Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Working Man

My name is Tom Love and I am a concerned parent, husband, and grandfather who has seen the American Dream slowly turning into the American Nightmare. I am a working man and speak for all the hard working men and women of Texas, who try to earn a living, educate their children, and keep their jobs in an era of outsourcing and $3 per gallon gasoline. We have become a nation that for too long has ignore its working peoples needs and rewarded powerful special interests that now threaten homeowners and Texans who pay their taxes while multimillionaires get special tax breaks. We cannot become a nation that builds bridges to nowhere, yet constructs no pathway to our children's future.

Over forty years ago John Kennedy said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Now the Republicans say, It is not my problem, what is in it for me, and I have got mine, you go get yours. The result has been a Culture of Corruption, a Crisis of Competence, and a Climate of Cronyism. I speak for the nurses, teachers, the electricians, truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, office workers and all Texans who are not the tool of the rich and powerful.

I speak as a Democrat as we are the party of the past, present and future. We are the party of the Quality of Life and all variations of people seeking truth, justice, and the American Way. We are the party of the working men and women and of businessmen committed to fair practices and trade to help make America grow and prosper. We are the party of educators and the educated. We are the party for good solid public education for all our children and we will never leave anyone behind.

We are the party of the Founders of America. We have never claimed to be perfect but only to strive for a more perfect Union. We believe we are Endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and freedom of and from religion. We are the party of law and trial by jury and innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. We are the party of the rights of the accused and the rights of the victims. We are the party of the Statue of Liberty and the Symbol of Justice.

We are the party of the 40 hour work week, of Child Labors Laws, overtime pay, of Labor Unions, Rights of women, of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We are the party of the uplifted and the downtrodden. Our strength is our diversity for we know and remember our roots while preparing for our future. We are the party with our hearts in the Past but with our eyes on the Future. We have died to give Americans Liberty, now we request your help to keep Americans Free.

We need Americans to register to vote and vote for America. Vote to end the politics of division, lies and deceit. Vote to end the politics of disrespect and humiliation. Vote for clean air and the right to breathe free. Vote for the right to have affordable and available heath care for a better and healthier America. Give us your vote and we will pledge to Serve, Protect, and Defend our Great Land.

And if you give us your vote, our heart will be your heart, our hand will be your hand, our voice will be your voice, and your dream will be our reality. I speak today as a working man who loves his country and loves his God, requests your help, and thanks you for listening.

Thomas P. Love

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The High Cost of Health Care

Editorial by The New York Times

The relentless, decades-long rise in the cost of health care has left many Americans struggling to pay their medical bills. Workers complain that they cannot afford high premiums for health insurance. Patients forgo recommended care rather than pay the out-of-pocket costs. Employers are cutting back or eliminating health benefits, forcing millions more people into the ranks of the uninsured. And state and federal governments strain to meet the expanding costs of public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

Health care costs are far higher in the United States than in any other advanced nation, whether measured in total dollars spent, as a percentage of the economy, or on a per capita basis. And health costs here have been rising significantly faster than the overall economy or personal incomes for more than 40 years, a trend that cannot continue forever.

It is the worst long-term fiscal crisis facing the nation, and it demands a solution, but finding one will not be easy or palatable.

The Causes

Varied and Deep-Rooted. Contrary to popular beliefs, this is not a problem driven mainly by the aging of the baby boom generation, or the high cost of prescription drugs, or medical malpractice litigation that spawns defensive medicine. Those issues often dominate political discourse, but they have played relatively minor roles in driving up medical spending in this country and abroad. The major causes are much more deep-seated and far harder to root out.

Almost all economists would agree that the main driver of high medical spending here is our wealth. We are richer than other countries and so willing to spend more. But authoritative analyses have found that we spend well above what mere wealth would predict.

This is mostly because we pay hospitals and doctors more than most other countries do. We rely more on costly specialists, who overuse advanced technologies, like CT scans and M.R.I. machines, and who resort to costly surgical or medical procedures a lot more than doctors in other countries do. Perverse insurance incentives entice doctors and patients to use expensive medical services more than is warranted. And our fragmented array of insurers and providers eats up a lot of money in administrative costs, marketing expenses and profits that do not afflict government-run systems abroad.

Does It Matter? If citizens of an extremely wealthy nation like the United States want to spend more on health care and less on a third car, a new computer or a vacation home, what’s wrong with that? By some measures, Americans are getting good value. Studies by reputable economists have concluded that spending on such advanced treatments as cardiac drugs, devices and surgery; neonatal care for low-birth-weight infants; and mental health drugs have more than paid for themselves by extending lives and improving their quality.

But if health care spending continues on its same trajectory, the United States will reach the point — probably several decades from now — where every penny of the annual increase in gross domestic product would have to go for health care. There would be less and less money for other things, like education, environmental protection, scientific research and national security, that may be equally or more important to the well-being of society.

Governmental budgets will face the crisis even sooner. States are already complaining that they have to crimp other vital activities, like education, to meet soaring Medicaid costs. And federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid is surging upward at rates that will cause the deficit to soar. That means politicians will have to raise taxes, severely cut a wide range of other governmental programs, or chop back the health programs themselves.

The question is: What can be done to lower both the high level of health care spending and its high rate of increase from year to year?

The Solutions

Geography. Pioneering studies by researchers at Dartmouth have shown enormous disparities in expenditures on health care from one region to another with no discernible difference in health outcomes. Doctors in high-cost areas use hospitals, costly technology and platoons of consulting physicians a lot more often than doctors in low-cost areas, yet their patients, on average, fare no better. There are hints that they may even do worse because they pick up infections in the hospital and because having a horde of doctors can mean no one is in charge.

If the entire nation could bring its costs down to match the lower-spending regions, the country could cut perhaps 20 to 30 percent off its health care bill, a tremendous saving. That would require changing the long- ingrained practices of the medical profession. Public and private insurers might need to refuse coverage for high-cost care that adds little value.

