Guns and Second Amendment Freaks: A Modest Proposal

Okay, here's a proposal for those guys who believe they need those AR-15, AK-47, 50 cal air cooled machine guns for when the spooky guys in blue helmets descend in the black helicopters and try to seize power for the new world order.

Let's organize some "well regulated militias" in every hamlet which wants them, put them on firing ranges, give them big guns, ammo etc and let them have at it.

Then, after playtime is over, they turn back in their weapons, which are locked up in the armory.  They each have a key to the armory, so they know they are special, but the keys to the gun room and the ammo are held by the militia officer.

So when the black helicopters appear overhead, the fire bell in the night, or the email alert goes out, all the volunteer firemen, militiamen, hop in their trucks and drive to the armory and the resistance is in place, the 21st century minutemen are ready to go.

Then nobody needs a friggin AK-47 over his mantle because it's right there in the militia building, along with all his friends who might actually form a real fighting unit, as opposed to a bunch of crazies running around the woods dressed in camo playing soldier like when they were kids.

Terence O'Rourke: Finally Some Fire Down Below

When you walk through the garden
You gotta watch your back
Well I beg your pardon
Walk the straight and narrow track
--"Down in the Hole"

The Candidate's night at the Exeter Inn did not begin auspiciously. Terence O'Rourke began with the kind of stuff you can only imagine some female campaign consultant told him he needed to do, so there was what felt like several hours of talk about his three children, his wonderful wife, who taught him all he knew about being a county prosecutor, a rendition of his life story, which at thirty something, cannot be all that long--except for the part about his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he touched on his military service the difference between him and Maura Sullivan was resounding. This is a man who is understated about his experiences in war, which real warriors always are.  He was not trying to claim to be a hero. He was just saying her learned some things from his time in combat, and there was a mixture of sorrow and anger which made him look and sound much older. 

It was only in the last few minutes, when he began to address the issues people started sit up and listen.  He said this whole endless war thing had to be brought to a close. And he said there is no reason we have to live with the legacy of a Supreme Court and meekly accept the reality of Roberts/ Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch for the next thirty years.  Congress can pack the court without a Constitutional amendment. 

But it was during the question and answer session he really shone: He said we had to take the profit motive out of health care in this country, had to move beyond single payor to a true National Health System, which would not mean the end to private medical care but simply give everyone access to some medical care. 

He has seen the "drug war" from the point of view of a prosecutor so he can be forgiven for seeing the "opioid problem" in terms of law enforcement, interdicting the flow of drugs from Afghanistan, the source of the lion's share of opium in the world.
He is clearly smart enough to be educated on this, to be brought to believe the opioid problem is not one but many problems and is, at heart a public health problem.

This is a guy who might even be persuaded to watch "The Wire." You can tell, it would appeal to him.

And he thinks attack rifles and military weapons have no business being sold to private citizens, and he is a hunter. He can read the Second Amendment and understand it. He can talk to the demented Second Amendment knuckle draggers and say he's not trying to castrate them from their guns, but there is no goddamn way they are owed military assault rifles by the Second Amendment, even if they do believe the blue helmets in the black helicopters are coming to get them.

I could see him standing up to Republican thugs like Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was a collegiate wrestling champion, and struts around in Congress sans the usual jacket and tie in a tight fitting dress shirt as if he was trying to get as close to a wrestling singlet as he can, to do battle with lily livered liberals.

He exchanged intelligently with the professor of economics in the front row who pointed out that the new tax bill is a theft from the poor to the rich. O'Rourke added that as most people earn more money, their tax rates rise, but for Walmart it is now fixed at 21% no matter how much money they make.

He also added that any threat to Medicare and Social Security could be easily fixed by simply removing the cap which means Bill Gates only pays for Social Security up to $120,000 of his income.

One of his best remarks came about the Charlottesville incident, where Trump said some of the alt right folks, some of them Nazis were "fine people." 
"I had thought," he said, "Despite all our differences, as Americans we all agreed that Nazis are never fine people."

He's as liberal as Bernie, but younger.

O'Rourke needs work: He speaks in a rushed, staccato way, and his best lines are lost in his lack of enunciation. 

But he might just be the real article. He might be what we need. We need some fire and fury. We need a war consigliere. 

