Well, society is doing it to itself again. Let’s legalize suicide. That is all the initiative is for, actually, that and to cover the physicians who prescribe the drugs. But before you get on a high horse, please read further.

There is an initiative on the ballot this year in Washington State, WA I-1000, “Death With Dignity” Act. There have been many, many comments flying around, including who lied about what, who said what, etc. That is all politics of course and rhetoric by people who have not taken the time to read and think about this Act. The Act is allegedly ”similar” to the Oregon initiative that passed in 1997. In a nutshell, it allows people who are diagnosed with 6 months or less to live to get a lethal prescription from a doctor to end their lives. There is more to it, but I am not here to debate the fine legalities of the law, what it specifically says or does, or any of the rest of that.

No, I am here to talk about the issues everyone else has ignored.

From my understanding, a 58 year old man, mentally competent, diagnosed with 6 months left to live can go to his doctor, and in a matter of weeks, get a prescription that when taken, will end a life. Now here is where it starts getting a little hazy.

That same man, a day after he gets the prescription, decides he doesn’t want to do this. So he takes the medicine and puts it in his medicine cabinet, thinking he will do something with it later. We all do that, put prescription medicine in the medicine cabinet, most of which sits in there for years. Go ahead, check it out - how much of that stuff is really, really old?

Anyway, the medicine is now there, available to anyone who has access to the medicine cabinet. Oh, but he can’t do that you say. Sure he can. After all, there is no controls over what happens to the medicine itself once it is prescribed. The State supposedly will track who got the medicine, who issued the prescription and possibly when it was used, as reported, but nothing about where it is stored during the meantime.

Have you seen the TV commerical about the drug dealer standing on the corner complaining that all the drug users are getting their drugs out of medicine cabinets so therefore he is losing business? That was something I thought of when I read this Act.  No control over the medicine after it is prescribed, just like any other medication.

Let’s see. The same 58 year old man is home, is not one of those who can afford hospice care, so he is pretty much on his own during the day because his spouse is out there working to try and cover at least part of the horrendous amount of medical bills that keep piling up. Now, when he was prescribed the medication, he was determined not to be suffering from depression - supposedly one rule of the Act. Today, however, he gets really depressed and also gets angry. He sees all of the bills, can not do half of what he used to be able to do, never mind that age might have something to do with it. He then remembers the medicine, goes to the bathroom and takes it because he is just plain fed up with it all.

His spouse comes home to a corpse. No previous knowledge of the medication, so she has no idea what has happened to her spouse. Oh, did I forget to mention? Under the Act, NO family member is required to be told about this 58-year old man going and getting this prescription. So his wife does not know.

Can you imagine the shock and the anger of the wife? Shocked because he simply did not trust her enough to confide in her. Angry because she is busting her tail to try and make enough money to support the spouse she dearly loves and wants around for as long as possible, even (or especially) knowing time is short?

People get tired of things, sometimes to the breaking point. I am tired of high prices at the grocery store, tired of high gas prices, tired of seeing my savings go down the drain because of the economy. Does that mean I am depressed? No, more like tired and disgusted. And I am sure I am not the only one.

People do stupid things when they are angry. I don’t think I even have to touch that one.

And for those of you interested in actual figures, here is something for you:

In Oregon, during 2007, 85 prescriptions for lethal medications were written under the provisions of the DWDA by 45 physicians (an average of 2 per physician) compared to 65 during 2006. Of these, 46 patients took the medications, 26 died of their underlying disease, and 13 were alive at the end of 2007. In addition, three patients with earlier prescriptions died from taking the medications, resulting in a total of 49 DWDA deaths during 2007. This corresponds to an estimated 15.6 DWDA deaths per 10,000 total deaths.

Under my thinking then, what happened to the medications from the 26 who died of their underlying disease? Or the 13 who were still alive at the end of 2007? Probably in the medicine cabinet, available to anyone with access to the medicine cabinet.

My points are this: There appears to be no control over the medication or the person once the meds are prescribed. You can’t control what someone does every day and not all terminally ill people are invalids - some walk, talk, and run just like you and me. The lack of controls is what makes this Act dangerous, regardless of the intent. Forget all religious and ethical concerns - this puts a lot more people than just that person in jeopardy.

And by the way, don’t tell me that “I knew someone who died a horrible death and I KNOW they would have used I-1000 if it had been available”. Get a clue. I can think of at least a hundred different methods of committing suicide if you really feel that way. You do NOT know unless they told you. And if they told you, they were asking for your help.

