Spaghetti Bolognese

After a two-day hiatus, we return to Woody Brock and American Gridlock. It is a fitting time to look at his discussion of the second great issue whose resolution has been lost in the politics of nastiness: entitlements, and in particular, health care, which is currently under discussion before the Anointed Nine. The issue of health care is enormously complicated –Brock calls it the “Spaghetti Bolognese of public policy problems – and his chapter addressing it is one of the book’s best. He is critical of “Obamacare,” but for reasons that have received little public notice – unless we address the supply side of healthcare, particularly by creating conditions that will produce more practitioners, America will end up both broke and rationing services. The logic that takes him there involves a fascinating discussion about the much-misunderstood law of supply and demand, but the essence of his argument is that the need to (1) provide access for 50 million currently uninsured Americans and to (2) control costs as a percentage of GDP are on a collision course unless the supply curve expands faster than the demand curve.

Universal health care is a public good, one in which the government must be involved, and so the focus on the “individual mandate,” which has become the centerpiece of the debate, seems nonsensical to me. We already have universal coverage, unless we are prepared to let the uninsured lie in the streets untended. This debate ought to be about making sure that does not happen.

Obamacare

In the almost two years I have been enrolled in Medicare, I have found it to be by far the best medical insurance plan I have ever had. I once said that to my doctor, who replied, “You know, many of us agree.” In fact, in our long – and so far successful – partnership to keep me alive, we went through a mini-crisis several years ago when he stopped accepting Aetna, which was the “gold plan” I was on at the time. He said he was fed up with the onerous paperwork the company demanded, its niggling oversight of his patient care, and what amounted to interference in his medical practice. Ultimately he had to return to the fold because a small group practice is no match for a huge corporate insurer. And as anyone who has to deal with Verizon can attest, just because you are not the government doesn’t mean you can’t be intractably bureaucratic and provide awful service. Moreover, at least for me, Medicare isn't cheap. I pay reasonable but not insignificant monthly premiums for the parts of the system that are not free.

Despite the constant allusions to the horrors of socialized medicine with its death panels asd rationed care, the United States currently spends more on health care than any other country, and the health of its people is no better as a result. The current law under scrutiny by the Supreme Court Nine is the first national effort to seek fair and full access to health care. It’s not perfect, but it’s a long overdue first step.

Due Process

Forty years ago a friend was staying with me, and as we went by a “Neighborhood Watch” sign, he said, “I know what that means. It means, ‘We have no police.’” Today it appears to mean, “Armed vigilantes on patrol.” Woody Brock must wait for a day. I need to try to understand what happened to Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black 17-year-old whom a neighborhood watch captain shot and killed last month in Sanford, Florida.

Here is what I know:

• The young man’s death is a complete and needless tragedy, and a parent’s worst nightmare.
• Florida’s seven-year old “Stand Your Ground” law, which was pushed by the National Rifle Association and opposed by police groups, is an abomination – one that is in effect in 21 states and needs to be repealed in all of them.
• The police department’s response to the shooting is inexplicable.
• The New Black Panthers’ bounty offer of $10,000 for the capture of George Zimmerman is repellent.

Here is what I don’t know: What happened the evening of Feb. 26^th that led to Martin’s death.

Here is what I fear: That we will never know and that justice will never be done.

Trayvon Martin’s death has become a cause in which the pressure to take sides has overpowered the search for truth – and the rush to either canonization or demonization has displaced the humanity of victim and shooter.

These days, it seems, if you want your voice to be heard, your mind must be closed.

And that, too, is a tragedy.

Dr. Brock

I have known Woody Brock since we were six years old, and he has recently published a thoughtful book, American Gridlock, Commonsense 101 Solutions to the Economic Crisis. Since he is neither bashful about his cognitive abilities nor modest in his ambition, he has subtitled his book, “Why the Right and the Left are Both Wrong.” In line with that aspiration, he takes on five of the most contentious and important issues of the day – issues, he argues, that now seem intractable because (1) the public conversation has become a “dialogue of the deaf” and (2) unbending ideologues “cherry pick” data which they use to fortify their intellectual redoubts. “Gotcha,” he writes, “has become the game of our times.”

