WebMD Provides Answers to Your Questions About Swine Flu
Like people, pigs can get influenza (flu), but swine flu viruses aren't the same as human flu viruses.
What is swine flu?
Like people, pigs can get influenza (flu), but swine flu viruses aren't the same as human flu viruses. Swine flu doesn't often infect people, and the rare human cases that have occurred in the past have mainly affected people who had direct contact with pigs. But the current swine flu outbreak is different. It's caused by a new swine flu virus that has spread from person to person -- and it's happening among people who haven't had any contact with pigs.
What are swine flu symptoms?
Symptoms of swine flu are like regular flu symptoms and include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills, and fatigue. Some people have reported diarrhea and vomiting associated with swine flu. Those symptoms can also be caused by many other conditions, and that means that you and your doctor can't know, just based on your symptoms, if you've got swine flu. It takes a lab test to tell whether it's swine flu or some other condition.
If I think I have swine flu, what should I do? When should I see my doctor?
If you have flu symptoms, stay home, and when you cough or sneeze, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue. Afterward, throw the tissue in the trash and wash your hands. That will help prevent your flu from spreading.
If you've got flu symptoms, and you've recently been to a high-risk area like Mexico, CDC officials recommend that you see your doctor. If you have flu symptoms but you haven't been in a high-risk area, you can still see a doctor -- that's your call.
Keep in mind that your doctor will not be able to determine whether you have swine flu, but he or she would take a sample from you and send it to a state health department lab for testing to see if it's swine flu. If your doctor suspects swine flu, he or she would be able to write you a prescription for Tamiflu or Relenza. Those drugs may not be required; U.S. swine flu patients have made a full recovery without it.
How does swine flu spread? Is it airborne?
The new swine flu virus apparently spreads just like regular flu. You could pick up germs directly from an infected person, or by touching an object they recently touched, and then touching your eyes, mouth, or nose, delivering their germs for your own infection. That's why you should make washing your hands a habit, even when you're not ill. Infected people can start spreading flu germs up to a day before symptoms start, and for up to seven days after getting sick, according to the CDC.
The swine flu virus can become airborne if you cough or sneeze without covering your nose and mouth, sending germs into the air.
The U.S. residents infected with swine flu virus had no direct contact with pigs. The CDC says it's likely that the infections represent widely separated cycles of human-to-human infections.
How is swine flu treated?
The new swine flu virus is sensitive to the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza. The CDC recommends those drugs to prevent or treat swine flu; the drugs are most effective when taken within 48 hours of the start of flu symptoms. But not everyone needs those drugs; many of the first people in the U.S. with lab-confirmed swine flu recovered without treatment. The Department of Homeland Security has released 25% of its stockpile of Tamiflu and Relenza to states. Health officials have asked people not to hoard Tamiflu or Relenza.
Is there a vaccine against the new swine flu virus?
No. But the CDC and the World Health Organization are already taking the first steps toward making such a vaccine. That's a lengthy process -- it takes months.
I had a flu vaccine this season. Am I protected against swine flu?
No. This season's flu vaccine wasn't made with the new swine flu virus in mind; no one saw this virus coming ahead of time.
If you were vaccinated against flu last fall or winter, that vaccination will go a long way toward protecting you against certain human flu virus strains. But the new swine flu virus is a whole other problem.
How can I prevent swine flu infection?
The CDC recommends taking these steps:
Wash your hands regularly with soap and water, especially after coughing or sneezing. Or use an alcohol-based hand cleaner.
Avoid close contact with sick people.
Avoid touching your mouth, nose, or eyes.
Can I still eat pork?
Yes. You can't get swine flu by eating pork, bacon, or other foods that come from pigs.
What else should I be doing?
Keep informed of what's going on in your community. Your state and local health departments may have important information if swine flu develops in your area. For instance, parents might want to consider what they would do if their child's school temporarily closed because of flu. That happened in New York City, where St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens closed for a couple of days after eight students were found to have swine flu. Don't panic, but a little planning wouldn't hurt.
How severe is swine flu?
The severity of cases in the current swine flu outbreak has varied widely. In Mexico, there have been deaths and other severe cases. Early cases in the U.S. have been mild. But that could change. The virus itself could change, either becoming more or less dangerous. Scientists are watching closely to see which way the new swine flu virus is heading -- but health experts warn that flu viruses are notoriously hard to predict, as far as how and when they'll change.
Why has the swine flu infection been deadlier in Mexico than in the U.S.?
It is unclear why U.S. cases have been milder compared to those in Mexico. Among the first 20 reported cases in the U.S., only one patient required hospitalization and that person has fully recovered. CDC researchers are actively investigating to learn more about the differences between the cases in Mexico and those in the U.S.
Have there been previous swine flu oubtreaks?
Yes. There was a swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1976 among military recruits. It lasted about a month and then went away as mysteriously as it appeared. As many as 240 people were infected; one died.
The swine flu that spread at Fort Dix was the H1N1 strain. That's the same flu strain that caused the disastrous flu pandemic of 1918-1919, resulting in tens of millions of deaths.
Concern that a new H1N1 pandemic might return in winter 1976 led to a crash program to create a vaccine and vaccinate all Americans against swine flu. That vaccine program ran into all kinds of problems -- not the least of which was public perception that the vaccine caused excessive rates of dangerous reactions. After more than 40 million people were vaccinated, the effort was abandoned.
As it turned out, there was no swine flu epidemic.
I was vaccinated against the 1976 swine flu virus. Am I still protected?
Probably not. The new swine flu virus is different from the 1976 virus. And it's not clear whether a vaccine given more than 30 years ago would still be effective.
How many people have swine flu?
That's a hard question to answer, because the figure is changing so quickly. If you want to keep track of U.S. cases that have been confirmed by lab tests and reported to the CDC, check the CDC's web site. If you're looking for cases in other countries, visit the World Health Organization's web site. And when you hear about large numbers of people who are ill, remember that lab tests may not yet have been done to confirm that they have swine flu. And there may be a little lag time before confirmed cases make it into the official tally.
How serious is the public health threat of a swine flu epidemic?
The U.S. government has declared swine flu to be a public health emergency.
It remains to be seen how severe swine flu will be in the U.S. and elsewhere, but countries worldwide are monitoring the situation closely and preparing for the possibility of a pandemic.
The World Health Organization has not declared swine flu to be a pandemic. The WHO wants to learn more about the virus first and see how severe it is and how deeply it takes root.
But it takes more than a new virus spreading among humans to make a pandemic. The virus has to be able to spread efficiently from one person to another, and transmission has to be sustained over time. In addition, the virus has to spread geographically.
NOTES from JODY to help you stay ahead of the flu pig!:
Ramp up your immune system by removing grains and dairy from your diet with the exception of live bacteria yogurt, increase consumption of purified water, organic produce and clean proteins,eat mostly live foods and avoid sugars and processed, irradiated and packaged foods.
Along with any supplements add a good amount of quality probotics and plenty of essential fatty acids, viruses have a difficult time reproducing with healthy fats present.
Get exercise, daily sunshine and plenty of sleep in the darkest room you can create and try two or three deep breathing sessions a day at least.
Consider a good colloidal silver as a supplement.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
E J DIONNE Jr.
Ironies of 'a Devout Non-Ideologue'
How many ironies can a single presidency engender? Barack Obama is a detached man who has inspired fierce loyalties, and a cool man who has aroused both warm feelings of affection and a fiery opposition.
He loves to engage conservatives, yet few of them have chosen to engage him. He is seen as too moderate by parts of the left, but the right thinks he has a radical, statist agenda.
Wall Street's critics believe Obama's approach to rescuing the financial system amounts to coddling the bankers and financial scammers who got us into this mess. But many on the Street say Obama doesn't understand them and fear he is a secret populist who would displace finance as the dominant force in the U.S. economy.
On torture, Obama sought a middle ground: He ended the practice, disclosed what happened and proposed that we move on. Yet the right opposed disclosure, parts of the left wanted more accountability and their fight brought forth all of the bitterness Obama wants to put behind us.
The man does more than defy labels. He hates them. At a briefing for columnists last week to influence the coming 100-day assessments, a senior Obama adviser, struggling to offer a philosophical definition of the 44th president, finally settled on calling him "a devout non-ideologue."
But the mysteries and paradoxes of these 100 days cannot be unraveled without an understanding that the president is more than a "whatever works" guy. Obama would not inspire such loyalty if his supporters did not see (correctly) that he has an agenda to move the country to a very different place. He would not inspire such resistance if his opponents did not sense exactly the same thing.
There can be no denying that if Obama succeeds, government will play a larger role in American life because access to health care will be guaranteed by Washington and the financial system will face much tougher rules. The federal government will be influencing education and its financing more than it does now and will push the country toward reliance on a new mix of energy sources.
