While I don’t do it often, I occasionally write to my representatives voicing my opinions on the issues. I don’t want to be the creepy weirdo that writes them once a week about how the networks are beaming gamma rays into my house at night, but I voice my opinion when I think it is important. In the past years, I think I have written them on mountain top mining and the General Patraeus/MoveOn.org embarrassment. I even published Tester’s response letter here, where I noted how impressed I was with the thought, time and energy someone had put into the letter. It really addressed the issue and several of the topics that I had mentioned. While it may have been a form letter, it actually felt more like someone had taken the time to customize the talking points in response to what I had said. Even if it was strictly form mail, I left the experience with the feeling that my voice had been heard and considered. I have had similar experiences with responses from Baucus.

Tonight I saw a curious subject line in my inbox. It said “Reply from Congressman Denny Rehberg”, which was more than enough to pique my interest. I clicked. Here is what I found:

November 29, 2007
-
Shane Mason
XXX Some Street
Helena, Montana 59602
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Dear Shane :
-
Thank you for contacting my office. I appreciate you taking the time to
bring your concerns and suggestions to my attention. The best
information I receive comes directly from constituents in Montana .
-
Should you have any further comments , questions or problems in dealing
with any aspect of the federal government, please feel free to call me.
My toll free number is (888) 232-2626 and the Washington, D.C. office
number is (202) 225-3211.
-
Thanks again for contacting me. For further information or to sign up
for my e-newsletter, please visit my website at www.house.gov/rehberg .
Please keep in touch.
-
Sincerely,
Denny Rehberg
Montana’s Congressman

What did I contact him about? Wouldn’t know from the letter. I have contacted him twice without a response, but the last time was August 26th. Tester’s detailed response came 10 days later, Baucus in about two weeks, both directly addressing my points. Out of no where Rehberg’s office emails me to say that he appreciates me bringing up my [comment|question|problem] and that the best information he gets comes from Montana, yet he doesn’t take the time to address my [comment|question|problem]? I am not even sure if he is addressing this one, or one from years ago. Boy, I feel like my voice counts here.

Know what I think? I think that he was just emailing me to let me know that he knows where I live and how to find me. A shot across the bow, if you will. If I keep this blogging thing up, he might have the networks beam gamma rays into my house at night…

I recently read a piece at Open Left titled More Massive Bellyflops From The Republican Netroots. As you can imagine, it led to a discussion on why the right can not seem to generate real movements on line. Several good ideas were put forward in the comments, mostly centering around lack of creativity etc etc. We have discussed here and witnessed in the Montana blogosphere that the right seems to be adverse to community endeavors in general.

I personally believe that it has something to do with a bivalent view of the world. Black and white with no middle ground. That sort of discussion can only go so far before it becomes dittohead speak. Now, look at this post by Andy Hammond titled “Sustainability vs. Globalization” where he argues that ‘localization’ is a leftist strategy to lead our economy back to the middle ages. He prefaces an article quote with:

During the Middle Ages in Europe people lived sustainable lives. The kind of lives progressives want us to live.

And then the quoted text.

This era was emphatically one of localization: people consumed only locally grown foods and locally made clothing. All building materials were local. There were no highways, railways, or CO2-emitting engines to pollute the local atmosphere with greenhouse gases or with foreign goods and foreign ideas.
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But paradise had its price. Starvation was common, as was death by plague. Giving birth was more dangerous for women than a game of Russian Roulette. People lived in tiny one-room dirt-floor huts without indoor plumbing. During the winter, some of the farm animals (all local!) shared these accommodations.
-
What little «business» there was during the long era of localization - subsistence farming - might have been sustainable, but human dignity and human life certainly were not.

Does anyone believe for a second that this is what proponents of localization want? No. What we have here is just one of many fallacious arguments in Andy’s writing. Reductio ad absurdum, reducing the opponents argument to the most absurd outcome. We’ll come back to this, but first look how Andy ended the piece:

No thanks! Give me globalization with the Walmarts, Safeways, Best Buys, Costcos, Dillards, Macys, JC Penneys, with all their products from around the world!

Now, as David Crisp pointed out in the comments, Andy has set up a discussion where there are only two choices: globalization or dirt floor huts. This one is called ‘the excluded middle’. Andy does not ponder for one second if there are any possible benefits from an approach half way between the two. Is it possible that it is a stupid idea that Wal Mart import beef to sell in Montana? Does it not make more sense to sell Montana beef in Montana? Does it make any sense to truck bread half way across the country when we make plenty of bread right here in Montana? We ship locally produced products out and then ship others (or the same) right back in?