After the talk,  a Chris Pappas supporter told me: "We need a work horse in Congress--this guy O'Rourke is a show horse."
And I had to ask: What for? What can any Democrat do in Congress now, for his home district, or for the nation?
I asked him to name just 4 Democratic Congressmen. He couldn't.
That's the problem. We got no leaders. We need leaders. Red blooded, testosterone infused leaders. That doesn't mean they can't be women, but they have to be bold, confrontational and fierce when aroused.
Chris Pappas, bless him, is a house cat. 
Maura Sullivan is ambitious, has attracted lots of money, but she's an empty suit, sorry to say. She just hasn't thought about the issues. She's about as into policy as those glam gals on Scandal. For her, Congress is all about the glamour.

This O'Rourke character, he's more like Josiah Bartlet. He's actually intrigued by the problems, searching for solutions.
He's the kind of guy you want to get in a place like the Community Oven, where it's not noisy and you can hear everyone talk and you want to spend a few hours listening to him, pelting him with questions, making him refine his thinking and you just have the inkling, he might someday grow up to be President, starting right here in New Hampshire.
Pappas is right on all the issues, but he lives in a world of Mr. Rogers neighborhood.
He has said he doesn't want to get in food fights in Congress. 
Sullivan is a show horse.

But O'Rourke strikes me as someone who knows when the only choice is to fight, who knows when there's no point in trying to appease.
And if  he gets into a fight, he's going to win it.
The real imponderable is why a bright young guy like this would want to spend his time shuttling between Washington National airport and Manchester, would want to get a job where, from day one, all you are doing is dialing for dollars and trying to get the IRS off the back of some elderly widow in New Durham and trying to keep the Shipyard open.

House of Representatives is no kind of job.
But if he got that ,and then took Maggie Hassan's seat in the Senate, well then I might could just show him around some nice neighborhoods he could move his wife and kids into down in the Maryland suburbs of DC, because he could have a good career down there.

Mass Shootings Same Old Same Old in USA

So, read this little vignette and tell me which of the mass shootings you think it's describing. I know, I know, they all blur together and sound the same.

With one exception, they are all male and except for one Asian male, they are all white. Exceptions that prove the rule.
It's a white male thing, basically.

So here goes: Where and which shooting is this report describing? Extra points if you can name the year. 

He then drove to a hardware store, where he purchased a Universal M1 carbine, two additional ammunition magazines, and eight boxes of ammunition, telling the cashier he planned to hunt wild hogs.At a gun shop he purchased four more carbine magazines, six additional boxes of ammunition, and a can of gun cleaning solvent. At Sears he purchased a Sears Model 60 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun before returning home.

Whitman sawed off the barrel and butt stock of the shotgun, then packed it into his footlocker, along with a Remington 700 6-mm bolt-action hunting rifle, a .35-caliber pump rifle, a .30-caliber carbine (M1), a 9-mm Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia .25-caliber pistol, a Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolver, and more than 700 rounds of ammunition.

--Wikipedia

Fact is, this was 1966 and it was the University of Texas clock tower shooting where a man named Whitman shot random people, 15 in all, dead.

When it comes to mass shootings, there seems to be a theme: These guys buy guns fairly close to the time they use them.  And they definitely buy up lots of ammo. So a law making purchase of said armaments might help to prevent mass shooting, which is all we seem to care about lately with respect to gun deaths.

Little kids at home shooting their siblings, people shooting their wives at home, men shooting citizens during robberies don't seem to bother the public all that much. Americans are willing to live with that. This America, man.

The Itch of Inequality

A woman visited my office today and she had not started a drug I had added to her diabetes regimen because Blue Cross refused to pay for it and it would have been $900 a month out of pocket. But, she said brightly, "I just got Mass Health."  So she asked me to re write the prescription; it'll be covered now.


Mass Health is Medicaid.


This is a common story in Massachusetts, but not in New Hampshire, where the people's representatives do not believe in government.  In Massachusetts, the government sponsored health insurance covers just about every drug. In New Hampshire, you're lucky if your doctor's visit is covered.

Reagan's welfare queen 

I don't know how many times a week I hear someone, usually a white person with no more than a high school education, if that, grouse about how her company sponsored health insurance would not cover a drug or a procedure, and then add indignantly, but my neighbor, Juanita Diaz, she gets it for free from Mass Health.

