionists were evil--now we see what really motivates them: It's all about the money. They want to kill these helpless infants because they are selling their body parts. They are making their boat payments on the hearts and lungs of these babies!

Of course, nothing like that is happening.  And, if Planned Parenthood were smart, it would stop doing abortions and just do contraception, which the Republicans will never acknowledge is the best thing to prevent abortion--an ounce of prevention.  But Planned Parenthood will not back down. So PP will suffer and maybe be defunded, which would likely be the best thing for it. Don't take government dollars if you want to steer clear of the jackasses in Congress. It would work better for Planned Parenthood.

The most powerful tool the right to lifers have ever had is the fetal sonogram. If you want to humanize a fetus, show the sonogram. People see clouds in the sky and they see horses, but they know those are not real horses. It's not so easy with a sonogram. The sonogram looks a lot more like a human being than the thing it is imaging actually looks like--your perceptual apparatus fills in the blanks. The real thing looks more like an earthworm, but you can't see that on the sonogram. 

It's all about illusion and perception and the pro life (isn't that a great name--who is "against life"?) forces are masters at manipulating that. 

Personally, I'm not voting for "abortion" over 21 weeks. Too close to actualization. But I've got no major problem with 9 weeks.  But that's an opinion which took several years of study to form. When you present it to the uncomprehending public and ask for a first blush opinion, what do you expect?

Not so good, however, for the women who cannot afford care anywhere but Planned Parenthood, especially if Medicaid and Medicare and all government programs are out of the picture.  

How Republicans Grew to Hate Business: The Ex-Im Bank Story

How Often Republicans Used to Hate Business: Until Now 

Today's New York Times carries a column by Joe Nocera about the efforts of conservative Republicans to kill an agency of the federal government called the Export-Import bank. Among the startling quotes, one came from the CEO of Boeing who said about the effort to kill the Ex-Im bank:  "I never thought I'd see the day that U.S> companies would, in effect, be penalized for not setting up shop overseas and, in the case of Boeing, expanding our domestic production and work force by billions of dollars and thousands of jobs." 

What he is talking about is that if Boeing moves offshore, they have access to loans which would be denied in the U.S. if the Ex-Im bank is shut down.

Now, I am the first to admit, I know nothing about banking and business, but it is a strange thing to see a CEO of a big American corporation complaining about Republicans in Congress. The Republicans were supposed to be the party of big business.  Caterpillar's CEO isn't any happier. Both companies export hugely to the rest of the world, and in dollars, Boeing is the top American exporter.  

Small businesses are also helped by the Ex-Im bank when buyers in Afghanistan or India wants a loan to buy from an American company. And when all those little shops in Pennsylvania or New Hampshire which make parts for a GE and GE exports lag, the effect ripples downstream.

Reading Hedi Heitcamp's (D-ND) say this is "Mind boggling idiotic" my own brain started to boil.

Senator Heidi Heitkamp

But I have learned something, over the years. One is that I tend to boil over and fulminate, when I should learn from Maud. Now, I ask myself, not "What would Jesus do?" but "What would Maud do?"  Would Ms. Maud explode in outrage over the mind boggling idiocy of these Congressional Republicans? Would she fulminate? Would she rage about a banking system she knew nothing about?  No, she would go to the internet and she would read and she would learn and only then would she explode. Or not, depending on what she found.

So I went to the net and started reading about the Ex-Im bank and tried to read what its detractors say.  Aude alterum partum, Hear the other side.

You know: you learn; you grow.

So why does the new majority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, say this?
 “It’s something that the private sector can be able to do,” McCarthy said on Fox News Sunday. “One of the biggest problems with government is they go and take hard-earned money so others do things that the private sector can do...I think Ex-Im Bank is…something government does not have to be involved in. The private sector can do it."

The more I read, the more it looks like this:  The new Republicans in Congress believe everything the government does could and should be done better by anyone but government, to wit, the vaunted (and sometimes imaginary) PRIVATE SECTOR. So if there were no Ex-Im bank, private banks would do the lending and better.

