Where's the Outrage?

This morning I attended the Yom Kippur service at Houston Hillel. Houston Hillel serves Jewish college students throughout the Houston area. The Rabbi is Kenny Weiss.

I am not Jewish. My wife is Jewish.

Yom Kippur is the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement.  It is seen as the most important day on the Jewish calender. Jewish folks, such as the wife, fast on Yom Kippur. I had clam chowder for lunch.

When I arrived at the service I was handed a book. I love to read. The book was called a machzor. This is a special prayer book for high Jewish holidays.

At one point were were told to stand and to read silently a 26 page section of the book. That’s my kind of service.

There was plenty of singing at the service. A young woman cantor sang prayers from the machzor in Hebrew. I was not always able to follow where in the book she was singing from, but I did feel I was getting the drift.   

The room the service was conducted in had a big window and was full of light.  

There were both many college students and elderly folks at the service. This mix was good as it spoke to the future and to the importance of the past. It spoke of the ability of the Jewish faith to draw new people and remain relevant for entire lifetimes.

The text of the machzor asked me to confess of the misdeeds I have committed in the past year and to learn from these errors for the year ahead. I am a misdeed a day type of person so I found the words to be relevant.

Nobody asked me if I were Jewish or not. Nobody seemed annoyed by the small baby in the room who made a little noise at times. The Rabbi was both welcoming and clear that the service had meaning.

Good luck to my wife and to all Jewish folks in the year ahead. Good luck to all.

Here is some history of the Jewish religion.

Tags: Religion by Texas Liberal
View Comments

I’m not sure what will fix the Dow and the stock market in the short term. I think that we need to focus on jobs. McCain has no viable plan for the economy. His latest lame duck plan was to carve out what was already in the bailout package and call it his own. Isn’t that plagiarism? (Nope, it can’t be. McCain is too honorable to something like that.)

From WaPo:

Exactly one year after setting its all-time high, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted today, falling 7.3 percent to 8,579, the first time it has closed below 9,000 since June 2003.

The Dow’s loss of 679 points is the third-largest point loss for the index and the 11th-largest percentage loss. It was the seventh day in a row of losses on Wall Street as investor fears of the financial crisis intensified.

The Dow is now down more than 39 percent from its peak of 14,164.53 set Oct. 9, 2007.

The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 7.6 percent, about 75 points, at 910. The Nasdaq was down 5.5 percent, 95 points, at 1,645, despite better-than-expected earning from International Business Machines, which buoyed the index earlier today. (more… )

Tags: Economy by ecthompson
View Comments

Blogger Interrupted did a great job asking questions at a Palin rally. One person said that she thought Barack Obama was a terrorist. Really? Why isn’t he being arrested then? Another person said that she had heard of Sarah Palin for the first time about a month and a half ago. She first learned of Barack Obama over a year ago. She says she thinks she knows more about Sarah Palin than she does about Barack Obama, since Palin has done more interviews. What? This is the craziness that is out there, folks. If there was ever a reason to push harder, this video is it.

C&L has more.

Tags: Election 2008, Party Politics by ecthompson
Comments Off

Understand that John McCain is desperate. Also understand that Sarah Palin doesn’t know any better. The second presidential debate starts in less than an hour. Barack Obama needs to address America, reminding us that we are a passionate people. These are confusing and difficult times. Politicians must be aware that their words can move people. Spreading lies and rumors is dangerous. They have to understand that spreading hatred will have consequences. Allowing their followers to yell epithets is unacceptable. People are going to get hurt. I mean seriously hurt. Someone is going to get killed. This is extremely important when people are so charged up that they yell terrorist and traitor. Soon terrorist and traitor will turn into nigger. I promise you it will happen. It must stop!

Barack Obama has to call on John McCain to reign in his campaign and focus on issues. He needs to do this tonight!

Ed posted this over at the Daily Kos:

The Secret Service is following up on media reports today that someone in the crowd at a McCain/Palin event suggested killing Barack Obama, according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley. The shout of “kill him” followed a Sarah Palin rant on Obama’s relationship with radical Chicagoan Bill Ayers.

I wrote about this, this morning on Huffington Post, after I had read far too many reports about the violent, racist shouts coming from McCain rallies, egged on by the rhetoric of “Barracuda.”

Certainly, I can’t say John McCain and Sarah Palin are responsible for the specific words that come out of some nutcase supporters.  However, I can and will blame them for setting the tenor here, and signaling what is and is not acceptable.

Let’s be clear – McCain and Palin are using some language that tells supporters that Barack Obama hates America, supports bombing America, thinks we are killers, that we should fear him because he views America like a terrorist would.  What’s a supporter supposed to think that Palin and McCain want to hear back?  ”Bully for him!  Huzzah!”?

No, it’s hate speech, as hateful as anything overt.  And it, not surprisingly, elicits a hateful, even violent, response.  Violence and hate directed at Barack Obama.

And if the McCain campaign wants to say this isn’t a big deal, I suggest that they contact the Secret Service, because the Secret Service is now treating the crowd reaction at McCain rallies to be a violent threat against a candidate for President of the United States.

Are you proud of your campaign, Senator McCain?

I agree 100%!

