McCain's Campaign: Not the Same Man We Liked, Respected

I have mostly liked and respected John McCain--at least since the time he was found to have exercised "poor judgment" in his involvement with the Keating Five. Still, I don't support his presidential aspirations, and I have some issues with his ideological predispositions. But as a Vietnam-era Marine, it is easy for me to respect his sacrifice and suffering for our country. And his public candor, his political courage, in pointing out the problems with his own party's positions, including his president's positions, on things like finance reform, irresponsible tax policy, immigration, off-shore drilling, and global warming, were bold and refreshing--and more than that, they were right.

But those days appear to be gone. He is now swallowed up in a Republican campaign machine led by many of the same folks that led the last Bush campaign, pandering as they do to conservative ideologues and the Christian Right, and "swift-boating" political opponents.

My disappointment in him is summed up by two quite different perspectives in recent articles reflecting puzzlement and dismay at the new John McCain. The first is from Time, the second from The Economist.

Time's "What Bush Taught McCain" was written by Joe Klein. Joe Klein is a left leaning centrist who over the years has found much to like and commend about John McCain, even if there was also much to disagree with him about. But he finds the new John McCain discomfiting and unlikable.

The woman, a venture capitalist from the Denver area...decided she just couldn't vote for John McCain this year. "I supported him enthusiastically in 2000, but he's hired the same people who ran him into the ground last time to run his campaign," she said. McCain's tone was more negative now. "It breaks my heart."

...Ronald Reagan never staged an ugly August. He attacked his opponents, but on the high ground of policy...But then Reagan was operating at the beginning of a political pendulum swing, utterly confident that his ideas were better than the tired industrial-age liberalism and post-Vietnam pacifism of the Democrats.

Michael Crowley of the New Republic recently observed that the McCain campaign was the most sarcastic in memory. He's right: sarcasm comes naturally to the fighter jock. He disdains all those — his colleagues in the Senate, his political opponents — who aren't as courageous as he thinks he is. But McCain has proved a selective maverick, surrounded by special-interest lobbyists who shape his foreign and fiscal policies. In fact, I suspect that this year's McCain is closer to the real thing than the noble 2000 version. This one is congenitally dark, the opposite of Reagan — not confident enough in the substance of his ideas, especially on domestic policy, to run a campaign that features them. Instead, his natural sarcasm has enabled him to perfect the Bush way of politics.

The Economist's "Bring Back the Real McCain," in the "Leaders" section, reflects more a sense of disappointment over an old political friend now lost, than Klein's writing off of a previously respected maverick and sometime opponent. After noting that they particularly like McCain for his past political courage, "his robust commitment to free trade, and his firmness in the face of American losses in Iraq," they also note their concern with his advancing age (72) and his "legendary volcanic temper," both of which they concede have been managed well so far. But they are a little more troubled about his unbridled hawkish views:

Many Americans see him as a warmonger, a man who would be happy to bomb Iran if that is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, who is more than ready to confront Russia, and who supported toppling Saddam Hussein before George Bush was elected and New York and Washington were attacked. This fear is surely overdone: even though Mr McCain is presumably more minded than Mr Obama to attack Iran, neither the joint chiefs of staff nor most of his advisers think that is a good idea. But it is not a completely unreasonable worry. Mr McCain needs to find ways of correcting this perception, rather than making jokes about bombing.

Yet their biggest concern is his apparent, unprincipled abandonment of some core beliefs:

This is not so much true of foreign policy. But even here, he used to talk much more about multilateralism than he does now. On the campaign trail, Mr McCain has tended to stress the more hawkish side of his nature, for instance by promoting his idea for a "league of democracies" that risks being needlessly divisive.

But it is on domestic policy that Mr McCain has tacked to the right more disquietingly. Doubtless he feels he needs to shore up his support among the conservatives who mistrust him. But the result is that he could easily alienate the independent supporters who are his great strength. Mr Obama will sensibly hope to woo them away.

Mr McCain used to be a passionate believer in limited government and sound public finances; a man with some distaste for conservative Republicanism and its obsession with reproductive matters. On the stump, though, he has offered big tax cuts for business and the rich that he is unable to pay for, and he is much more polite to the religious right, whom he once called "agents of intolerance". He has engaged in pretty naked populism, too, for instance in calling for a "gas-tax holiday". If this is all just a gimmick to keep his party's right wing happy, it may disappear again. But that is quite a gamble to take...