But would the private sector pick up the slack if the Ex-Im bank went away? What people at Boeing and in the business community are saying is: Not likely. When the motive for the lender is maximizing profit, a lot of loans don't get made if the bottom line does not look attractive enough; but with a government, non profit agency, if the number of jobs created, the positive effects on the American economy are factored into the equation, the loan gets made and the production lines roll.

We, of course, have seen the corrosive effects of the bottom line mentality in medicine for years where all considerations of patient convenience, patient safety, patient comfort have been shoved aside and quarterly profit statements substituted.  An obvious example is the two year shuffle: in corporate medicine doctors are given a two year contract and when their time comes to renew, their salaries are cut in half and so they leave.  So patients are faced with constant turnover in their doctors, with doctors who are re learning them.  Turnover is not a problem for the bottom line for the healthcare corporations, only for the customers, but since 90% of patients are seen by corporate doctors, the patients really don't have better choices elsewhere. The private sector in action.

In the end, I'm convinced the Republicans in Congress who are set to kill the Ex-Im bank are, as the good Senator from North Dakota says, idiotic. They are idiotic because they cleave to the new mantra of the newly ultra right Republican party: The only good government is a dead government. 

New Hampshire: The Indifferent Parent

University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH

NPR had a report on New Hampshire and it's university system yesterday which was pretty depressing. It was actually a report on student debt nationwide and the outcomes for kids who had borrowed to go to college, invested in themselves and in their own futures, kids who had done all those things we've all been told are good for the kids and good for the country. The distress and ruin taking that advice has caused was the focus,  and they were using New Hampshire as a case in point because as a state it is the worst in the nation in providing support for its college system and its students. In-state tuition for New Hampshire residents is, cost adjusted, the highest in the nation.

They interviewed two graduates of UNH, a young woman who graduated with a double major in political science and English, minor in Spanish and her boyfriend who got his BA and then his law degree from UNH. He is currently working for $10 an hour at some job in a law firm. They didn't say if he'd passed the bar, but presumably, he's not an associate at the firm; likely he's doing clerical work. A paralegal would make much more. 

The woman has yet to find a real job, but cobbles together jobs in retail, jobs which do not require college degrees. From a financial perspective, they'd both have been better off not going to college which only served, thus far at least, to burden them with debt.

One might say, well what did you expect--with a BA in English?  

On the other hand, there is the story of my friend who worked as a welder at the GE airplane engine plant and moved up quickly through the organization until they wanted to elevate him to management, to run an entire section of the plant. But they called him in and told him he couldn't have the job everyone knew he could do well, in fact the job he was already doing well as an acting chief, because he didn't have a college degree.

So industry can be part of the problem, by sheer stupidity. There are industries which require some certification or another when the employee has already demonstrated competence in a much more meaningful way.

College degrees become important for all the wrong reasons: Because the people who run industry are too lazy to think of what real quality means, are unwilling to think about how to identify and reward real talent and initiative and effort among employees. Just shuffle paper--if the employee has a paper for the wall that's all that counts.

All education is a leap in faith:  The student studies things for which there is no apparent immediate reward, from learning what sounds go with which letters when you are learning to read, to reading Shakespeare or Camus or learning calculus, there is often no real world benefit evident at the time you are in the classroom. As a student, you have to trust the adult doing the instruction this is all worthwhile. 

But the English department sees things differently:  We teach Hemingway because it broadens the experience of the student. We are not here to do trade school training.  Literature courses are not apprentice training.  You want that, go to tech school. Liberal arts has less direct benefits. 

When you watch a show like "West Wing" you see what verbal people think is the power of the word, the power of emotive writing. Peggy Noonan, Dee Dee Myers made good careers out of spinning images, out of writing stirring phrases for Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton to deliver. So when Reagan spoke of touching the face of God, Noonan wrote his script for him and people were uplifted. But, fact is, about as many people make a living by writing inspiring stuff for politicians or corporate heads as make it in professional sports, percentage wise.  It's the rare, lucky, talented person who can actually translate the liberal arts into a viable living. 

The fact is, we probably ought not be encouraging so many people to go to college. But the fact remains, for those who have the financial backing to do so, it can be life changing for the individual, and the engineers, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, economists and psychologists we train at universities benefit the nation at large.  In New Hampshire, we hear, well, but why should we spend our money on these kids, who may get their educations and take their skills elsewhere?  Let other states do that. 