Stick to What Works. The sad truth is that less than half of all medical care in the United States is supported by good evidence that it works, according to estimates cited by the Congressional Budget Office. If doctors had better information on which treatments work best for which patients, and whether the benefits were commensurate with the costs, needless treatment could be junked, the savings could be substantial, and patient care would surely improve. It could take a decade, or several, to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies, modify relevant laws, and change doctors’ behavior.

Managed Care. For a brief period in the 1990s it looked as if health maintenance organizations competing for patients and carefully managing their care might bring down costs and improve quality at the same time. The H.M.O.’s did help restrain costs for a few years. The problem was, doctors and patients hated the system, management became much looser, and the upsurge in costs resumed. Managed care techniques are creeping back into some health plans, especially for services apt to be overused, but too heavy a hand would most likely produce another backlash.

Information Technologies. The American health care system lags well behind other sectors of the economy — and behind foreign medical systems — in adopting computers, electronic health records and information-sharing technologies that can greatly boost productivity. There is little doubt that widespread computerization could greatly reduce the paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals, head off medication errors, and reduce the costly repetition of diagnostic tests as patients move from one doctor to another. Without an infusion of capital, the transition from paper records is not apt to happen very quickly.

Prevention. Everyone seems to be hoping that preventive medicine — like weight control, exercise, better nutrition, smoking cessation, regular checkups, aggressive screening and judicious use of drugs to reduce risks — will not only improve health but also lower costs in the long run. Preventive medicine actually costs money — somebody has to spend time counseling patients and screening them for disease — and it is not clear how soon, or even whether, substantial savings will show up. Still, the effort has to be made. The Milken Institute recently estimated that the most common chronic diseases cost the economy more than $1 trillion annually, mostly from lost worker productivity, which could balloon to nearly $6 trillion by the middle of the century.

Disease Management. Virtually all policy experts want more careful coordination of the care of chronically ill patients, who account for the largest portion of the nation’s health care expenditures. Although that should improve the quality of the care they get, coordination may not cut costs as substantially as people expect. In some initial trials it has cut costs, in others not.

Drug Prices. Compared with the residents of other countries, Americans pay much more for brand-name prescription drugs, less for generic and over-the-counter drugs, and roughly the same prices for biologics. This page believes it would be beneficial to allow Medicare to negotiate with manufacturers for lower prescription drug prices and to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from abroad. The prospect for big savings is dubious.

Who Picks Up the Tab?

Pay Providers Less. With doctors dreadfully unhappy under the heavy hand of insurers, it would seem shortsighted to make them even unhappier by cutting their compensation to levels paid in other countries. But many experts believe it should be possible to tap into the vast flow of money sluicing through hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities to find savings.

Emphasize Primary Care. In a health system as uncoordinated as ours, many experts believe we could get better health results, possibly for less cost, if we changed reimbursement formulas and medical education programs to reward and produce more primary care doctors and fewer specialists inclined to proliferate high-cost services. It would be a long-term project.

Skin in the Game. The solution favored by many conservatives is to force consumers to shell out more money when they seek medical care so that they will think harder about whether it is really necessary. The “consumer-directed health care” movement calls for providing people with enough information about doctors and treatments so that they can make wise decisions.

There would most likely be some savings. A classic experiment by Rand researchers from 1974 to 1982 found that people who had to pay almost all of their own medical bills spent 30 percent less on health care than those whose insurance covered all their costs, with little or no difference in health outcomes. The one exception was low-income people in poor health, who went without care they needed. Any cost-sharing scheme would have to protect those unable to bear the burden.

And consumer-driven plans have limitations. Most health care spending is racked up by a small percentage of individuals whose bills are so high they are no longer subject to cost sharing; they will hardly be deterred from expensive care they desperately need. Moreover, few consumers have the competence or knowledge to second-guess a doctor’s recommendations.

Single Payer. Deep in their hearts, many liberals yearn for a single-payer system, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, that would have the federal government pay for all care and dictate prices. Such a system would let the government offset the price-setting strength of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, eliminate much of the waste due to a multiplicity of private insurance plans, and greatly cut administrative costs.

But a single-payer system is no panacea for the cost problem — witness Medicare’s own cost troubles — and the approach has limited political support. Private insurers could presumably eliminate some of the waste through uniform billing and payment procedures.

By now it should be clear that there is no silver bullet to restrain soaring health care costs. A wide range of contributing factors needs to be tackled simultaneously, with no guarantee they will have a substantial impact any time soon. In many cases we do not have enough solid information to know how to cut costs without impairing quality. So we need to get cracking on a range of solutions. The cascade of knowledge flowing from the human genome project, new nanotechnologies and the advent of treatments tailor-made for individual patients may well accelerate, not mitigate, the rise in medical spending. If we want the benefits, we will need to make them affordable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25sun1.html?em&ex=1196139600&en=505328f556942bd9&ei=5087%0A

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Strategic Goals Unmet in Afghan War

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page A01

A White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan has concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration set for 2007 have not been met, even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials.

The evaluation this month by the National Security Council followed an in-depth review in late 2006 that laid out a series of projected improvements for this year, including progress in security, governance and the economy. But the latest assessment concluded that only "the kinetic piece" -- individual battles against Taliban fighters -- has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.

This judgment reflects sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban's unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

"There is a key debate going on now between the military -- especially commanders on the ground -- and the intelligence community and some in the State Department about how we are doing," said one Afghanistan expert who has consulted with the National Security Council as it continues to "comb through conflicting reports" about the conflict.