Brock calls for a return to a rigorous logic in which win-win solutions are deduced from first premises. A discussion of this method is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Over the next couple of posts I will briefly present each of the issues raised in Brock’s book.

The Deficit. Brock, a serious mathematician, engages in simple math to distinguish between “good” and “bad” deficits. There is a huge difference, he argues, between spending and investing: a government’s negative cash flow is not a deficit if the borrowed money is invested in human capital and infrastructure improvements that will earn a positive return in the future.

“We eclipse all other nations,” he writes, “spending a whopping 71% of GDP on consumption.” In doing so we have created what John Kenneth Galbraith predicted over 50 years ago: an Affluent Society of “private splendor and public squalor.”

Next up: Entitlements; Preventing Perfect Financial Storms; China and Bargaining Theory; Distributive Justice.

Stumble of the Week

• Mitt Romney. If he’s the candidate, said Rick Santorum, “we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future."

• Rick Santorum. “[I]t is clear,” wrote Romney’s political director, “that he is becoming the most valuable player on President Obama's team."

Silver Lining. Etch A Sketch’s stock price nearly tripled in yesterday’s trading.

• Georgia. In a report published by the Center for Public Integrity that ranked the most corrupt states, Georgia came in dead last. The other states receiving failing grades: South Dakota, Wyoming, Virginia, Maine, South Carolina, North Dakota and Michigan.

Silver Lining. The top two states were #2 Connecticut and #1 New Jersey. Huh? Apparently the horrendous ethical histories of both states (Connecticut supreme court justices, state officials and governors have been indicted for abuse of power; in the last decade in New Jersey, “at least five state legislators were convicted on corruption charges.”) led to such public outrage that the voters have demanded – and instituted – significant reforms.

• Young and minority voters. When Virginia’s pending Voter ID bill becomes law, 13 states, with 189 electoral votes (70% of a majority) will have new laws that (take your pick) reduce voter fraud or disenfranchise voters, almost all in states with Republican legislative majorities. But the real problem is not that too many people vote in this country, but too few. In the 2010 elections, 37.8% of those eligible voted. Two years earlier, the figure was 56.8%, the highest since 1968. Question: why would groups who did better in 2010 want to dampen the turnout we saw in 2008?

Readers Write

Today some comments from readers (two from a public official who follows state activities and two from friends):

• A resolution calling the UN program encouraging sustainable development as a dark scheme to crush people’s property rights through “extreme environmentalism” goes to the Tennessee House for a vote today.

• The Missouri legislature has considered legislation to require equal treatment of global warming and evolution denial positions in a K-12 curriculum being created by the Heartland Institute. "[It] will be a nice counterweight to the many, many materials distributed that present an overtly political and alarmist message in regards to climate change. . . ," said James M. Taylor of Heartland. "By contrast, our materials would be based on sound science and fact."  Mark McCaffrey of the National Center for Science Education said the curriculum creates a debate where none exists. A 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that about 98 percent of active climate scientists believe human activities hasten climate change.

• On yesterday’s blog: A little one sided.  Obama's abandonment of Simpson Bowles, a committee he had set up, is equally as egregious as Mitt’s flip flops, which can be somewhat forgiven considering the audience he has to appeal to. Obama had a chance to set our country on a different path and failed miserably, in my opinion.

• Asked what surprises him most, the Dalai Lama said, "modern man:" "He works so hard for money and ruins his life in the process, then he uses the money he worked for to try to recover his life without getting it back where it was. Then he spends all his present preparing for the future and in the process dies without living in the future while he never lived in the present either.”

The White Ladies

Since when is a joke like the one Robert De Niro told at an Obama fundraiser (“Now do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady?") the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh calling a Georgetown law student, who had testified on health insurance and contraception, a slut? Since Newt Gingrich said so: "If people on the left want to talk about radio talk show hosts, then everybody in the country ought to hold the president accountable when somebody at his event says something as utterly, totally unacceptable as Robert De Niro said last night.”

And how did the White House react? The Democrats are the midwives of political correctness; the White House agreed with Gingrich.

