Sunday, August 8,  2:oo pm
At the outdoor stage on the grounds of the Sautee Nacoochee Center
Peace Pole Installation Remembering Nagasaki and Hiroshima

Refreshments and Facilitated Roundtable Discussion following the ceremony in the conference room of the main SNCA building.

The Sautee Nacoochee Center is located in the beautiful Sautee & Nacoochee Valleys of Northeast Georgia near Helen on Highway 255 North, 1/4 mile off Highway 17.

For Directions/Map: http://www.snca.org/main.html

Please email Julianne Wilson <thrivingspirit@me.com> if you will bring FINGER foods and/or beverages for the reception so we can be sure to have enough to share well. Please take the food/drinks to the conference room NO LATER THAN 1:45pm on Sunday - thanks!

Thank you!
Please check out the article (and picture of Adele!) http://talkingstick.gamountains.net/adele.html

More information:  Joanne Steele at 706-878-2035

Co-sponsored by Nuclear Watch South and Georgia WAND for more information:

Obama has disappointed us. He is constitutionally a conservative. We didn't expect that. He began the HIR miserably. We have seen the Senate Blue Dogs and religious fundamentalists turn the process over to the greedy and the fanatics. But you know in the end they didn't have all the votes.

Those who believe mostly as we do never had the votes either. We can rightly shout that we never got much respect.

But one thing our side in the House got is this speech, this "government expression" that this is about people and about making moral choices. Do you think this is the speech Obama would have made or did make for the Max Baccus group?

Hypocrites? Yes many, Is the bill. fair? Will it solve much? Nope, In fact we can hope for the failures to prove us right soon.

But what history will record is this articulation of a message and I am proud of.it.. Johnson didn't cure the sickness of racism when he said "We shall overcome." But he did send the message that the power of the government is on the side of those who bring solutions.

It is the moral power of the government to enunciate the universal moral principles that so terrifies the GOP, the Libertarians and The Tea baggers.

I have no notion of how hypocritical Obama is but our side forced him to say the right things, to send the message. We should be proud.

If you are looking for a sense of victory just look at the shoddy the GOP. They are pitiful.
.

I am disappointed in the usually insightful Jesse Corn for his column in Friday’s Times. He takes our elderly to task for being “selfish” in their desire for compassionate quality medical care during their final years.

Critical of objections to proposed cuts in Medicare benefits, his words are cruel and callous: “The old of this country apparently fail to see that by selfishly pursuing the destruction of this program for their own gain, they will break the social contract with the young who have to fund it. “

What social contract? Mr. Corn laments that today’s younger are paying for the needs of elders. Where does he believe the uncapped 3 percent Medicare tax on income and other taxes paid over some 50 years of working lives by our elders went?

Flash! That’s the contract. That’s civilization.

Beyond that, it should be noted that Medicare services are not free to patients. They bear the cash costs of deductibles and co-pays, and for drugs up to some $2,900 annually. Annual insurance premiums continue throughout life. For this single elder, premiums alone are in excess of $5,000. This is significant to those relying on Social Security and now diminished pension funds.

Bedside providers barely profit from Medicare fees, if at all, and they should be applauded, for without their acceptance the system would have failed long ago.

There is no doubt that the Medicare age group, most of whom have lost 50 percent, give or take, of already stagnant private pension funds, are vulnerable to the scurrilous propaganda emanating from profit- and politically motivated constituencies. However, the solution does not lie in vilifying and abandoning a segment of our society.

Perhaps Mr. Corn should look to those who benefit from the propaganda; the supporters of no bulk negotiation of pharmaceutical company charges for medication, sweetheart deals for appliances, extending patents on biologicals, bans on drug importation and an insurance industry that insists on Dow Jones CEO salaries, and profits for shareholders.

W. Lorraine Watkins
Dawsonville

It seems to now be beyond the hysterical media calling for virtually non-existant violence. A paralyzed military sits off shore and at the airport surrounded by thousands of tons of desperately needed water and food; waiting for "security."

As far as I can tell, most of the aid that is reaching the victims is coming by road over the mountains from Santa Domingo, accompanied by the First Lady of the D. R. She doesn't seem to fear the machete's nor do the hard hats pulling victims out nor, with one noted exception, the medical teams. Even Secretary of State Clinton will be on the ground in Port au Prince. this afternoon.

If our cowering military delays much longer to begin major distribution of food and water the chance of violence fulfilling their prophecies will develop. I suppose when the primary goal is to train the men to kill it is not considered a good idea to teach them much about human nature. If they had begun even a trickle of supplies as soon as they had one of those monstrous vehicles; to deliver them the people would have been reassured that more would soon be coming and more likely to be patient. Witholding goods sitting on the ground it until a division of Marines arrives just incites anger. The longer it goes on the less trust and the more grasping and hoarding there will be.

I am struck with the image, really a meme, the white man's fear of oppressed and suffering black people. No pacts with the devil. It was our white ancestors who through enabling slavery so long have endowed us with paranoia and terror. Can one imagine a similar reaction to the devastation of a city such as Denver? I don't think so.

Yes. It lingers yet. There was more than a taint of it in the response to Katrina. This is blatant.Then there is the politics of 2010. Another possible source of the slowdown, I fear has, so far been little noted by the media and mentioned with sullenness indirectly by some of the organizations involved in the aid mission. That is just days ago President Obama turned the leadership of international aid missions back to the State Department's USAID. After the earthquake he specifically named them to head the US mission to Haiti.

Now we all know the military and Cheney's friends are not that fond of President Obama. And they think their warriors know all about how to run countries, better than any civilian. One can only hope they are not playing passive aggressive to USAID with the lives of these wonderful people of Haiti.

If you have any communication with the rescue efforts please see "Cries for Help" I posted the other day.