And one last point to think about. There are a lot of Powers of Attorney and Living Wills out there. Do they give the holder the right to get the prescription for you and help you with it? I’ll bet someone tries….

Death With Dignity Act? More like Death With Non-Liability Act.

Ever wonder how much stuff $700 Billion can buy?  According to the Florida Sun-Sentinel, you could buy:

• Gasoline for a year for every adult in America. (175 billion gallons of gas)
• You could literally buy the world a Coke. One 2-liter bottle per week for a year.
• You could buy a 60-inch HDTV for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
• Sounds like Monopoly money? It should. You could buy 10 Monopoly games for each of the 6.7 billion human beings on planet earth.
• You could buy all 32 NFL teams - 27 times.
• You could buy 7 Mac laptops for every school-age child in U.S.
• You could buy 2 mountain bikes for everyone in China
• You could buy 438 pounds of rice for every single person in Africa.
• You could buy a Caribbean Island for every single person in the state of South Dakota.

Short version:  unimpressed.  Neither candidate won.  It was boring, the questions were insipid, Brokaw’s follow-ups were lame, and Obama kept whining and trying to have the last word, even when, by the debate format, McCain should have had it. 

McCain’s first major point — that the government should buy up mortgages.  Why, after one unpopular bailout that nearly ruined his campaign, does McCain propose another one?  The proposal directs the Treasury Secrety to “purchase mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage servicers” and replace them with manageable, fixed-rate mortgage that will keep families in their homes.  The new mortgage would be an FHA guaranteed fixed-rate mortgage.  The cost?  About $300 billion because the purchase of mortgages would relieve homeowners of “negative equity” in some homes.   I’m not sure if that $300 billion is on top of the trillion dollars the US taxpayer is already on the hook for, or not. 

Not that it matters, really.  Me, my son, and my grandchildren will all be dead and buried before this gets paid off.  McCain thinks that house prices need to be stabilized by government mandate.  Why?  Why is it the government’s duty to keep people in their overpriced homes? Why should the government discriminate against non home owners by helping establish home prices that are outside the range of many if not most people who work near where the homes are located? 

And while we’re at it, what about my husband’s stamp collection?  Some years ago the bottom dropped out of his stamp collecting hobby as values dropped. Well, nobody came to bail him out, to buy his stamp collection from him, to pay off any loans he might have made to buy stamps, to make up for the weak market for stamps, to pay him back the money he lost from buying overpriced stamps from dealers who misrepresented them.  After all, it’s not faaaaaaaaair that only irresponsible HOMEOWNERS get bailed out.  All irresponsibilities should be bailed out.  (okay, enough sarcasm.)

If the government insists on sticking its nose in our business, I have a much simpler solution.    Keep the morgage the same. Freeze the interest rate as it is and instead of a 30 year morgage extend it out to 40 or 50 years. That would lower payments and enable people WHO WANT TO Keep their houses to do so.  Simple.

From the AP, news on just how bad the economy is and why we needed the bailout… right?

In an abrupt change of course, Wachovia Corp. said Friday it agreed to be acquired by Wells Fargo & Co. in a $15.1 billion all-stock deal, wiping out Wachovia’s previous plan to sell its banking operations to rival suitor Citigroup Inc.

A key difference is that the Wachovia deal will be done without government assistance, while the Citigroup deal would have been done with the help of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (emphasis added) …

But the failure of the government’s proposed $700 billion bailout for financial institutions Monday afternoon cast doubt on whether Citigroup would be able to rid itself of some of Wachovia’s bad debt.

While the proposal would have prevented most banks from profiting on the sale of troubled assets to the government, an exception would have been made for assets acquired in a merger or buyout.

That would have allowed Citigroup to sell Wachovia’s distressed mortgage-related assets to the government for a profit. (emphasis added)

We can’t have that!  Making a profit on government handouts is something everyone is entitled to.  Besides, Citibank had a deal to buy them with Government loan guarantees! How dare Wells Fargo offer to buy them completely devoid of them!

That might make people think perhaps, just perhaps, the bailout wasn’t as desperately needed as expressed.

How dare there be a deal that requires not one penny of taxpayer money and drives the stock price of the bank being purchased up almost 60%!

Hopefully the Federal Government will act to force Wachovia to accept the taxpayer-backed Citibank purchase.