It's equally clear that the financing for all this will depend more heavily on taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans and that assistance to the neediest Americans will grow. As one social activist to Obama's left who was closely involved in the stimulus fight observed, "When it has the opportunity, the administration always puts its thumb on the scale in favor of doing more for the poor." Obama doesn't tout that fact, and he is not a radical egalitarian. But he certainly is for more equality.
In foreign affairs, the picture is blurrier, partly because this is an area in which Obama really is opposed to an ideological approach. This is precisely what separates him from the previous administration. Without question, the pragmatic Obama is winning the United States new friends in the world. He will need to show how this new affection translates into support for American positions and material help for American undertakings.
The first 100 of the 1,461 days in a presidential term are an imperfect predictor of how a leader will ultimately be judged. But they do offer a clear look at a president's style. Obama, on the whole, has been as crisp a decision maker and as calm an influence on his aides and his country as he was during the campaign.
But the most intriguing aspect of Obama's presidency so far may be the way in which he combines intelligence and intellect. The two are quite different, as Richard Hofstadter noted more than four decades ago in his instructive book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life."
Intelligence, Hofstadter argued, is an "unfailingly practical quality" that "works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals." Intellect, on the other hand, is the mind's "creative and contemplative side" that "examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines."
For Obama's base of progressive and liberal supporters, it is his intellectual side that draws such fierce loyalty and admiration, while his conservative foes mistrust the very part of him that imagines and dreams -- because they do not share his dreams.
But Obama's continued high standing in the polls rests on the great middle of the electorate that doesn't care if he's intellectual as long as he is smart enough to fix things. Obama and his aides know this, which is why our intellectually inclined president will continue to sow mystery by casting himself as a mechanic, a problem-solver and "a devout non-ideologue."
How many ironies can a single presidency engender? Barack Obama is a detached man who has inspired fierce loyalties, and a cool man who has aroused both warm feelings of affection and a fiery opposition.
He loves to engage conservatives, yet few of them have chosen to engage him. He is seen as too moderate by parts of the left, but the right thinks he has a radical, statist agenda.
Wall Street's critics believe Obama's approach to rescuing the financial system amounts to coddling the bankers and financial scammers who got us into this mess. But many on the Street say Obama doesn't understand them and fear he is a secret populist who would displace finance as the dominant force in the U.S. economy.
On torture, Obama sought a middle ground: He ended the practice, disclosed what happened and proposed that we move on. Yet the right opposed disclosure, parts of the left wanted more accountability and their fight brought forth all of the bitterness Obama wants to put behind us.
The man does more than defy labels. He hates them. At a briefing for columnists last week to influence the coming 100-day assessments, a senior Obama adviser, struggling to offer a philosophical definition of the 44th president, finally settled on calling him "a devout non-ideologue."
But the mysteries and paradoxes of these 100 days cannot be unraveled without an understanding that the president is more than a "whatever works" guy. Obama would not inspire such loyalty if his supporters did not see (correctly) that he has an agenda to move the country to a very different place. He would not inspire such resistance if his opponents did not sense exactly the same thing.
There can be no denying that if Obama succeeds, government will play a larger role in American life because access to health care will be guaranteed by Washington and the financial system will face much tougher rules. The federal government will be influencing education and its financing more than it does now and will push the country toward reliance on a new mix of energy sources.
It's equally clear that the financing for all this will depend more heavily on taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans and that assistance to the neediest Americans will grow. As one social activist to Obama's left who was closely involved in the stimulus fight observed, "When it has the opportunity, the administration always puts its thumb on the scale in favor of doing more for the poor." Obama doesn't tout that fact, and he is not a radical egalitarian. But he certainly is for more equality.
In foreign affairs, the picture is blurrier, partly because this is an area in which Obama really is opposed to an ideological approach. This is precisely what separates him from the previous administration. Without question, the pragmatic Obama is winning the United States new friends in the world. He will need to show how this new affection translates into support for American positions and material help for American undertakings.
The first 100 of the 1,461 days in a presidential term are an imperfect predictor of how a leader will ultimately be judged. But they do offer a clear look at a president's style. Obama, on the whole, has been as crisp a decision maker and as calm an influence on his aides and his country as he was during the campaign.
But the most intriguing aspect of Obama's presidency so far may be the way in which he combines intelligence and intellect. The two are quite different, as Richard Hofstadter noted more than four decades ago in his instructive book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life."
Intelligence, Hofstadter argued, is an "unfailingly practical quality" that "works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals." Intellect, on the other hand, is the mind's "creative and contemplative side" that "examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines."
For Obama's base of progressive and liberal supporters, it is his intellectual side that draws such fierce loyalty and admiration, while his conservative foes mistrust the very part of him that imagines and dreams -- because they do not share his dreams.
But Obama's continued high standing in the polls rests on the great middle of the electorate that doesn't care if he's intellectual as long as he is smart enough to fix things. Obama and his aides know this, which is why our intellectually inclined president will continue to sow mystery by casting himself as a mechanic, a problem-solver and "a devout non-ideologue."
Sunday, April 26, 2009
MEET the PRESS 'Obama 100 days' Goodwin & Meacham
MR. GREGORY: We're joined by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and the editor of Newsweek magazine, Jon Meacham.
So, 100 days. Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post has an interesting a column today in which he says that the first 100 days are like the opening chapter of an unfinished novel. Doris, what have we learned about this president after 100 days?
MS. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think we've learned a lot about his leadership. We've learned that he's a man who is enjoying the job of being president, which is really important. You know, somebody said to FDR in the middle of all those challenges, "How can you bear all of this?" And he said, "Wouldn't anybody want to be president?"
It's the best job in the world. If you frees your psychic energy by loving the job, that's one thing. We've learned that he loves to speak to the American people, that he's willing to risk the overexposure in order to establish that connection with the American people. We've learned that he somehow shapes his own day. I mean, I think it's great that he gets up in the morning, has breakfast with the kids before going to the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. He said--not with the kids, but he got to the Oval Office later. Somebody said, "There'll be a national security adviser there at 7:15. You've got to be there, Mr. President." He said, "That guy's going to be waiting a long time. I'm going when I want to."
If you can find ways to sustain your spirit and maintain a sense of normalcy, the fact that he goes out and he has dinner in the White House--I mean, in the, in the Washington, D.C., area, that he goes on ESPN, all of that frees up, I think, your energies to replenish yourself and allow you to become a good president.
MR. GREGORY: Jon, it's interesting. We're talking about temperament here. It applies to the substance.
MR. MEACHAM: This is a president who almost instantly looks in the mirror and says, "I am the go-to guy" when it comes to pulling it all together, providing leadership, providing the way forward and communicating all of that. You expect that out of a president, but it comes in varying degrees.
It's the politics of calm, in many ways. And I think we'll study these 100 days and possibly the entire administration, ultimately, as a case study in crisis management in which he is trying to do something quite fascinating. He's doing a counterculture--running a countercultural presidency. In a news--in a world run by news cycles that move so fast, stories burn so brightly, he's saying, no, that we will be--he quoted St. Paul in his inaugural address, to use another one, "Be patient in tribulation."
He's arguing for a kind of patience. It's a projection of his personal characteristics on the politics of the moment. And that is one of the things that defines a great president, if he becomes one.
MR. GREGORY: And yet critics would say one of the things that he's done in 100 days already is expand the role of government, the size of government, the level of activism of government to a point that has put this country on a very dangerous heading, particularly financially, for the longer term.
MS. GOODWIN: You know, on the other hand, that's what he ran for the presidency in the first place for. He thought this was a moment in time when people realized that government had to take a more active role in solving the problems. That was his whole campaign. And I think to a certain extent, by doing a lot of things at once, at least setting the groundwork for them--he knows he's not going to get everything at the same time. But if he does get health care, then he can move toward alternative energy, then he can move toward education. By having those task forces going, by having Congress starting to work--you know, LBJ was told in '65, "You just got the Civil Rights Act desegregating the South through in '64, you had your war on poverty. Go slow, the country has to absorb these things." He said, "No. The momentum is here, I've got to move forward." He went for voting rights, he went for Medicare, he went for aid to education, he went for immigration reform, and he got those things because the country was ready. He's making a decision that the country's ready for this act of his government.
MR. GREGORY: And isn't it interesting, a new poll from The Washington Post/ABC News out just today measuring people's sense of whether the country's headed in the right direction, and for the first time, look at these numbers. In January he takes office, only 19 percent thought the country was headed in the right direction. Now that's 50 percent, more than think it's headed in the wrong direction. Jon, even at such an anxious time for the country.
MR. MEACHAM: Yeah. I think he wants to make a lot of big plays, and he knows that presidents are only remembered for two or three things. I think this argument about doing too much too quickly actually underestimates the people.