When veterans returning from World War II went to college in droves on the GI bill, people who would never have gone to college got degrees. This is frequently cited as a prime example of how investing in the work force, investing in higher education benefits the nation at large.  But was it college or was it simply the return of a lot of eager workers which fueled the sustained post war economic boom?

As someone in the NPR piece noted, New Hampshire, compared to most states, has no tax base. It is a state which has chosen to not support it's citizens, especially its children.  If providing grade school through graduate school instruction for New Hampshire children means an income tax or a sales tax, well, no thank you.

I have friends like this. They had kids and they said, "They got public schooling through high school, but we need to provide for our own retirement. We can't afford to pay for college. They want college? That's on their own dime. They got to get loans."  And these same people owned summer homes, went on cruises and trips to Europe. But they did not have money for college.

They are the parental equivalents of New Hampshire. 

Keene State College, New Hampshire

The Explorers: Making the Shire Go Global

T.E. Lawrence

A good friend from Nashville visited last week and she wondered out loud why New Hampshire is allowed such an outsized role in our nation's politics. This place is so...White! It's so homogeneous.  Tennessee  may be more representative of the push and pull going on in the country than this state of happy little shires populated by Hobbits. 

She is not the first to make that point, but in a way I like the idea of New Hampshire, the prototypical Hobbit shire sending it's people and ideas out into the world. There are some, admittedly small in number but large in heart and mind, who launch themselves from their shires into the world and go to China or South America or Europe and see all that through the clear lenses they developed in Hampton and return with that and they bring what they grew in New Hampshire to the places they explore.

She is actually unusual in that she had the intellectual daring to learn Japanese, having grown up in North Carolina, and she made an impressive career working for law firms and various groups as an American who was fluent in Japanese and who understood the culture. Getting an American mind to bend to the Asian world is challenging and requires courage and persistence. 

People who leave the comfortable and explore have often been malcontents, restless because they did not feel they really fit into the safe, comfortable world their parents had organized for them.  

Lawrence of Arabia was typical in that sense--said to have been homosexual and certainly not enamored of British imperial culture, he sought the exotic and embraced it in Arabia. 

Hemingway and Friends

Hemingway was not happy and snug at home and that led him to Europe, where he learned French and Spanish and rejected the familiarity of the American Midwest and he discovered the joys and risks of life in Spain, France and Germany. And he brought home those adventures and insights and made his home country more aware and educated in the process. 

Douglas Paal

In the roiling sixties, many college kids began questioning whether America really was the best place on earth, but our generation had not had enough experience of other places to be very sure what we could take from the rest of the world which was of any value. Back packing through Europe had its vogue, still does. Those brief forays, with the security of supportive parents back home, likely helped broaden minds back home in provincial America, but did not change the basic insularity of American thought, especially in places like the South and West and Midwest where few people ever ventured out into the rest of the planet.  At college, Doug Paal was a thoughtful, but clearly detached observer of what was swirling around him. He was on the college newspaper, which brought him into the campus whirl and buzz, but he remained apart in many ways. He wound up going to China, learning the language and served in the White House and now in a consulting capacity to help America deal with that inscrutable power across the Pacific. He managed to be an expatriot who remained oriented toward America, to bring home China to the United States.

Deb and James Fallows

Neither James nor Deb Fallows could be described as outsiders in their own country--Harvard educated, products of nurturing families, they nevertheless felt compelled to explore.  I think of them as something like members of that Explorers Club Jules Verne described in "Around the World in 80 Days" seated in London, where explorers returned to their plush leather chairs and their port wine to regale their colleagues with tales of what they saw in India, Polynesia and Africa. James Fallows provided a significant service to his homeland when he wrote "More Like Us" in the midst of the era when Japan seemed to be overtaking and replacing the United States economically and as a world power. Presciently, Fallows said Japan actually has more demons and burdens than we did and their culture of conformity and suppression of dissent and insistence on harmony when self criticism would be healthier did not put them in a good position to adapt to a changing world. He argued America, with its capacity for self examination and improvement would ultimately do better if only we decided to be "more like us," i.e. to cleave to what makes us strong--our diversity and energy and imagination.