Note the financials of the suiters and target:

Citigroup has not turned a profit for three straight quarters, and lost a total of $17.4 billion in that period after writing down its assets by about $46 billion. That’s the most write-downs of any U.S. bank.

While Wells Fargo has logged three straight quarters of profit declines, the bank has been weathering one of the nation’s worst credit crises much better than most of its competitors, in part because it had less exposure to the subprime mortgages whose failure undermined the financial sector. …

Wachovia shares rose $2.30, or 58.8 percent, to close Friday at $6.21. Wells shares slipped 60 cents to $34.56, and Citigroup shares dropped $4.15, or 18.4 percent, to $18.35.

So the conservative bank that followed sound banking principles shouldn’t be allowed to buy Wachovia, but the bank that’s been hemorrhaging cash and needs a government-backed loan should.

Got it.

After the last 18 months of mind-numbing politics, it is hard to really get motivated for any one candidate nowadays. I have a pretty good idea at this point, as I did about 6 months ago, who I would vote for, so it is almost a moot point.

So I casually read articles about the speeches, debates, and blogs about the two presidential candidates. And of course, all of the emails going around about this one or that one. Having read several articles, something caught my attention that deserves some comment.

With all of the hype about the “bailout” that the House and Senate has passed, and the President has signed, I was curious exactly how both candidates voted. Both voted for the bailout. I have read some on the bailout but as is usually the case, there are little specific details, you know, those specific details that really matter to us working class. I have yet to find what part of the bailout is actually going to help the general population, not just specific groups, (or “classes of people”, as some media have described groups).

Mr. Obama attended a rally at the University of Mary Washington located in Fredericksburg, Virginia on September 26, 2008. It was estimated that 26,000 attended the rally. This was also the rally where Mr. Obama’s campaign forbade the use of any signs, citing “security”, dampening First Amendment rights.

Per CHELYEN DAVIS of Fredericksburg.com, as related to Mr. Obama:

(Quote) Obama said he will push for economic policies that benefit average Americans, instead of corporations or the rich. He proposes a tax plan he said will reduce taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and also touched briefly on plans to raise teacher pay, make college more affordable, and provide health care for everyone. “We need a president who will change this economy so it finally works for your family,”

Obama said. “We need a president who will fight for the middle class every single day.” He spoke also of President George Bush’s proposal to use $700 billion in government money to help bail out troubled financial institutions. Obama said he will not support a “blank check” for banks, nor vote for a bailout package that has no conditions or oversight. “If the American people are being asked to provide a solution you’vegot a right to make sure your tax dollars are protected,” Obama said. He also said the plan must include provisions to help homeowners, and not contain excessive compensation for CEOs.

“I will not allow this plan to become a welfare [plan] for Wall Street executives,” he said.” Obama said McCain has long been supportive of deregulation and other policies that helped lead to the crisis. “Unlike Senator McCain, it doesn’t take a crisis on Wall Street for me to understand folks are hurting,” he said. (Unquote)

Now anyone who knows anything about the origins of “deregulation”, and some of the other such things the government has passed, this all started during the Carter administration and then just sort of ran downhill from there. (That is where the origins of the current financial mess was born). From what I have been able to determine, most of the time, it was a Democratic-led Congress who voted for and passed a great number of these changes in regulations, like deregulation of airlines, for an example. And you see what happened there - they charge for everything, almost to an extreme.

And the Democratic-majority Congress just passed the bailout. So I am confused. How is it that the President and “his Republican backers” managed to skip around the Democratic-majority Congress to get all of this mess set up? From my understanding, it takes the Congress to vote on these things. and they have been doing that for a long time.

No matter how you look at it, the President can ask for anything he wants, but it is the Congress who has to approve it. So if blame has to be placed, or fingers have to be pointed, which has been happening alot, then the Congress needs to look at their own house, (no pun intended), to see what has been happening.

If you really want to know who is responsible, even for the bailout, check out who voted for and who voted against the bailout. I think if you look at the numbers, in comparison to the total “Representatives”, more Republicans voted AGAINST the bailout, and MORE Democrats voted FOR the bailout.

So bottom line? Congress is pushing the things that Congress has pushed in the past and will continue to do so in the future.  Doesn’t really matter who the President is, now does it?

So I am going to vote based upon my own criteria, not who is Democrat or Republican. But trust me - I WILL vote.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Just for political purposes only, you know, to look good to their districts, the House passed a bunch of stuff that is really not worth the effort since the Senate is in recess already so will not be voting on any of it into law this year. You know, all the stuff “for the people”?