Turbulence in health care...requires serious questions

By Gina Kolata, New York Times, December 18, 2010
(Ms Kolata's story focuses on a patient diagnosed with Alzheimer's and her receipt of that diagnosis.)
The new diagnostic tests are leading to a moral dilemma. Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?

“I am grappling with that issue,” Dr. Rafii said. “I give them the diagnosis — we are getting pretty good at diagnosis now. But it’s challenging because what do we do then?”
It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms.
At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?

• Diagnoses without cures....
• prescriptions with far more warning signs than any medical doctor's intervention would warrant...
• medical orders that are only partially followed by conscientious practitioners...
• new infectious (and potentially fatal) diseases that result from over-prescribing anti-biotics and destroying the body's capacity to fend for itself...
• the PSA test and potential interventions that could leave the patient struggling in more ways than before both diagnosis and treatment...
• phony clinical trials conducted by researchers funded by pharmaceutical firms seeking to market their products, approved by bureaucrats seeking the approval of their political masters

These are just some of the many obvious and newly reported hiccups in the practice of health care, apparently with more to come, as new knowledge outstrips our capacity to design and deliver effective treatments. And then there is the report from McMaster University that points to the potential to generate new blood cells from sample skin cells, in order to provide "compatible" blood for all patients....simply revolutionary!
According to some reports, we are going to go through a period of some turbulence, as the various and different rates of discovery continue, with the accompanying treatments coming along much later, resulting in serious ethical questions about the patient's right to know, desire to know, need to know and the medical profession's responsibilities in those cases.
For one, I have made a conscious decision never to have a PSA test, simply because I do not want to know the results. If I were to develop prostate cancer, and become conscious of that fact, I would then have to make another decision about whether to have it treated. And of course, the medical profession would seek to intervene. However, at this time, the treatments, including surgery, could result in more damage and complications than my not knowing and living with the unknown and undeclared "sentence" or diagnosis would generate.
I have discussed this position with one family practitioner, who was virtually incredulous at my response. He simply could not understand, having practiced medicine effectively for nearly forty years.
Nevertheless, I learned much from my mother about withholding complete trust, and thereby complete access to my body by the medical fraternity. She graduated from St. Michael's Hospital School of Nursing in Toronto, in 1931, and had occasion to say to a doctor, "You are not going to operate on my body" for her own valid, if unique, reasons.
There is a phrase in the legal profession that runs something like, "He who has himself for a lawyer has a fool for a client." A similar expression could apply to the field of one's personal health regimen. However, a healthy skepticism is a necessary part of any visit to a doctor. There is a culture to the practice of medicine which includes a commonly accepted maxim that most interventions are better than no intervention. Not always so.
When my father, at ninety one, was diagnosed with three cancerous tumours, the medical team advised "no" surgical interventions, given his age. The family concurred.
It seems appropriate, especially during this turbulent time in the field, to ask as many questions as come to mind, and even to find an advocate to attend our visits to the doctor, to absorb the information prior to making important decisions on the information we are given.

Anger and Fear: common to all in turbulence

By James Travers, Toronto Star, December 18, 2010
What are Sarah Palin, Rob Ford (newly elected Mayor of Toronto), Don Cherry (ex-NHL coach, from CBC's Coach's Corner) or Julian Assange if not angry birds? What are political leaders, investment bankers, coddled bureaucrats and other grasping elites if not egg-stealing pigs? What are parliaments, banks and multinational corporations if not soaring stone, glass and steel strongholds protecting the privileged?