MS. GOODWIN: I agree.
MR. MEACHAM: I think that the American people are a sophisticated and mature republic and can, I think, think about more than one thing at once. And I think, again, as Doris says, does no one listen during campaigns? This happened with--you know, you covered President Bush. He use to say, when they say, "Well, why are you really cutting taxes?" He said, "Well, you know, this is what I ran on."
He ran on changing the conversation. In, in the same way President Reagan changed it center right, Obama wants to change things to center left. And that's the issue before us.
MS. GOODWIN: I think that right track, wrong track thing is huge, because what that shows is this mystery of leadership, that somehow you can change the American people's feeling about their country because you're there. You know, when FDR got into office there was this incredible letter sent to him by somebody who said, "Oh, my dog is hurt, my roof is falling in, I've lost my job, my, my wife is mad at me, but you are there so everything's going to be all right."
That's the extraordinary transference of a leaders to the mood of a country.
And if you can get confidence in the country going, that's the most important thing he's done in these 100 days.
MR. GREGORY: But there's--this is a question of leadership. Again, what critics would say, if you look at how this president handled the bonus question with AIG, he knew that in the scheme of things it was not the biggest deal to this administration. And yet when the politics shifted, he stood up and said, "Yeah, those bonuses are table--terrible, and I'm angry." Perhaps the leadership moment there was to say to the country, "Calm down, it's not the most important thing." Here on this memos now he seems to be shifting positions because he's got a left wing of his party that says there must be accountability from the Bush administration. The politics of looking backward are tricky.
MR. MEACHAM: They are hugely complicated, and my sense is we have not seen the end of this story. I think that they are keeping some options open. I'm personally in favor of a 9/12 Commission, where we find someone like Jack Danforth and Sam Nunn and do some something like the 9/11 Commission where you review the entire war on terror. Did rendition work, did the unmanned aerial drones, as well as the, the interrogation techniques? And I, I suspect that what they've shown themselves to be are quite pragmatic, quiet realistic. That was the AIG example you raised. He didn't want to jump on it. There was a huge moment of populist rage. But remember, it was just a moment. I mean, it burn, it burned very quickly. And what's going to happen, for all the stylistic points, all the temperament points, he's going to be judged on whether this stuff works.
And whether the, whether the economy comes back and how he confronts still unforeseen national security challenges.
MR. GREGORY: Isn't this question about torture, Doris, if you put it in an historical context, we have to ask the large question, which is can you defeat an enemy like al-Qaeda without compromising the nation's character? Can you?
I mean, is that a debate that should go forward?
MS. GOODWIN: I mean, one has to hope so, that it's possible to do; as everybody was saying before, that the moral values of our nation are what we are known for abroad. I think the interesting question about why he wanted to look forward instead of back, I think he recognizes, as all leaders do, that you only have a certain number of resources in time, focus and imagination. And if the country goes off on a jag, you're going to lose--look at even now, we've been talking about torture this morning rather than maybe what should have been talked about if he had his way, which was this new speech that he just made about the importance of every time you have a tax increase you're going to have to use that to go for the tax cut. Every time you have a increased spending, you're going to have to have some sort of reduction in spending. That's a big thing he was talking about. You lose, you lose command of the airwaves with these things, and I think that was his initial instinct of hoping that somehow we could put this behind us. But once that elephant is in the room with that CIA memo...
..options are lost. They're going to have to do something.
MR. MEACHAM: I disagree a little bit. I think that the, to go to your phrase of politics of looking back, is the mature thing to do. And if we are right about our first point that the people can handle a lot of things, then finding a smart, moderate, intelligent way to look back, find out what this history of these seven years can teach us about how to fight terrorism, as you say, can we do this and preserve our moral values? Well, Abraham Lincoln didn't. FDR didn't. Great war presidents have always committed great sins, whether it's suspending habeas corpus or detaining Japanese...
MS. GOODWIN: Incarcerating, incarceration.
MR. MEACHAM: ...Japanese-Americans. And so life is messy. Life is complicated. But we have to understand this history, because if we don't then we--I think we're unilaterally disarming, in a way, as we push forward.
MS. GOODWIN: How could I go against looking back at history? I must yield to your greater judgment.
MR. MEACHAM: There you go.
MR. GREGORY: Doris, you know what's--talk to people, and they want to know, you know, what's he like? What are president's like? How do they make decisions? And somebody close to the president said he's got a very disciplined mind. What do we know about how he makes decisions?
MS. GOODWIN: Well, it sounds like one thing he does is to bring people into the room and ask them to debate different sides of the issue so that he can get alternative points of view, and that what I've heard him say, or other people say, is that he asks people who have been quiet in the room, "Speak up. I want to hear what you said." That's a very healthy thing. Again, going back to FDR, there was a certain time when he was in a room and he was explaining a pet project and everybody said, "Oh, it's great, Mr. President. It's great." George Marshall didn't say a word. He said, "George, what do you think?" and Marshall said, "I don't agree with you at all, Mr. President." Instead of being mad at him, he lifted him 34 feet up--not 34 feet up, 34 generals up to become his chief. And I think that's the way you want to have a president to make decisions, to have as many points of view there, listen to them and then think, think.
MR. GREGORY: All right, we're going to leave it there. Thanks both of you very much
So, 100 days. Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post has an interesting a column today in which he says that the first 100 days are like the opening chapter of an unfinished novel. Doris, what have we learned about this president after 100 days?
MS. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think we've learned a lot about his leadership. We've learned that he's a man who is enjoying the job of being president, which is really important. You know, somebody said to FDR in the middle of all those challenges, "How can you bear all of this?" And he said, "Wouldn't anybody want to be president?"
It's the best job in the world. If you frees your psychic energy by loving the job, that's one thing. We've learned that he loves to speak to the American people, that he's willing to risk the overexposure in order to establish that connection with the American people. We've learned that he somehow shapes his own day. I mean, I think it's great that he gets up in the morning, has breakfast with the kids before going to the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. He said--not with the kids, but he got to the Oval Office later. Somebody said, "There'll be a national security adviser there at 7:15. You've got to be there, Mr. President." He said, "That guy's going to be waiting a long time. I'm going when I want to."
If you can find ways to sustain your spirit and maintain a sense of normalcy, the fact that he goes out and he has dinner in the White House--I mean, in the, in the Washington, D.C., area, that he goes on ESPN, all of that frees up, I think, your energies to replenish yourself and allow you to become a good president.
MR. GREGORY: Jon, it's interesting. We're talking about temperament here. It applies to the substance.
MR. MEACHAM: This is a president who almost instantly looks in the mirror and says, "I am the go-to guy" when it comes to pulling it all together, providing leadership, providing the way forward and communicating all of that. You expect that out of a president, but it comes in varying degrees.
It's the politics of calm, in many ways. And I think we'll study these 100 days and possibly the entire administration, ultimately, as a case study in crisis management in which he is trying to do something quite fascinating. He's doing a counterculture--running a countercultural presidency. In a news--in a world run by news cycles that move so fast, stories burn so brightly, he's saying, no, that we will be--he quoted St. Paul in his inaugural address, to use another one, "Be patient in tribulation."
He's arguing for a kind of patience. It's a projection of his personal characteristics on the politics of the moment. And that is one of the things that defines a great president, if he becomes one.
MR. GREGORY: And yet critics would say one of the things that he's done in 100 days already is expand the role of government, the size of government, the level of activism of government to a point that has put this country on a very dangerous heading, particularly financially, for the longer term.
MS. GOODWIN: You know, on the other hand, that's what he ran for the presidency in the first place for. He thought this was a moment in time when people realized that government had to take a more active role in solving the problems. That was his whole campaign. And I think to a certain extent, by doing a lot of things at once, at least setting the groundwork for them--he knows he's not going to get everything at the same time. But if he does get health care, then he can move toward alternative energy, then he can move toward education. By having those task forces going, by having Congress starting to work--you know, LBJ was told in '65, "You just got the Civil Rights Act desegregating the South through in '64, you had your war on poverty. Go slow, the country has to absorb these things." He said, "No. The momentum is here, I've got to move forward." He went for voting rights, he went for Medicare, he went for aid to education, he went for immigration reform, and he got those things because the country was ready. He's making a decision that the country's ready for this act of his government.
MR. GREGORY: And isn't it interesting, a new poll from The Washington Post/ABC News out just today measuring people's sense of whether the country's headed in the right direction, and for the first time, look at these numbers. In January he takes office, only 19 percent thought the country was headed in the right direction. Now that's 50 percent, more than think it's headed in the wrong direction. Jon, even at such an anxious time for the country.
MR. MEACHAM: Yeah. I think he wants to make a lot of big plays, and he knows that presidents are only remembered for two or three things. I think this argument about doing too much too quickly actually underestimates the people.
