Given an over 150 point drop in the Dow Jones last week one can only be amazed that the government is looking at spending more than $11 billion to perform the first high-tech census in 2010. However, that is not the worst of it since due to technology problems an additional $2 billion may be needed to train and use this new technology and there is still no guarantee of accuracy. One first indication that there was cause to worry was seen when door-to-door headcounters couldn’t figure out their fancy new handheld computers.

So what did these gadgets promise to do? Well, initially, the computer system was to have had several functions:

1. Workers would use the handheld computers to verify every residential address in the nation, a process that is crucial to ensuring an accurate count.
2. They would use the computers to collect and transmit information from residents who failed to return the census forms mailed out by the government.
3. The computer system would track and manage workflow for all field operations.
4. Harris Corp. would provide technical support for the computer system.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the census has been mandated by the Constitution to take place every 10 years and its success or failure could have widespread repercussions.

Why is it so important? Well, these figures are used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among the states and states and many cities use census data to draw legislative districts.

Additionally population numbers are used to calculate billions in state and federal grants for transportation, education and other programs. For more information regarding the Census, you can go here.

Thankfully, the uncertainty surrounding the new census has caused a congressional agency to hold hearings about the issue and Census officials are considering a return to using paper and pencil to count every man, woman, and child in the nation.

The main problem with the use of these high-tech devices is that the Census Bureau needs to hire and train nearly 600,000 temporary workers but interviews and government reports describe the agency as totally unprepared to do this. First the Census Bureau has never had to deal with the kind of $600 million contract involved with the handheld computers and secondly, it has already been discovered that the computers were too complex for some temporary workers who tried to use them in a test last year.

Given the complications with the proposed high-tech devices it appears that the current administrators of the census and the ones to make the above contract are seriously trying to scale back the use of computers in an attempt to keep finances in check.

If you are eloquent and powerful you may be able to match Barack Obama’s inspirational oratory unless you are a thorough redneck. If you are then I am sure you are going to side with Hillary Clinton as she continues to pound away at what Obama’s ill advised pastor had to say.

On the other hand, while you are free to choose where you worship and who shepherds your flock I for one am the first to admit that there are things said from the pulpit that I disagree with. However, that does not mean that I have any intention of leaving my church. I agree with the vast majority that is preached, especially the parts directly from the Bible and I love the fellowship of the other people who attend. I believe that same to be true Obama. He is a man who is neither black nor white and he was born at a time when race, ethnicity, or national origin should have nothing to do with his qualifications to be president.

You may ask why Obama stayed in the church, or why didn’t he speak up, when he heard the anger in the Pastor’s voice. The answer, I think, is that he did. He is speaking up in running for president. Offering a different approach than his pastor to the injuries of race and class is what his campaign is all about. So, while it is obvious that this church and this pastor has played an important role in Barack Obama’s life as a black American one cannot forget that he is the son of a white mother who was raised by white grandparents. I believe that Barack seeks an understanding of his black roots through this church and wants to understand the injuries that others of those roots have suffered.

I myself, met a young black woman this last week, which is unusual in southwest Missouri. She was from Florida and taking part in a Urban Solutions. I found her courage and determination to make something of her life a real inspiration. This woman was not looking to blame others for her past errors but wanted to be able to return to the inner city to mentor confused and misguided youths from making the same mistakes that she did. If only white America could get past their own fears of diversity I believe that life would improve dramatically for all of us. This is just one thing, that as a white American, I think Obama has to offer us.

That, to me, is clearly why the church was so important to Obama that even now he views his pastor as the uncle with whom he might disagree but never disown.

But if the church taught him about the pain and injuries of race, made clear what it was like to grow up on the wrong side of every line dividing privilege and access from poverty and denial, what it, and its minister, did not teach him was how to deal with those injuries. His minister’s response has been as all the awful excerpts reveal, tinged with bitterness, anger and resentment. His minister has embraced the very victimization and demonization that Barack Obama, in his speech and in his campaign at its best, has denounced.

The case for Obama, and ultimately he has to be the one to make it, is that there is a different answer to the injuries of race than the one his pastor offered to their congregation The answer is not to denounce America, but to embrace it, not to embrace victimization, but to denounce it.

Obama doesn’t want to denounce his pastor, his uncle, but in a way, he already has, both by running for president and by the way he has run. He just needs to say that loud and clear, and not because whites want him too, but because his failure to do so obscures a strength of his campaign for which he deserves credit.

