Santorum, Risky Parenting, Heresy, and the Quran

Rick Santorum thinks President Obama is a snob for wanting Americans to go to college.



Santorum wants to create jobs so that people can remake their children in their own image.  While you do want your children to adopt your positive characteristics, everyone knows that trying to make your children grow up to fit some ideal persona that you have in mind for them can be disastrous.  For all of Santorum's questioning of the President's theology, what he just said is heresy.  Our children are made in God's image, not our own.


As for the violence over the military's destruction of the Quran, were these rare collectors' special edition Qurans or something? We apologized.  They do have more copies left, right?  I'm going to need the Afghans to simmer. 

The Definition of Class Warfare

Like After Katrina, Outside Folks Getting the Disaster Contracts

The fine folk over at The Lens informed the citizenry today that "Gulf Coast states lag behind other states in getting contracts for oil disaster work." Only 12% of the $53.3 million in federal oil-spill related contracts have gone to Louisiana companies. Most of the rest of that has been contracted to companies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Colorado -- not to other Gulf Coast states suffering the direct environmental and socioeconomic consequences of this disaster.

People in other states need work too, and it seems quite plausible to me that some of corporations best able to execute the particular terms of some contracts are not Gulf Coast business. Maybe many Gulf Coast businesses were already at full capacity due to having already received state or local contracts or contracts directly from BP to do disaster-related work.

My point is I just don't know enough about the details to know whether we're getting shafted down here in the federal contracting game for this disaster. I do know, based on past experience, that we need to dig deeper into this before it becomes like the Katrina recovery in which local workers were brazenly left out of the citizen driven recovery we were promised. That is, if it's not too late. I blogged about it on 9/16/2006, and I'm going to be quite pissed if this sort of thing is happening again...

The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same "contract vehicles" in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" open-ended "contingency" contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also "cost-plus" contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend. [Corpwatch.org, 8/17/2006]

...and we were supposed to have learned our lesson so that our federal government could protect us from shady contract deals.

I hope that last part didn't make you laugh TOO HARD.

Physician, Heal Thy Profession

I just stumbled upon this link: When Doctors Kill Themselves.

The unsettling truth is that doctors have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. Every year, between 300 and 400 physicians take their own lives—roughly one a day. And, in sharp contrast to the general population, where male suicides outnumber female suicides four to one, the suicide rate among male and female doctors is the same. (Newsweek)

Interestingly, it was written in April 2008 and not at all in response to the Ft. Hood incident yesterday. It reminded me of my thoughts from earlier today while listening to WWL talk radio. I guess because the gunman hadn't been deployed yet, it didn't occur to the callers or the host that occupational stress might have played a role -- at least not during the 45 mins. of the show that I heard.

There are obviously other factors involved (so do not go the hell off in my comments section about me being a "liberal/socialist" apologist for terrorists who hate America, or about Muslims, or tea bags, or big government, or whatever), but as a mental health professional, my first reaction was to wonder what stress military psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as civilian ones working for the VA, must be under. It's no secret that the soldiers returning from war have experienced serious psychiatric illnesses, and that the VA system is stretched very thin right now and, by extension, so are the doctors.

I wouldn't be surprised if being a doctor played a significant role in leading this psychiatrist to such a low point in his life. Physician suicide vs. going the hell off and killing others are two different things, but the two scenarios share some of the same causes.

Article on physician suicide:

they worry—not without reason—that if they admit to a mental-health problem they could lose respect, referrals, income and even their licenses...

...physicians are supposed to be the strong ones who care for the sick, not the sick ones who need to be cared for. "I did not want it to go on my medical record that I had been treated for depression," says Dr. Robert Lehmberg, 60, whose moving account of his struggle with the condition—and the stigma it carries.

Article on the Ft. Hood shooting:

The consensus at Walter Reed, Casscells said, was that Hasan was sent to Fort Hood for "a fresh start" after a difficult time at the medical center.

Hasan received a poor performance evaluation there, the Associated Press reported, quoting an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. While he was an intern, Hasan had some "difficulties" that required counseling and extra supervision, according to Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time...

...The military will look at all this closely and decide if there is any mental or physical illness, whether this is just a lonely guy with a remote personality who got a bad officer evaluation report and lost the confidence of his peers...

...Our focus was on the doctors to dig deep and do all they can for these guys (troops) and to have one of our own do this is personally crushing.

Healthcare providers, especially doctors, are supposed to "push through it" and perform perfectly no matter what is going on, an expectation that's hard to argue with since they're responsible for human lives. Still, at a certain point and with enough pressure, something's gotta give.

U.N. Has New All-Female Peacekeeping Unit

Click on the title of this post to see a BBC news story about this all-female unit.

I just thought this was an interesting story. Folks are hoping that one result of their presence will be a decrease in the exploitation of women and girls in Liberia, where they are now deployed. I hope so.