Tags: Election 2008, Race by ecthompson
View Comments

From NYT:

Question of the day: Why do more jobs get created when Democrats are president than when Republicans are in office?

The calculations that follow are for private sector employment, and incorporate the preliminary benchmark revisions announced today. (They subtracted 21,000 total jobs, and 61,000 private sector jobs, through March 2008. The fact those numbers were so low was one of the few bright spots in the September report.)

I ranked the presidencies since Truman in terms of compound average percent growth in private sector jobs, using seasonally adjusted employment figures.

Presidents get credit here for the job growth from the month they took office (January for those who were elected) to the month they leave office. The George W. Bush figures will of course change during the remainder of his term, but given the current recession and the probability that next year’s benchmark revision will also be negative, the final figures are likely to be even lower.

1. Johnson +3.6%
2. Carter +3.3%
3. Truman +2.7%
4. Clinton +2.6%
5. Reagan +2.3%
6. Nixon +2.1%
7. Kennedy +2.0%
8. Ford +0.9%
9. Eisenhower +0.5%
10. George H.W. Bush +0.41%
11. George W. Bush +0.35%

On average, that is a rate of 2.8 percent job growth for Democrats, and 1.1 percent for Republicans. The top four were Democrats, and the bottom four were Republicans. [Read more →]

Tags: Economy by ecthompson
View Comments

Thursday morning news Roundup

• John McCain’s campaign is looking vaguely familiar. I’ve seen this type of campaigning before…recently. It looks almost exactly like Hillary Clinton’s campaign in late April and May. The only difference is that Hillary Clinton actually found a message and John McCain has not. Yesterday, John McCain told Sean Hannity that Barack Obama “lacks the experience and the knowledge, and, more importantly, the judgment…” A 72-year-old man, who is looking older by the second, picks a running mate with zero experience and is trying to play the experience card. Maybe you can explain it.
• Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, points out some of the confusing messages that Sarah Palin has been spewing on the campaign trail.
• There was an interesting article published a couple days ago about Sen. John McCain’s days as an aviator. It seems that there are some questions about his judgment. The senator had three crashes early in his career before he was shot down over Vietnam. Questionable judgment. Hmmm..!
• David Brooks, conservative columnist of the New York Times, called Sarah Palin a conservative cancer.
• In spite of AIG executives spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the St. Regis Hotel, the $85 billion lthat we lent AIG was not enough. The Federal Reserve has just handed out another $38 billion in cash.
• Last night, John McCain repeated his claim that he knows how to get Osama bin Laden. If this is true, why hasn’t he told anyone? He says he knows how to fix government spending, yet I haven’t seen any plan. Is he going to make this stuff up with pixie dust?

Tags: Economy, Election 2008 by ecthompson
View Comments

On September 20, Mike Herrera checked into the waiting room at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas (the same hospital that Kennedy was brought to when he was shot). He was complaining of a stabbing sensation in his abdomen. The man collapsed 19 hours after he first checked in. Medical staff rushed to help Herrera but it was too late. He died.

As a physician, let me say that my heart goes out to Mr. Herrera’s family and friends. It should never happen. There is simply no adequate excuse.

Having trained at Parkland Hospital, I can say without a doubt that the staff is as caring and knowledgeable as any in the United States. The problem here is resources. Parkland has one of the busiest emergency rooms in the country. There is nowhere to put all of the patients. Every treatment room is full. There are stretchers with patients on them in the hallways of the ER. Doctors and nurses and physician assistants are seeing patients as fast as they can. To make matters worse, the rest of the hospital is usually full, too. Therefore, it is possible to admit a patient to the ER and for that patient to remain in the ER for several hours to several days because there is no bed availability in the rest of the hospital. This is of little consolation to the Herrera family but it is a fact. In my opinion, any patient that has waited more than 2 hours has waited too long.

The problem with indigent care in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and many other major cities is that it is overwhelming. We can point fingers at the large immigrant population. We can blame the economy. We can blame a healthcare system that has decreased reimbursement to hospitals every year for the past 15-20 years so it is much more difficult to expand when there is very little money for expansion.

Parkland Memorial Hospital is a county hospital. Although it has expanded over the last 20 years, it has not kept pace with the population of Dallas County. This is a problem that no one really wants to address. If you’re a city councilman, where would you spend the city’s money? You can build satellite hospitals in the poor areas of Dallas or you could build parks and paved roads in the rich areas of Dallas. Granted, my analogy is not entirely fair but it isn’t entirely wrong either. There is little political will to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a hospital that takes care of poor people.

This is a serious problem with the national discussion on health care. No one is talking about building more hospitals. We need more doctors and we need tens of thousands more nurses. We need more respiratory therapists and occupational therapists. We need more healthcare personnel. How do we do this? Where is the money going to come from? This is something that we need to be talking about so that we never again hear about a patient who is was in the ER for 19 hours.

Tags: Healthcare by ecthompson
View Comments

Jon Stewart points out what you and I already know. John McCain did a belly flop. He looked old and slow and had nothing new to say. Barack Obama was forceful but polite.

Tags: Election 2008, The Daily Show by ecthompson
View Comments

Senator John McCain in spite of his rhetoric isn’t behind vets. This is an ad from Vote Vets.

Tags: Election 2008, Military by ecthompson
View Comments