Tags: obama, race, presidential campaign, barack obamal, hillary clinton, obama’s speech, urban solutions

Fear can be an overwhelming feeling of dread or a consistent uneasiness that keeps you on edge. Fear and/or phobias exist under several names including such familiar ones as claustrophobia which is the fear of enclosed spaces and acrophobia which is the fear of heights. However, just because you can put a name to a fear doesn’t make it any easier for the person experiencing it to deal with.

Fear has become not just an individual problem these days but is also being used by economists and the government to control the populace. You see it every day when you listen to the radio and are bombarded with the rising price of gas and find yourself worried about how you are going to continue to keep your car running so that you can get to work. You feel it creep up on you in the dark after listening to the news of home invasions and burglaries or after hearing reports of a rise in the terror alert warning system. The problem with these fears is that you have no power to avert the outcome of these situations and it is this very powerlessness that gives flight to fear.

In my life I see my daughter affected by panic/anxiety attacks when she finds herself in a crowded environment. I see my granddaughter, who is only nine, dealing with selective mutism due to her inability to cope with her intense shyness and fear of being judged by what she has to say. I myself really never felt particularly fearful until I was put in a hospital situation where others made the rules and decided to perform procedures and administer drugs without my having the ability or time to decide if I wanted those things to happen to me. As a result, I now find myself leery if not downright frightened of future hospital visits but at least for the most part I do realize that what was done to and for me had scientific reasoning behind it.

To deal with fear Marks, a behaviorist, in 1987 wrote that simple or specific phobias can be effectively treated with behavior therapy. (Marks, I. M. (1987). Fears, phobias, and rituals: Panic, anxiety, and their disorders. New York: Oxford University Press.) He suggests that phobic fear is a reflex and that conditioning techniques can help reduce the incidence of fearful episodes. He believed that a healthy fear such as of being bitten by a vicious dog is carried over to include a fear of all dogs. His remedy then became to expose the person afraid of all dogs to non-dangerous ones thus showing them that there is no danger and eliminating their phobic response. Of course, over the period of treatment it is mandatory that the person is not exposed to a vicious animal.

In some instances, however, patients are so fearful that a study by Watson in 1924 called for an alternative to classical conditioning called counter-conditioning. (Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). In his treatment Watson called for a relaxation response. This method requires the patient to substitute relaxation for the fear response when in the presence of the phobic stimulus. He believed that since relaxation is incompatible with anxiety that the person would eventually learn not to be afraid.

According to Joseph Wolpe (1958) counter-conditioning can also be used in a systematic way to very gradually introduce the feared stimulus in a step-by-step fashion known as systematic desensitization. This method not only trains the patient to physically relax but also to establish an anxiety control level to analyze the danger of the stimulus. This method is often what one sees with biofeedback where the patient is ensured of being truly well-relaxed before being subjected to the fear stimulus.

So while many people are fearful one proven known is from a German proverb which says: “Courage is not the lack of fear but the ability to face it.”

Tags: fear, coping with fear, economy, government, terror alert, systematic desensitization, joseph wolpe, biofeedback, j.b. watson, classical conditioning, i.m. marks, selective mutism, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, acrophobia, claustrophobia, phobias

Due to an auto immune disease that I am forced to deal with along with my dependence on Prednisone I was once again hospitalized this last week. During this visit to my least favorite place in the world I was appalled at the number of visitors who entered my room  who were carrying obvious diseases. These individuals were there to visit my roommate who had just undergone a very serious operation.

Having already been forced to endure the pain of my condition and the horrific treatments in the ER which consisted of inexperienced personnel trying to insert an IV, that they had no idea how to insert, in a person with Cushing disease and the accompanying fragile veins to the pain and indignity of having a nasal-gastric tube inserted, as well as, a catheter. Neither is an experience that anyone would opt for unless they thought they were going to die.

Once these horrific procedures were completed, it was necessary to wait another two hours before being taken to my room where more tests were scheduled. Blood technicians came in and drew blood, radiologists required horrible things to be swallowed so that Xrays could be taken and then nursing assistants seemed to enter every few minutes to check for vital signs. At this point, I wasn’t dead but I was thoroughly exhausted after almost 24 hours of pain. The continual jostling and pain continued to defeat any opportunity my body had to fight this attack on its own.

When all of the trauma had begun to subside and I was finally left alone long enough to sleep for an hour or two a lady was brought in who had just undergone a serious, complex operation. Being in the bed next to  her I once again was kept awake while they attended to her needs. This I understood and bore in silence knowing that they needed to care for her. With that in mind I also tried to ignore her steady stream of visitors who talked among themselves never leaving her bedside.

