The Respectfully Republican Conversation

Moody, as Rosemary said, is there some research we can do for you? I do not understand why they cannot feed her intravenously? Can't they give her something besides sugar water? My nephew had a brain tumor on his pituitary. Fortunately, most childhood brain tumors are supposedly benign and indeed he survived the surgery and is now fine. We are praying that her doctors can come up with a solution. Maybe it is time to demand that they fly her to a better hospital?? My heart is with you. This must be so incredibly hard on your family. Let's all continue our prayer vigil tonight, and throughout the day.

Moody, is there a Children's Hospital near you?

What's the major medical center in your area?  I mean like a huge famous one? Or a famous research hospital?

I put in a search for "missing pitiuary gland and nausea" and up came a paper on it, but no signature of the specialist. That's where I found the above about ACTH.   I'm looking for a current paper that has a signature of a specialist so Moody can consult.  If anyone wants to help read?

I think Scottish Rite is a pediatric hospital

So everything is panning out just as I had predicted. I am patting myself on the back here. I knew that eventually the Chicago dems and the DC dems and the southern blue dogs would be at odds. I just did not think it would happen in the first two weeks. This is exactly what happened in Illinois. The southern dems, the Chicago mob and some Gop blue dogs. Sadly, this ruined Illinois, and I do not want to see a repeat at the National level. Obama is going to have to take Miss Nasty out to the woodshed if he wants to survive this politcal debacle. The dems are going to self destruct.

I have to stop reading med papers.  Now I have a new disease.  If I keep reading, I'll have 10 more new diseases.  Everything I am reading is saying the same thing about ACTH.  So I have to give it up.  I hope Moody is reading and asking her Docs questions about what therapy they're doing. 

Oh Moody,

My heart goes out to you and your little girl. I pray that you will get it all behind you soon and your daugther will get her treatment plan in place. It WILL happen, but you need to be strong and have faith. The doctors  probably want to make sure they know exactly what to do before rushing in with the treatment.

Sherri_ Giddyup cowgirl! LOL

They are saying there will be a vote on the package today.  I say they don't have the Dem votes needed and they won't have a vote on it today.  They would need Kennedy to come in, no?  If we don't see him, then they aren't even close and it will be another embarrassment for them for us to see the dems voting against it.

They only want to call us obstructionists instead of sitting down and getting it vote worthy.  They've been sending all their talking heads out to use the "obstructionist" word.  It's not working, Americans don't want this package as its written today. 

For all the promises of a revolution in ethics, President Obama has created a new syndrome: The well-off can be made to stop evading their taxes by nominating them for cabinet posts. In any case, compare Bush's cabinet picks with Daschle, Geithner, Holder, Lynn, and Richardson - and discover that there is no empirical evidence of any higher ethical standard for public office in the Obama era.

George Bush called for unity, passed some bipartisan legislation on prescription drugs and education, and appointed a few Democrats to his administration. Barack Obama appointed a few Republicans to his administration, but so far has not mapped out areas for bipartisan lawmaking. Despite his legendary cool and gravitas, he has scoffed "I won" (in the manner of Bush's "I'm the decider"). The uniter went after Rush Limbaugh in a way that Bush never quite took on Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews.

Bush bumps into doors; so does Obama. Bush swaggered; so does Obama (often in a swimming suit). Not much difference there, either.

Bush said Iran was part of an axis of evil. Outraged media insisted that his braggadocio was unwise and gratuitously alienated Tehran. Obama said he wanted to talk to the theocracy without preconditions and improve on the mistakes of our past. Iran answered back: "This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed. . . . Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change." So, like Bush's, Obama's words incurred Iranian disdain - but won some humiliation as dessert.

On other issues as well - the withdrawal plan from Iraq, the Patriot Act, FISA - Obama is Bush II. Your counterexample is Guantanamo? But Obama has not closed Guantanamo, which has mysteriously become complex and problematic, and therefore has disappeared as the Gulag and Stalag of the op-ed pages. Bush said in 2006 that he wanted to close it; Obama echoed that in 2009, but promised a task force to study how to do it within a year.

So is Obama Bush redux? Not quite.

The comparisons are simply to point out that Obama can pick and choose to do what Bush did, without worrying over press censure or consistency with his past protestations. Remember, there is no press now, at least as we have known it since Watergate. Sometime around mid-2007, during its coverage of the Democratic primary, it ceased to be investigatory and chose to become an adulatory megaphone. A news story on the front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, or a piece aired on NPR, or a feature in Time or Newsweek, is simply a disguised op-ed on yet another underappreciated moral or intellectual gift of Barack Obama. He has transcended the traditional doctrinaire support for liberal governance and become a sort of talisman that offers exemption to our elite from all sorts of guilt and anguish in matters ranging from race at home to multicultural sensitivity abroad.

Obama, unlike Bush, is an adherent of the therapeutic mindset. The recession was caused by "them" - Wall Street greed mostly - and never "us," we who borrowed too much for houses we could not afford and things we did not need. The solution will be the European socialist model, in which a few thousand well-trained elites, educated at our best Ivy League law and business schools, will form partnerships with private enterprise. These Guardians will make major economic decisions and redistribute wealth through high taxes and massive entitlements - albeit with the understanding that the managerial class in both business and government will enjoy lifestyles similar to those they led in the past.