Perhaps overly simplistic, the analogy nevertheless resonates. Played for fools for too long, citizens, taxpayers and voters are hurling themselves at the most visible targets with a vengefulness that is often suicidal.
The sights and sounds of siege are everywhere in this capital. After decades of decay, scaffolding leans against the Gothic walls and towers of a Parliament that can’t escape the rotten whiff of corruption even when it renovates. Nortel pensioners seeking help for disabled colleagues are repulsed by unelected, unaccountable Senators hustling off to the Conservative Christmas party. Alarms bells warn day and night that those trusted with public power are sucking advantage through the very loopholes they solemnly swore to slam shut.
Like most overnight phenomena, this one has been a long time coming. Little by little, by stealth and increment, the command-and-control that we-the-people took centuries to strip from kings, queens and courtiers has been retaken by the new overlords.
My, how deftly the worm turned while most of us were preoccupied by the hurly-burly of humdrum daily life. The merely wealthy became the super rich. The middle class lost its mojo. Boom went bust, not once but many times. The kids moved back home after university. And the carrot of hope that each generation would do better than the last has now been beaten silly by the stick of grim realities.
If there’s a surprise in our collective anger it’s that it took so long to boil. One of many plausible reasons is that while so much was unfolding elsewhere, Canadians were lulled into complacency by what wasn’t happening in the political village clustered below the Peace Tower.
First, thanks to Mr. Travers for his insight, and for his courage to lay it out there in bold terms.
Collective political anger really has no political, ideological home. It is like a river that has overflowed its banks, as so many are doing, while roads "flood" with snow on the 402 drowning transports, trucks and cars in twenty-foot drifts, and weather casts a curtain of pathetic fallacy over all our thoughts, feelings and confusions.
We are all so very tiny, facing the turbulence that is everywhere overturning all that we thought we could rely on...in nature, in religion, in the economy, in technology, in international relations, in human consciousness of the plight of millions, if not billions of hungry, diseased, poor and destitute around the globe, ..and then there is  the environment.
And like any family in crisis, we begin with anger, some move into denial and we await the oncoming new strategies and alliances that are yet to take shape, in some kind of new paradigm.
But first, while angry, we have to take stock of what is really happening.
Is the confluence of all these mega-problems partly the result of the way humans have been doing things?
What is the part the human organizations, and human complacency, and human lassitude and human "head-in-the-sand-ness" are playing in our own wake-up call to an unsustainable future, if we continue along a path of greed and selfishness for a few and dire scarcity for the many?
And just as in private life, when anger rears its head, as a signal that something is dreadfully wrong, and we must awaken to that reality and consider all options, the body politic is being awakened to the cavernous gulf that grows between the haves and the have-nots, and looking for both scapegoats and messiahs.
Scapegoats, so that we can pelt rocks and words and eggs and perhaps even a few rockets if we have any in the direction of the privileged and their protectors, and messiahs who might lead us out of "Egypt" as Moses once did for the Israelites. (Let's not forget that it was not Moses or the people who made him their leader; it was God's intervention, as the story is told!) And, sadly, we have many more individuals today claiming to know the mind and the will of God, in order to get us out of our collective mess. They wear the hats of extremists in every faith on the planet and their extremism is another of the human responses of fear.
It is the inseparable link between anger and fear that we need to examine, individually, domestically and collectively.
We are indeed angry! We are also frightened about many things, depending on our perspective. However, one thing that is common in all our fears, is our perceived impotence to "right the ship" to a kind of balanced equilibrium so that our "sailing" through these extreme storms can be a little more predictable, a little more equitable and a little more "just" as we have come to know the meaning of that word.
We seem impotent to bring opposing sides together to reach mutually beneficial decisions and accommodations to:

• end poverty, in all its ugly forms, especially among the young and the dispossessed
• reduce green house gases
• reduce or eliminate run-away greed in the financial services sector and in the corporate boardrooms
• reduce or eliminate our voracious appetite for guns, drugs, and titillating entertainment
• reduce or eliminate our imbalances of power within organizations, and between organizations and between nations and even between religions
• provide equal access to education, health care, food, shelter, and clear water and air for all
• reduce or eliminate our "dependence" (again based on our fear) on nuclear weapons, and even all other military hard power
• provide some kind of assurance that our children and grandchildren will have a future equal to, if not even more just than the one our parents and grandparents passed on to us.