If that white lady found her drug was covered by her own health insurance, likely she not feel angry at all that Ms. Diaz got her drug paid for by Medicaid. What bothers the white working stiff about Ms. Diaz is the sense that Ms. Diaz is getting something unfairly, when the working stiff is being denied it.  


What really riles the patient, that white lady, working two jobs--one cleaning offices and one at the car wash-- is that while she works hard, she manages to earn just enough to disqualify her from Medicaid coverage, while Ms. Diaz sits homem watching TV, and gets the drug paid for.


So it's two things:
1/ The inequity: she gets it when I don't 
2/ The idea that by working hard, I pay the taxes to pay for Ms. Diaz and I don't get what my taxes pay for Ms. Diaz is getting--the worst of both worlds.

Did she not rape the system?

Of course, there are layers here:
1/ Why does the white guy's health insurance not cover the drug?
2/ Why is the drug $900 a month in any universe?
3/ Why does Medicaid get a sweetheart contract for the drug but not Blue Cross?


In our for profit, profit driven American health care system, the drug company can charge whatever it  wishes, whatever the market will bear. 
The best health care is consistently provided by the government run programs and the commercial programs are niggardly.
The working stiff never directs his resentment toward the inadequacy of the commercial programs; he is only angry at the perceived profligacy of the government run program.

It's the old Ronald Reagan "welfare queen" driving her Cadillac, wearing mink, raping the government welfare programs which were  supposedly devised to assist the poor and needy but instead get exploited by the lazy, undeserving "poor" who are growing rich and fat on the government's teat.

Why is she not a welfare queen?

If we had healthcare for all, Medicare for all, if everyone got the same basic benefits (with perhaps a little extra for people who added company health insurance on top of what the basic government plan offers) then we would likely hear no complaints about Ms. Diaz who is getting her drugs for free, because everyone gets them for free.


Of course, as Lester Freeman of "The Wire" noted, "Ain't no such thing as free in this country."


But at least we'd all perceive the situation differently. It's not bad if you don't have something until you see someone else gets it when you are denied it.


Perception of inequality.

Russian Trolls

Here's a little oddity to explain.
He's a chart of views of last week's blogs on Mad Dog:

Russia	283
United States	169
France	17
Germany	9
Canada	6
United Kingdom	6
Ireland	6
Ukraine	5
Algeria	2
Spain

So, do you really think Russians are just such fans of some rabid New Hampshire Democrat? 

Do you, as you look over last week's blogs, think there is much of interest to the average Russian?

Is Mad Dog a star in Russia?
Or does Russia have a lot of paid eyes looking at the American blogosphere?

Troll

Does that hurt the USA?
How could it hurt us?

Actual Intervention, American Style

"Russian meddling" means zilch to me. 
Everyone was trying to influence, intervene in and change our last Presidential election: Hillary, Democrats, Bernie, France, Germany, England, Ukraine, Israel, Syria. Everyone had skin in the game.

If the Russians put out fake news and a lunatic from Virginia jumped in his truck with his AK-15 and burst into a pizza pallor in Washington, DC, looking for the pedophile ring run by Hillary Clinton, because he believed the stuff he read on the internet, is that Russia's fault? 

Until and unless you can show me the Russians somehow got into the computers and changed votes or vote counts, and that Hillary actually won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, then I do not care how hard Russia tried to elect Trump.

They wanted the sanctions against Russia ended and so they tried to help the guy they thought would do that.
The Supreme Court says corporations can spend unlimited amounts trying to elect Senators and Congressmen they like. 
We muffle no voice here in the USA.
Not even Russian voices. 

Has the CIA not done more nefarious things than that routinely in other countries?

Playing the Game

I don't know. I'm just asking to be educated here.
The basic question is: Why should I care about what Russia did in 2016 to influence our election?

Massacre Du Jour: The 2nd Amendment Blues

A well regulated milita, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. --Second Amendment, United States Constitution.


Let's see, where are we? Oh, this week it's Florida.
Fourteen dead kids?

President Slithole says it's the fault of:
1. Democrats (who have not built his wall)
2. Local officials, who did not see the warning signs or better yet, the FBI for not swooping in on this kid
3. Unarmed students and teachers who failed to defend themselves.
4. Barack Obama, because, well, you know.
5. Hillary Clinton, because she is crooked.
6. Ted Cruz, who must be related to the shooter, who was also named "Cruz" and so, you know.

Thoughts and prayers are working over time.
It's not appropriate to discuss laws at this time of mourning, or morning.