The tragedy in all this - aside from the manifest hypocrisy of the first two weeks of the Obama administration - is that Obama is uniquely positioned to do things no other president could accomplish. He need not vote "present" or offer mere hope and change or continue to play Hamlet.

He could, for example, raise the age eligibility of Social Security benefits, cut back on the rates of annual increase, save the system - and hear little of the invective that would greet any other who tried it.

He could call for utopian pacifism, praise the U.N. to the skies, talk up the E.U. at every turn - but nonetheless allow Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Richard Holbrook, and James Jones to play a morose Shane to his noble-sounding Joe Starrett when the creepy Rykers and the bloodthirsty Wilsons of the world begin to cause trouble. We remember Bill Clinton not for all his bite-the-lip nonsense and therapeutic bromides, but largely for two major achievements: stopping the holocaust in the Balkans and ending government welfare as we knew it.

Obama could radically revise the tax code, not by mega-increases, but by simplification and transition to a flat-tax formula. We are beginning to suspect that the government's revenue problem follows not from the percentages we pay, but from the fact that millions of Americans - from the lowly who take their wages in cash to the most exalted at the Treasury Department - too often cheat.

In the next year Obama can continue to run against George Bush and whine about the "mess" that "they" left him as he tries to turn the U.S. economy and government into copies of those in Spain and Greece. He can print money and label as "stimulus" a pork plan that is designed to empower Democratic constituencies at the price of leaving generations to come with decades of debt. He can use his formidable powers of rhetoric to talk of ethical progress while he allows Clintonian ethical regress. He can hope-and-change the world - and learn to his dismay that its thugs take such magnanimity for weakness to be ridiculed and indecision to be exploited. And he can end up a mediocre president who counts on historians to whitewash his presidency just as the media once ensured it.

Or President Obama can decline to be worshiped and instead stop the monstrous borrowing, unsustainable debt, and endless expansion of an increasingly incompetent government. And as solace, he can remember that his idol, Lincoln, was as hated by his contemporaries as he was worshiped by posterity - and that the latter is often predicated on the former.

©2009 Victor Davis Hanson

Moody - Has a pediatric endocrinologist been in to see Olivia? Two good ones in Atlanta are Dr. Lillian Meacham and Dr. Eric Fulner (both got 5 out of 5 rating on Health Grades). The pituitary gland secretes hormones so an endocrinologist should be seeing her - they would know what type of treatment to give. Were they able to get the feeding tube in? Praying that they can figure this all out and she is on the road to recovery.

First of all Vivre so sorry I missed your Birthday.............wooooooooooooohoooooooooooo.........I hope you had a BITE of birthday cake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Moody just so sorry what is happening to your baby girl..............she is in my constant prayers as well as you, your husband and your son.................Shokk

Are they stupid or what? I heard on the radio today that the phone lines on Capitol Hill were jammed with people calling in madder than a hatter over this bill. They do not want it!!  Someone needs to tell PBO his role is to be the nation's cheerleader not the spreader of doom and gloom - permanent recession - give me a break - if we do NOTHING, the economy will recover on its own. If we spend 1.3 trillion mostly on pork projects - yeah - it could become permanent because everyones taxes will have to be raised to pay for it. What happened to PBO and his no pork. Oh yeah, once this behemoth gets passed - they will have to ban pork!

1.3 trillion dollars and did you know that the SCHIPS bill PBO signed the other day will allow families of four making up to about $90,000 to get on board. I am all for providing health care to poor children - but if that is poor - I raised five children and didn't know I was destitute and even sent three of them to college!!

Maybe they should nominate Boxer, Pelosi and Kennedy to something --- that maybe the answer to the weatherization program -- past due taxes from these guys could really bring in some dough!

Oh gosh,  there is just so much out there negative about this spending package!  I hope our gov't will listen:

Ben Smith at Politico has an interesting bit about Obama's Trillion Dollar Jockstrap that hadn't occurred to us until now: a good deal of the spending package merely REPLACES items the states had to cut from their budgets this year.

So, a year ago, these programs were paid for by states, but now Obama is going to have the federal government pay for them, as the states can no longer afford them.

That does not mean these programs and initiatives are needed...and it shows, clearly, that in many cases this spending will not create new jobs (only keep some jobs that exist now, but would be lost if that state money is not replaced with federal money).

How can something be considered a "stimulus" if it's just replacing funding that was there a year ago, merely sending the bill to Washington instead of Sacramento, Albany, Springfield, or Columbus?

This is more a bailout to the states than anything.

We can't speak for all of the states, but can talk at length about Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, three states those of us here have spent a lot of time in. The city, county, and state governments in all three are riddled with waste and corruption. Illinois and Ohio actually have a fairly competitive fight for the title of most corrupt, in terms of construction project spending scams. Ohio's roads are built with a three-year obsolescence, so the same crews that tore up that road last summer will be back to tear it up again in short order, to perpetuate an endless cycle of one year ripping up the road, one year rebuilding it, one year leaving it alone to crack and fall apart, then ripping it up again to go back to where it all began.

Why does the German autobahn hold up so well in relatively the same winter conditions as Ohio, with the greater pressure put on it by faster moving vehicles?

Because the Germans use quality materials and sound engineering to build infrastructure projects designed to last decades, not a single midwestern winter.