These are not merely Canadian or North American issues, problems or needs. They are universal, and once we come to our senses, which we are doing now in our own inimitible way, through the sending out of many canaries into the many coal mines around the globe (metaphorically speaking), and we realize our potential for both survival and solutions, including the enhanced deployment of both current and developing resources, we can then potentially move through this extreme turbulence, into a kind of collaborative, and less power-down-driven method of acting and deliberating, and reach some kinds of concensus that we reduce our anxieties our fears and our impulsivity.
However, the rich and the privileged among us are going to have to "give up" much of that wealth and that superior status, in order for the plenty that is our's to be shared. And that means that a lot of concentrated power and "established" order is going to have to give way not only to individual acts of  benevolence, and similar movements of non-profits, but a relinquishing of the power and privilege that some consider "mine" or perhaps even "God-given" or perhaps "earned" or perhaps "historical."
A former mayor I had the opportunity to "cover" politically, used to remind his audiences, "There are a lot more little people than there are 'big shots' ," as he would put it, and when most of the voices of that majority start to sing from the same song sheet, that choir is going to be heard around the world. I hope I'm still around to sing with it!

We Concur with James Laxer: No "thinning" of U.S. Canadian border

By James Laxer, on the James Laxer Blog, December 15, 2010 http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesLaxer
The Canadian proponents of Fortress North America want you to think about the prospect of speedier passage across the Canada-U.S. border for goods and people. They propose that we “thin” the border between the two countries and “fatten” it around Canada and the U.S. against the rest of the world.

The proponents are fond of calling up images of the ease of passage for motorists travelling between EU countries such as France and Germany. There, drivers are not required to stop at customs posts when crossing the border.
What the Fortress fanciers don’t tell you is that the governments of European countries that removed border controls spent years assuring themselves in negotiations that they all had similar regulations for hazardous products before they opened their frontiers to one another. They weren’t prepared to open the gates if one country had a more lax regime for hazardous products than the others.
The problem for Canadians is that we live next door to the gun capital of the world. In the U.S., home of the cherished Second Amendment, that gives Americans the right to bear arms, a wide range of handguns and high-powered, rapid-fire weapons, are legal products. Americans possess more than two hundred million guns. In some states such as Virginia, high-powered weapons, that are not legal in Canada, can be purchased with ease at gun shows.
Some U.S. states such as Massachusetts have much tougher gun laws than Virginia and other states from the old Confederacy. But those laws are of little use. Gun owners can just drive into Massachusetts with their weapons in tow. A high proportion of the gun crimes in New York City are committed with weapons brought into the city from Virginia.
Once, to observe the American gun culture up close, I enrolled in a gun-training course offered by Smith and Wesson in Springfield, Massachusetts. Many of the participants in the course were from out of state and they brought their firearms with them.
On the other hand, I’ve seen Canadian Customs officials seize the guns of Americans crossing into Canada. On one occasion at the crossing from Calais, Maine to St. Stephen, New Brunswick, I watched a Canadian official explain to the members of an American family that they’d have to leave their weapon with Customs and then pick it up on their return trip home.
Canada already has a serious gun problem. Over half the guns used in the commission of crimes in Canada have been illegally smuggled into the country from the United States. Most of the weapons smuggled from the U.S. are high-quality, semi-automatic handguns. Smugglers commonly place the guns in hidden compartments in their vehicles when they cross the border. Some duct-tape them to their bodies.
“Thinning” the border would be an invitation to criminals to import many more guns into Canada. Opening the border to the free passage of motorists with no customs stops----EU style---would effectively mean that Virginia’s guns laws would apply in Canada. Today’s Canadian gun problem would become a gun epidemic.
Presumably the attraction of Fortress North America is that crossing the border will be easier and quicker. But easier and quicker border crossings mean more U.S. illegal guns in Canada, the easier the crossing the greater the flow of weapons. That’s axiomatic.
Of course, we could always try to convince Americans to abrogate the Second Amendment and join the civilized world on the matter of guns…..
Married to a spouse who is an American citizen, I have learned about how some Americans do not know about the constitution's requirement that if asked by  Uncle Sam to bear arms, U.S. citizens must comply.
As she is in the final stages of her application for Canadian citizenship, (while continuing to keep her U.S. Passport) she eagerly looks forward to the day when she will be a citizen of a country that makes no such demand on its people. She is as appalled at the American addiction to firearms as I am, and, apparently as is James Laxer.
It is the sale and spread of armaments, ubiquitously, by the Americans, that fans many of the global conflicts in which they (and sometimes we and others) find ourselves. Attempting to nurture democracy, with the point of a gun or a banonet is a conflicted message, especially to an untrained, educated and innocent young person in a country barely subsisting, and everyone, including the Americans, knows it.
The Canadian government's "adherence" to this America, for the glib sake of quick and easy flow of tourists and trade, will bring with it a tsunami of additional American weapons, even those carried by law-abiding U.S. citizens. If they wish to visit Canada, they must continue to leave those weapons at their border, and we will continue to struggle with whatever impediments such differences in government policy make that requirement continue.
We at the acorncentreblog.com heartily endorse Laxer's opposition to "fortress North America" and hope the Canadian people can and will see through the glib arguments of the government and mark their ballots with an X beside the name of a candidate from a different political party than the Conservative.