Hawkish foreign policy, irresponsible tax cuts, more talk about religion and abortion: all this sounds too much like Bush Three, the label the Democrats are trying to hang around the Republican's neck. We preferred McCain One.

And then there are the more recent revelations about his quixotic choice of running mate: 44-year old Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a lady of the NRA and Christian Right. A Pentecostal with creationist beliefs, she prays and calls for prayer that the Bush administration is sending our soldiers to Iraq "on a task that is from God." Once the mayor of a very small Alaska town and now governor for two years, she has only little experience with Washington and national issues, and none with international and geopolitical issues. Not likely the profile that will attract many Hillary democrats, or many independents or centrists either, women or men. John McCain's self-assessed claim to strong judgment could again be reasonably questioned. Perhaps he serves us best where he has served for so long: in the U.S. Senate.


http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1836890,00.html
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12009710

Group Headed by Dobson: Pray for Rain at Obama Acceptance Speech

This is what it has come to. This article, below, is the kind of thing we hear more and more of--and so does the rest of the world. Yet another spokesman for the so-called evangelical Christian Right has provided to the world their view and their example of what it is to be a follower of Jesus and reflect his love, patience, compassion and trust in God to the world. This is their take on what it is to live and share Christ in such a way that the world will feel His love for them. How could it come to this? How could confessing Christians become so co-opted by secular politics, and so distort the Christian walk? I am so sad and sick about it.

Last week, however, Focus [on the Family] unveiled a new video, asking politically-conservative Christians to pray for rain on Aug. 28, in order to disrupt Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Shepard called for "abundant rain, torrential rain ... flood-advisory rain." He adds, "I'm talking about umbrella-ain't-gonna-help-you rain ... swamp-the-intersections rain." Explaining why he wants everyone to pray for rain, Shepard explains, without a hint of humor, "I'm still pro-life, and I'm still in favor or marriage being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree."

In other words, Obama disagrees with the religious right on culture-war issues, so Focus on the Family wants God to smite Obama with rain. Got it.

And this is the image of evangelical Christianity that for some time has been set in the minds of non-evangelical Christians and non-Christians. Despite your earnest protestations and historical explanations, evangelical Christianity (the contemporary, protestant definition and interpretation, that is) is now inextricably linked and identified as a right-wing political identity and right-wing political machine. And James Dobson joins with both parachurch and church organizations in leading it.

But I don't sense or hear any direction remotely like this in the voice of Jesus I encounter in the Scriptures, nor the voice of the gentle, humble Jesus that I hear in prayer through His Spirit that indwells me. I don't know about you, but the evangelical Christian Right does not reflect my Christian identity, nor the walk I feel called to by my Lord. It is not my identity--and I want people to know it.

Greg Hudson

[Thanks, Laura.]

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/94853/group_headed_by_james_dobson_asks_christians_to_pray_for_rain_at_obama_speech/

The Population Paradox: Time Bombs, Where & Why

Population growth is a problem--just not the problem you think it is. Yes, it's hard to forget a book like The Population Bomb (Paul Erlich, 1968). It remains memorable for its stark, frightening prognostications of overpopulation. And the troubling Malthusian hypothesis is still recycling generation after generation, reflecting as much nationalistic and racial paranoia as concern with overpopulation--always pointing at other groups as the problem, most often the poorer, less educated countries or ethnic groups. But for some decades now, a different type of problem has been evolving: declining birthrates and aging populations in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, and continued high population growth rates in large areas of the third world and the developing world.

The implications and reasons have been speculated about for some time, but this article in the British Independent World covers this global issue rather well, reflecting what is known and what remains speculative.

The implications of all this are enormous. Low-birth Europe is faced with an ageing population, a pensions crisis, later retirement, changes in work patterns, shrinking cities and a massive looming healthcare cost. Nations of children with no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles – only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents – will face the burden of paying for the care of a massive older generation. The same prospect of an older, more conservative, less vigorous or inventive culture looms in China, Japan and much of the Far East.

Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning. A tall order, though the example of Bangladesh shows change can come...

[Still] the United Nations has had to revise downwards its prediction that the world population would reach 11.5 billion by 2050. The human race is now expected to peak, according to one of the world's top experts, Dr David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, at 9.5 billion people. Then, around 2070, it will begin to decline. We have reached a demographic crossroads which will have dramatic consequences for large sections of the world – including us.

