Intimate Moments With Insects
Posted by Michelle Moquin on August 15th, 2010
I love my sleep. I have said so here many times.
Our tenant, who is a tad fearful of spiders had a spider problem a few weeks ago. When she started waking up with spiders in her bed, it understandably became more of an issue. We had the exterior of our house sprayed with an environmentally safe pesticide. Remove their food, they go away – Okay, problem solved.
Many, many years ago while studying fashion design in la-la-land and living in Hollywood, I woke up twice with dead cockroaches underneath me in my bed. Yuch! I’ll take spiders any day. I never kill them. I always gently scoop them up and put them outside. Okay, spider problem solved.
Cockroaches – that’s a different story. Let me just tell you, I do not scoop them up and take them outside. I complained to my landlord. Like in New York, Los Angeles has its share of roaming cockroaches. However New York has the biggest ones I have ever seen. And in Bangcock, they sell cockroaches, or at least critters that looks very much like cockroaches, on the street: A delicacy. Not my kind of delicacy, but the Thai seemed to covet them.
But I digressed – my landlord in Hollywood, at that time sprayed the interior of my rental with this pesticide, that to this day if I ever smell it, I know exactly what it is that I am smelling. And if I ever do smell that smell and I can skidoo out of where I’m at ( hopefully it is not some restaurant I am about to dine at), believe me I will as quickly as I can. Reminders of waking up with cockroaches isn’t exactly something I want to remember.
Nor is the memory of being woken up in an old boyfriend’s bed with a potato bug trying to nestle up in a warm spot. ( I thought you’d like a picture just in case you’ve never seen one – this bug is about 2.5″ long. I even found a website for those of you who want to learn more.:) It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t my boyfriend trying to subtly fondle me and wake me up with a dose of pleasure.
I threw back the covers, flicked the critter off nestled in my pubic bed, and I screamed a scream that I am sure the neighbors to this day still remember. All I can ever think about is how lucky I am to be a light sleeper and that I didn’t fall into an erotic dream where I might have spread these thighs to invite my little friend in for some hot lovin’ with me. Got the visual? Sex with bugs – Hmm could be someone’s turn on. Not mine – Ugh! The thought!…
Evidently talking about bugs brings me back. And perhaps I’m giving TMI. (Too Much Information)
Ah yes, so here we are at the present moment…the topic at hand…Can you guess what it is?
This Bedbug’s Life
I had been a professor of entomology for 15 years before I saw my first live bedbug. It crawled out of a plastic film canister that had been mailed to me by a distraught student in the Boston area who had no idea what it was. I was so thrilled to see a live bedbug, I showed it off to every graduate student I ran into that day: Cimex lectularius – a small, flat, wingless, brown ectoparasite that hides in cracks and crevices in human dwellings and emerges under cover of darkness to feast on human blood.
That was in 1995, and none of my students had laid eyes on Cimex lectularius either. A century ago, bedbugs were ubiquitous in New York – so much so that their presence in an apartment wasn’t considered sufficient legal cause for withholding rent. Bedbugs, one judge remarked in an early 20th century lawsuit against a landlord, “can be dealt with by the tenant by processes known to all housewives.” But with the midcentury advent of synthetic organic insecticides, these insects all but vanished from urban landscapes (and pretty much every other kind of landscape) in North America.
My Bostonian bug turned out to be one of many on the forefront of an unprecedented resurgence. Global travelers now bring in a steady supply from around the world, inconspicuously undeclared in checked bags and carry-on luggage. Today, bedbugs have been found in all 50 states, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico and American Samoa, and bedbug-related calls to pest control operators are escalating at a fantastic rate. From June 2009 to June 2010, there were more than 31,000 calls in New York City alone.
Now, bedbug-related lawsuits can lead to thousands of dollars in punitive damages for mental anguish, embarrassment or humiliation.
Everywhere New Yorkers go – theaters, stores, offices, schools, trains, ships, hospitals – bedbugs go, too, hidden in folds of clothing, bags, backpacks and purses. Getting rid of them has become more than any housewife could ever be expected to handle. Even professional pest control operators are struggling to keep up, because bedbugs have become, for the most part, resistant to the old pesticides that once were so effective, and relatively few viable chemical alternatives exist.
We reserve a special kind of enmity for bedbugs because, though humans generally do not like being anywhere other than at the pinnacle of a food chain, there is a particular horror associated with being consumed while relatively helpless, asleep in what should be the security of one’s own bed (or chair or couch). With bedbugs, it’s personal – unlike cockroaches, ants, silverfish and other vermin that are attracted to our possessions, bedbugs are after us. And they’re remarkably adept at circumventing our defenses: They not only attack while we sleep, but they also inject anesthetics, so as not to awaken us, and anticoagulants, so that in every 10-minute feeding they can suck in two to three times their weight in clot-free blood.