More research into poverty, sickness and social ills

By Carol Goar, Toronto Star, December 17, 2010
(Ms. Goar's story focuses on the research by Richard Wilkinson, British epidemiologist, into the relationship between poverty, sickness and death)
In societies with wide disparities in wealth, the poor did have a disproportionately high rate of morbidity. But in societies with a more even distribution of assets, the pattern faded.

Could inequality be the culprit, then? This time, the dots connected. No matter where Wilkinson looked, those who ranked lowest in the socio-economic hierarchy experienced more health problems than people above them.
For a while, the British researcher was satisfied. He wrote a string of publications documenting the psycho-social causes of poor health.
Then his curiosity reasserted itself. If inequality explained why some people were sicker than others, could it also explain why some societies had elevated rates of drug abuse, violence, illiteracy and teen pregnancy?
He examined the evidence, comparing equitable jurisdictions to those with sharply differentiated “haves” and “have nots.”
He found that the wider the gap between rich and poor:
• The higher the incidence of drug addiction.
• The higher the dropout rate.
• The higher the concentration of adolescent gangs.
• The higher the prison population.
• The higher the rate of teen pregnancy.
“How could I have been so slow to pull it together?” he asked. “It is surprising someone didn’t write this book 20 year ago.”
The book to which he was referring is The Spirit Level — Why Equality is Better for Everyone. (Its title confuses North Americans. In Britain, a spirit level is a familiar construction tool used to measure the flatness of a surface.)
Listen to the people who have nothing, and they will tell you they are living lives of desperation. Of course! Why did no no one write this research twenty years ago? So many times, we find that research confirms what our grandparents told us, yet we did not want to believe and were not willing to admit the truth, unless and until it hit us over the head "with the proverbial  2 x 4," another of those timbers used in carpentry, like the spirit level.
And many have been seduced by the street mantra "let them pick themselves up by their own bootstraps just like I had to"...as a way of denying social assistance, extended unemployment benefits, guaranteed annual income, welfare, government bursaries for education (that do not need to be paid back) and we have created a monster myth about the virtues of the corporation, and the corporate culture and the wealthy...in our own madness, a madness based on denial of the reality that the disdain and the indifference and the contempt we demonstrate to our very "least" continues to bite us in the ass, with increased costs of crime detection, and security intelligence, and increased health costs and increase "national security".
We are trying to protect ourselves as much from our own denial of the reality of social compassion and community within the body politic as from any threat from some cavemen in the Af-Pak mountains.
And we need to look in the mirror, and reflect on what we already know...that when the society truly cares about its indigent and about its diseased and about its troubled hearts, bodies and minds, that very care in real and measureable terms lifts the spirits of all, both the compassionate and the recipients.
It is no accident that the very word "care" comes from the original word "kara" meaning "lament".
As Henri Nouwen reminds us, "The basic meaning of care is to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with." (From Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope, p. 129)
Nouwen mentions this in the context of how the world usually sees "care". We tend to look at caring as an attitude of the strong toward the weak, of the powerful toward he powerless, of the haves toward the have-nots....Still when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in a hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.(Nouwen, p.129)
When the society can see and take action from a similar spirit, and not from a spirit of disdain and contempt, imagine the metanoia that results in everyone, not even to mention the change in the account books of that society. Which of us would not want to live and work and play with a body politic that operates from that perspective?

