One of my professors in graduate school was an elderly lady who the students all thought was losing it. She would regularly show up at school with laundry tags still attached to her clothes and I think sometimes the kinder students would help her fasten her buttons correctly. One morning she showed up with a copy of the National Enquirer. When asked why she had a newspaper of such questionable accuracy and quality she replied: " You should all read this". We were stunned. Even we knew that stories such as "Man Marries Cow" and "Saddam Hussein and Elvis in Love Tryst" were fabrications. We figured this was final proof that our professor had indeed reached her expiration date and prepared to notify the Dean. Then she added: "The National Enquirer is the most widely read newspaper in the country. More people get their news from this paper than any other source. If you don't read it, you will miss what most of the country is concerned with." I now know this professor was a valuable source of wisdom as well as technical knowledge and wrote down most of what she said for the remainder of the semester. Although this was in the day before the Internet and CNN, I believe her admonition about the Enquirer holds true in a slightly altered version today. It also explains why the health care debate becomes so heated so quickly and why we have not yet been able to reach consensus. Most people need information in clear and simple terms and become easily overwhelmed if these requirements are not met. Our Republican politicians are taking advantage of this and causing serious damage to the efforts to solve this very complicated problem.Instead of trying to provide clear and simple information to their constituents so they can participate in the debate in an intelligent and informed manner, they are using the media to confuse and confound the American public and do their best to bring the project to a halt.

A few nights ago I watched CNN and saw the Representative from Iowa's 5th District, Steve King present information on the health care debate. He utilized a large poster size version of what he claims is the Democrat's organizational chart of the proposed health care plan. Rep. King, a Republican, failed to mention that this chart is based in large part on a joke chart that came out in the early 1990's to illustrate some of the difficulties of health care reform. It is obviously overly complicated and was intended as a joke from the beginning, something Rep King either failed to understand or deliberately chose to misunderstand in his representation on the floor of the House and on national television. This is an excellent example of irresponsibility on the part of a politician in the health care debate. Any rational person seeing this presentation would immediately conclude that the plan is too complicated and therefore fatally flawed. In addition, Rep King was throwing out statistics about how many more people die of cancer in other countries that have implemented similar health care programs. It is doubtful if this data is at all accurate and Rep King did not reveal any sources (if there are any other than his own imagination). It is this type of irresponsibility that will undermine the health care reform initiative and leave the American people once again in the quandary we currently face. We need to stop politicizing the issue and rally together to solve the problem, not complicate it further and confuse the American public who needs clear and concise information to make some very important decisions.

We are so in trouble...

This from the Exec of a metro area human service agency: "Legislators have commented that they are receiving more phone calls about funding for the state’s zoos than they have about funding for human services. "