However, my frustration knew no end when her family chose to stay while being obviously ill themselves. If the illness had not been so obvious to me I could have dealt with their continual chatting but it took no mental giant to see how sick these people were. They were flushed, displayed a raucous cough, were sneezing continually and told their mother that they didn’t want to get too close since they were afraid of exposing her to their disease. During their visits it did not require a .mental giant to realize they while it was nice that they loved this woman so much but that what they were doing was dangerous. Common sense alone told me that if they really loved and cared about her that they would have called and kept track of her that way. Instead, they chose to spend hours on end sitting in our room coughing like there was no tomorrow. . As a result, I ended up fighting a bout of pneumonia which only made my recovery that much more difficult. 

In retrospect, I still can’t believe that despite the multitude of flyers placed throughout the hospital that discouraged flu carriers from visiting that these individuals had been allowed into our room. Where were the nurses? Where were the enforcers of protection for patients of the hospital? While this was occurring nursing personnel continually entered the room and never once suggested that these fragrant germ sharers leave the facility until they were well.

While I suffered in silence I know that many others experience the same situation when they are forced to use the hospitals in their areas.I would suggest that patients be more vocal about these visitors than I was. Perhaps, then and only then will change take place and the patients actually be safe.

Overall, the care I received was good yet there was a lot that needed improvement. Never have I seen such inexperienced care in an ER. My situation was not a trauma event like a care accident nor was it a situation where my heart had stopped pumping but it was considered a life threatening situation. I also noted that weekends were a deadly time to be stuck in the hospital as no one changed beds or provided for washing needs. You only saw them when the IV machine beeped and you paged them or at meal time. No one seemd to know what Peter or Paul doing or saying. Doctor’s instructions were not done quickly and necessary medications were held up by hospital protocol.

My advice, hospital admission should be your last option since good personnel are overworked and others just want to collect a paycheck for the minimal amount of work.

Tags: hospital, pneumonia, visitors, hospital admission, er staff, nurses, nursing assistants, medication, cushings disease, iv machines, iv insertion, nasal-gastric tubes, catheters, protect yourself

Just last week I was admitted to the hospital with yet another in a recurring series of stomach issues. This time it was diagnosed as a small bowel obstruction. Frighteningly, this carries with it an 8% mortality rate. However, while this was the diagnosis this time, last time they were unsuccessful in coming to a definitive reason for the terrible debilitating pain I was in. They finally removed my gall bladder which the pathologist declared unbelievably diseased and full of stones.

At the time that my gall bladder was removed I was thrilled that the years of pain would once and for all be behind me. Unfortunately, as you can see that has not been the case. This latest attack took me on my own search for answers. My research brought me to emedicinehealth.com where I discovered that the symptoms that I had been complaining about for a minimum of seven years fit perfectly in with the symptoms for a condition call Pancreatitis.

After much research I discovered that the usual cause of Pancreatitis is alcoholism. That being the case, and with my being a teetotaler, I could somewhat understand why my doctor’s wouldn’t have looked there but unfortunately there are other conditions that can result in this disease. One of those conditions is undiagnosed gall bladder disease, which as I mentioned I had suffered from for years before it was removed and another is steroid dependency. I have Cushings disease which makes me Prednisone dependent due to previous treatment by doctors. Given those two situations alone I continued to pursue my inquiry into Pancreatitis.

The first and most significant symptom of Pancreatitis is the debilitating pain that is associated with it. The pain is so intense and the accompanying nausea and/or vomiting so uncomfortable that I couldn’t even walk to the car to go to the hospital and therefore had to be transported by ambulance. Be aware that this pain may come suddenly or build up gradually and if it begins suddenly, it is usually going to be severe. If it starts out less severe that doesn’t mean by any means that it isn’t also going to end up getting worse as time progresses. In addition, while you may think that eating a cracker may help lessen the nausea you will find that eating only tends to increase the pain and this pain may last for days on end.

Additional symptoms may include feeling worse if you lie on your back, fever, chills, swollen abdomen, rapid heartbeat, (Possible internal bleeding), dehydration, Low blood pressure, weakness, lightheadedness, a feeling of lethargy, irritability, confusion and/or headache.

If the disease becomes chronic you may find yourself suffering less pain but for those who did not get this reprieve the pain may get even worse as the condition worsens. In long-term conditions the person may experience diabetes, weight loss as the body becomes unable to digest food, anemia, or jaundice.

While in the hospital this last time several exams were performed to evaluate enzymes, and to look for signs of infection. The test confirmed that my magnesium and potassium counts were both extremely low. In the past two years my iron count had also dropped to dangerously low levels. All of these are signs of Pancreatitis.