Update! Mulcair supports Liberal-NDP Coalition

CBC's At Issue Panel took shots at some of the best and worst political moves of 2010 tonight.
One topic that garnered both bouquets and briquets was the issue of a potential alliance between the Liberals and the New Democrats in Ottawa.
Chantal Hebert called it the most "missed opportunity" that Ignatieff did not pursue the feasibility of such an alliance, given that the right has already achieved a modicum of unity between the former "Reform" party and the Progressive Conservatives, and the left is dividing up the same turf, making it less likely that either will win a majority government. On the other hand, Andrew Coyne feels strongly that the idea should be buried, burned and forgotten about, forever, the end, period!
Purists like Mr. Coyne are having a difficult time in today's political world. It is the pragmatists like Chantal Hebert who make more sense, certainly in this case.
The "political left" has almost atrophied from derision and scorn, including some character assassinations along the way, by the neo-conservatives, both north and south of the 49th parallel. While there is a rump of "left" leaning Democrats currently holding up the compromise legislation on the Bush taxes in the House of Representatives, and the bill is still likely to pass, the middle of the road is the turf where political leaders will find the votes needed to win, or to stay in, power. Obama knows this, hence his negotiation of the compromise.
Ignatieff, whose political colour has really yet to be disclosed, (sometimes he sounds like a Bay Street clone, and at others, a social activist yearing for more compassionate government), is going to need all the political support systems he can find and muster in order to enter the election fray, probably early in the Spring of 2011. Jack Layton, who has served his constituency admirably since taking the mantle of leadership, is never going to be prime minister, as a result of gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons.
Nevertheless, there is a large group of voters whose natural political leaning is toward the traditional "left" while not swirving into the ditch of socialism, or into state control of major corporations, as has been the pursuit of the early NDP movement.
Those in the Liberal party who cringe at the thought of a Layton, or a Thomas Mulcair sitting in a coalition cabinet would do well to give themselves a shake, and wake up to the potential that such "new blood" would bring to the cabinet table. And, furthermore, if the Liberals were to put up candidates only in ridings that the NDP were unlikely to win, and vice versa, the potential of a Liberal-NDP coalition government rises.
And just think about the potential political muscle that could be directed toward a renewed Canada Health Act, for starters, and a formal dropping of the insanity of both new prison cells and 65 F35 Fighter Jets, with therefore increased availability of both funds and political will to tackle some of the glaring social assistance issues facing the country.
Moreover, it is in the election after the next one that this potential comes fully to flower.
That election could follow a joint meeting of the two parties, and a formal declaration of one party, to speak clearly and forcefully for the voices, the hearts and minds of the centre-left. And then, after all the many splinters and factions and third party movements we have seen over the last century plus, we could actually find out what many of us believe, that, different from the U.S., Canada is traditionally, historically and naturally a more "left-leaning" country than our southern neighbour.
And then the new Liberal-Democrats (it is not rocket science to envision such a name for the new party) could campaign with the best policies and practices of both parties, and the fund-raising and the personalities who could be attracted to such a new party.
Here is a single, modest and unequivocal vote for Ms. Hebert's view of the missed opportunity, by Michael Ignatieff.
Update
By Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail, December 28, 2010
(Thomas Mulcair was a Liberal member of the Quebec legislature for thirteen years before winning the Outremont seat for the N.D.P. in Ottawa.)
Being a former Liberal, Mr. Mulcair has no doubt the two parties (Liberal and NDP) can work together. “On the centre-left, we have to be just as smart as conservatives were on the centre-right when they coalesced. We’ve got to learn from that, otherwise we’ll end up with Harper governing with 37 per cent of the vote again.”
The NDP, he says, is sending a clear signal. “People can trust us to work with anyone else who wants to give voice to the 65 per cent of Canadians who are asking for a more progressive form of government than what we’ve been getting. This will require everyone to put a little water in their wine.”
Water in the wine. From a former Liberal, that’s good advice.