Over the past year, all combat encounters against the Taliban have ended with "a very decisive defeat" for the extremists, Brig. Gen. Robert E. Livingston Jr., commander of the U.S. task force training the Afghan army, told reporters this month. The growing number of suicide bombings against civilians underscores the Taliban's growing desperation, according to Livingston and other U.S. commanders.

But one senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed was not authorized to discuss Afghanistan on the record, said such gains are fleeting. "One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive . . . where we go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys," the official said. But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements.

Although growing numbers of foreigners -- primarily Pakistanis -- are joining the Taliban ranks, several officials said the primary source of new recruits remains disaffected Afghans fearful of opposing the Taliban and increasingly disillusioned with their own government.

Overall, "there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent," the intelligence official said.

Senior White House officials privately express pessimism about Afghanistan. There is anxiety over the current upheaval in neighboring Pakistan, where both the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintain headquarters, logistical support and training camps along the Afghan border. But "in all honesty, I think it is too early to tell right now" whether political turmoil will undermine what U.S. officials already consider lackluster counterinsurgency efforts by Pakistani forces, the senior administration official said.

At the moment, several officials said, their concern is focused far more on the domestic situation in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers are losing faith in Karzai's government in Kabul. According to a survey released last month by the Asia Foundation, 79 percent of Afghans felt that the government does not care what they think, while 69 percent felt that it is not acceptable to publicly criticize the government.

Although 42 percent remained optimistic that things are moving in the right direction -- slightly lower than in a similar survey in 2006 -- most of those who thought otherwise cited insecurity as the biggest problem, followed by poor governance and the economy. Just a year ago, security was cited as the biggest reason for optimism.

U.S. troops number more than 25,000 and make up the largest contingent of the 41,000-member NATO force in Afghanistan. NATO officers say they have eliminated Taliban leaders and fighters in higher numbers than in any previous year. But such claims of success reflect "a very tactical outlook in a game that is strategic," said a former U.S. senior commander in Afghanistan who shares many of the intelligence community's concerns. "I have a lot of respect for [Taliban] strategy," he said. "These guys are not cowardly by any stretch of the imagination."

While U.S. and other NATO forces have maintained a firm hold on major cities, they have been unable to retain territory in the vast rural areas where 75 percent of Afghanistan's population lives, several sources said. Ground hard-won in combat has been abandoned and reoccupied by Taliban forces, which establish dominance over local governmental bodies.

There is widespread agreement among administration officials that the Taliban has suffered heavy losses this year. But the U.S. military has also suffered losses, with deaths already past the 100 mark, compared with 87 over all of last year -- making this the deadliest year for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the war began. Afghan civilian deaths also reached an all-time high of 5,700 this year, according to an Associated Press tally.

The strategy is "clear, hold and build," said Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert at the Rand Corp. "You clear the Taliban out, then you hold it for a period of time. You keep forces there, including Afghan forces, then you begin to build, then expand and go into neighboring districts. The problem has been that when you move troops into neighboring districts, you don't have enough to hold what you just cleared."

Although the competence of the Afghan army is improving by all accounts, U.S. military officials acknowledge that the goal of turning captured territory over to Afghan forces has been hampered by training delays and insufficient numbers.

In last year's Operation Medusa, Jones said, Canadian combat troops fought hard for control of the Panjwai district, south of Kandahar. "Four weeks ago," he said, "the levels of Taliban in Panjwai . . . were back up to pre-Operation Medusa."

Experts said the Taliban's control has extended beyond the group's traditional southern territory, with extremists making substantial inroads this year into the western provinces of Farah, Herat and others along the Iranian border even as they regularly challenge eastern-based U.S. forces.

"We're seeing definite expanded strongholds," said a U.S. official who declined to be identified by agency. "That's not going to stop in 2008. . . . If anything, it's gaining momentum."

Northern Afghanistan, ethnically separate from the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, is still considered relatively peaceful, although officials regard a Nov. 6 suicide bombing in northern Baghlan province that killed more than 8o people -- most of them children -- as an ominous sign. Though U.S. intelligence officials initially questioned the Taliban's denial of responsibility, they now believe the bomb was the work of Hezb-e-Islami, a Taliban ally, even as suspicion has grown in Afghanistan that most of the deaths were caused by Afghan police officers responding to the explosion.

The former senior U.S. commander said suicide attacks are a "hugely effective tactic" that has been imported from Iraq to Afghanistan, terrorizing the population and convincing Afghans that the coalition cannot protect them. "The idea that [suicide bombs] are a sign of desperation, that's ludicrous," he said.

In Washington, Afghanistan policy has often seemed to be on the back burner since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Republican presidential candidates rarely discuss it, while Democrats generally bring it up to criticize the administration, saying officials are paying too much attention to Iraq at the expense of a "forgotten" war.

President Bush seldom mentions Afghanistan. In White House remarks last month asking Congress for an additional $200 billion for both wars, he noted that "our troops, NATO allies and Afghan forces are making gains against the Taliban," then offered an extensive recounting of progress in Iraq.

To the extent that the administration has publicly described problems in Afghanistan, it has focused on the reluctance of NATO members to send more troops and the restrictions placed by some on the missions they can undertake. "In Afghanistan, a handful of allies are paying the price and bearing the burdens" for the rest of the 26-nation group, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said at a NATO meeting last month. "The failure to meet commitments puts the Afghan mission -- and with it, the credibility of NATO -- at real risk."

Gates has acknowledged that U.S. Marine commanders have appealed to him to speed their departure from Iraq for deployment in Afghanistan to address more pressing challenges there. The Special Operations Command has also been lobbying for a more active role along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Several experts believe that the United States can no longer afford to leave the Pakistani military to clean up its side of the border. "Unless we resolve the safe-haven issue, this is not going to succeed," said Henry A. Crumpton, a CIA veteran who led the agency's successful 2001 Afghanistan campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "It's getting worse."