Andy does not consider this though. The main problem is that he really thinks that the left wants to destroy this country. Not that we see things a little differently, we want to destroy the country. You are either with him or against him. It is either his way or it must be evil. That is bivalent thinking. He knows that he is not evil, so any thoughts that are not the same as his must be evil. The excluded middle again.

To me, this is a horrible way to try and have a conversation or debate. It is a zero sum game for the other party, who starts with the assumption that both sides respect the other enough to understand that their motivations are good. Andy, on the other hand, starts the conversation with the assumption that if you disagree with his view on policy, you must be trying to destroy whatever the focal point of the discussion is. In this case, it was our economy and way of life. In other cases it is the troops, democracy, health care etc etc. The dialog breaks down almost immediately and the effort is a failure. That is why I think their are so many bellyflops in the republican netroots.

This one is a dinger and looks pretty damning. From Politico:

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone, the man has shifting values and shifting no values. The question is, if this does pan out as being what it looks likes, what are the ramifications? If we were past the primaries, I would say that Republican’s would back him until the bitter end. At this point though, it might be a different story. Why support a candidate that might wind up with an indictment pending during the general? Also, there is the cumulative effect of scandal upon scandal.

It looks like Verizon intends to open its network, allowing a greater choice of phone hardware. This isn’t a real win, but it is a step in the right direction. In short, it will decouple their phone software from the hardware. This is a good thing, if you have ever used a Verizon version of a phone and then the manufacture’s version, you will realize that you are getting a crippled phone though Verizon.

Speculation is that this comes under fear of the possibility of Google entering the phone marketplace in a big way. Chalk this up to a win for the ‘free market’.

Winston Smith! Man your station at the Ministry of Truth! The terrorists have sneaked propaganda into the history books claiming that it was President Bush who pushed for the war in 2002. We all know it was the ‘Democratic’ senate that pushed for the war! The truth has come down from brother Karl:

…the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. Rove, you see, did not think the war vote should be “political”.

Moreover, according to Rove, that “premature vote” led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors.

It is common knowledge that President Bush wanted to build a coalition and no politicize the war. We all know that he wanted to give the inspectors time to do their jobs but was pushed into war by the Democrat’ senate.

Winston. You missed one thing. This White house press release from September of 2002 titled “President Urges Congress to Pass Iraq Resolution Promptly“.

We realize there’s little time left in — before the Senate and the House goes home, but we’re optimistic a lot can get done before now and then. Congress must act now to pass a resolution which will hold Saddam Hussein to account for a decade of defiance.

Fix that, and also, change the math back to Karl’s math while you are at it.

Friday after thanks giving is called ‘Black Friday’. It is denoted as such due to the massive sales that will kick off the holiday shopping frenzy. Tonight I was watching my in-laws pouring over the inserts from the Helena IR with lists and highlighter pens and it set me to thinking on this sick tradition. Why does the Helena IR have a proclamation on the front page that this was the biggest paper of the year? Wasn’t there an election a few weeks ago? Aren’t we in a war that has cost more American lives this year than any other? Why does a Christmas sale the day after Thanksgiving warrant the largest edition of the year? Why is it called Black Friday?

The earliest uses of “Black Friday” refer to the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash) or other black days.

Additionally, the fact that people go out on that day and spend large volumes of money despite bleak economies. If you have ever been to Wal Mart or Target around the holiday season and paid any attention to the faces of people in the check out lines, you know what I mean. While household debt is increasing in this country at a rate bordering on exponential, we still spend. Why is this? Can this be healthy? It doesn’t feel like that is the right move.

The unemployment rate has remained low, at 4.5 percent. A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country — and I encourage you all to go shopping more.
-
George Bush December 20, 2006

Is this the right advice? At a time when we are supposedly trying to get off foreign oil and stop sending the bulk of the GDP to China, shouldn’t we be conserving? At a time when our household debt is increasing and our wages are decreasing compared to the cost of living, shouldn’t we be conserving?

Is this consumer-uber-alles nature good for our souls? We have an entire room at our house that is bigger than some inner city apartments dedicated entirely to plastic toys. Will adding more plastic crap to that room really add anything of substance to my children’s lives? Will it make them feel any more loved? Will it help to give them the confidence and assurance that they need to go out into the world and make a positive impact and live up to their real potential? If it wont, then what is the purpose of the negative impacts of our consumerist nature?