If we can’t make distinctions between silly jokes and offensive attacks, we will become a society without a sense of humor, a nation without nuance – which is two ways of saying the same thing.

Actually, leaving the ladies aside for the moment, I don’t think our country is ready for a white president . . . at least not:

• One who whittles his core principles to fit his current audiences.

• One who has affairs when his wives are sick and then says it’s OK because he has made peace with God? We all know it’s OK with Newt. Only Newt knows it’s also OK with God.

• One whose policies will drive men to prostitution and women to back-alley abortions. Rick Santorum can pontificate about his religion all he wants, but even his fellow Catholics aren’t buying it.

The sanctimony is pretty galling.

Rick Perry may be gone, but God, it seems, has settled into other candidates’ heads.

Light Fare

With all that is happening in the world, it seems almost frivolous to discuss the Republican primary (yes, it is still going on . . . Illinois today), but the ultimate winner could end up president of the United States, so it is a contest with a significant trophy. Ironically, Sunday was not a good day for Rick Santorum.The candidate, who has developed a Romney-like penchant for inept phrasing (“I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be. Doesn’t matter to me.”), may also have his own Jeremiah Wright problem. At a morning service at Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, Rev. Dennis Terry blessed Santorum . . . and repeated the “I don’t care” mantra. “I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation. . . . If you don’t love America, if you don’t like the way we do things, I have one thing to say — get out!”

Later in the day Romney trounced Santorum in the primary in Puerto Rico (or Rich Port), partly perhaps because the latter announced that the “Spanish speaking country” must adopt English before it can be considered for statehood. (I have been unable to confirm rumors that he has called on California to rename its major cities Saint Francis and The Angels.)

Actually, this is more than a joke. The public hostility toward immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, disfigure the history of a nation whose west was settled by indigenous peoples and then – 500 years ago – by Spaniards and retains a rich heritage from both.

Remembrance

I have taken to reading . . . and beginning to chronicle . . . the plaques on New York City’s park benches. There are thousands of stories on these small bronzes, and there is probably, too, one huge story about a city and its people. Several of the plaques are in memory of victims of World Trade Center victims, such as this one to Derek Sword, so poignant in its aching simplicity.

I had intended to write about Sergeant Robert Bales and the killing of 16 people, mostly children in the village of Panjwai, Afghanistan, having as little insight to shed as others. The story became even more difficult with this morning’s news that a gunman had killed four people, three of them children, outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.

I have no generalizations to offer, other than we don’t need generalizations. For days, the U.S. government did not identify Sgt. Bales, which seemed such a contrast to the almost immediate release of the name of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. With the identification of Sgt. Bales has come an effort to humanize him, to wonder how he could have committed such an atrocity. This is a consideration we must extend to Maj. Hasan.

For the perpetrators and the victims are people, not members of a group, Abdal Samad lost his wife, four young daughters and four young sons at the hands of Sgt. Bales. A father and his two children were killed in Toulouse.

We need to look through the categories and see the people. And we must not, as Kate Wenner wrote yesterday, “lose our memory when it comes to the consequences of wars fought far from home.”

Stumble of the Week

Five things I stumbled onto this week:

• The five developed countries with the widest gap between rich and poor are: (5) Israel (4) United States (3) Turkey (2) Mexico (1) Chile.

• The CBS New York Times poll found that:

1. 54% believe that presidents can do “a lot” to control gas prices
2. Tea Party support is at 22%
3. Women prefer Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney by a 3-2 margin
4. Women are split on whether health insurance should cover contraception

• “Modern mega-slums like Kibera (Nairobi) and Citi-Soleil (Port-au-Prince) have achieved densities comparable to cattle feedlots” (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 92).

• Rick Santorum’s remark in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, that “it’s good to be in the hometown of Rush Limbaugh, which some  people see as a trip to Mecca" came not long after he told a Bates College audience that Islam " is stuck in the 7^th century ."

        •   Two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the Reagan administration helped draft: Somalia and the United States.