But others said the problem is not Pakistan or a lack of military or financial resources in Afghanistan. It is the absence, they say, of a strategic plan that melds the U.S. military effort with a comprehensive blueprint for development and governance throughout the country.

"There are plenty of dollars and a hell of a lot more troops there, by a factor of two, from when I was there," the former commander said. The question, he said, is "who owns the overarching campaign for Afghanistan, and what is it?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/24/AR2007112401333_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2007112500076

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

New Stem Cell Method Could Ease Ethical Concerns

By GINA KOLATA
Two teams of scientists are reporting today that they turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.

The reprogrammed skin cells may yet prove to have subtle differences from embryonic stem cells that come directly from human embryos, and the new method includes potentially risky steps, like introducing a cancer gene. But stem cell researchers say they are confident that it will not take long to perfect the method and that today’s drawbacks will prove to be temporary.

Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.

“Everyone was waiting for this day to come,” said the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “You should have a solution here that will address the moral objections that have been percolating for years,” he added.

The two independent teams, from Japan and Wisconsin, note that their method also creates stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to the controversial step of cloning. If stem cells are used to make replacement cells and tissues for patients, it would be invaluable to have genetically matched cells because they would not be rejected by the immune system. Even more important, scientists say, is that genetically matched cells from patients will enable them to study complex diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in the lab.

Until now, the only way to get embryonic stem cells that genetically matched an individual would be to create embryos that were clones of that person and extract their stem cells. Just last week, scientists in Oregon reported that they did this with monkeys, but the prospect of doing such experiments in humans has been ethically fraught.

But with the new method, human cloning for stem cell research, like the creation of human embryos to extract stem cells, may be unnecessary.

“It really is amazing,” said Dr. Leonard Zon, director of the stem cell program at Harvard Medical School’s Children’s Hospital.

And, said Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard University, it is “ethically uncomplicated.”

For all the hopes invested in it over the past decade, embryonic stem cell research has not yet produced any cures or major therapeutic discoveries. Stem cells are so malleable that they may pose risk of cancer, and the new method of obtaining stem cells includes steps that raise their own safety concerns.

Still, the new work could allow the field to vault significant problems, including the shortage of human embryonic stem cells and restrictions on federal funding for such research. Even when scientists have other sources of funding, they report that it is expensive and difficult to find women who will provide eggs for such research.

The new discovery is being published online today in Cell, in a paper by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute for Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, and in Science, in a paper by James Thomson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin.

While both groups used just four genes to reprogram human skin cells, two of the four genes used by the Japanese scientists were different from two of the four used by the American group. All the genes in question, though, act in a similar way – they are master regulator genes whose role is to turn other genes on or off.

The reprogrammed cells, the scientists report, appear to behave exactly like human embryonic stem cells.

“By any means we test them they are the same as embryonic stem cells,” Dr. Thomson says.

He and Dr. Yamanaka caution, though, that they still must confirm that the reprogrammed human skin cells really are the same as stem cells they get from embryos. And while those studies are underway, Dr. Thomson and others say, it would be premature to abandon research with stem cells taken from human embryos.

Another caveat is that , so far, scientists use a type of virus, a retrovirus, to insert the genes into the cells’ chromosomes. Retroviruses slip genes into chromosomes at random, sometimes causing mutations that can make normal cells turn into cancers.

In addition, one of the genes that the Japanese scientists insert actually is a cancer gene.

The cancer risk means that the resulting stem cells would not be suitable for replacement cells or tissues for patients with diseases, like diabetes, in which their own cells die. They would, though, be ideal for the sort of studies that many researchers say are the real promise of this endeavor — studying the causes and treatments of complex diseases.

For example, researchers want to make embryonic stem cells from a person with a disease like Alzheimer’s and turn the stem cells into nerve cells in a petri dish. Then, scientists hope, they may be able to understand what goes awry in Alzheimer’s patients when their brain cells die and how to prevent or treat the disease.

But even the retrovirus drawback may be temporary, scientists say. Dr. Yamanaka and several other researchers are trying to get the same effect by adding chemicals or using more benign viruses to get the genes into cells. They say they are starting to see success.

It is only a matter of time until retroviruses are not needed, Dr. Melton predicted.

“Anyone who is going to suggest that this is just a side show and that it won’t work is wrong,” Dr. Melton said.

The new discovery was preceded by work in mice. Last year, Dr. Yamanaka published a paper showing that he could add four genes to mouse cells and turn them into mouse embryonic stem cells.

He even completed the ultimate test to show that the resulting stem cells could become any type of mouse cell. He used them to create new mice, whose every cell came from one of those stem cells. Twenty percent of those mice, though, developed cancer, illustrating the risk of using retroviruses and a cancer gene to make cells for replacement parts.

Scientists were electrified by the reprogramming discovery, Dr. Melton said. “Once it worked, I hit my forehead and said, ‘it’s so obvious,’ ”he said. “But it’s not obvious until it’s done.”

Some were skeptical about Dr. Yamanaka’s work and questioned whether such an approach would ever work in humans.

“They said, ‘That’s very good with mice. But let’s see if you can do it with a human,”’ Dr. Zon recalled.

But others set off in what became an international race to repeat the work with human cells.

“Dozens, if not hundreds of labs, have been attempting to do this,” said Dr. George Daley, associate director of the stem cell program at Children’s Hospital.

Few expected Dr. Yamanka would succeed so soon. Nor did they expect that the same four genes would reprogram human cells.

“This shows it’s not an esoteric thing that happened in the mouse,” said Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell researcher at M.I.T.

Ever since the birth of Dolly the sheep, scientists knew that adult cells could, in theory, turn into embryonic stem cells. But they had no idea how to do it without cloning, the way Dolly was created.

