By The River

My wife, although she doesn't go out of her way to mention it, graduated from an evangelical Christian high school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She's Episcopalian, and not a typical graduate of the school, but got a good education. We went to her class reunion one year and I had a chance to talk to a lot of people. What struck me was how focused many of them were not simply on their conservative religious faith, but on "having my own business." It didn't seem to matter what sort of business: Amway sales, construction, carpet cleaning, you name it.

I thought about them today when former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani gave a speech lashing out at "government-controlled" health care and proposing tax subsidies that will supposedly enable uninsured Americans to buy their own health insurance plans. Guiliani and the Republican Party want to move away from employer-provided health care, which should scare the hell out of most Americans, evangelical or not. At best, it's a pipedream. At worst, it's a strongarm robbery of the vast majority of the American middle class.

Who would benefit from the Republican plan? Small business owners like the people at my wife's class reunion for one. In other words, the Republican base. They'll get help buying plans for themselves, and they won't have to worry about providing health insurance for their employees. Business owners large and small will benefit as the money spent on health insurance flows to the bottom line. What they spend on your health insurance now is part of your compensation, even if you never see it. Think they're going to give you that money if they don't spend it on health insurance? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Who loses? Just about everybody else. Many people who get employer-sponsored health insurance won't be able to buy individual plans because of pre-existing health conditions or because the plans are simply too expensive.

The good news is that this "plan" has no more chance of being enacted than did Bush's plan in 2005 to privatize Social Security. That's another dream of the Republian base, by the way--not having to pay the employer's share of Social Security. The Republican dream is every man for himself. If you lose, too bad. If your kids die, it's your fault.

Guiliani waved the bloody shirt of socialism in his speech. I don't think that's going to work with many people anymore, and I credit Michael Moore and his film "Sicko" for much of that. His film opened American eyes for the first time to the truth that Canadians, British, French, and most other western Europeans have better healthcare than we do. The social democratic movements in their countries after World War II lifted the weight of worrying about paying for health care from the vast majority of their citizens. We must do the same.

Posted by David at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(c) 2007 by Lydia DeKok

I'm on the way home with my family from a week in Canada. I've been to Canada on many previous occasions, but not since about 1999 and not for this long since my parents took us to Expo '67 in the summer of 1967. It is very much a different country from America despite certain similarities. They speak English--unless they speak French--but a mainly common language doesn't make them "just like Americans" anymore than it does people in Australia or England.

We spent most of the week in Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province in both territory and population, and one day in New Brunswick, another of the Maritime Provinces. PEI, as it is universally known, is smaller than central Pennsylvania and has just 133,000 people. Being an island, and one without bridge access to the mainland until 1997, sets PEI apart. New Brunswick, which was founded by United Empire Loyalists (what we call Tories) after the Revolutionary War, could use "More of Maine" as a slogan.

Here are my Canada pros and cons:

--Prince Edward Island is not big on street signs at intersections. Many intersections on the island have no signs to let you know where you are. I mentioned this to a Canadian couple we met at the graduation ceremony for the summer vet camp my daughter attended, and they (being from Ontario) were as perplexed as we were. One of their PEI relatives commented that "we know what the streets are." A definite con.

--Prince Edward Island is big, really, really big, on recycling. They call themselves "The Green Province." You have to sort every bit of trash into one of four recycling bins. Plastic supermarket bags, bottles, and plastic wrap go in one bin, paper products in another, "compost," meaning food scraps, in a third, and glass bottles and cans in a fourth. Not only do you do this at home, there are similar recycling bins along city streets (see photo above). You'll search a long time before you find a gas station with a trash bin by the pumps where you an dump the empty coffee cups from your car. Don't get me wrong--this is a good thing. But it gets wearisome after awhile, and I wonder how many Canadians really follow all the recycling rules. Both a pro and a con.

--Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick residents are among the nicest people you will ever meet. They are friendly and helpful to strangers. My younger daughter slipped and fell in a puddle of soda pop in an indoor mall in St. John, N.B. She picked herself up and was fine. Ten minutes later, while waiting for rootbeers at the A&W, the mall janitor came over and apologized for not having mopped up the puddle more quickly and was my daughter okay? I got the sense it was sincere and that he hadn't been sent out to find me by the mall lawyer. This morning, leaving St. John, a gas station attendant apologized twice for the pay-at-the-pump function being inoperable and promised they were trying to get it fixed. A definite pro.

--Maritime Canada is expensive for American tourists. This is something new. Their prices have always been higher, but the very favorable exchange rate more than made up for it. At one time just a few years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth about 67 cents to the U.S. dollar. Now it's worth 95 cents, so those high prices pinch. Books in Canada are very expensive now. The new Harry Potter novel cost $38 after being discounted 20 percent. It cost $22 in America after being discounted a whole lot more from a list price that was lower to begin with. Big con.

--PEI seafood was terrific, as long as you prepared it yourself. We bought three one-pound live lobsters one night for $38 and steamed them. We had them with some of the excellent island potatos. Great dinner. The next night, not having satisfied our lobster fix, we went to the New Glasgow Lobster Supper, which is in all the tourist guidebooks. We paid $30 a head for two one-pound lobster dinners. That included a gallon bucket of PEI mussels that were the best I've ever had. But the lobster was a real disappointment, tough from being over-cooked. Our suspicion was that New Glasgow's mass production kitchen had heated up cold pre-cooked lobsters. I later cooked fresh haddock caught the day before off the coast of Nova Scotia and it was excellent. So was a Malpeque (from Malpeque Bay, PEI) oyster I ordered on the half-shell at a Charlottetown restaurant. First one I'd ever had. Mainly pro.

--Canada still has real local radio stations, the kind America used to have in the 1960s and 1970s before Congress eliminated the Fairness Doctrine and the requirement that radio stations offer news as part of their programming. You can actually figure out what's going on in the world on a Canadian radio station.

Posted by David at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Whoever thinks about the Atlantic time zone? Ever hear of it? It includes the Maritime Provinces of Canada, basicly everything in North America east of Maine. Prince Edward Island, where I am this week, is one hour ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.

Which means that we get the Harry Potter novel an hour before you back in Pennsylvania do. Nah, nah, nah, nah.

Pottermania is as evident here on Prince Edward Island as everywhere else. The two main bookstores in Charlottetown, a branch of the Indigo chain and a local independent, are having Harry Potter parties tonight, with sales beginning at midnight. We're going to the independent, where we'll pay $38 Canadian for one copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If we could wait until we cross the American border, it would be $22 U.S. Worse, the Canadian stores are charging the full $99 list price for the audiobook version, even though Indigo is offering it for $65 on its website.

So we decided to wait until we get to Bangor, Maine, to pick up the audiobook for the thousand mile ride back to Harrisburg this weekend. $47 is the price at the Borders store there. Much better. The ride will be enjoyable, provided they're not sold out by the time we get there.

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We were driving my elder daughter to vet camp yesterday morning and were still on the dirt road that leads from the cottage. All of a sudden, a large cow jumps a fence (or went through an opening, I'm not sure which) and comes onto the road about 200 feet in front of us, followed by three large calves. My wife was driving and was not pleased at what she saw. We creeped up on them. At about 100 feet, she tapped on the horn to get them to move.

Bad move (although I suggested it). The mama cow turned and started running at us, followed by the calves. Lisa backed the car up as fast as she could--this was very like the scene in "Jurassic Park" where the Land Rover full of humans is fleeing the dinosaur. I, of course, whipped out my camera and began shooting (this did not go over well in the car). We finally stopped, and the mini-herd moved past us.

We later learned that bad cow-human encounters are not at all uncommon. They aren't the peaceful, placid, cud-chewing creatures you've been led to expect, especially if mama cow is protecting her calves. For whatever reason, the beep of the horn was interpreted as an aggressive act and she reacted accordingly.