Polls for Everyone

Several polls were published this week to determine who will be elected president eight months from now. They cleared up a lot of confusion. “The Republican party has a big problem. Huge!” writes The New York Times’ liberal columnist Charles Blow in “Obama-mentum.” Blow dissects a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, which begins, “Mitt Romney has retaken a significant lead nationally in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, even as he has fallen further behind Barack Obama in a general election matchup.”

“For the Republicans,” writes Blow, “there is no way to put a positive spin on these trends.”

Well, maybe for that poll.

In “The Vulnerable President,” the Times’ conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, cites other polls – Times/CBS (“President Obama is heading into the general election season on treacherous political ground”) and ABC/Washington Post (“Four bucks a gallon gas is taking its toll”) to dissect the president’s ratings drop: “Obama’s political position is tenuous enough that it doesn’t take all that much bad news – particularly on the economy — for his approval ratings to go negative.”

So take heart, there is a poll to suit everybody’s tastes . . . . and many more on the way.

Are the polls worthless? I think they tell us that a lot of people are unsettled about the future, and they are hoping someone will speak honestly to their concerns – and their hopes – instead of robotically reciting talking points. I believe that is what made Obama a special candidate in 2008. And I think it is heartening news that people want to look through a candidate's carefully manicured image to the person himself.

Tell it to a Plant

The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is."

Rick Santorum, Biloxi, Mississippi, March 13, 2012

Of all the tripe to which we have been subjected in the never-ending Republican primary, this is the most ignorant. Partly because it was uttered with such willful hubris – and pride, if I remember my confirmation classes, is not just one of the seven deadly sins, it is the first of them. Moreover, the statement makes no sense, and it wouldn’t even if Santorum actually talks to plants. Plants, of course, depend on carbon dioxide, and we humans increasingly depend on plants to remove the escalating levels of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

For contrary to the pontifications of Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, et. al., the question of global climate change – and the role of humans in accelerating it – are no longer matters of serious scientific debate. I am not a scientist, but I have spent a lot of time with them, and I recently talked to one who studies carbon movement and climate change. Not only is the evidence “irrefutable,” he said, but as researchers refine the models, the message gets more dire. The good news, however, is that, if we get serious about addressing the issue, we can prevent the worst excesses of global warming.

If Santorum is going to dismiss something this important as “a hoax,” he should at least tell us why “liberal America” is perpetrating it – something more informative than “in Washington, blocking the American dream has become political sport.”

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon on such a beautiful day, so I am heading outside to enjoy the weather.

Collateral Damage

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that read: “I’m already against the next war.” Not to mention the current undeclared ones.

The latest tragedy in Afghanistan – in which an army sergeant, trained as a sniper, left his base at night, walked a mile south and killed 16 people, including nine children in their homes – has raised again the questions: Why are we there? What are we trying to accomplish? Why don’t we leave these people alone?

This is by far the most awful of a series of recent incidents that have incensed Afghanis and ought to incense us – Marines urinating on dead insurgents’ bodies; burning sacks of Korans; NATO helicopters inadvertently shooting civilians while on a mission to flush out Taliban fighters; a group of soldiers killing for sport.

Everyone decries the most recent tragedy, but even the contrition demonstrates how the language of war threatens our sense of decency.

"This is tragic and will be investigated, and that soldier will be held accountable," said Senator Lindsey Graham. "Unfortunately, these things happen in war."

“These things” are the methodical murders of women and children in their own homes.

Newt Gingrich, who pummeled President Obama over the Koran burning for apologizing “to people who are in the process of killing young Americans,” said the U.S. should offer “condolences” and perhaps “compensation” to the families – as if the children were somehow fungible, their lives replaceable.

A random act by a deranged individual – but as Senator Graham said, “These things happen in war.”

For better or worse, this is now Barack Obama’s war, and it is time to end it.

Shrinking Commons

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, writes, “Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. . . .While independent India had been founded by high-born well-educated men, by the 21^st century few such types stood for elections or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, the poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had" (pp 216-7). But in Boo’s portrait of the lives of the poor, living in a fetid slum by Mumbai’s gleaming airport, the vote brings no secure power. It brings promises and celebrations at election time; it offers the possibility of individual access to the system through the corrupt political machines that exchange petty patronage for loyalty and eschew any change that might undermine their inconsequential power. The real power lies with the police, courts and government bureaucracy that set the poor against each other and supply “justice” for bribes.