With cloning, researchers put an adult cell’s chromosomes into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material was removed. The egg, by some mysterious process, then does all the work. It reprograms the adult cell’s chromosomes, bringing them back to the state they were in just after the egg was fertilized. Those reprogrammed genes then direct the development of an embryo. A few days later, a ball of stem cells emerges in the embryo. Since the embryo’s chromosomes came from the adult cell, every cell of the embryo, including its stem cells, are exact genetic matches of the adult.

The abiding question, though, was, How did the egg reprogram the adult cell’s chromosomes? Would it be possible to reprogram an adult cell without using an egg?

About four years ago, Dr. Yamanaka and Dr. Thomson independently hit upon the same idea. They would search for genes that are being used in an embryonic stem cell that are not being used in an adult cell. Then they would see if those genes would reprogram an adult cell.

Dr. Yamanaka worked with mouse cells and Dr. Thomson worked with human cells from foreskins.

The researchers found more than 1,000 candidate genes. So both groups took educated guesses, trying to whittle down the genes to the few dozen they thought might be the crucial ones and then asking whether any combinations of those genes could turn a skin cell into a stem cell.

It was laborious work, with no guarantee of a payoff.

“The number of factors could have been one or ten or 100 or more,” Dr. Yamanaka said in a telephone interview from his lab in Japan.

If many genes were required, the experiments would have failed, Dr. Thomson said, because it would be impossible to test all the gene combinations.

The mouse work went more quickly than Dr. Thomson’s work with human cells. As soon as Dr. Yamanaka saw that the mouse experiments succeeded, he began trying the same brute force method in human skin cells that he ordered from a commercial laboratory. Some were face cells from a 36 year old white woman and others were connective tissue cells from joints of a 69 year old white man.

Dr. Yamanaka said he thought it would take a few years to find the right genes and the right conditions to make the human experiments work. Feeling the hot breath of competitors on his neck, he was in his lab every day for 12 to 14 hours a day, he said.

A few months later, he succeeded.

“We did work very hard,” Dr. Yamanaka said. “But we were very surprised.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/science/21stem.html?_r=1&exprod=myyahoo&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Excerpt: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Excerpt By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies.Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.

I've had enough. How about you? I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to, as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real. I'm hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don't vote because they don't trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us. Who Are These Guys, Anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy. And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

The Test of a Leader
I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points, not ten (I don't want people accusing me of thinking I'm Moses). I call them the "Nine Cs of Leadership." They're not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can learn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let's be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It's up to us to choose wisely.

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the "Yes, sir" crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. "I just scan the headlines," he says. Am I hearing this right? He's the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he's ready to go.

If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn't put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he's right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don't care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn't listen to the polls. Yeah, that's what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a "thumping" on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn't listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.

A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. "The President was serene," Joe recalled. "He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'how can you be so sure when you don't yet know all the facts?'" Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts." Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush,"Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough." Joe Biden sure didn't think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn't. Leadership is all about managing change, whether you're leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.

A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I'm not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I'm talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don't know if it's denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while. Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it's painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn't cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we've stopped listening to him.

A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power." George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths. For what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.

A leader must have COURAGE. I'm talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn't courage. Tough talk isn't courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

If you're a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can't even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.

To be a leader you've got to have CONVICTION, a fire in your belly. You've got to have passion. You've got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President, four hundred and counting. He'd rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake. It's no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That's eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that's not leadership.

A leader should have CHARISMA. I'm not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It's the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That's my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn't look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don't go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.

A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn't it? You've got to know what you're doing. More important than that, you've got to surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.

You can't be a leader if you don't have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham's rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford's zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, "Remember, Lee, the only thing you've got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don't know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you'll never make it." George Bush doesn't have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know, Mr.they'll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-heck-of-a-job-Brownie-mission-accomplished Bush. Former President Bill Clinton once said, "I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world, and I like it here." I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.

The Biggest C is Crisis Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down. On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day, and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero. That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq, a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you,I don't know what will.

A Hell of a Mess.
So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: "Where have all the leaders gone?" Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened. Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it? Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change? Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17516.htm

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Leadership by Example Mr Rove

I read in a recent publication that Karl Rove wants Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton to release their private conversations between each other while in the White House. Now in most states and venues conversations between spouses are private privileged conversation.

Mr. Rove you were in the White House, as an example of how the release of these conversations should be conducted, why don't you turn over your E-Mail conversations between you and your wife while a member of the White House?

Perhaps this leadership by example would enlighten all sorts of responses.

The Theology of Torture-Who Would Jesus Torture?

Fallible creatures are not to be trusted with empire.
by Jim Wallis

Christian theology is uneasy with empire, and the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison reveal why. More than politics is at stake in this scandal. Moral theology is also involved, and that is worthy of serious public discussion—especially when this war's commander-in-chief speaks often of his Christian faith.

The Christian view of human nature and sin suggests that we are fallible creatures and thus not good at empire. We cannot be trusted with domination, becoming too easily corrupted by its power and too often succumbing to repression in defending it. Therefore, we should not simply be shocked at the evil we have seen in the horrible prison photos, but also sobered and saddened by that same potential in ourselves. History teaches that domination can make good people do bad things. The British did horrible things in Northern Ireland, the French in Algeria, and we Americans in Vietnam. Brutality is the inevitable consequence of occupation and domination and an enduring part of the cycle of violence.

In Iraq, young Americans are being shot at and blown up every day. The frustration and anger at being daily targets is enormous. To "set the conditions" for the interrogation of prisoners that might yield critical intelligence and, perhaps, relieve some of that frustration, both soldiers and commanders clearly crossed the line. Now the detainee scandal is distracting attention from another, equally alarming consequence of this occupation: a growing tolerance for civilian casualties in U.S. counter-insurgency military operations. Again the memory of Vietnam haunts.