No sign of the cows this morning. But as I was driving down Highway 6, I saw a moving mound of black and white fir on the highway ahead of me. As I got closer, I saw it was a mama skunk and four little skunks trying to cross the road. I hit the brakes, fortunately in plenty of time. The skunks scurried back to to the field alongside the road to await better crossing conditions. They didn't spray, thankfully.

Posted by David at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To get to Prince Edward Island, you drive, and drive, and drive. It is just over a thousand miles from my home in Harrisburg, Pa. Even from Boston, it is nearly 600 miles. That distance has protected the island from the mass tourism that overwhelms beautiful islands along the Atlantic Coast in the U.S. You can buy oceanfront property here for a fraction of what you would pay further south, and the water is warm in summer, not frigid at all.

We came here because my eldest daughter was accepted into the one-week veterinary camp at the Atlantic Veterinary College of the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. She's the only American in the camp this week. The school is a good one, with a special research interest into diseases of fish and shellfish, two mainstays (along with potatoes) of the local economy. This morning she observed "large animal surgery," probably on a horse. I'm waiting to hear how that went. The school (as opposed to the camp) takes 18 Americans or other foreigners into each year's class of 60. Students from the Maritime Provinces of Canada pay a subsidized $9,500 a year, and Americans pay $44,000 a year for tuition, room, and board.

The Canadian dollar is nearly at par with the U.S. dollar. Just a few years ago, it was worth 66 cents to the U.S. dollar and travel here was dirt cheap. An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning attributed the rising Canadian dollar to the rise in world oil prices--Canada is a major supplier of oil to America--and to the U.S. trade deficit with China, a persistent and damaging drain on our economy.

Prince Edward Island is one of the whitest places I've ever been. Blacks and Asians are nearly non-existent here. The island is also one of the more friendly and well-mannered places you'll ever hope to visit. IIt is almost unnerving. Drivers automatically stop for pedestrians, even in the absence of a crosswalk (note to Prince Edward Islanders--don't expect that in Harrisburg, Pa.). We had a flat tire yesterday and pulled onto a side road. While I was in the process of changing it, a complete stranger stopped and made sure we were okay. He recommended a place to get a new tire and said he would swing past later to check on us.

We're staying in Crescent Isle Cottages on Tracadie Bay, down a long dirt road where we regularly see a mother fox and her cubs. There are scores of similar cottage colonies on PEI set up to serve, primarily, middle-class Canadian tourists. I walked down to the bay on Sunday night with my wife and a man and woman and their dog were digging clams. The bay is a major source of blue mussels. This is seafood heaven, although cheap lobster is as distant a memory here as it is anywhere else. You can buy them fresh for $12.95 a pound, which isn't bad, but the famous lobster suppers cost about $30 a head.

All in all, this is a special place, far enough from the world to seem lost in time, yet close enough to have all the modern conveniences.

Posted by David at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We left Harrisburg, Pa., on vacation Friday, driving up to Prince Edward Island in Canada for a week. Because it is a journey of a thousand miles (the single step was into the car), we took my wife's 2005 Toyota Prius instead of my larger, somewhat less fuel-efficient 2007 Honda CR-V. The Prius gets 45-50 miles per gallon on the highway, the CR-V about 27 mpg. On a trip that long, it is a significant difference.

The Prius averaged 47 mpg on the first tank of gas, which I purchased in Harrisburg just before we left. I didn't fill the tank again until we were in Massachusetts. As I did, I noticed that this gasoline contained 10 percent ethanol. Fine, I thought. That's what Gov. Rendelll wants everyone in Pennsylvania to be using in the very near future. Lets see how it runs.

Unfortunately, alcohol in the Massachusetts gasoline caused the Prius mileage to drop to 40-41 mpg. That's still good in the greater scheme of things, but you can't get past the fact it represented nearly a 13 percent decline in fuel efficiency. I drove most of that Mass. gas out of the car by the time I refueled in northern Maine. What I bought wasn't gasohol, and gradually the fuel efficiency climbed back toward 47 mpg.

I'm not willing to write off ethanol based on one tank of gas, but the experience was sobering to say the least.

