Under The Knife

Damn you Montreal Canadiens. Damn you.

Still recovering from the surgery, and facing an over-nighter in Detroit later this week, this update will be short and sweet. Sort of like me. Without the sweetness.

In case you're keeping score, it's oil spill 37, British Petroleum, zero. It's been over a month since the exploratory well in the Gulf of Mexico began leaking thousands of barrels a day into the water, still with no end in site. BP will attempt a "top kill" on Wednesday, forcing pressurized mud into the well in an attempt to clog it, then seal it completely. However, to this point, nothing has worked, and if this maneuver fails, which is certainly possible - if not likely, the next plausible response is the completion of the relief wells at least 30 days from now. Add that to the fact that independent analysis of the leak has determined the flow rate to be significantly higher than the 5,000 barrels/day BP has touted thus far, and we have what can only be described as a disaster of epic proportions.

There has been some grumbling suggesting the federal government should simply seize control of the clean-up and well-capping effort from British Petroleum, removing them from the equation. Setting aside the delicious irony that some of the people engaging in the grumbling could be found as recently as a few weeks ago searching out television cameras to whine about how awful it is that the federal government interferes in private business, it's pretty obvious that these people have little to no understanding of how the government actually works. Unlike say, hurricane relief, in which the government has unfettered access to its own rescue equipment, like helicopters, transports, communications and security, the U.S. Navy does not have any deep water drilling equipment. In fact, the government doesn't own any oil drilling, containment or rescue equipment at all. So demanding they take over is really what? A demand they remove BP from the operation, then hire Exxon to come in and do exactly what British Petroleum is doing right now? Come on. Despite what the right-wing talking heads would have you believe, this is not a socialist country. The government does not own the means of production. Private industry does. And when private industry screws up, we have to wait for private industry to rectify the mistake. Sometimes you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Sometime this week Congress will consider a bill to delay a 20% cut in Medicare payments to doctors for at least three more years. Said cuts were supposed to kick in several years ago to help reduce the cost of the Medicare program and save the government money. But due to a "flaw" in the formula used to arrive at the reduction amount, everyone in Congress seems to agree that the size of the cuts, and the short period of time during which they would be implemented would cripple the program and leave many Medicare patients without coverage. A reasonable person might conclude that if there was a "flaw" in the reduction formula, the smart thing to do might be to revise the formula in order to arrive at the correct scale of reductions over an adequate period of time. However, Congress is not filled with reasonable people. So instead of fixing the problem, they will, again, simply postpone them, setting up the next Congress for an even larger potential cut, combined with three years of healthcare cost escalation. Brilliant. Lest you think this is an aberrant error for Congress, they've had plenty of practice with the Alternative Minimum Tax. When it was first passed, no one thought it important to tether the trigger for the tax to inflation. So every year, more and more people are threatened with having to pay it. But instead of simply indexing the AMT to inflation and forgetting about it, Congress passes a temporary fix for it every single year, for the express purpose of claiming they succeeded in not raising taxes on a certain group of voters. At what point will the public demand our representatives actually solve problems instead of simply running on them?

Last week, new Republican senatorial candidate and folk hero Rand Paul made a complete ass of himself on the Rachel Maddow show when he aired his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, (outlawing discrimination on the basis of race) because it "interferes" with the rights of private business to conduct said business however they please. You see, Rand Paul is a libertarian. (Well, a pseudo-libertarian. A libertarian who believes the federal government should supplement 50% of the income of his private practice really isn't a libertarian.) And while libertarianism sounds fascinating in academic debates, it, like every other purist political ideology, crashes and burns spectacularly upon contact with reality. Paul sincerely believes that no business should be forced to provide goods or services to any individual, for any reason. The "free market" provides choices, and the person being denied service could always choose to patronize another business that chose not to discriminate. Of course, by that logic, a hospital emergency room staffed with misogynists could refuse to treat a woman having a heart attack, simply because they are a private hospital and don't have to treat anyone they don't want to. The lady having the heart attack could then choose to have the ambulance rush her to a different hospital not staffed morons, hopefully before she dies of said heart attack, which would render her incapable of exercising her free market choice. It's stupid, and Paul knows it. He just doesn't care. It's his ideology. Reality be damned. It's too early to know if Rand Paul and his tea party supporters will pay a political price in Kentucky for their lunacy. The smart money says they don't. But it promises to be an interesting campaign.

Last November, a supervising nun at Saint Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, signed off on an abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old pregnant patient. Last week, news of her excommunication came to light. I don't care about the excommunication, one's relationship with a particular organization has nothing to do with the well-being of one's soul. What raised my ire was the reason given for the excommunication by the medical ethics director of the Diocese of Phoenix. When asked what actions the nun should have taken instead, the director replied, "...there are some situations in which the mother may in fact die along with her child..." Excuse me? The "right thing to do" would have been to allow the mother AND the fetus to die? That sounds so ridiculous it can't possibly be true, right? But according to Lisa Sowle Cahill, professor of Catholic theology at Boston College, "...The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die..." Wow. I do not have the vocabulary necessary to express how ludicrous that statement is. I have always been baffled at the juxtaposition between the pro-life movement's reverence for the unborn and their lack of concern for the "post-born," but now I'm just angry. Life is precious. Even if it exists outside the womb. If this is what the Catholic church is offering, I don't want any part of it.

Finally, American researchers have developed what they are calling synthetic life. Doctor Craig Venter has taken an existing cell "blank" and implanted it with a completely synthetic, "home-made" strand of DNA. Yeah. In the words of Bartok the bat, this can only end in tears. Oh sure, at first this might be used to replicate vaccines much more quickly and cure diseases on a cellular level. But how long until someone holds up in a secret basement lab somewhere designing an army of perfect, superhuman embryos to implant in unsuspecting women in a plan to take over the world 20 years later? We are going straight to hell in a handbasket. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.