Interestingly, the article introduces the topic by referencing a piece in a leading British medical journal that calls for the British to reduce the number of children per family further in order to curb global warming and the depleting of environmental resources.

His argument was straightforward. The mushrooming population of the world is putting extreme pressure on the planet's resources and increasing the output of greenhouse gases. Every single month there are nearly seven million extra mouths to feed. And because a child born today in the UK will be responsible for 150 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a child born in Ethiopia the obvious place to start cutting back is here rather than there.

Talk about failing to see the forest for the trees! Talk about blinkered, draconian solutions that ignore the wider array of global problems--and the need for integrated, interdisciplinary answers! He apparently believes government policy, technology, and individual behavior cannot change--and that more of Africa and less of the UK would consitute a better world.

Regardless, the thrust and remainder of the article stresses the new reality of contracting populations in many Western and Eastern areas. It addresses the paradoxes, the counterintuitve facts and factors, the likely reasons for differences in population growth in different parts of the world.

The span of fertility across countries has never been wider," says Dr John Cleland, Professor of Medical Demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "Both extremes cause their own problems. If Europe continues at 1.5 [children per family] the population will halve every 65 years. If Africa continues with half its population under [age] 15 it will continue to consume more than it produces making it harder to escape from poverty and illiteracy...

A country's population is determined by three things: how many people are born, how soon they die and how many leave or enter the country. Fertility, as we have seen, is rising in Africa and parts of the developing world but falling in Europe and the Far East. Mortality, by contrast, thanks to medical advance, is falling almost everywhere: global life expectancy has risen from 46 in 1950 to 65 in 2008 and is expected to reach 75 by 2050; in Europe it will be 82 by mid-century. Migration, despite the heat it generates as a political issue, is a marginal factor in population issues. It would take massive numbers of immigrants – some 700 million throughout Europe – with unthinkable cultural and identity tensions, to counter the low-birthrates. Fertility is the key engine to population rise and fall.

But the most interesting elements of the article are the explorations of the changing economic and cultural realities in different regions and countries--and among different groups within those regions and countries--and the resulting changes in population growth. Those elements also address the likely reasons for the unlikely results: the qualified role of poverty, the role of education and outside work for women, the countering role of more conservative or fundamentalist religion, and perhaps most important, the level of emacipation and status of women, and the changing, accomodating roles of men and government programs.

In the US, like Japan, 20 per cent of women born between 1956 and 1972 are childless and likely to remain so. The figure could rise to 25 per cent. Revealingly, the incidence rises with education and income. A third of women graduates in their late thirties have no children. And only 20 per cent of women with MBAs have kids, compared with 70 per cent of MBA men. [That is, 80% of women with MBAs have no children.]

By contrast 40 per cent of college-educated American women are not in the workforce, but they are still not having many kids; the number of women with only one child has doubled since 1976. And in that same year 36 per cent of women had four or more children but less than 10 per cent do today. Childlessness is now a fashionable lifestyle choice, as it is in Germany where 27.8 per cent of women born in 1960 are childless, far more than any other European country. (In France the figure is just 10.7 per cent.)

The article provides many more interesting examples and more explanatory analysis. It is well worth reading. But we should also bear in mind a point of caution and qualification tucked into the middle of the article:

How seriously should we take all this? "All population projections are wrong," concedes Professor Coleman. "The question is by how much?"

Too true. But we know the changes that have already occurred, and that we are continuing in that same direction. And we know the resulting problems about to be visited upon us.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/population-paradox-europes-time-bomb-888030.html

Plight of the Little Emperors: China's Only Children

We are by now all aware of China's long-standing one-child policy. And we are also aware of the continual speculation about the resulting demographic imbalances, national preoccupations, and adverse impact on the country, it's families, and it's children. This article in Psychology Today places in perspective these speculations and concerns, what is myth and what is fact, what is better and what is worse than we might have expected.

First, the policy was set in place not only as a method of population control, but with designs on creating an elite generation of high potential and high-achieving youngsters. They could not have known how successful they would be.