MS. GOODWIN: I agree.
MR. MEACHAM: I think that the American people are a sophisticated and mature republic and can, I think, think about more than one thing at once. And I think, again, as Doris says, does no one listen during campaigns? This happened with--you know, you covered President Bush. He use to say, when they say, "Well, why are you really cutting taxes?" He said, "Well, you know, this is what I ran on."
He ran on changing the conversation. In, in the same way President Reagan changed it center right, Obama wants to change things to center left. And that's the issue before us.
MS. GOODWIN: I think that right track, wrong track thing is huge, because what that shows is this mystery of leadership, that somehow you can change the American people's feeling about their country because you're there. You know, when FDR got into office there was this incredible letter sent to him by somebody who said, "Oh, my dog is hurt, my roof is falling in, I've lost my job, my, my wife is mad at me, but you are there so everything's going to be all right."
That's the extraordinary transference of a leaders to the mood of a country.
And if you can get confidence in the country going, that's the most important thing he's done in these 100 days.
MR. GREGORY: But there's--this is a question of leadership. Again, what critics would say, if you look at how this president handled the bonus question with AIG, he knew that in the scheme of things it was not the biggest deal to this administration. And yet when the politics shifted, he stood up and said, "Yeah, those bonuses are table--terrible, and I'm angry." Perhaps the leadership moment there was to say to the country, "Calm down, it's not the most important thing." Here on this memos now he seems to be shifting positions because he's got a left wing of his party that says there must be accountability from the Bush administration. The politics of looking backward are tricky.
MR. MEACHAM: They are hugely complicated, and my sense is we have not seen the end of this story. I think that they are keeping some options open. I'm personally in favor of a 9/12 Commission, where we find someone like Jack Danforth and Sam Nunn and do some something like the 9/11 Commission where you review the entire war on terror. Did rendition work, did the unmanned aerial drones, as well as the, the interrogation techniques? And I, I suspect that what they've shown themselves to be are quite pragmatic, quiet realistic. That was the AIG example you raised. He didn't want to jump on it. There was a huge moment of populist rage. But remember, it was just a moment. I mean, it burn, it burned very quickly. And what's going to happen, for all the stylistic points, all the temperament points, he's going to be judged on whether this stuff works.
And whether the, whether the economy comes back and how he confronts still unforeseen national security challenges.
MR. GREGORY: Isn't this question about torture, Doris, if you put it in an historical context, we have to ask the large question, which is can you defeat an enemy like al-Qaeda without compromising the nation's character? Can you?
I mean, is that a debate that should go forward?
MS. GOODWIN: I mean, one has to hope so, that it's possible to do; as everybody was saying before, that the moral values of our nation are what we are known for abroad. I think the interesting question about why he wanted to look forward instead of back, I think he recognizes, as all leaders do, that you only have a certain number of resources in time, focus and imagination. And if the country goes off on a jag, you're going to lose--look at even now, we've been talking about torture this morning rather than maybe what should have been talked about if he had his way, which was this new speech that he just made about the importance of every time you have a tax increase you're going to have to use that to go for the tax cut. Every time you have a increased spending, you're going to have to have some sort of reduction in spending. That's a big thing he was talking about. You lose, you lose command of the airwaves with these things, and I think that was his initial instinct of hoping that somehow we could put this behind us. But once that elephant is in the room with that CIA memo...
..options are lost. They're going to have to do something.
MR. MEACHAM: I disagree a little bit. I think that the, to go to your phrase of politics of looking back, is the mature thing to do. And if we are right about our first point that the people can handle a lot of things, then finding a smart, moderate, intelligent way to look back, find out what this history of these seven years can teach us about how to fight terrorism, as you say, can we do this and preserve our moral values? Well, Abraham Lincoln didn't. FDR didn't. Great war presidents have always committed great sins, whether it's suspending habeas corpus or detaining Japanese...
MS. GOODWIN: Incarcerating, incarceration.
MR. MEACHAM: ...Japanese-Americans. And so life is messy. Life is complicated. But we have to understand this history, because if we don't then we--I think we're unilaterally disarming, in a way, as we push forward.
MS. GOODWIN: How could I go against looking back at history? I must yield to your greater judgment.
MR. MEACHAM: There you go.
MR. GREGORY: Doris, you know what's--talk to people, and they want to know, you know, what's he like? What are president's like? How do they make decisions? And somebody close to the president said he's got a very disciplined mind. What do we know about how he makes decisions?
MS. GOODWIN: Well, it sounds like one thing he does is to bring people into the room and ask them to debate different sides of the issue so that he can get alternative points of view, and that what I've heard him say, or other people say, is that he asks people who have been quiet in the room, "Speak up. I want to hear what you said." That's a very healthy thing. Again, going back to FDR, there was a certain time when he was in a room and he was explaining a pet project and everybody said, "Oh, it's great, Mr. President. It's great." George Marshall didn't say a word. He said, "George, what do you think?" and Marshall said, "I don't agree with you at all, Mr. President." Instead of being mad at him, he lifted him 34 feet up--not 34 feet up, 34 generals up to become his chief. And I think that's the way you want to have a president to make decisions, to have as many points of view there, listen to them and then think, think.
MR. GREGORY: All right, we're going to leave it there. Thanks both of you very much
SWINE FLU up date
Swine flu is usually a mild infection.
Suggestion:
stay away from crowded places where people are
sneezing and coughing and
washing hands.
There is confusion why so many people in Mexico have died
because swine flu does respond to Tamiflu
and other anti-viral medicines.
Watch news for vaccine news.
Suggestion:
stay away from crowded places where people are
sneezing and coughing and
washing hands.
There is confusion why so many people in Mexico have died
because swine flu does respond to Tamiflu
and other anti-viral medicines.
Watch news for vaccine news.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
FRANK RICH The Banality of Bush White House Evil
WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.
The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.
Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”
He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”
Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.
Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”
We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.
Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.
Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.
Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.
President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.
The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.
Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”
He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”
Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.
Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”
We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.
Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.
Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.
Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.
President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
BOB HERBERT A Culture Soaked in Blood
Guns.
Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.
In Palm Harbor, Fla., a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma, police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.
There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.
When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.
We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.
There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.
A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind.
Homicides are only a part of the story.
While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns).
And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police.
The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.
The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.
Another 17,000 are shot but survive.
I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.”
Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.
This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.
Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.
In Palm Harbor, Fla., a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma, police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.
There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.
When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.
We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.
There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.
A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind.
Homicides are only a part of the story.
While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns).
And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police.
The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.
The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.
Another 17,000 are shot but survive.
I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.”
Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.
This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.
100 Days of Obama
Turning Peril Into Possibility
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barack Obama opened his presidency by drawing an unflinching portrait of the challenges. Then he set about turning those perils into possibilities.
In a dizzying dash to the 100-day mark, Obama made a down payment on the changes he'd promised and delivered a trillion-dollar wallop to wake up the moribund economy. He put the country on track to end one war, reorient another and redefine what it means to be a superpower.
All this with a cool confidence that has made increasing numbers of Americans hopeful that the country may at last be heading in the right direction.
The public couldn't get enough of it, fixating on Team Obama's every move: the arrival of family dog Bo; the president showing up for work in his shirt-sleeves; the first lady's moxie in baring her arms; Sasha and Malia's swing set; even a visit to the White House by the surviving Grateful Dead. Obama says it is a ''weird fishbowl'' that he has jumped into.
Not everyone's impressed. For all that went right with the president's liftoff (after that small matter of the flubbed oath of office), Obama's opening moves have fallen short in the eyes of many, and have left others wondering where it all will lead.
Republicans largely stiffed the president on his call for bipartisanship and cast him as a weak leader on the world stage. Liberals groused that he could have done more and wondered whether he's too prone to compromise. Deficit hawks worried that he's blown a gaping a hole in the budget.
Obama himself seems energized.
''The decision-making part of it,'' he says, ''actually comes pretty naturally.''
As for the critics, Obama says, Washington is ''a little bit like 'American Idol' -- but everybody is Simon Cowell.''
Almost overlooked in all the hoopla is the historic nature of Obama's tenure as the first black president. There's been little time to even think about that issue, which commanded so much attention during the campaign, as Obama has grappled with a seizing economy and has rushed pell-mell to reverse the legacy of eight years of Republican rule.
''You'd be hard put to find another president facing those kinds of challenges who has acted as intelligently and aggressively to meet the challenges head on,'' said presidential historian Andrew Polsky, a professor at Hunter College in New York. ''He hasn't pushed things to the back burner. Of course, whether any of this works is another question, and it's too soon to know that.''
Others are less hesitant to draw conclusions.
Ted Sorensen, a former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, says Obama ''seems likely to be one of the great presidents in our history.''