Posted by David at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went last night to see "Sicko," the new documentary by Michael Moore. It's Moore's first documentary since "Fahrenheit 911," which came out in the summer of 2004. The main screening room at the Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg had a few empty seats, but not many. It wasn't like "Fahrenheit 911," when the line reached out the door and down to the end of the block. George W. Bush and the Iraq War can obviously draw bigger crowds than the sad state of American health care, but I suspect word of mouth will soon be delivering full houses for "Sicko" as well.

This is a revolutionary movie. The genius of Michael Moore is to both show the horror stories and the promised land. By now you may have heard about the American man who lost the tips of two fingers in a table saw accident, and was told by doctors (he had no insurance) that it would cost $60,000 to have his middle finger sewn back on, but "only" $12,000 for the ring finger. He chose the cheaper option and the tip of his middle finger ended up as medical waste in a landfill. Later, Moore talks to a Canadian who had five fingers reattached in 24-hour operation involving four surgeons that didn't cost him a dime.

Then there's the nurse in Colorado whose husband needed a life-saving bone marrow transplant to save him from kidney cancer. His doctors rated the chance of success as high. But her insurance plan--administered by her own employer--called it "experimental" and refused to pay. Even a personal appeal to the hospital board of trustees failed to sway them. He died. Moore interviews former insurance company employees who talk about bonuses linked to denied claims. One doctor is shown telling Congress how she let a man die to save her employer, his insurance company, $500,000. It won her a big promotion, but she was haunted to the point where you wondered if she would walk out of the hearing room and put a pistol in her mouth.

The promised land portrayed by Moore is the single-payer, government-run health care systems of Canada, Great Britain, France, and Cuba. This part of the film will be eye-opening to many Americans, who more likely than not have heard only the self-serving criticisms of these systems by people with a stake in the big-money American plan. Moore shows Canadians, British, French--and American expatriates living in those countries--and Cubans quite happy with their national systems. They can't imagine living in America and having to pay for health care.

Moore should have addressed the taxation issue. Canadians and Europeans do pay higher taxes to finance that free health care, but not nearly as high as you've been led to believe. In Britain (I did a story on this recently for the Patriot-News), the national income tax rate for the middle class is the same or less than it is here. The difference is a national sales tax of about 17 percent. In return, they pay nothing for doctor visits or hospital stays, and about $10 for any prescription. I suspect that many Americans would accept higher sales taxes if they got free healthcare in return. And by the way, Canadians, British, French, and Cubans have longer lifespans than Americans.

I also think he was much too kind to Sen. Hillary Clinton and the failure of the Clinton Administration's attempts to create a national health care plan in 1993. That plan would have been more like the German system, and would not have eliminated private insurance companies from the picture, but it would have insured everyone and eliminated by law many of insurance company practices that bankrupt or kill people. I'm reading Carl Bernstein's new biography of Sen. Clinton, "A Woman in Charge," and he places much of the blame for the utter failure of that effort on her. At least she tried, and showed great personal courage in doing so, but many mistakes were made.

It is one thing to present horror stories, but quite another to show convincingly that it doesn't have to be that way. I hope "Sicko" makes it onto HBO so it can get an even wider audience. I'm not certain if a national single payer system can be created here without some great national calamity like the Great Depression to clear the field for radical action. With at least a third of Americans convinced that gay marriage and immigration are greater threats than lousy healthcare, it will be no small task.

Posted by David at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is it about riding a bicycle as an adult, or a putative adult, that turns one into a self-righteous zealot?

I write in defense of poor Sheila Rothenberger of West Hanover Twp., Pa. Ms. Rothenberger wrote to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., on June 20 complaining that bicyclists ought to be more careful in how they ride. She suggested they stay off certain roads entirely, such as one where a 19-year-old woman from Lebanon, Pa., was killed tragically in early June while riding her bicycle.