The privatization of public space extends across the economic spectrum in India, just as it does in the rest of a world increasingly characterized by gated communities, private security guards, the dismantling of public education, the shredding of the social safety net, and proxy armies fighting off-budget wars.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is not to privatize it, as Garrett Hardin suggested in his 1968 essay. It is to reclaim it for the common good.

Stumble of the Week

3^rd Runner-up Amanda Clayton, whose food stamps were cut off by Michigan’s Department of Human Services after it was revealed that she had won $1 million on the “Make Me Rich" lottery game show. Clayton, who is unemployed, had continued to collect the public payments because, among other things, “I have two houses.” 2^nd Runner-up The graceful concession speech took a hit this week when idiosyncratic Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich said, after losing the primary for a redistricted Ohio seat to fellow Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur: “I would like to be able to congratulate Congresswoman Kaptur, but I do have to say that she ran a campaign in the Cleveland media market that was utterly lacking in integrity.”

1^st Runner-up Iraq seems to have stumbled off the list of countries that John McCain wants to bomb. It is not clear how long it can remain out of his sights, since it is firmly nestled between prime targets Syria and Iran. Other reported countries on his long list include Venezuela, Sweden and northern California.

This Week’s Winner Japan’s nuclear program has virtually shut down, with the last of its 54 reactors scheduled to go off-line next month. The country has responded to the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster with a combination of stringent conservation policies and increased dependence on imported fossil fuels – and the Japanese people have also, in the words of poet Madoka Mayazumi, begun to ask “some basic questions [about] the constant pursuit of more. . . . An aesthetic of reduction can be one way to reframe our lifestyle.”

Growth?

Third in a (sort of) series     In a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, it seems unconscionable to talk about policies that slow economic growth. In a world in which we use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide our resources and absorb our waste, it seems unconscionable not to.

This, I think, is the great – and often unspoken – divide in progressive politics today. The United States has long equated the nation’s well-being with its median standard of living, and we use economic growth to measure human progress. For the last 70 or 80 years, the Gross Domestic Product has been the measuring stick of America’s prosperity . . . and even of its people’s personal happiness.

That whole notion is under attack – from Joseph Stiglitz’s Mismeasuring Our Lives to Woody Tasch’s Slow Money to Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. And yet, when a hard choice must be made, we continue to treat environmental issues as a luxury to be addressed after we have solved the more immediate economic problems.

Everyone’s mantra in this election is “jobs.” And while Republicans attack environmentalists as job killers, Democrats bring them to the table to discuss “green jobs” and to figure out how to build future growth on alternative energy and better management of ecosystem services.

That’s all fine. But the deeper question is whether the model of economic growth, in whatever form, is viable any more. That question – as we are already beginning to see in issues such as the Keystone pipeline and “fracking” – threatens to divide the current Democratic coalition.

A Goldwater Liberal

At a talk she gave last week, Gloria Steinem referred to Barry Goldwater as a moderate Republican. I almost fell out of my chair.

But consider this. Goldwater:

• Accused Pat Robertson of trying to turn the Republican Party into a religious organization (“If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye”).
• Supported gays in the military ("You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight").
• Endorsed medical marijuana, defended Roe v. Wade, and believed in the separation of church and state.
• Delivered the word to Richard Nixon that he must resign.
• And lamented that a “bunch of kooks” had taken over the GOP, telling Bob Dole in 1996, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"

Before we get too carried away, Goldwater also opposed the Civil Right Act (as, by the way, did Al Gore Sr.), was one of eight senators to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment,declined to censure Joe McCarthy, discussed nuclear defoliation of Vietcong supply routes, and suggested the United Nations move to Moscow or Beijing.

Still, while we think of America as a more conservative society in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today, in some ways its politics were not. When he ran for president in 1964, Goldwater’s views on religion, gay rights and abortion were simply not issues, and the Republican party paid little attention to the cultural conservatives in its ranks. Now they have taken over the party, and they are gunning not just for Barack Obama but for Mitt Romney . . . who is standing there in his new blue jeans desperately hoping to get picked by their team.