Former House Republican leader Newt Gingrich says Obama's foreign policy moves have been looking ''a lot like Jimmy Carter,'' a one-term president regarded as a weak leader.
Whatever the record so far, it's clear Obama's biggest challenges are still to come. The pledge to overhaul health care will make his successful expansion of children's health coverage look like child's play.
While there have been hints the recession may be easing, Obama still needs to stabilize the shaky banking system and get credit flowing again. The clock is ticking on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year, and each detainee poses his own set of problems. Obama's ability to wind down U.S. operations in Iraq and reshape efforts in Afghanistan hinges in large part on factors beyond his control.
Obama had hoped that his early actions to ban torture and release top-secret details of past interrogation practices would end a ''dark and painful chapter in our history.'' Instead, they have only inflamed passions and sparked new calls for more investigation and prosecution that are likely to be more than a passing distraction.
------
Change has arrived at a head-snapping rate, a product both of the troubled times and the president's ambitious agenda.
There's been the monstrous economic stimulus package that funneled billions into Obama priorities such as health care and renewable energy; a new law to provide 4 million more children with health insurance; another making it easier for workers to sue over discrimination on the job; the easing of Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research; jaw-dropping revelations about past interrogations; plans to put 21,000 more troops in Afghanistan; the White House-orchestrated ouster of General Motors Corp.'s top executive.
In smaller ways, too, evidence of change is everywhere.
Obama was the first president to host a White House seder to mark Passover. His administration set aside tickets to the annual Easter Egg Roll for gay and lesbian parents. He was the first sitting president to do NBC's ''Tonight'' show. His weekly radio address airs on YouTube.
There have been blunders along the way. It took three nominations for Obama to get his commerce secretary right, two to find a health secretary. Obama apologized after making an off-key joke suggesting that his lame bowling skills made him Special Olympics material.
Through it all, the economy has been Job One.
For a while, the news was only grim and grimmer.
The Dow Jones Industrials average closed at 7,949 on Inauguration Day. By early March, it was closer to 6,500.
Job losses piled up in staggering increments: 598,000 in January, 651,000 in February, 663,000 in March.
Obama went pedal-to-the-metal to throw money at the problem, first with billions of bailout dollars, next with billions of stimulus dollars, then with a proposed budget expected to produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade.
House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio calls it ''a spending spree the likes of which our nation has never seen,'' and polls pick up growing concern on that front.
About half of all Americans say they're ''very worried'' that the rising national debt will hurt their children and grandchildren, according to an AP-GfK poll.
Taxpayers seethed when word surfaced that insurer American International Group Inc., the recipient of billions in bailout money, had paid millions of dollars in bonuses, and it was all Obama could do to keep out in front of the anger and not get flattened by it.
By mid-April, tensions had eased, and the president was pointing to economic ''glimmers of hope.'' The Dow was back in same range as around Inauguration Day.
For all his focus on the economy, Obama also devoted considerable effort to repairing the nation's tarnished image abroad.
His sat down for his first formal TV interview with an Arabic-language station, telling Muslims that ''Americans are not your enemy.'' In Europe, he said America in the past had ''shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.'' He carried the same message to Latin America, entertaining overtures from isolated Cuban President Raul Castro and Venezuela's anti-American president, Hugo Chavez.
Breaking with the unyielding tone of the Bush years, Obama said he was rejecting the notion ''that if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness.''
Republicans said that was naive, calling the president ''a timid advocate of freedom at best,'' in the words of former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.
------
The 44th president starts his day with a workout in the White House gym (usually with his wife, Michelle). Then it's breakfast and the morning papers -- he likes the feel of newsprint in his hands. When Obama gets to the Oval Office, he finds a stack of 10 letters on his desk, culled from the 40,000 to 50,000 that arrive daily.
The letters are ''one of the really important rituals of his day,'' says senior adviser David Axelrod.
Also each morning, Obama gets a briefing on national security, and a second on the economy.
''Between 7 and 10, I sort of know what I'm doing,'' the president says. ''After that, who knows?''
For all of the problems that Obama knew awaited him, new ones arrived out of left field.
''I'm pretty sure that he hadn't boned up on piracy any time recently before he came here,'' says Axelrod, who credits his boss with moving smoothly from one challenge to the next -- ''usually a few furlongs ahead of the others in the room.''
The trappings of the office, though, still take some getting used to. Like that button next to him that can be used to summon people.
''It took him awhile to recognize what that was,'' says Axelrod.
Obama says one of the hardest adjustments has been dealing with the isolation that comes with the presidency.
He chafes a little ''being inside this bubble,'' Obama said in one early interview. To fight that, the president negotiated with his security people to keep using his BlackBerry, although his contacts list got chopped down to about 30 close friends and advisers.
Known for his even temper, Obama keeps things loose even in meetings on tense subjects, aides say.
What annoys him?
Axelrod mentions ''the scorecard politics of Washington'' and takes note of a proliferation of ''bloviators'' on television.
''He doesn't have one of these in his office,'' Axelrod says, gesturing toward a TV.
------
Axelrod says Obama has settled into the presidency more easily than he did his candidacy.
The president seem unafraid to admit he's wrong. Or right.
''I screwed up,'' Obama said after his nomination of former Sen. Tom Daschle for health secretary failed.
''On this one I think I'm right,'' he said to critics of his friendly exchange with Chavez.
The president, whose aides dismiss the whole notion of the 100-day yardstick as the equivalent of a ''Hallmark holiday,'' came to office imbued with sky-high expectations from the public and emerged three months later with his approval ratings intact, at a solid 64 percent in the AP-GfK poll. But it's all been too much for many Republicans: Seven out of 10 now disapprove of his job performance, compared with 58 percent in February.
And there are still a lot of pages to be written.
Though Obama is on TV almost every day, Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York who is writing a book about the president, says he's still hard to read.
Sometimes, he says, ''it's hard to get a handle on whether Obama's being prudent or radical.''
Or, in the view of some liberals, too cautious.
Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, said members are thrilled to have a president who's making health care and clean energy priorities. ''But on the financial front, the jury's still out and folks are looking to see whether the president is really prioritizing Main Street over Wall Street.''
Axelrod shrugs off the critics from both ends, saying: ''He doesn't work off anybody's checklist.''
Sorensen, the former Kennedy speechwriter, said some of the Americans who invested such high hopes in ''an unknown black man elected president in an overwhelmingly white country'' now expect too much, too soon.
''He's a very good leader with all the instinctive skills of leadership, including superb judgment,'' says Sorensen, ''but that doesn't make him a miracle worker.''
''There are no miracle workers.''
------
Having inherited two wars and an economy in crisis, Obama talks often about the high stakes for the nation in getting things right.
Only rarely does he allude to the stakes for him personally.
''I will be held accountable,'' he said a few weeks into his presidency. ''You know, I've got four years. ... If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition.''
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barack Obama opened his presidency by drawing an unflinching portrait of the challenges. Then he set about turning those perils into possibilities.
In a dizzying dash to the 100-day mark, Obama made a down payment on the changes he'd promised and delivered a trillion-dollar wallop to wake up the moribund economy. He put the country on track to end one war, reorient another and redefine what it means to be a superpower.
All this with a cool confidence that has made increasing numbers of Americans hopeful that the country may at last be heading in the right direction.
The public couldn't get enough of it, fixating on Team Obama's every move: the arrival of family dog Bo; the president showing up for work in his shirt-sleeves; the first lady's moxie in baring her arms; Sasha and Malia's swing set; even a visit to the White House by the surviving Grateful Dead. Obama says it is a ''weird fishbowl'' that he has jumped into.
Not everyone's impressed. For all that went right with the president's liftoff (after that small matter of the flubbed oath of office), Obama's opening moves have fallen short in the eyes of many, and have left others wondering where it all will lead.
Republicans largely stiffed the president on his call for bipartisanship and cast him as a weak leader on the world stage. Liberals groused that he could have done more and wondered whether he's too prone to compromise. Deficit hawks worried that he's blown a gaping a hole in the budget.
Obama himself seems energized.
''The decision-making part of it,'' he says, ''actually comes pretty naturally.''
As for the critics, Obama says, Washington is ''a little bit like 'American Idol' -- but everybody is Simon Cowell.''
Almost overlooked in all the hoopla is the historic nature of Obama's tenure as the first black president. There's been little time to even think about that issue, which commanded so much attention during the campaign, as Obama has grappled with a seizing economy and has rushed pell-mell to reverse the legacy of eight years of Republican rule.
''You'd be hard put to find another president facing those kinds of challenges who has acted as intelligently and aggressively to meet the challenges head on,'' said presidential historian Andrew Polsky, a professor at Hunter College in New York. ''He hasn't pushed things to the back burner. Of course, whether any of this works is another question, and it's too soon to know that.''
Others are less hesitant to draw conclusions.