Sometimes I find myself in situations where I am faced with a problem in my work that must be solved. As a software engineer my entire job is to find solutions to problems, I imagine the same is true of all engineers. Most of the time I set about it in my normal way: I charge it head on and sink my teeth into it with everything I have. I stay up to all hours of the night and live on coffee and adrenalin, but somewhere from the depths of my handy gcc compiler, all the bits get lined up and the problem is solved.

Recently though, I have found myself banging my head against the wall to no avail. Day after day, night after night have been spent reordering bits to no avail. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Darkness descends as hope fades. Maybe there is no solution to the problem I was trying to solve. I will never know. I talked to the client today, and he told me a little secret. The bits didn’t need to do what I was trying to make them do. It turns out that I was trying to solve the wrong problem and the real problem was much much simpler. It took me a few minutes to solve the real problem and everyone will walk away very very happy. On a fixed price contract, it is just my time at stake. Who cares about that?

I focussed so hard on trying to solve the problem as I perceived it that I didn’t notice that it wasn’t the real problem at all. The real problem was simple and apparent. I wonder where else I can apply this? Ideas?

Happy thanksgiving to all of you. I hope that you have a wonderful day.

Motivated to prevent President Bush from making any recess appointments, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid has decided that, technically speaking, the Senate will stay in session over Thanksgiving.

The sessions are expected to last less than 30 seconds — the clerk will announce who the presiding officer is, and then that senator will gavel the session closed.

The Constitution gives a president the power to fill vacancies without the Senate’s confirmation when the legislative body is in recess. Such appointees can serve without confirmation through the rest of the current session of Congress, which ends in January 2009.

You might remember John Bolton, the U.S. UN Ambassador who was installed through a recess appointment despite wide criticism of his intents.  It seems that is exactly the kind of incident Reid is trying to avoid by resorting to this parliamentary tactic, a move he has put into play because he has been told Bush was planning some Thanksgiving recess appointments.

Reid said the Bush administration had informed him that several recess appointments would be made during the Thanksgiving break. At the same time, Reid said the White House has been unwilling to confirm nominations Democratic leaders have made to agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

I, for one, am happy to see Reid going this route.  We have been complaining for quite some time that Congress needed to step up and take back some of its place in the balance of powers, and this is exactly what Reid is attempting to do here.

I guess sometimes you have to play a little dirty.

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving Day and enjoys the company of friends and family. Speaking of family I want to share this with all of you here at Montana Netroots. Many of you know I am still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and Cancer but this is almost nothing when compared to my brother’s daughter. Please feel free to email her and thanks for your prayers and comments.

Ex-Husky battles hidden ailment

By GREG JOHNS
P-I REPORTER

Melissa Erickson used to dread the running. She was a big girl, a 6-foot-3 center, and tears would come to her eyes when former Huskies basketball coach June Daugherty pushed her body farther than she thought possible.

Oh, if only to feel that friendly pain again. Erickson is 29 now and her body aches once more, but for a far different reason. She’d give anything to be able to trudge through those old workouts, back when life and her legs were taken for granted.

	Former UW basketball player Melissa Erickson, 29, shown at Cal Anderson Park near her home on Capitol Hill, is suffering from muscular degeneration in her legs that has been difficult to diagnose. One doctor believes she has ALS and gave her 10 years to live.

When she tells friends her goal now is to run a half-marathon if she regains her health, they chuckle. Not because it seems unlikely that someone in an apparent fight with Lou Gehrig’s disease could journey 13 miles, but because it’s such an ironic carrot for the easy-going Erickson.

But nothing’s easy anymore.

Not walking around outside her Capitol Hill condo, where even the slightest upgrade makes footing treacherous for a young woman who already needs braces to support legs she says feel like cement.

Not standing in the bathroom, when the failure to set herself properly sometimes results in her balance giving way and leading to the awkward truth of a once-powerful athlete suddenly trying to un-turtle herself from the cold linoleum floor.

Not approaching each day with the wonder if that first doctor’s diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was correct and that she really does have only 10 years to live.

Her current physician, a Virginia Mason neurologist, believes she suffers from progressive muscular atrophy, a cousin of ALS since the illness hasn’t yet invaded her respiratory system and upper limbs. But Erickson continues searching.

Maybe the naturopath has it right, that she’s suffering from Lyme disease, which would be more treatable and thus provide more hope for recovery. Or the other naturopath, since discarded, who tried convincing her she’d been infected by a parasite while playing basketball overseas.

Sometimes Erickson just wants a name attached permanently to her problem so she can put the questions to rest. Sometimes she hates that any label is required, as if that really makes a difference. And sometimes she just acknowledges it probably is ALS, even while taking an assortment of foul-tasting concoctions and vitamins designed to rid her body of toxins that might fit with Lyme.