Truth be told, Mad Dog, were he President would have no clear plan for dealing with this mayhem, other than perhaps agitating for legislation to restrict ammunition.
Trying to eliminate guns is a losing proposition--that ship has sailed. You can bury guns in your backyard. There are more guns floating around this nation than there are people.
Probably not a good idea to sell any more AR-15's, especially to kids, especially to kids who hear voices.
This kid, we are told lived with an adult who allowed him to keep his AR-15 locked in a gun locker in the house,and they told him he needed permission to unlock the locker. 
These people, the Sneads,  seem like nice people, but why do nice people allow a kid who had been expelled from school to keep an AR-15 in their house? 
Mr. Snead is said to be a "military intelligence analyst."  Now that is a thought provoking detail.
In this country, we probably should not be selling attack rifles and bump stocks to anyone, or at least we should make it just a little tougher for the next boy/man who hears voices telling him  he has to kill all his classmates.

But, you know, this America, man.

England was once a very violent place, lots of murders and beheadings. Somehow, they got past it. Same for a lot of Europe, although some places in Europe still haven't got past it--like Ukraine.

Add guns to the list of things government cannot likely solve all by itself; the list includes:
1. Opioid deaths
2. Opioid addiction
3. Women wanting abortions who should never have gotten pregnant in the first place
4. Illegal immigration by people who want to leave their horrible, "shit hole" countries
5. Global warming
6. Crime
7. Terrorism
8. Cancer
9. Death
10. Taxes.

Other than that, government can do a lot of good things to make life better, to enrich communities and improve life and health and education and foster new knowledge and the advancement of mankind.

But some things will always be with us. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying.

All we can do about those 10 nasties is try something, anything, and keep on trying.

So, I ask you: who, in his right mind can read that frigging 2nd Amendment, the only sentence in the entire Constitution which provides an explanation for the right it is about to confer, who could possibly read this and not understand this is not a right for individual ownership of guns? 

The New Medicine

This morning I spoke with a nurse who is in the University of Massachusetts Lowell nurse practitioner program. She is 25 years old and has been working on a ward at a community hospital and says, "I can't see doing that at age 40. I'm exhausted when I get home at night."

She is taking course work at the university and expects to have her NP certification in two years, 2020.
She got her BA in nursing in 2017.
I asked where she will do her clinical training and she smiled and said, "That's the problem. I have to arrange for my own."
"What? You mean with a doctor?"
"Or with another nurse practitioner."
"But how do you know if they are any good?"
"That's what I'd like to know," she said.
The clinical rotation covers 6-9 months, sometimes a year, but it is not clear how many hours a day this means. As a working floor nurse working 8 hour shifts, presumably the clinical rotation will not be 8 hour days.

At one of our clinics, all the primary care doctors quit and the manager, a thirty something woman with a MBA told me that really would not be a problem. They can always find nurse practitioners or physicians assistance to see patients. The doctor who signs off on their patients does not have to be on the premises, in fact will be about 10 miles away seeing his own patients.

I considered how I learned about patient care. It's true, I did not have much direct training dealing with patients who were not critically ill. We had a weekly outpatient clinic which most of my fellow residents thought a waste of time because the patients really didn't have much wrong with them, as opposed to the patients we saw in the hospital who often had several things wrong with them, each competing to see who could kill the patient first. I didn't mind the clinic, though. I got to see the patients I had seen in the hospital in follow up and it was amazing how healthy and normal they looked. Gratifying really. Some of those folks we wondered why we were working so hard to save, they looked so damaged, but then, six months later they looked like normal human beings.

Being exposed to people who turned out to have leukemia, or colon cancer or lung cancer or serious vascular disease or heart attacks or new onset diabetes for four years taught me a lot about how innocent sounding symptoms could be the harbinger of serious underlying illness.


It also made me respect influenza, strep pharyngitis and pneumonia, which occasionally landed a patient in the hospital where sometimes we could not save them.

How a nurse with 6 months of "shadowing" another nurse practitioner could step into the world with that kind of preparation, I could l only imagine.
She will look like a doctor, with a white lab coat, a stethoscope around her neck and many of her patients will not actually understand she is not an MD but she will know.


Fact is, she will be "cost effective" for the MBA who manages the clinic: Her salary will make those Excel spread sheets for the clinic's income and overhead look good.