Ted Sorensen, a former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, says Obama ''seems likely to be one of the great presidents in our history.''
Former House Republican leader Newt Gingrich says Obama's foreign policy moves have been looking ''a lot like Jimmy Carter,'' a one-term president regarded as a weak leader.
Whatever the record so far, it's clear Obama's biggest challenges are still to come. The pledge to overhaul health care will make his successful expansion of children's health coverage look like child's play.
While there have been hints the recession may be easing, Obama still needs to stabilize the shaky banking system and get credit flowing again. The clock is ticking on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year, and each detainee poses his own set of problems. Obama's ability to wind down U.S. operations in Iraq and reshape efforts in Afghanistan hinges in large part on factors beyond his control.
Obama had hoped that his early actions to ban torture and release top-secret details of past interrogation practices would end a ''dark and painful chapter in our history.'' Instead, they have only inflamed passions and sparked new calls for more investigation and prosecution that are likely to be more than a passing distraction.
------
Change has arrived at a head-snapping rate, a product both of the troubled times and the president's ambitious agenda.
There's been the monstrous economic stimulus package that funneled billions into Obama priorities such as health care and renewable energy; a new law to provide 4 million more children with health insurance; another making it easier for workers to sue over discrimination on the job; the easing of Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research; jaw-dropping revelations about past interrogations; plans to put 21,000 more troops in Afghanistan; the White House-orchestrated ouster of General Motors Corp.'s top executive.
In smaller ways, too, evidence of change is everywhere.
Obama was the first president to host a White House seder to mark Passover. His administration set aside tickets to the annual Easter Egg Roll for gay and lesbian parents. He was the first sitting president to do NBC's ''Tonight'' show. His weekly radio address airs on YouTube.
There have been blunders along the way. It took three nominations for Obama to get his commerce secretary right, two to find a health secretary. Obama apologized after making an off-key joke suggesting that his lame bowling skills made him Special Olympics material.
Through it all, the economy has been Job One.
For a while, the news was only grim and grimmer.
The Dow Jones Industrials average closed at 7,949 on Inauguration Day. By early March, it was closer to 6,500.
Job losses piled up in staggering increments: 598,000 in January, 651,000 in February, 663,000 in March.
Obama went pedal-to-the-metal to throw money at the problem, first with billions of bailout dollars, next with billions of stimulus dollars, then with a proposed budget expected to produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade.
House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio calls it ''a spending spree the likes of which our nation has never seen,'' and polls pick up growing concern on that front.
About half of all Americans say they're ''very worried'' that the rising national debt will hurt their children and grandchildren, according to an AP-GfK poll.
Taxpayers seethed when word surfaced that insurer American International Group Inc., the recipient of billions in bailout money, had paid millions of dollars in bonuses, and it was all Obama could do to keep out in front of the anger and not get flattened by it.
By mid-April, tensions had eased, and the president was pointing to economic ''glimmers of hope.'' The Dow was back in same range as around Inauguration Day.
For all his focus on the economy, Obama also devoted considerable effort to repairing the nation's tarnished image abroad.
His sat down for his first formal TV interview with an Arabic-language station, telling Muslims that ''Americans are not your enemy.'' In Europe, he said America in the past had ''shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.'' He carried the same message to Latin America, entertaining overtures from isolated Cuban President Raul Castro and Venezuela's anti-American president, Hugo Chavez.
Breaking with the unyielding tone of the Bush years, Obama said he was rejecting the notion ''that if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness.''
Republicans said that was naive, calling the president ''a timid advocate of freedom at best,'' in the words of former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.
------
The 44th president starts his day with a workout in the White House gym (usually with his wife, Michelle). Then it's breakfast and the morning papers -- he likes the feel of newsprint in his hands. When Obama gets to the Oval Office, he finds a stack of 10 letters on his desk, culled from the 40,000 to 50,000 that arrive daily.
The letters are ''one of the really important rituals of his day,'' says senior adviser David Axelrod.
Also each morning, Obama gets a briefing on national security, and a second on the economy.
''Between 7 and 10, I sort of know what I'm doing,'' the president says. ''After that, who knows?''
For all of the problems that Obama knew awaited him, new ones arrived out of left field.
''I'm pretty sure that he hadn't boned up on piracy any time recently before he came here,'' says Axelrod, who credits his boss with moving smoothly from one challenge to the next -- ''usually a few furlongs ahead of the others in the room.''
The trappings of the office, though, still take some getting used to. Like that button next to him that can be used to summon people.
''It took him awhile to recognize what that was,'' says Axelrod.
Obama says one of the hardest adjustments has been dealing with the isolation that comes with the presidency.
He chafes a little ''being inside this bubble,'' Obama said in one early interview. To fight that, the president negotiated with his security people to keep using his BlackBerry, although his contacts list got chopped down to about 30 close friends and advisers.
Known for his even temper, Obama keeps things loose even in meetings on tense subjects, aides say.
What annoys him?
Axelrod mentions ''the scorecard politics of Washington'' and takes note of a proliferation of ''bloviators'' on television.
''He doesn't have one of these in his office,'' Axelrod says, gesturing toward a TV.
------
Axelrod says Obama has settled into the presidency more easily than he did his candidacy.
The president seem unafraid to admit he's wrong. Or right.
''I screwed up,'' Obama said after his nomination of former Sen. Tom Daschle for health secretary failed.
''On this one I think I'm right,'' he said to critics of his friendly exchange with Chavez.
The president, whose aides dismiss the whole notion of the 100-day yardstick as the equivalent of a ''Hallmark holiday,'' came to office imbued with sky-high expectations from the public and emerged three months later with his approval ratings intact, at a solid 64 percent in the AP-GfK poll. But it's all been too much for many Republicans: Seven out of 10 now disapprove of his job performance, compared with 58 percent in February.
And there are still a lot of pages to be written.
Though Obama is on TV almost every day, Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York who is writing a book about the president, says he's still hard to read.
Sometimes, he says, ''it's hard to get a handle on whether Obama's being prudent or radical.''
Or, in the view of some liberals, too cautious.
Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, said members are thrilled to have a president who's making health care and clean energy priorities. ''But on the financial front, the jury's still out and folks are looking to see whether the president is really prioritizing Main Street over Wall Street.''
Axelrod shrugs off the critics from both ends, saying: ''He doesn't work off anybody's checklist.''
Sorensen, the former Kennedy speechwriter, said some of the Americans who invested such high hopes in ''an unknown black man elected president in an overwhelmingly white country'' now expect too much, too soon.
''He's a very good leader with all the instinctive skills of leadership, including superb judgment,'' says Sorensen, ''but that doesn't make him a miracle worker.''
''There are no miracle workers.''
------
Having inherited two wars and an economy in crisis, Obama talks often about the high stakes for the nation in getting things right.
Only rarely does he allude to the stakes for him personally.
''I will be held accountable,'' he said a few weeks into his presidency. ''You know, I've got four years. ... If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition.''
OBAMA's First 100 Days Key Events
A look at key events during the first 100 days of Barack Obama's presidency:
Jan. 22: Obama orders the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison within a year and declares that the United States will not engage in torture.
Jan 23: Obama lifts ban on federal funding for international organizations that perform or provide information on abortions.
Jan. 27: Obama gives first formal television interview as president to Arab television station, telling Muslims, ''Americans are not your enemy.''
Jan. 29: Obama signs first bill into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination.
Feb. 3: Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., withdraws as Obama's nominee for secretary of health and human services.
Feb. 9: Obama holds first prime-time news conference, calling on Congress to enact his economic stimulus plan.
Feb. 12: Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., withdraws as Obama's nominee for secretary of commerce.
Feb. 13: Congress completes action on a $787 billion economic stimulus package of tax cuts and new spending, intended to jolt the country out of the worst recession in 50 years.
Feb. 17: Obama signs the stimulus measure into law.
Feb. 19: Obama makes his first visit to a foreign country as president, meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a seven-hour visit to Ottawa.
Feb. 22: Obama hosts governors in his first formal dinner at the White House.
Feb. 23: Obama holds a fiscal responsibility summit at the White House, signaling his intention to tackle health care, the budget and Social Security.
Feb. 24: Obama addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time, focusing on economic issues.
Feb. 26: Obama unveils a $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2010 and estimates that the federal deficit for 2009 will balloon to $1.75 trillion.
Feb. 27: Obama announces withdrawal of all American combat forces from Iraq by August 2010, but says the U.S. will leave tens of thousand support troops behind.
March 5: Obama hosts daylong White House summit on health care.
March 9: Obama reverses President George W. Bush's ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, and declares that all federal scientific research will be walled off from political influences.
March 11: Obama signs a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running for the rest of the 2009 budget year. He calls the measure ''imperfect'' because it includes money for special projects set aside by members of Congress, a practice he pledged to end during the 2008 campaign.