“I feel like I’m fighting shadows,” said Erickson, now working as a counselor at Echo Glen youth facility in Snoqualmie. “I get pulled this way and then they tell me something else. Just tell me what it is and let me do whatever it takes.”

Even if it’s the worst-case scenario?

“It’s a conundrum, but I think at this point I wouldn’t even care,” she said. “When I was told I had 10 years, I don’t think it can get any worse than that. But just when you think that, maybe it could.

“That was the lowest for me, but it’ll be a year this month I was told that. I’m sure the day will come up and I’ll be, hmm, I wonder if I do have nine years left now?”

She’s far too young to fret about that ticking clock. Far too fun to face this sort of pain. Far too strong to feel so vulnerable.

Friends and former UW teammates have rallied to her cause, helping form a Melissa Erickson Foundation (melissaerickson.org) that will hold a fundraiser Saturday night at Jabu’s Pub in Seattle from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., with a portion of all food and drink sales helping pay for medical treatment and support.

She’s happy for the help, but humbled at the same time. She hopes any extra money received eventually can be turned over to another cause once she gets better herself because, well, to think anything else would be giving in to a disease she’s not ready to fully adopt.

This all seems too sudden for a young woman who was playing professional basketball in Portugal just three years ago, when she first started noticing weakness in her legs.

At the time, Erickson figured she must be getting older and needed to train harder. Instead, she discovered after returning to the U.S. that something was attacking the muscles in her lower body.

Her hidden foe slowly stole her ability to play basketball, her lifelong crutch. Now she’s to the point where walking is difficult and going to the gym too painful for a whole different reason.

“I hate the reminder of what I once was,” she said.

But as the body weakens, the mind adapts. Perspectives shift. Focuses change.

“It’s made me think about each day as one day,” Erickson said. “Not one week or one year. Just each day. And I definitely don’t care what people think about me any more. I value my family and relationships so much now. Friendships are my medicine. They’re what heals me.”

In college, she was the Husky who often butted heads with authority. As a member of Daugherty’s first UW recruiting class in 1997, she was the one who didn’t work quite as hard, didn’t study quite as much, didn’t worry about staying out a little late.

“She was the one always getting into a little trouble,” said teammate Sarah Duncan, now an Everett attorney. “It was good trouble, not bad. You could always rely on Mo for a good laugh. She did well in school, but the rest of us were nerds, brainiacs, and Mo had more of a social life.

“I always enjoyed her as a teammate and we were close, but now as she’s going through this, we’ve grown to a maturity level where we love each other. It’s amazing how the whole class has pulled together.”

When Erickson was first given 10 years to live, she collapsed on her bed in an apartment she then shared with former teammate Kirsten Brockman, older sister of UW men’s standout Jon Brockman.

It was a rugged first year of acceptance and denial; the fight both physical and mental.

	Melissa Erickson calls for a loose ball recovered by Huskies teammate LeAnne Sheets in a 2001 home game against USC.

“Kirsten has always been a person with such positive strength,” Erickson said. “Whenever the devil in the back of my head was saying, ‘Give up, it’s hopeless,’ I had her as my angel on the other shoulder saying, ‘You are not a quitter. You’ve never quit before. Don’t quit now.’

“I’ve got lots of angels around me.”

Her mom and dad recently moved to Duvall from their longtime home in Colorado. Her older sister works at Echo Glen with her. Teammates and friends keep her going, even though she no longer parties like old times because alcohol slows her already-sluggish body.

She admits to slipping toward depression at times, but a two-week treatment program at Sanoviv Medical Institute in Mexico in September bolstered her outlook. Duncan, her pragmatic former teammate, said Erickson tended to get down on herself as an athlete, but has been much more positive as a patient.

“I think I’d have broken down a long time ago and said I can’t take this,” Duncan said. “I’ve never seen that with Mo. This has been a real gut check for her and she’s handling it better than anybody I can imagine.”

Erickson, who missed much of her senior seasons both in high school and college with knee injuries, draws on her athletic background for strength. She remembers playing basketball, trailing by 15 points, but knowing a couple of buckets, a forced turnover or two and suddenly momentum has shifted back.

She’s looking for that positive flow now, hoping that good days will lead to more. Thinking the chiropractic treatments and naturopathic medicines might ignite a breakthrough. Figuring there’s nothing to lose when the alternative is watching your body slowly give way.