Stay tuned. I’m trying to figure this out myself.

The Wars Within

It has become an axiom in today’s politics that Washington is increasingly, intolerably and perhaps permanently polarized, that the two major parties are moving toward their ideological extremes, and that the result is legislative paralysis and really ugly politics. There is a lot of truth in that sentence.

But it misses a critical internal debate in which dissenting groups in each party are challenging that party’s economic orthodoxy. I’ll outline those changes in this post, and look more closely at each in the days ahead. I welcome your thoughts.

On the Republican side, the tendency to lump together Tea Partiers and cultural conservatives – while dismissing Ron Paul as a libertarian outlier – has shed insufficient light on what is driving bitter rivals to pummel Mitt Romney as much for his persona as his politics. One clue lies in the success of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which attracted to the GOP millions of disaffected Democrats, They were not simply nostalgic for the Jim Crow south or fed up with the 1960s. They were also heirs to an agrarian, and often angry, economic populism, which meshed with similar beliefs held by generations of western and midwestern Republicans. One result was to vastly expand the wing of the party that detested “Wall Street” and its bankers, financiers and internationalist worldview.

Meanwhile, the reigning Democratic ideology equates social justice with economic growth, a position that resonates with the party’s dominant interests – labor unions, entitlement recipients and minorities seeking opportunity. Environmentalists, however, are increasingly raising fundamental questions about both the possibility and the desirability of unlimited growth.

Stumble of the Week

Civility took another step backward with Olympia Snowe’s announcement that she will not seek re-election to her Maine senate seat. Snowe, one of the few remaining moderates in the GOP, cited the atmosphere in Washington as a reason for her retirement: “I do find it frustrating that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.” Shortly after her announcement, she became the only Republican to vote against the Blunt Amendment. Ordinary People. While the Blunt Amendment failed by three votes, the arguments of its supporters that the issue was First Amendment rights for employers and institutions it ignores the needs and desires of the people who actually have the insurance policy or need the services. But don’t forget, corporations are people, too. Mitt Romney’s flip flop on the issue is only news because he took little more than an hour to do so.

Gut Instincts. In 2001 George W. Bush looked Vladimir in the eye and said, "I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Masha Gessen’s new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, “is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and . . . made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.”

Inhumanity. Asked about the boy who had killed her son Demetrius Hewlin at Chardon High School, Phyllis Ferguson showed the nature of true humanity: “You have to forgive because if you don’t forgive you hold that in your heart. It’s still in your memory of your child. You got that hatred in your heart.”

“On March the 8th, which will be Demetrius’ birthday next Thursday, I appreciate if everybody will light a candle for him. He would be 17 years old.”

Blunt Instrument

Several organizations are reported to be moving quickly to take advantage of the Blunt Amendment, which is not to be confused with Virginia’s blunt instrument (Feb 27^th post). Its aim is to amend current health care law to enable those with “religious or moral objections to specific items or services to decline providing them.” In a way that makes sense only in Washington, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has attached his legislation to Senate Bill 1813, whose purpose is to reauthorize Federal aid to highway construction programs.

The amendment, which has attracted 23 co-signers, could redefine health-care delivery:

• The First Church of Christ, Scientist could open a chain of hospitals across the country that, to comply with its religious beliefs, will offer no medical services whatsoever. They will, however, accept Medicare and Medicaid.
• To expedite its program of posthumous baptisms (Feb. 24^th post), the Mormon Church could install baptismal pools adjacent to wards for the terminally ill.
• While the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will provide no contraceptives in its pedophilia treatment centers, it could install large shredders to ensure confidentiality (http://articles.philly.com/2012-02-25/news/31098596_1_church-lawyers-abuse-complaints-priests).
• The Shriners, however, would seem to have an issue. Although the organization has operated outstanding children’s hospitals for decades, some believe that any group whose members wear a red fez and worship in a temple must be Muslims – the one religion to which the Blunt Amendment probably does not extend. I mean, look at the logo.

And the organization’s name change from the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine to Shriners International will probably not fool the senators – who know that international is just another word for un-American.