March 16: Obama declares he will stop insurer American International Group Inc. from paying out millions in executive bonuses after receiving billions in federal bailout funds.
March 19: Obama becomes the first sitting president to appear on the ''Tonight'' show.
March 20: Obama releases video message to people of Iran in celebration of Nowruz, the Persian new year and the first day of spring.
March 26: Obama holds ''Open for Questions'', the first virtual town hall meeting at the White House.
March 27: Obama announces comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the deployment of 4,000 additional military trainers to Afghanistan.
March 30: Obama asserted unprecedented government control over the auto industry, rejecting turnaround plans by General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, and engineering the ouster of GM's chief executive, Rick Wagoner.
March 31: Obama travels to London, the first stop on an eight-day, six country tour of Europe and the Middle East.
April 1: Obama meets with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and announces start of negotiations on new strategic arms-control treaty.
April 1: Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have a private audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.
April 2: Obama attends the Group of 20 economic summit in London, where leaders agree to bail out developing countries, stimulate world trade and regulate financial firms more stringently.
April 3: Obama speaks and takes questions from crowd of mostly French and German citizens at a Town Hall meeting in Strasbourg, France.
April 4: Obama attends NATO summit in Strasbourg but gets commitment from allies to send up to 5,000 more military trainers and police to Afghanistan.
April 5: Obama launches an effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them during a speech in Prague ''the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.''
April 6: Obama speaks to Turkey's parliament, declaring that ''the United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.''
April 7: Obama pays a surprise visit to Iraq, meeting with U.S. troops and Iraqi leaders.
April 9: Obama sends a request to Congress for $83.4 billion for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
April 10: Obama says the economy is showing ''glimmers of hope'' after meeting with top economic officials.
April 12: Obama authorizes a military rescue of an American sea captain taken hostage by pirates in the waters off Somalia. The rescue results in the deaths of three pirates and the capture of the fourth, and frees Capt. Richard Phillips.
April 13: The administration announces that Cuban-Americans will be permitted to make unlimited transfers of money and visits to relatives in Cuba. The decision also clears away most regulations that had stopped American companies from bringing high-tech services and information to Cuba.
April 14: The Obamas introduce their new puppy, Bo, in a photo session on the White House lawn.
April 16: Obama meets with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on his first trip to Mexico and Latin America. The leaders agree to cooperate on combating drug violence along the U.S.-Mexican border.
April 17: Obama releases memos from Bush administration authorizing harsh interrogation techniques but says no CIA employees who followed the memos will be prosecuted.
April 17: Obama travels to Trinidad and Tobago for the 34-nation Summit of the Americas and declares that he ''seeks a new beginning with Cuba.''
April 18: At the summit, Obama shakes hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, the leftist, anti-American leader who had called Bush a devil.
April 19: Obama calls on Cuba to release political prisoners as a way to improve relations with the U.S.
April 20: Obama holds the first formal Cabinet meeting of his administration, ordering department heads to slice spending by $100 million, a tiny fraction of the $3.6 trillion federal budget he proposed a month earlier.
April 21: Obama leaves the door open for prosecution of federal lawyers who wrote harsh interrogation memos during Bush administration and says if there's an investigation, it should be done by an independent commission.
April 22: Obama makes his first visit as president to Iowa, the state where his 2008 Democratic caucus victory launched him toward the presidency.
April 23: Obama tells congressional leaders he will not support creation of an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration's harsh interrogation techniques.
April 24: Obama promotes his idea for the government to stop backing private loans to college students and replace them with direct government loans to young people. He also declines to brand the early 20th century massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey a ''genocide,'' breaking a campaign promise.
April 25: Obama uses his radio address to announce a plan for federal workers to propose ways to improve their agencies' and departments' budgets.
Compiled by AP
Jan. 22: Obama orders the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison within a year and declares that the United States will not engage in torture.
Jan 23: Obama lifts ban on federal funding for international organizations that perform or provide information on abortions.
Jan. 27: Obama gives first formal television interview as president to Arab television station, telling Muslims, ''Americans are not your enemy.''
Jan. 29: Obama signs first bill into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination.
Feb. 3: Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., withdraws as Obama's nominee for secretary of health and human services.
Feb. 9: Obama holds first prime-time news conference, calling on Congress to enact his economic stimulus plan.
Feb. 12: Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., withdraws as Obama's nominee for secretary of commerce.
Feb. 13: Congress completes action on a $787 billion economic stimulus package of tax cuts and new spending, intended to jolt the country out of the worst recession in 50 years.
Feb. 17: Obama signs the stimulus measure into law.
Feb. 19: Obama makes his first visit to a foreign country as president, meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a seven-hour visit to Ottawa.
Feb. 22: Obama hosts governors in his first formal dinner at the White House.
Feb. 23: Obama holds a fiscal responsibility summit at the White House, signaling his intention to tackle health care, the budget and Social Security.
Feb. 24: Obama addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time, focusing on economic issues.
Feb. 26: Obama unveils a $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2010 and estimates that the federal deficit for 2009 will balloon to $1.75 trillion.
Feb. 27: Obama announces withdrawal of all American combat forces from Iraq by August 2010, but says the U.S. will leave tens of thousand support troops behind.
March 5: Obama hosts daylong White House summit on health care.
March 9: Obama reverses President George W. Bush's ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, and declares that all federal scientific research will be walled off from political influences.
March 11: Obama signs a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running for the rest of the 2009 budget year. He calls the measure ''imperfect'' because it includes money for special projects set aside by members of Congress, a practice he pledged to end during the 2008 campaign.
March 16: Obama declares he will stop insurer American International Group Inc. from paying out millions in executive bonuses after receiving billions in federal bailout funds.
March 19: Obama becomes the first sitting president to appear on the ''Tonight'' show.
March 20: Obama releases video message to people of Iran in celebration of Nowruz, the Persian new year and the first day of spring.
March 26: Obama holds ''Open for Questions'', the first virtual town hall meeting at the White House.
March 27: Obama announces comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the deployment of 4,000 additional military trainers to Afghanistan.
March 30: Obama asserted unprecedented government control over the auto industry, rejecting turnaround plans by General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, and engineering the ouster of GM's chief executive, Rick Wagoner.
March 31: Obama travels to London, the first stop on an eight-day, six country tour of Europe and the Middle East.
April 1: Obama meets with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and announces start of negotiations on new strategic arms-control treaty.
April 1: Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have a private audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.
April 2: Obama attends the Group of 20 economic summit in London, where leaders agree to bail out developing countries, stimulate world trade and regulate financial firms more stringently.
April 3: Obama speaks and takes questions from crowd of mostly French and German citizens at a Town Hall meeting in Strasbourg, France.
April 4: Obama attends NATO summit in Strasbourg but gets commitment from allies to send up to 5,000 more military trainers and police to Afghanistan.
April 5: Obama launches an effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them during a speech in Prague ''the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.''
April 6: Obama speaks to Turkey's parliament, declaring that ''the United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.''
April 7: Obama pays a surprise visit to Iraq, meeting with U.S. troops and Iraqi leaders.
April 9: Obama sends a request to Congress for $83.4 billion for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
April 10: Obama says the economy is showing ''glimmers of hope'' after meeting with top economic officials.
April 12: Obama authorizes a military rescue of an American sea captain taken hostage by pirates in the waters off Somalia. The rescue results in the deaths of three pirates and the capture of the fourth, and frees Capt. Richard Phillips.
April 13: The administration announces that Cuban-Americans will be permitted to make unlimited transfers of money and visits to relatives in Cuba. The decision also clears away most regulations that had stopped American companies from bringing high-tech services and information to Cuba.
April 14: The Obamas introduce their new puppy, Bo, in a photo session on the White House lawn.
April 16: Obama meets with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on his first trip to Mexico and Latin America. The leaders agree to cooperate on combating drug violence along the U.S.-Mexican border.
April 17: Obama releases memos from Bush administration authorizing harsh interrogation techniques but says no CIA employees who followed the memos will be prosecuted.
April 17: Obama travels to Trinidad and Tobago for the 34-nation Summit of the Americas and declares that he ''seeks a new beginning with Cuba.''
April 18: At the summit, Obama shakes hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, the leftist, anti-American leader who had called Bush a devil.
April 19: Obama calls on Cuba to release political prisoners as a way to improve relations with the U.S.
April 20: Obama holds the first formal Cabinet meeting of his administration, ordering department heads to slice spending by $100 million, a tiny fraction of the $3.6 trillion federal budget he proposed a month earlier.
April 21: Obama leaves the door open for prosecution of federal lawyers who wrote harsh interrogation memos during Bush administration and says if there's an investigation, it should be done by an independent commission.