When China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy's most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. For the Chinese people, however, the policy's greater purpose was to turn out a group of young elites who would each enjoy the undivided resources of their whole family—the so-called xiao huangdi, or "little emperors." The plan was to "produce a generation of high-quality children to facilitate China's introduction as a global power," explains Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy. But while these well-educated, driven achievers are fueling the nation's economic boom, their generation has become too modern too quickly, glutted as it is with televisions, access to computers, cash to buy name brands, and the same expectations of middle-class success as Western kids.

Still, there is no way to reasonably expect a new market economy to grow as dynamicly and broadly as would be required to fully accomodate the new generation with the kinds of jobs they had prepared themselves for. For that matter, it is not reasonable for the most robust market economy to provide a disproportionately large percentage of jobs for the professional and management ranks. The most successful economies still need a significant percentage of labor-class workers. And so disappointments, and on a large scale, were inevitable.

The shift in temperament has happened too fast for society to handle. China is still a developing nation with limited opportunity, leaving millions of ambitious little emperors out in the cold; the country now churns out more than 4 million university graduates yearly, but only 1.6 million new college-level jobs. Even the strivers end up as security guards. China may be the world's next great superpower, but it's facing a looming crisis as millions of overpressurized, hypereducated only children come of age in a nation that can't fulfill their expectations.

But the failure of China's economy to provide the expected jobs, social status and lifestyle is just the final blow for so many only children and their families. The destabilizing process had already forced unhealthy, imbalanced lives on them from early childhood.

The pressure to succeed was all the greater given that his parents' own dreams had been dashed during China's Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong closed schools and sent difficult-to-control intellectuals to be "reeducated" by working the fields. His own dreams destroyed, he poured all his hopes and ambitions into his son. "Because of the Cultural Revolution, my parents literally wasted 10 years," explains Wang, 29, who was among the first Chinese only kids born under the one-child policy. "I was explicitly told that they had lost a lot in their lives, so they wanted me to get it back for them."

Then, how could we be surprised when competitive, self-preservation instincts of parents were carried to extremes by the all-or-nothing, one-child policy forced on them and their children? (And why should we be surprised that the perverse social extremes visited on one Chinese generation should result in an equally perverse social exteme of another sort being visited on the next?)

In recent years, however, Chinese parents have sometimes blurred the line between sacrifice and slavery in aiding their child's success: Mothers carry their child's backpack around; couples forgo lunch so their kid can have plentiful snacks or new Nikes. Vanessa Fong recalls meeting one mother who resisted hospitalization for her heart and kidney troubles because she feared it might interfere with her daughter's gao kao preparation; when Fong gave the mother money for medication, it mostly went to expensive food for her daughter.

"In China, the term for a one-child family is a 'risky family,'" says Baochang Gu, a demography professor at Beijing's Renmin University who advises the Chinese government on the one-child policy. "If something happened to that child, it would be a disaster. So from the parents' point of view, the spoiling is all necessary to protect them."

It is understandable, then, that Chinese students tend to have fewer friends; they most often view classmates as competitors in a zero-sum game they must win. And talking to their parents, who cannot allow themselves to be understanding or sympathetic, is a waste of time and a sure way to create further misunderstanding. So where do they find escape and psychological release?

Many young only children opt for escape from reality through online gaming worlds. Every day, the nation's 113,000 Internet cafés teem with twitchy, solitary players—high school and university students, dropouts, and unemployed graduates—an alarming number of whom remain in place for days without food or sleep. Official estimates put the number of Chinese Internet addicts at over 2 million, and the government considers it such a serious threat that it deploys volunteer groups to prowl the streets and prevent teens from entering Internet cafés.

The mostly male youth who turn to virtual realms find there a place to realize ambitions that are frustrated in real life, says Kimberly Young, a psychologist and Internet addiction expert who has advised Chinese therapists. "With the click of a button, they go from a 19-year-old with no social life to a great warrior in World of Warcraft," Young says.

But, for those inclined to conclude that all the problems were unavoidable with a generation of only children, the article is quick to make the point that being only children was not by itself the problem.

Yet despite the stereotype, the research has revealed no evidence that only kids have more negative traits than their peers with siblings—in China or anywhere else. "The only way only children are reliably different from others is they score slightly higher in academic achievement," explains Toni Falbo, a University of Texas psychology professor who has gathered data on more than 4,000 Chinese only kids. Sure, some little emperors are bratty, but no more than children with siblings.