However, for some the blood tests may be inconclusive if the pancreas is still making digestive enzymes and insulin. Therefore, my advice to you is if you get unbelievable pain in the vicinity of your umbilicus, mine was immediately above that area, that radiates around to your back and you have consulted with specialists I would demand to be checked for Pancreatitis. The test you need is called an Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP).

Remember it is a hard disease to get diagnosed, unless you are a heavy drinker, and there is little that can be done to prevent it but once you have the diagnosis you can begin to take charge of your life once again. One thing that I discovered is that an extremely low-fat diet helps. Don’t eat anything that is deep fried or you will pay for it.

So, keep the faith out there and I pray that this information may be used to help anyone else out there who has been suffering with this type of recurring pain.

People wake up!!! Twenty years of the Bush/Clinton White House is too much.How can anyone support Hillary Clinton when we have watched her again and again play dirty? I am sick of watching her mud-slinging and intentional defamion of Barack Obama with her lies and misrepresentations of his stands on political issues and his personal life.  Barack is a Christian who is an active member of the United Church of Christ and has been for over twenty years.

I couldn’t even believe how desperate this evil woman was until I saw the picture of Barack in native dress on CNN. He was honoring the African people he was visiting which was honorable not something to be dredged up to use against him. If any other head of state had participated in the same ceremony that he was attending they would have looked bad had they not done the same. The problem is that Clinton is so desperate that she used this picture just to attempt to once again embarrass Barack. I am proud to say that he, as always, handled her mudslinging with dignity.

Then, too, how can any voter forget the scandals that rocked the White House during the Clinton years. When Bill was president he was nearly impeached for his improprieties which went so far as to try and steal things from the White House when they left in 2001.

However, the “Hillary Express” – is working overtime to remake Ms Clinton into someone she is not and tThey are sadly succeeding in perpetrating the most cynical, cold-blooded deception of American voters in the history of Presidential elections.

Despite the fact that you are being led to believe that Senator Clinton is a kinder, more thoughtful person of faith, with values that reflect those of Middle America, yet one that is strong enough to be the nation’s leader in a time of war remember that she has always been anti-war, anti-military. In fact, her husband is a fine example of Middle America morality with his numerous well-known affairs. This compounded with the fact that he chose not to act decisively, during his tenure in office thus setting the country up for the events that occurred on  9/11 should give every voter second thoughts about who you want to answer the phone at 3 A.M. 

We need to stop her or you will soon see, once she acquires office that you have been once again duped by her strategists who helped get first her husband elected and who know want to see her in office. These strategists are not alone, however, remember that she is owned by lobbyists and big corporations who are going to call in favor upon favor at the expense of the Middle Class American.Your option, Vote for Barack Obama. He is not owned by lobbyists, no matter what Ms Clinton alleges. In fact when I went to make a contribution to his campaign I had to pass a maze of questions to verify that I had no ties to any lobbyist or big corporation interest.

So if you want fair representation and a voice for change please remember who Hilary Clinton is and research for yourself what kind of man she is attacking. Make sure that whoever you vote for in the 2008 presidential race is the person you really want to lead this country.

Tags: hilary clinton, political office, 2008 presidential race, barack obama, bush/clinton white house, bill clinton, middle class values, mud-slinging campaign

In this intense drama you meet Jon and Wendy Savage, siblings in their forties, who are forced to deal with their father — whom they haven’t seen in years. Their father, played by Philip Bosco, has proven himself to be an abusive and angry parent whom neither of the siblings really want to have in their life. However, life has other ideas for them and they find themselves thrown into the position of caregiver when their father begins to suffer from a form of dementia.

Throughout the course of the movie, the viewer finds out that Dad has been thrown out of the Sun City, Arizona house that he had shared with his recently deceased girlfriend which is why the siblings are forced to come to his aid. Along with that you are made aware that Wendy, played by Laura Linney, blames her father for her so-called failure as a playwright and Jon, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, blames him for taking him away from a book that he is writing that is only stalled by a case of writer’s block.

In this story, however, there is no family quirk that makes for a relief from the reality of all the nasty stuff that the members of this family have done to one another. There is no wonderful forgiveness, but there is an oddly funny approach by the director who neither tries to absolve her characters of guilt or to demonize any of them for their feelings and actions. The main moral of the story as I see it is that a family can be anything but loving and accepting but when they need each other they will come together and realize that in times of trial each of them must get over the hurts of the past.

Overall, this is a great and emotional story of life as it really is and how people find themselves adaptable and available for one another in times of need. I would highly recommend this story for adult viewers. Be aware, however, that it is not appropriate for children under 17.