From the reaction, you'd think that Rothenberger, who I've never met in my life, had confessed a desire to take part in the annual baby seal hunt in Canada. First to take up the stick and beat Rothenberger to the ground was Mike McKenney of Mechanicsburg, who suggested that the fault was entirely Rothenberger's for being angry at slow-moving bicycles and that she ought to confine her motoring to interstate highways. Or else, he sniffed with moral superiority, she ought to slow down. Then came a letter from someone who said bicycles have a legal right to be on the same roads as cars, blah, blah, blah.

In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, I distinctly remember my first encounter with bicycle zealots. It was on the busy street that runs past my parents' house. It has two lanes and is divided by double yellow lines, which means, of course, no crossing into the opposite lane to pass. There would be plenty of room to pass a single bicycle, or a procession of them, except that these two bicyclists insisted on riding side by side and blocking the entire lane. I tapped on the horn once, then again when there was no reaction. After the second time, one of the riders turned around with a look of pure hatred on his face. I don't recall if they moved to the side of the road or not.

Of late, bicyclists in my bike-loving hometown have proclaimed a right NOT to ride on bike paths built for them at taxpayer expense. Some Rothenberger out there (probably Van Rothenberger, given the town) had complained about bikes being on a really busy road with lots of fatal accidents. Why couldn't they use the adjoining bike path? Silly woman. She was cudgeled into the ground by the bicycle zealots and informed that the bike path ALSO HAD PEDESTRIANS, which forced dedicated bicycle zealots to slow down, greatly annoying them.

I do most of my daytime driving in the city of Harrisburg, where I observe bicyclists without helmets weaving through traffic, running red lights, running stop signs, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and generally behaving in a dangerous and obnoxious manner.

Rothenberger is right. There are some roads where bicyclists don't belong. No one in their right mind, for example, would commute to work on a bicycle on Second Street in Harrisburg at 7:40 a.m. You can ignore common sense but you can't ignore the laws of physics. Big crushes little in an accident. We may not be South America, where the big vehicle has the right-of-way over the smaller one, but it's time for the bicycle zealots to be a little more considerate if they want the right to ride where they please.

Posted by David at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(c) 2007 by David DeKok

The protester above, and several others off camera, were in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., on Tuesday not long after news broke about George W. Bush's pardon, er, commutation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison time for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the White House's leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilso . Ithaca is that kind of place, a city of aging hippies from the 1960s and political liberals and radicals of every stripe. Gotta love it.

While what Bush did is being spun by the White House and Republicans as "only" a commutation of Libby's prison term, anyone with half a brain can figure out the rest of the story. Libby won't pay a dime of the $250,000 fine. The Daily Kos, which calls it "pardon on the installment plan," reports that rightwing conservatives have already donated $5 million to the Libby Defense Fund. The full pardon, erasing the felonies from Libby's record, will come the day Bush leaves office. Meanwhile, any pressure on Libby to provide information on Dick Cheney's role in Plamegate is gone.

Liberals of a certain age will recall the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" on Oct. 20, 1973, in which President Richard M. Nixon, with the flames of Watergate licking at his feet, set in motion the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Cox had insisted that Nixon turn over certain of the Watergate tapes. Nixon refused, and tried to broker a compromise in which the tapes would be heard only by aging Democratic Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi, who was still recovering from near-fatal gunshot wounds in a mugging and was hard of hearing to boot. Cox rejected the compromise and demanded the tapes. The next day, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliott Richardson and then Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. They refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork (yes, THAT Robert Bork) to fire Cox, and he happily complied. Thank God he was kept off the Supreme Court. The uproar turned many moderate and even conservative Republicans against Nixon, although he would hang on until the following August, when he resigned in disgrace.

It is a sign of how jaded the nation has become that the Libby pardon so far hasn't caused Republicans to run for the door. Mitt "Flip-flop" Romney even called it the "right thing to do." Romney knows he needs the far right vote to have any chance of getting the nomination.

I used to think a Bush impeachment was unlikely or even unwise, since it would give us Cheney as president. But things have changed so much that I don't completely rule out an attempt to impeach both of them.

Posted by David at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)