The fundamental theological issues in the prisoner abuse story and the increase of civilian casualties involve the nature of occupation itself, and domination as the consequence of empire—the strategy that appears to be the Bush administration's unapologetic choice for fighting terrorism. Christian theology suggests that domination is oppressive and corrupting for both the dominated and the dominator. In preferring the virtues of human dignity, justice, and humility, Christianity implicitly teaches that empire is not the best strategy to fight terrorism. In fact, the domination policies of empire often make terrorism worse by producing tragic behaviors that terrorists use to fuel their murderous agendas. The pictures from Abu Ghraib have already become recruiting posters for the next generation of terrorists in the Muslim world.

TRUTH-TELLING is also central to Christian theology, which teaches that falsehood has consequences. When a war is primarily justified by arguing imminent threats from weapons of mass destruction that are later revealed not to exist, essential trust in political authority erodes. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently warned of this very thing, declaring that "credible claims on our political loyalty have something to do with a demonstrable attention to truth." When "liberators" become "occupiers," greeted not with flowers but with an unexpected and bloody insurgency, the moral ground is further diminished. And when the only arguments left for war and occupation constantly invoke the horrors of "Saddam's torture chambers," American torture in those same chambers deeply undermines the authority of America's arguments and proposed solutions.

The question of moral agency has been much discussed in regard to the prison scandal. Just who is responsible for the horrific pictures and widespread reports of prisoner humiliation, illegal treatment, torture, and perhaps even murder at American hands? Those soldiers who abused detainees should be held morally and legally accountable, even if they claim to have only followed orders. If there were such orders, commanders should be held even more culpable. Both common sense and the dynamics of how "sin" operates in human beings and their institutions suggest that the "patterns of abuse" reported by the International Red Cross and human rights organizations are most likely true. We are learning that a climate of official toleration and even encouragement may have created pressure for young military police to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.

The central point is that we always have choices and the responsibility to make ethical judgments based on moral values and established law. Positive moral agency was indeed active in this appalling scandal, when Spec. Joseph Darby reported the prison abuses and turned over incriminating pictures to his commanding officer because he "thought it [the abuse] was very wrong." Some of the most disturbing comments in this scandal have come from those who called Darby a "snitch" who should "never get home." Rather, Darby is a moral hero who should be held up to our children as a role model for what to do when their peers are bowing to pressure to do the wrong thing.

BUT OUR REFLECTION will be of little worth unless it takes us deeper than revulsion against "bad apples" who taint the reputation of the military, or investigations into the policies and atmosphere initiated by the chain of command, or even how high accountability should go—to military intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, or even the Oval Office. We must also address the "bad theology" that contributes to the problem.

When the White House promulgates an official theology of righteous empire, in which "they" are evil and "we" are good (and if you are not with us you are on the side of the "evildoers"), it contributes to an atmosphere that makes abuse more likely. And when leaders from the American Religious Right describe Islam as an "evil religion," they are, however indirectly, helping to set conditions for the abuse of Muslim detainees. Abuse and torture are always more likely when the victims are objectified, made into an "other" that is somehow different and less human than we are. The religious conviction that challenges us to see the "image of God" in every person is an absolute barrier to the practice of torture. It is also a moral foundation for international accords such as the Geneva Convention.

President George Bush is a Christian, but he did not listen to U.S. and world church leaders who overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq and who warned about many of the "plagues of war" (to use the language of the Vatican) that have transpired since. Perhaps he should listen to religious leaders now. American domination and empire is both bad policy and bad theology, and it will not succeed. Only international initiative and authority have a chance of repairing the damage. The United States must make the major contribution it clearly owes to reconstruction in Iraq, but only under somebody else's leadership. The domination of empire must be abandoned.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners. http://www.sojourners.com/
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040851

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Brothers, Bad Blood and the Blackwater Tangle By SCOTT SHANE

BALTIMORE, Nov. 16— They were smart, scrappy brothers who rose from modest circumstances in Baltimore to become lacrosse stars at Princeton, succeed in business and land big government jobs.

Now the Krongard brothers — who have carried childhood nicknames, Buzzy and Cookie, through long careers — are tied up in the tangled story of Blackwater, the security contractor accused in the deaths of at least 17 Iraqis while guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad.

The shorthand version boils their involvement down to that Washington catchall conflict of interest. The full story appears more complicated, less about cozy nepotism than about family estrangement.

But the concern about a conflict resulted Friday in the resignation of Alvin B. Krongard — Buzzy — from the Blackwater advisory board he had just joined. The company said he hoped to defuse accusations that his ties to the company were causing Howard J. Krongard — Cookie — the State Department inspector general, to go easy on Blackwater.

Alvin Krongard, 71, who left a $4 million-a-year job in investment banking to serve in top posts at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1998 to 2004, played what he describes as a routine role as an intermediary in helping Blackwater get its first big security contract from the agency for guards in Afghanistan in 2002.

A martial arts enthusiast and former Marine who has regaled friends with tales of punching a great white shark while scuba diving, Mr. Krongard said he later became friendly with the company’s founder, Erik D. Prince. They have hunted near Blackwater’s North Carolina training ground and at Mr. Krongard’s hunting club in Maryland.

Meanwhile, Howard Krongard, 66, a former general counsel at the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche who took the State Department job in 2005, was grilled this week by House Democrats. They accused Mr. Krongard (who does not use his nickname professionally, as his brother does) of alienating his staff and improperly interfering in investigations, including a Justice Department inquiry into allegations of weapons smuggling by Blackwater employees.

Hence Representative Henry A. Waxman’s disclosure at a hearing Wednesday, the latest in a string of revelations the California Democrat has used to torment the Bush administration.

“We have now learned that Mr. Krongard’s brother, Buzzy Krongard, serves on Blackwater’s advisory board,” Mr. Waxman declared, saying the inspector general had “concealed this apparent conflict of interest.”