Drills for the UNTHINKABLE

By William Broad, New York Times, December 15, 2010
 Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.
The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.
But a problem for the Obama administration is how to spread the word without seeming alarmist about a subject that few politicians care to consider, let alone discuss. So officials are proceeding gingerly in a campaign to educate the public.
“We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview. “We have to be ready to deal with it” and help people learn how to “best protect themselves.”
Officials say they are moving aggressively to conduct drills, prepare communication guides and raise awareness among emergency planners of how to educate the public.
I recall driving through Niagara Falls NY, back in 1963 or 64, and seeing a triangle painted on a sign on the wall of a large public building, indicating a fall-out shelter. At the time, I was coaching a Canadian basketball team on its way to play a private college in the U.S., and the memory is vivid. As I recall, the lines and letters were in yellow or orange, and the background was dark navy.
I remember thinking, I wonder what these young men, between 16 and 19, were thinking about the kind of world they were inheriting, with a real danger of nuclear war. And that was then, and the cold war, and now, fifty years later, the U.S. is announcing drills, preparing guides and proceeding to eduate the public about the measures to take, in the event of a nuclear device landing in a city near you.
We have returned to the world of the unthinkable, after we thought and believed that, with the ending of the cold war, and the long-standing dispute with the then Soviet Union, that we had "escaped" that bullet.
Only to learn that while the Congress of the U.S. considers the START treaty, reducing the number of nuclear devices in both Russia and the U.S., while providing verification processes apparently satisfactory to several former Secretaries of State in the U.S., the U.S. government, albeit the announcement comes from FEMA, not exactly from the state department, or the Pentagon is making overt, public plans for an education plan to "save lives".
Does this announcement mean that the U.S. has succumbed to the notion that either a rogue state or a terrorist organization, or some combination of both, is now more likely (than yesterday, for instance) to either design and build a nuclear device, or steal or purchase such a device, and that it will likely be targetted at a U.S. city?
Does this mean that the psychology of the cold war, in which many of us grew up, and which held the breath of at least one or two generations, is back, or perhaps that it never left, and we were seduced into thinking that we were safe?
Proceeding gingerly, to say the least, would be prudent. To move aggressively into these waters would be to evoke panic in all the major cities, and put considerable additional strain on already over-stretched budgets, human resources, and the basic psyches of all the inhabitants of the country, not to mention the inhabitants of many other countries.
Talk about "not raising the threat" on the terrorist danger warning scale. This blows that scale all to simthereens! There is no longer any need for such a warning system. Now, we will learn the sounds of actual sirens in the streets, along with drills, and escape routes, and the inevitable mistakes along the way for the process will not be foolproof.
Is the U.S. government actually telling its citizens that the country is that close to experiencing a nuclear device dropped on its territory? Clearly, that must be the message!
Otherwise, there is a loose cannon in FEMA who needs to be removed, immediately.
Isn't it interesting that a low level civil servant now has the power to release such a statement, amid all the calming statements of all the other American leaders, whose credibility would trump that of this man, in a heartbeat.
I know that my heart skipped a beat when I read this story, the first time. And I can only imagine that many other hearts will skip a beat, at least one, perhaps many more, as the news seeps out across the country, and the continent, and then across the many oceans, where already millions of people are struggling to survive, without anything other than hope to sustain them, and now this!
Once again, the American "war" mind-set is taking over, and the price just of this announcement, could be lost lives. And who will be responsible for that?