Gauguin brought home his colors and his palate from Polynesia to France, where van Gogh learned from him and the world is in debt to that intermingling.


We are told we are living in the new global economy, but exploration and interaction is as old as mankind roaming out of Africa, as old as the Silk Road and men in ships heading from Viking land toward Newfoundland and from Spain to the Caribbean. It has occurred, for much of man's history as part of war, from the Crusades to World War II. 

The difference now is that a boy who grew up in North Carolina and became an accountant for a big American firm now finds himself in Hong Kong and Beijing with some regularity and he brings all that home to his workplace, his community and his family.  The numbers in this group will overwhelm the numbers of artists, academics and government types. They may actually change America and the world. 

But it takes courage and it takes vigor and persistence. The question is, will we have the wisdom to support those who are willing to launch?

Planned Parenthood in the Cross Hairs

"I’ve seen these two videos. They’re gruesome and I think they’re awful. That’s why the Energy and Commerce Committee and Judiciary Committee are doing an investigation. I expect that we will have hearings, and the more we learn, the more it will educate our decisions in the future.”
John Boehner

Videotapes, surreptitiously obtained by anti abortion groups, and cut artfully, suggest that some Planned Parenthood officials negotiated to sell the tissue obtained at the time of abortions (D&C, dilation and curretage or vacuum extraction) for fun and profit. Ah, now we see why Planned Parenthood does abortions: They are selling body parts for profit! The truth about these videos was exposed by the New York Times and it turns out the officials rejected some offers and asked questions about others. Planned Parenthood, and most university hospitals, provide tissue from such procedures for stem cell research, among other things, but does not profit from this practice.  The whole video scam was just that, a set up and a fraud.

But Republicans are asking no questions: It's something they want to believe--Planned Parenthood is a wicked organization whose bird ought to be the Red Tail Hawk because it rips its victims limb from limb.

What mystifies me is why anti abortion groups and the Republican party are so determined to kill Planned Parenthood. By far the greatest number of patients they see are not for abortions but for the very thing which makes abortions unnecessary: Effective contraception.

I understand, if you think abortion is murder and some Planned Parenthood facilities do abortions, you'd want to protest that and try to shut them down, but most PP facilities do contraception not abortion, so why attack those?  If the patient has a festering wound in her thigh, would you stab the patient in the heart to kill the abscess? 

Just another line of reasoning in the Republican hymns and verses which mystifies.

The Other: Obama and Fear of the Alien

 “We have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain.”

--Senator Pat McCarran 


When Donald Trump says he sent agents to Hawaii to investigate the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate and "You wouldn't believe what they are finding." He was correct. I do not believe what Mr. Trump was implying and, in fact, Mr. Trump never released what they "found," presumably because it would have been too disturbing to the American psyche.

This is not a new phenomenon in American life. Ever since the first English colonists arrived, people who arrived earlier than the next wave of immigrants expressed alarm and resentment about those who followed.  So, in one era "No Irish Need Apply" signs were posted in store and factory windows. 

In fact, as current as Senator McCarran's remarks (above) may seem, they were made in 1952 in support of his "act" which set quotas for immigrants from various (undesirable) countries of origin.

Of course, President Barack Obama will always seem like an alien to some: He was born in Hawaii, our most remote state, to a Kenyan father, and he came of age in Chicago, a very American city, but Obama was working with the dispossessed and the flotsam of our society, and he grew up, in part, in Indonesia, on the far side of the world, consorting with Muslims.

But for me, oddly, he seems far more familiar and understandable than Mr. Trump and certainly I'm more comfortable with him than with George W. or Lindsay Graham,  Rick Walker or any of the Republican jackasses who bray and say such offensive things in virtually every utterance.  I could see sitting on the sea wall with Barack Obama,  eating lobster bisque from the Beach Plum and talking about things, the world, life, where I cannot imagine I'd have much to share with Trump, Graham, McConnell, Boehner, Limbaugh, or virtually any of the haters who comprise that part of American society who want to preserve America for the good, White, Christian people they think belong here and who they think should own this country.