Long awaited, it has now been dissected and reacted to by the pundits. Bottom line President Obama will continue Bush policies in Afghanistan. It is likely that the criminals that preceded the president in the White House were successful in locking the nation into that course.

My 2 cents.

I think the twit Chris Matthews stumbled on the key phrase; ‘America is no longer as innocent as in the days of FDR.’ or something close to that. While Matthews seemed genuinely confused over the metaphor Ron Reagan gave a passionate interpretation applied to the mood of the nation.

I think Obama was speaking more for his own state of mind than interpreting the mood of the nation.

As any woman knows. You lose your innocence when you get screwed. The days of the Great Depression were in my view when Americans lost their innocence. When FDR came into office we were realizing we had been screwed. With his compassion and enduring optimism he certainly strove to reverse that.

But we all know, once screwed you can’t go back. Fasten your seat belts.

Many living today know that it was Christa McAullife who made the phrase an every day aspiration. One could say the teacher astronaut being lost in the reach should bring fear to the phrase. But it was not the aspiration but weather, mundane statistical thinking and perhaps some hubris that led to her loss. In the imperfections of self and world it is a reach, not always a grasp.

There is always something more ahead. To cease the reaching is to lose what can be.

Had there not been some several years of the space program reaching, at great taxpayer expense, it is not likely the explosion in innovation in microcomputing, communications and imaging would have happened. Imagine our world of the wired black Bell telephone, the IBM Selectric and Speed Graphic still the top of their lines. Did we get our money's worth? I think so. More important we fueled our hope and confidence.

My question is evoked by the recommendations by the Obama administration's prize committee on effectiveness of medical practices. The report is really only the nail in the coffin of my hope for a move back to humane and universally available care for our sick and would be sick. Surely the insurance, pharmaceutical-appliance and educational industries have extracted all the wealth there is to be had?

Care of the lame and the suffering is a social and cultural concern. Surely the goal is to care, not to sustain highly profitable industries? To address how it shall be given is not a zero sum game of manipulated statistics. They do not reach.

It has set me to reflecting on the real science as I have lived it and know it can be. And I can see many parallels to the space program in medicine. The great physician Galen took much from Aristotle and much from Hippocrates as well as his own work. He was so successful in organizing the knowledge of how the body works that it was decided that he had published all that there was to know. And for a thousand years the science of medicine lay fallow. Only in the Renaissance did it begin to be advanced by those such as Paracelsus, Vesalius and Harvey who believed there was more knowledge to reach for. It is a tradition that has endured in medical science until recently. But the obsession with profit is taking its toll.

My little piece of it began in the early 1960s. And I have stories to tell. There are many but I suppose Halstead was one of the first to challenge the notion that many cancers do not begin systemically. Reaching for a cure for breast cancer in the second half of the 19th century he performed the first radical mastectomy. Others were beginning to do the same for other cancers.

The situation with childhood cancer was in the fifties and early sixties similar to adult cancer in the latter half of the 19th century. I was honored to be among relatively small group of pediatricians who chose to join the surgeons and radiologists in the reach for cures of children. There were remarkable achievements within ten short years. Much of what we developed then is still being applied to all age groups. This includes finding ways to treat breast cancer without resorting to radical mastectomy.

Countless vibrant lives have since survived to participate in their own joy and the welfare of their nation and the earth.

Had Halstead used the reasoning currently being applied, that of cruel perversions of science and statistics  called economics, to care for our ill, he would have never put a scalpel to a breast. Had those who believed children with cancer must die prevailed, Edward Kennedy, Jr. would not be among us. You fill in the multitude of faces and facts. I know of few of us that don't have a beloved to add.

When you don't reach for the stars you opt for dark ages and entropy.

Good News
"AFTER MONTHS OF REPUBLICAN RESISTANCE, SENATE CONFIRMS DR. BENJAMIN AS SURGEON GENERAL: A trailblazing African-American physician with a long record of service to Alabama's rural poor, Dr. Regina Benjamin has said she will emphasize disease prevention and public health. (11/2/2009)"
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/11/after-months-of-republican-resistance-senate-confirms-dr-benjamin-as-surgeon-general.html

Not so good news
"The White House has nominated Mr. Siddiqui for the position of chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the United States trade representative. He is presently a vice president at CropLife America, a coalition of the major industrial players in the pesticide industry, including Syngenta, Monsanto, Dow Chemical and DuPont. That job doesn’t seem to square with the Obama administration’s professed interest in more sustainable, less chemically dependent approaches to agriculture."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opinion/04wed4.html

Thoughtful analysis on sustainablity
"Rethinking Jobs for a Sustainable Economy
By Matthew Cardinale, North American Correspondent, Inter-Press Service; News Editor, The Atlanta Progressive News (November 10, 2009)"
http://atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0544.html

Maureen on Wall Street.
"But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.
Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11dowd.html?th&emc=th

More on Nidal Hasan
http://talkingstick.gamountains.net/news/index.php/2009/11/11/more-reflection-on-nidal-hasan-1#comments

More on rendition disgrace
"Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11wed1.html?th&emc=th

From Bob
The Generals' Revolt:
http://www.rollingstone.com:80/politics/story/30493567/the_generals_revolt
Seymour Hersh: Military is Waging War Against the White House:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/seymour-hersh-military-is_n_332139.html
Sack the General; Stop the War:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09280/1003447-374.stm#ixzz0THbOo9Py

Late Breaking Outrage
After all they are doing "God's Work."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-nancy-snyderman/planes-vaccines-and-no-eq_b_353727.html

Robert L. Borosage: It Ain't No Crystal Staircase

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/obamas-first-year-it-aint_b_346124.html&cp

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Obama One Year On

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123/kvh?rel=emailNation

Juan Cole:  Obama's foreign policy

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/26/obama_report_card