April 22: Obama makes his first visit as president to Iowa, the state where his 2008 Democratic caucus victory launched him toward the presidency.
April 23: Obama tells congressional leaders he will not support creation of an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration's harsh interrogation techniques.
April 24: Obama promotes his idea for the government to stop backing private loans to college students and replace them with direct government loans to young people. He also declines to brand the early 20th century massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey a ''genocide,'' breaking a campaign promise.
April 25: Obama uses his radio address to announce a plan for federal workers to propose ways to improve their agencies' and departments' budgets.
Compiled by AP
Questions and Answers About Swine Flu
Mexico is contending with an outbreak of swine flu, suspected in the deaths of dozens of people and sickening perhaps 1,000. In the United States, at least eight cases have been confirmed with the infection, all of them in California and Texas; only one person was hospitalized. Here are some questions and answers about the illness:
Q. What is swine flu?
A. Swine flu is a respiratory illness in pigs caused by a virus. The swine flu virus routinely causes outbreaks in pigs but doesn't usually kill many of them.
Q. Can people get swine flu?
A. Swine flu viruses don't usually infect humans. There have been occasional cases, usually among people who've had direct contact with infected pigs, such as farm workers. ''We've seen swine influenza in humans over the past several years, and in most cases, it's come from direct pig contact. This seems to be different,'' said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert with the University of Michigan.
Q. Can it spread among humans?
A. There have been cases of the virus spreading from human to human, probably in the same way as seasonal flu, through coughing and sneezing by infected people.
Q. What are the symptoms of swine flu?
A. The symptoms are similar to those of regular flu -- fever, cough, fatigue, lack of appetite.
Q. Is the same swine flu virus making people sick in Mexico and the U.S.?
A. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the Mexican virus samples match the U.S. virus. The virus is a mix of human virus, bird virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.
Q. Are there drugs to treat swine flu in humans?
A. There are four different drugs approved in the U.S. to treat the flu, but the new virus has shown resistance to the two oldest. The CDC recommends the use of the flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza.
Q. Does a regular flu shot protect against swine flu?
A. The seasonal flu vaccine used in the U.S. this year won't likely provide protection against the latest swine flu virus. There is a swine flu vaccine for pigs but not for humans.
Q. Should residents of California or Texas do anything special?
A. The CDC recommends routine precautions to prevent the spread of infectious diseases: wash your hands often, cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, avoid close contact with sick people. If you are sick, stay at home and limit contact with others.
Q. What about traveling to Mexico?
A. The CDC has not warned Americans against traveling to Mexico but advises that they be aware of the illnesses there and take precautions to protect against infections, like washing their hands.
------
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Q. What is swine flu?
A. Swine flu is a respiratory illness in pigs caused by a virus. The swine flu virus routinely causes outbreaks in pigs but doesn't usually kill many of them.
Q. Can people get swine flu?
A. Swine flu viruses don't usually infect humans. There have been occasional cases, usually among people who've had direct contact with infected pigs, such as farm workers. ''We've seen swine influenza in humans over the past several years, and in most cases, it's come from direct pig contact. This seems to be different,'' said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert with the University of Michigan.
Q. Can it spread among humans?
A. There have been cases of the virus spreading from human to human, probably in the same way as seasonal flu, through coughing and sneezing by infected people.
Q. What are the symptoms of swine flu?
A. The symptoms are similar to those of regular flu -- fever, cough, fatigue, lack of appetite.
Q. Is the same swine flu virus making people sick in Mexico and the U.S.?
A. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the Mexican virus samples match the U.S. virus. The virus is a mix of human virus, bird virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.
Q. Are there drugs to treat swine flu in humans?
A. There are four different drugs approved in the U.S. to treat the flu, but the new virus has shown resistance to the two oldest. The CDC recommends the use of the flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza.
Q. Does a regular flu shot protect against swine flu?
A. The seasonal flu vaccine used in the U.S. this year won't likely provide protection against the latest swine flu virus. There is a swine flu vaccine for pigs but not for humans.
Q. Should residents of California or Texas do anything special?
A. The CDC recommends routine precautions to prevent the spread of infectious diseases: wash your hands often, cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, avoid close contact with sick people. If you are sick, stay at home and limit contact with others.
Q. What about traveling to Mexico?
A. The CDC has not warned Americans against traveling to Mexico but advises that they be aware of the illnesses there and take precautions to protect against infections, like washing their hands.
------
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Friday, April 24, 2009
TORTURE is friggin' hilarious to media CONServatives
The Nuts keep rollin'
For most rational human beings, even the notion of torture is bone-chilling. Media conservatives, on the other hand, apparently find it hilarious. Following President Obama's release of four previously classified Justice Department memos that had authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees -- including "stress positions," "cramped confinement," "sleep deprivation," and "the waterboard" -- numerous conservatives in the media have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that those practices constitute torture. Hard to believe? Here are just a few of the many examples:
Conservative leader and radio host Rush Limbaugh asserted, "If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh," said that "if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn't torture," and claimed that "appeasers" have "water[ed] down" definition of torture like "NOW gang" did with definition of domestic violence.
Radio host G. Gordon Liddy compared the proposed technique of placing a detainee who "appears to have a fear of insects" in "a cramped confinement box with an insect" to his appearance on a game show, stating, "I went through worse on Fear Factor."
Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee mocked the same technique: "Look, I've been in some hotels where there were more bugs than these guys faced." Huckabee went on to state that under the Obama administration, "We're going to talk to them, we're going to have a nice conversation, we're going to invite them down for some tea and crumpets." Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson replied, "That usually works with your kids, too, right? When they're in trouble for something, they just tell you everything." To which her co-host Steve Doocy joked, "Mr. Moussaoui, it's time for you over in the time-out chair."
To buttress his support of torture, Fox News' resident conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Glenn Beck aired a clip from Fox's 24.
When they weren't bowled over with laughter, many media conservatives were serving up the dubious claim that harsh interrogation techniques used on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed "stopped an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles." The claim conflicts with the chronology of events put forth on multiple occasions by the Bush administration. Indeed, the Bush administration said that the Library Tower attack was thwarted in February 2002 -- more than a year before Mohammed was captured in March 2003. Facts be damned, Fox News and others pressed forward with the story repeatedly. Typifying the use of this story, Sean Hannity claimed this week that enhanced interrogation techniques "saved an American city, Los Angeles."
The hysterical nature of coverage surrounding the torture issue by conservatives didn't reach everyone in the media. This week, Fox News' Shepard Smith stood out among his colleagues at the conservative news network when he said of torture, "We are staring into an abyss and it's staring back at us, and we don't do it. We are America.
Source:MEDIA MATTERS
For most rational human beings, even the notion of torture is bone-chilling. Media conservatives, on the other hand, apparently find it hilarious. Following President Obama's release of four previously classified Justice Department memos that had authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees -- including "stress positions," "cramped confinement," "sleep deprivation," and "the waterboard" -- numerous conservatives in the media have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that those practices constitute torture. Hard to believe? Here are just a few of the many examples:
Conservative leader and radio host Rush Limbaugh asserted, "If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh," said that "if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn't torture," and claimed that "appeasers" have "water[ed] down" definition of torture like "NOW gang" did with definition of domestic violence.
Radio host G. Gordon Liddy compared the proposed technique of placing a detainee who "appears to have a fear of insects" in "a cramped confinement box with an insect" to his appearance on a game show, stating, "I went through worse on Fear Factor."
Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee mocked the same technique: "Look, I've been in some hotels where there were more bugs than these guys faced." Huckabee went on to state that under the Obama administration, "We're going to talk to them, we're going to have a nice conversation, we're going to invite them down for some tea and crumpets." Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson replied, "That usually works with your kids, too, right? When they're in trouble for something, they just tell you everything." To which her co-host Steve Doocy joked, "Mr. Moussaoui, it's time for you over in the time-out chair."
To buttress his support of torture, Fox News' resident conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Glenn Beck aired a clip from Fox's 24.
When they weren't bowled over with laughter, many media conservatives were serving up the dubious claim that harsh interrogation techniques used on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed "stopped an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles." The claim conflicts with the chronology of events put forth on multiple occasions by the Bush administration. Indeed, the Bush administration said that the Library Tower attack was thwarted in February 2002 -- more than a year before Mohammed was captured in March 2003. Facts be damned, Fox News and others pressed forward with the story repeatedly. Typifying the use of this story, Sean Hannity claimed this week that enhanced interrogation techniques "saved an American city, Los Angeles."
The hysterical nature of coverage surrounding the torture issue by conservatives didn't reach everyone in the media. This week, Fox News' Shepard Smith stood out among his colleagues at the conservative news network when he said of torture, "We are staring into an abyss and it's staring back at us, and we don't do it. We are America.
Source:MEDIA MATTERS
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