No Messiah in political life...

By Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, December 15, 2010
If Obama’s supporters had accepted him as he was, they might have been less disappointed. But they wanted Jesus Christ and, in the new president, thought they had found him.

To list Obama’s failures is almost unfair. His signal achievement — America’s complex and almost incomprehensible health care reform package — remains unpopular and under attack.
It has received mixed reviews from the courts (on Monday a Virginia judge ruled a key component unconstitutional) and faces neutering by the new Republican-dominated Congress.
Obama’s attempts to bring peace to the Middle East are in full retreat. The U.S. president had gamely and briefly tried to get tough with Israel. But, as it turned out, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood domestic U.S. politics better than he.
Obama didn’t cause the recession. But his finance-friendly administration can be faulted for bailing out bankers ahead of the general public.
And Afghanistan — well, let’s not even talk about that.
Walkom's piece goes on to say that, by comparison, Harper has clear principles and continues to forge his way on the Canadian scene, as instruction especially to the Liberals, not to look for a messiah.
While there are no messiah's, in human terms, Mr. Walkom forgets that Obama burst on the scene following a disastrous eight years of Republican fiasco. To get rid of the Republicans and Bush-Cheney, meant that John McCain really never had a chance.
Let's not forget, either, the plate of complex nearly unresolveable issues that Obama was served, upon entering the White House. It was a monstrosity, nothing more, nothing less.
Also, while Mr. Walkom virtually equates Obama to a "Chicago pol" in his language without substance, I think that is a very "bum rap" because this president has been consistently attempting to bring the U.S. ship of state back "upright" so that the wealthy do not run away with the store.
On the other hand, Harper is so "in bed" with the corporate elite, and out of touch with the Canadian people, that he really does not even have an environmental strategy that would take on those corporate interests.
We are so far back in terms of international leaderhip on that file that all Canadians are embarrassed. At least Obama has tried to forge a new energy/environment initiative, albeit in the face of a single historic obstacle, a Republican party that merely says, "No" to anything he proposes.
And, Mr. Walkom, don't be so fast to dismiss the health care reform act, because one judge out of some fifteen, has declared the provision of requiring the purchase of coverage to be unconstitutional. Fourteen others have found it fits within the constitution.
And as for a culture of "stars" (or in political terms, messiahs), the U.S. has led the way, in North America, in developing literally generations of both stars, and their acolytes, the teenie-bopper adolescents who almost worship their idols, perhaps attempting to find meaning vicariously through worship of another.
Naturally, Canadians would be wise to steer clear of even searching for a messiah, in political or in adolescent cultural terms, (although Justin Bieber is the latest on the international scene, from Canada no less!) and that means getting involved in the political process.
And with only 2% of Canadians even taking the time and the trouble of joining a political party, one does not have confidence that that figure will change any time soon.
It is so easy to gripe and complain, but I am increasingly grateful that some Canadians do want to make a substantial difference, even though I take a very different option to many of those selected by Harper.
A nation of whiners needs to be transformed into a nation of activists so that more power is not brought into the PMO, (the Prime Minister's Office) and so that ridiculous political vaccuum like, 'we can't afford to care for veterans,' and 'we can't increase social assistance but we can afford $16 billion for 65 F35 fighter jets'...that is completely outrageous...and no government can be permitted to push that kind of mismanagement onto the backs of Canadian taxpayers. And as for, 27,000 new prison cells, for prisoners whose crimes have not been reported....how ridiculous can they get?
Even without charisma, I'll take Ignatieff over Harper any day, just as most Americans took Obama over McCain, after their previous decade.