But reality is harsh and Erickson finds herself accepting things now that seemed intolerable before, like the handicapped-parking pass in her car and the need to lean on friends for comfort and care.

She falls more now, losing balance and pride at the worst possible times.

“I feel like one of those ladies with the beeper on saying, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ ” she said with a wry laugh. “It’s been such a humbling experience. Being as independent as I always have been and now always having to ask for help? It sucks.

“This has definitely been a teeter-totter of a battle that I never, ever thought I’d have in my life. It left me in shock, the normal ‘why me?’ and “what’s going on?’ stuff. There are no answers for that.

“But you know what?” she said. “I’ve always thought there are miracles out there. And I think I’m going to get one of them.”

If she does, there’s a half-marathon in her future. But regardless, Melissa Erickson has come to one realization.

For her, life now is about putting one foot ahead of the other. One step at a time. Surrounded by friends to help catch her if she falls.

HOW TO HELP

WHAT: Melissa Erickson fundraiser; a percentage of proceeds from food and drink purchases goes to the Melissa Erickson Foundation.

WHEN/WHERE: Saturday, 5 p.m.-2 a.m., Jabu’s Pub, Lower Queen Anne, 174 Roy St., Seattle

ALSO: Donations accepted at Melissa Erickson Foundation, c/o Sarah Duncan, Adams, Johnson & Duncan, Inc., 3128 Colby Ave., Everett WA 98201, or visit melissaerickson.org

Over in the comments at Rebels Are We, a little conversation started up between myself and Mike of The Last Best Place.  Essentially, this conversation centered around Mike’s belief that we should return the ‘abortion decision’ to the states via the elimination of the Roe vs Wade precedent.

If the people of Montana are in favor of abortion, put it to a vote. The same goes in Alabama and elsewhere. Will it ultimately create a a patchwork of laws nationwide? Sure it will, but we forget that we’re already a patchwork of 50 individual states , 13 of which existed essentially as sovereign governments until 1787. If we’ve already agreed upon the notion that Montana values are not New York or California or Mississippi values why pretend otherwise?

I disagreed, saying that passing the buck 50 times doesn’t move us any closer to reaching agreement or solving any of the problems associated with abortions.  I did, and still do, contend that in places where abortion has been made illegal, there has been no noticeable change in the number of abortions performed.  However, this isn’t quite the point I want to bring up here.  Mike made an interesting claim when he said “Sure it will, but we forget that we’re already a patchwork of 50 individual states”, because Mike Huckabee touched upon that exact subject when he spoke of abortion recently:

“It’s the logic of the Civil War,” Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. “If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

While I don’t agree with Huckabee’s specific position on abortion, I do agree that taking a controversial issue and splitting into 50 controversial decisions isn’t helpful, no matter how local those decisions might be.  Especially because most pro-choice advocates believe this is a Constitutional issue (whether or not you agree with their interpretation), it doesn’t just work to hand it off to the states.  However, I do at least understand the desire to allow the appeal of approaching these issues from a federalist standpoint; letting smaller units make their own decisions is more likely to make people happy.

Which is why I wanted to bring the question here.  Despite the appeal, and possible utilitarian nature, of shifting decisions such as abortion to the individual states, does it just create more problems allowing 50 possible interpretations and stances of moral issues such as this?

After listening to the Democratic debate in Nevada for the 5th time, I came away with the final line up for the Democrat’s party ticket. What is it? Clinton & Biden. Both of these individuals are aligned in their positions and both would make a ticket that would defeat ANY Republican ticket nominees.

Think not? Well only time will tell.

I find it amusing in a way, a sick sort of way, that the recent Democratic debate from Nevada was sponsored by the so-called ‘clean coal industry’.

It reminds me of the debates in 2000. As soon as the Republicans and the Democrats hammered out a set of ground rules for the debates that effectively removed Ralph Nader and the Green Party from the picture, bingo. Up stepped Budweiser to bring them right into our living rooms.

So here we have it again. The latest round of contenders ‘brought to you by’ a corporate sponsor who knows it has little to fear from this bunch. Can anyone say sporting event?

A nod to Craig for pointing this out, but Bill Kennedy, due to health concerns, will not be running against Denny Rehberg for Montana’s lone House seat.

Is there a chance for Democrats to field another suitable challenger?  I doubt it.  Kennedy had a good combination of qualities that gave him a chance, and even that chance was looking slim.

What is the famous line? Something like “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me, fool me, can’t get fooled again”. I want to expand on a post Colby had here about claims that the surge is working and we should just stay the course:

Yes, this leadership has inspired confidence.