Howard Krongard grew indignant, saying his brother had no ties to Blackwater.

“When these ugly rumors started recently, I specifically asked him,” he said. “I do not believe it is true that he is a member of the advisory board.”

Then came a break, and Howard phoned his older brother. Buzzy told Howard he had just returned from his first Blackwater advisory board meeting in Williamsburg, Va.

A chagrined Howard Krongard returned to the witness stand. “I want to state on the record right now that I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater,” he said.

Howard Krongard has also disqualified himself from an inquiry into the construction of the American Embassy in Baghdad, and subordinates have lambasted him for what they called abusive and erratic conduct. John A. DeDona, Howard’s assistant for investigations until August, said in an interview that he believed top State Department officials had influenced the inspector general to back away from tough investigations, including that of Blackwater, which diplomats depend on for protection in Iraq under a $1.2 billion contract.

At the hearing, Howard Krongard, who did not respond to a request for an interview for this article, described himself as an apolitical auditing lawyer whose reforms have met resistance from subordinates who resent supervision. “I want to say in the strongest terms that I have never impeded any investigation,” he told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

From a distance, events might suggest that Mr. Prince chose to recruit Buzzy Krongard to curry favor with Howard Krongard and blunt any inquiry into Blackwater. But if that was Mr. Prince’s strategy, his intelligence was gravely flawed, according to people who know the family.

The Krongard brothers barely speak, friends say. In fact, Howard appears to be estranged from several family members, including his son Kenneth, whom he sued last year over a home loan. And Buzzy Krongard has said that when Howard called him a few weeks ago as he prepared his testimony, it was their first conversation in months.

Even their accounts of that brief call are at odds: Buzzy says that he told Howard he was joining the Blackwater advisory board, and that Howard said that was not a good idea. Howard testified that they had no such discussion.

Still, Buzzy Krongard said in an interview, “Whatever issues I have with my brother, I don’t question his integrity.” Given their estrangement, any attempt to reach Howard through him would have backfired, he said. “Based on our recent relationship,” he said, “the effect would be the other way around.”

Buzzy Krongard spoke in his 15,000-square-foot Georgian mansion, Torch Hill, north of Baltimore, where family photos were propped atop an antique piano and memorabilia of his lacrosse days covered half a den wall.

The two brothers grew up in a middle-class West Baltimore neighborhood, sons of a partner in a uniform-manufacturing business. Buzzy’s nickname was bestowed by an aunt who thought he resembled a comics character by that name; a few years later, when his grandmother wanted to buy him a war bond, she had to ask his parents his formal name. Howard got his nickname from knocking on doors and asking for cookies, his brother said.

They went to public school and on to Princeton, and their athletic exploits — Buzzy as a midfielder, Cookie as a goalie — landed both men in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in Baltimore.

“Most people around here started to play lacrosse at 7 or 8,” said Ralph N. Willis, 76, another Hall of Famer from Baltimore and Princeton. “Buzzy and I used to play with those old wooden sticks.”

After rising to the helm of Alex. Brown & Sons, the venerable Baltimore investment banking firm, Buzzy Krongard oversaw its acquisition by Bankers Trust in 1997 and left the next year for the C.I.A., as a counselor to George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. He became executive director, the No. 3 post, in 2001 and helped design the agency’s secret detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Krongard said he visited Blackwater’s training facilities for C.I.A. officers but did not meet Mr. Prince until early 2002, shortly after a visit to the agency’s quarters at a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mr. Krongard said he told the Blackwater chief, who was making the rounds at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Virginia to drum up business, of his worries about the reliability of Afghan perimeter guards.

“I just thought, ‘Here’s a guy who says he can get highly skilled special operations types over there in a hurry to help with security,’” Mr. Krongard recalled. He said he connected Mr. Prince with the proper C.I.A. officials to discuss a contract but neither then nor later exerted pressure on the company’s behalf.

Buzzy Krongard vigorously defends Blackwater’s record in Iraq. “It’s very easy to second-guess them when you’re sitting back in an air-conditioned office,” he said. After Mr. Krongard’s resignation from the Blackwater board was announced late Friday, Mr. Prince expressed his dismay at the politically charged maelstrom around the company.

“It’s a real shame in this country when honorable men and private companies are presumed guilty based on politicized allegations, even while investigations are under way,” Mr. Prince said.

But Mr. Waxman seems disinclined to back down. He announced Friday that in light of the discrepancy between the brothers’ statements, he plans to call both to a hearing after Thanksgiving to sort it out.

“The information from Buzzy Krongard,” Mr. Waxman wrote to other committee members, “raises serious questions about the veracity of Howard Krongard’s testimony before the committee.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17brothers.html?_r=1&exprod=myyahoo&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Friday, November 16, 2007