It's just that their psychological issues stem not from a lack of siblings but from the harsh academic competition and parental prodding that pervade their lives. Susan Newman, a New Jersey psychologist and only-child expert, says the notion that little emperors are bossy, self-obsessed little brats is simply part of the greater myth of only kids as damaged goods. "Pinning their problems on having no siblings is really making them a scapegoat," she says. Being an only child is not the problem.

Perhaps, so. But in the case of China's one-child policy, it is still hard to separate the conditions imposed by families and culture on their only children, from the existence of a generation of only children. That is, being only children may not be the problem, per se, but the problem unavoidably follows from the reality of a generation of Chinese only children.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20080623-000004&print=1

It's Time: 80% Want Overhaul of U.S. Health Care

Yes, over 80% of Americans now agree: the U.S. health care system needs to be completely rebuilt or requires fundamental change. That's what a recent Harris International poll found. And that's true regardless of income and insurance status: 81% of those who were insured for the prior year and 89% who were uninsured called for either fundamental change or complete rebuilding. Only 16% of adults said the health care system works relatively well and needed only minor reform.

But how can that be, you ask? Isn't ours the great, market-driven health care system, the international standard-setter? Well, let's see:

• At least 47 million Americans do not have health insurance at all (as of 2005).

• Inefficiencies and rising costs have resulted in over a 100 percent increase in health premiums for private sector employers and their workers in just over a decade. The average premium for a family insurance plan rose to $11,381 in 2006, from $4,954 in 1996, while the average cost for a single premium rose to $4,118 from $1,992;

• Americans spend double what people in other industrialized countries do on health care: $6,697 per capita on health care in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product, compared to $3,326 in Canada, or 9.8 percent of GDP.

• And, contrary to the propaganda of our health care industry, Americans often have more trouble seeing doctors, and are the victims of more errors and go without treatment more often than people in other industrialized countries.

I'd say it's time, wouldn't you? I'd say 80% of American voices should be heard, wouldn't you?

There are some national social services that are considered by modern civilized societies to be the rights of all citizens--and also in the best interest of a robust and growing economic system. As such, they must be administered fairly and equally to all people. This is not something that markets do. Markets develop and provide the very best to those with the most money through those incentivized by profit to provide the best, most expensive products and services. People with less money can afford only lesser products and services. People with little or no money can afford none.

We Americans all recognize this with respect to education and subsistence retirement incomes. They are administered by the government for the equal benefit of all--but supplemented by private market products for those who wish to get more and pay more for it. The combined national and private systems work relatively well. Everyone wins.

But the rest of the industrialized, civilized world also recognize that health care, and certainly basic, preventative health care, must also be provided to all in the same fair and equal way. It is not only what a civilized country should guarantee to its people, it is absolutely necessary to provide healthy and well-educated workers for a modern workforce and well-functioning economy.

But not our United States government. Or, I should say, not our government as influenced primarily by lobbyists for the enormous private healthcare industry in the U.S.: Big Pharma (the big pharmaceutical companies), big high-tech healthcare products manufacturers and, of course, big healthcare providers (hospitals and their doctors). They are the principal architects and beneficiaries of this unequal, inefficient, uncontrollable brier patch of a health care system that the market's "invisible hand" has wrought. They've patched it together based primarily on their own interests and reward, not on delivering effective health care for all people. That's the way markets work, after all. That's what we thought we wanted. But the context and nature of their roles must now evolve. The needs of our country and our people have changed.

It's time. It's just time.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26077335/

"Sleeping on It" Improves Memory, Problem Solving

Understanding the importance of sleep just keeps growing more important. You haven't been paying attention if you've failed to noticed the parade of studies over the years that have revealed more and more about how critical sleep in its various phases is for emotional health, attention, cognition, memory and, in one sense or another, problem solving.

Even in college, I recognized that if I could prepare for exams early enough to get a full night's sleep before taking them, my memory and command of the exam material was notably better and easier the next morning. I didn't understand it, but it worked. In a similar way, I and others have shared throughout our school and professional lives that solutions to problems that eluded us the evening before were somehow so urgent and clear at 4-5 am in the morning. Not knowing how it occurred, there was no question that it did.

This article in Scientific American provides an informative, readable review of what we now know about the critical functions and considerable activity of the brain while we sleep. Particular attention is devoted to the increasing body of knowledge about the brain's organizing, storing and strengthening of memory, and it's organizing, analyzing and solving of problems--again, while we sleep.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-snoozing-makes-you-smarter&print=true