Army desertion rate up 80 pct. since '03 By LOLITA C. BALDOR, AP


Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.
"We're asking a lot of soldiers these days," said Roy Wallace, director of plans and resources for Army personnel. "They're humans. They have all sorts of issues back home and other places like that. So, I'm sure it has to do with the stress of being a soldier."
The Army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for longer than 30 days. The soldier is then discharged as a deserter.
According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.
The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military leaders — including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey — have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. Efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments.
"We have been concentrating on this," said Wallace. "The Army can't afford to throw away good people. We have got to work with those individuals and try to help them become good soldiers."
Still, he noted that "the military is not for everybody, not everybody can be a soldier." And those who want to leave the service will find a way to do it, he said.
While the Army does not have an up-to-date profile of deserters, more than 75 percent of them are soldiers in their first term of enlistment. And most are male.
Soldiers can sign on initially for two to six years. Wallace said he did not know whether deserters were more likely to be those who enlisted for a short or long tour.
At the same time, he said that even as desertions have increased, the Army has seen some overall success in keeping first-term soldiers in the service.
There are four main ways that soldiers can leave the Army before their first enlistment contract is up:
_They are determined unable to meet physical fitness requirements.
_They are found to be unable to adapt to the military.
_They say they are gay and are required to leave under the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
_They go AWOL.
According to Wallace, in the summer of 2005, more than 18 percent of the soldiers in their first six months of service left under one of those four provisions. In June 2007, that number had dropped to about 7 percent.
The decline, he said, is largely due to a drop in the number of soldiers who leave due to physical fitness or health reasons.
Army desertion rates have fluctuated since the Vietnam War — when they peaked at 5 percent. In the 1970s they hovered between 1 and 3 percent, which is up to three out of every 100 soldiers. Those rates plunged in the 1980s and early 1990s to between 2 and 3 out of every 1,000 soldiers.
Desertions began to creep up in the late 1990s into the turn of the century, when the U.S. conducted an air war in Kosovo and later sent peacekeeping troops there.
The numbers declined in 2003 and 2004, in the early years of the Iraq war, but then began to increase steadily.
In contrast, the Navy has seen a steady decline in deserters since 2001, going from 3,665 that year to 1,129 in 2007.
The Marine Corps, meanwhile, has seen the number of deserters stay fairly stable over that timeframe — with about 1,000 deserters a year. During 2003 and 2004 — the first two years of the Iraq war — the number of deserters fell to 877 and 744, respectively.
The Air Force can tout the fewest number of deserters — with no more than 56 bolting in each of the past five years. The low was in fiscal 2007, with just 16 deserters.
Despite the continued increase in Army desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they find. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.
"My personal opinion is the only way to stop desertions is to change the climate ... how they are living and doing what they need to do," said Wallace, adding that good officers and more attention from Army leaders could "go a long way to stemming desertions."
Unlike those in the Vietnam era, deserters from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may not find Canada a safe haven.
Just this week, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeals of two Army deserters who sought refugee status to avoid the war in Iraq. The ruling left them without a legal basis to stay in Canada and dealt a blow to other Americans in similar circumstances.
The court, as is usual, did not provide a reason for the decision.
___
On the Net:
U.S. Army: http://www.us.army.mil
U.S. Navy: http://www.navy.mil
U.S. Air Force: http://www.af.mil
U.S. Marines: http://www.usmc.mil
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.
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Friday, November 2, 2007

The Case for Universal Healthcare

The current American health care system with its obscene profit incentives and increasingly impersonal nature undermines the essential point of all prior medical knowledge, namely an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It gives essentially the promise of medical care without the substance of quality care. It is increased nurse patient ratios stretched by ever expanding workloads and less individualized attention to patient needs. It is the substitution of doctor's orders and prescriptions by cost care analysts and accountants not health care professionals. It is profits before patients and premiums before patients, not the reverse as it should be.

While HMO's and insurance companies decide how much care and at what price working families lucky enough to afford its premiums are doled out, a vastly expanding number of as many as 50 million Americans have no coverage at all and are plagued by chronic illnesses. Our American Quality of Life is a Right that must and should include access to affordable and quality health care. It should guarantee the respect and dignity for our disabled and aged as well as our children and lower our infant mortality, which has become one of the worst rates in the industrialized world. Health care for all should be one of the guarantees, rights, and responsibilities to all our citizens and based on special circumstances, not political slogans.

We need only to revisit the recent tragedy at one of our major Universities to also explore the failure in the mental health sector. We have failure by a system beset with guidelines that require a direct emergency to provide and sustain help to many Americans. We also have failure by a system that turns away many Americans and allows insurance companies to cap lifetime benefits without regard to personal needs or safety.

We should hold as inviolate the relationship between a patient and their health care professional, not between an insurance company and a drug manufacturer, just as we hold as inviolate the relationship between the clergy and their ministry, and between an attorney and their client. They all need be an essential part of the free and just exercises of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness in any future America.

-Thomas P Love

Who's Counting: How Iraq Trillion Could Have Been Spent

The Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary -- Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion -- but let's be conservative and say it's only $1 trillion in today's dollars. (This is in Feb. 2007, before The Surge and Bush's request for 2 hundred billion additional supplemental dollars.)

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number -- a 1 followed by 12 zeroes -- can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn't hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

Different Monetary Units

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century's worth of EPA spending (in today's dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

Or note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan "No child left behind."

And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs. No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS's, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion. Really securing the ports and chemical plants would have only eaten up a few of these HS's. A few more could have been usefully spent in Afghanistan.

One last and rather tiny governmental monetary unit functions almost as spare change and has the ungainly acronym NHTSA. It stands for the annual budget of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, which is approximately $670 million, or about two-thirds of $1 billion. The Iraq War has cost about 1,500 NHTSA's, several of which could probably have reduced the more than 40,000 Americans killed annually on our roads.

Of course, using these nonstandard monetary units isn't quite appropriate when trying to come to terms with the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the 20,000 wounded, and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. The latter number is staggering, whether you subscribe to the figures put out by Iraq Body Count or those published in Lancet or to other even higher estimates.

Unlike death and serious injury, the medical costs for returning veterans, their decreased productivity, and the depreciation of military equipment can be quantified and constitute yet another huge indirect cost of the war.

Other Measures

Another way to get at the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq War is to note that the Treasury could have used the money to mail a check for more than $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the United States. The latter alternative would have an added benefit: Uniformly distributed and spent in this country, the money would have provided an economic stimulus that the war expenditures have not.

Alternatively, if the money was spent in an even more ecumenical way and a global mailing list was available, the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs.

There are also more fanciful ways to induce a visceral feel for $1 trillion.

For example, it would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second, and if spending at this rate occurred only during business hours, more than 120 years would be required to dispense the sum.

Another time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney's recent hallucinatory comment that "we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes" in Iraq."

At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.

John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, has written such best-sellers as "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market." His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.

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