Bedbugs win neither praise for their sophisticated technique, nor very much respect for the fact that they don’t carry diseases, as most bloodsucking human ectoparasites do. Although their bites can cause unrelieved itchiness, bedbugs take only blood and leave no pathogens behind. In contrast, lice spread typhus; mosquitoes carry the viruses that cause yellow fever, dengue, encephalitis and West Nile disease; ticks transmit the Lyme disease bacterium; and fleas can bring the bacterium that causes plague.
But lack of involvement in spreading disease is hardly an endearing attribute. In fact, precious few aspects of bedbug biology are endearing. They don’t build their own houses or care for their young, and their sexual practices are bizarre even by insect standards: Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in a frenzied pursuit of sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.
To top it off, almost every aspect of bedbug behavior is mediated by airborne odorants, almost all of which are, when detected, repulsive to humans.
What, if anything, is there to like about a bedbug? They certainly like us; we probably have no greater admirers in the insect world. They like the way we live, unlike most vertebrates, in permanent homes. (Bats and birds, which also build homes, are hosts to several of the bedbug’s close relatives.) Bedbugs do not discriminate among humans on the basis of race, creed or socioeconomic status, and they’re happy with almost any interior decorating style; they are as happy in a French provincial nook as they are in a contemporary cranny. The bugs’ climate preferences are essentially an exact match to our own, and a small wingless creature couldn’t ask for a better traveling companion – airlines have opened a world of possibilities for a species that can’t get very far on its own six legs.
Perhaps the one good thing about bedbugs is that they provide a rare point of agreement that transcends race, religion, culture, nationality, tax bracket and party. It may be one of the few remaining universal truths – urban or rural, red state or blue, everyone agrees it would be great if bedbugs would disappear once more.
May Berenbaum, the head of the entomology department at the University of Illinois, is the author of “The Earwig’s Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends.”
By MAY BERENBAUM,
Published: August 7, 2010 – New York Times
Readers: I found this story fascinating. Obviously I’ve had some intimate moments with bugs. Bedbugs are not on my list and I don’t plan on having any type of relationship with them intimate or otherwise. – How about you? Bothered by bugs in your bed (or just your mate?:) And spider stories you want to share? Have you been intimate with insects? Blog me.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my ‘loyal’(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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August 15th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Even Little Lies Can Hurt a Marriage
Joel D. Block, PhD
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
The happiest, most passionate couples are those who are emotionally open and unafraid to reveal themselves to each other. Yet the potential for deception always is present.
The “big” lies, such as having an affair, tend to have the worst repercussions (often divorce). Yet a lifetime of small lies also can erode a relationship.
Examples of little lies: Maybe you bought something that you didn’t really need — and lied to your partner about the cost.
Or your partner noticed your lingering glance at another person — then you swore up and down that you really didn’t find that person attractive.
We tell ourselves that these small lies are harmless — or even beneficial because they protect our partners’ feelings.
But little lies can be just as detrimental to a relationship as telling a whopper. They just take more time to tear couples apart — and are not always easy to detect.
People who tell lies really are protecting themselves by hiding their own true feelings. When the truth is discovered (it almost always is eventually), the other person naturally feels betrayed. Here, the many kinds of lies…
INDIRECT COMMUNICATION
Rather than stating clearly what they do or don’t want, people tend to talk around subjects that they find uncomfortable. The more afraid you are of rejection or potential criticism, the more likely you are to communicate indirectly. The “lie” is not owning up to what is wanted.
Example: I once counseled a couple who had been married for 12 years. The husband, who was in the restaurant business, had once been arrested for selling drugs.
His wife noticed that he recently had a lot more money. She also noticed a spike in their cell-phone bills and a spate of hang-up calls.
She secretly wondered whether her husband was back in the drug world — but rather than confronting him about her fears, she tried to gather information indirectly.
She suggested, for example, that she might start spending more time at the restaurant. He said he didn’t need extra help, but she kept pressing and their disagreements escalated. Finally, she blurted, “You’re hiding something. I know it!”
If a couple is going to argue, they should at least have a disagreement based on an accurate understanding of each other’s position.
With indirect communication, no one is even sure what the argument is about. In this case, the real issue was the wife’s (unfounded) suspicions.
Solution: Openly request information. Had the wife stated directly what she was worried about or had the husband asked why coming to the restaurant was so important, they could have had a real conversation instead of an argument.
If you’re uncomfortable making a request, say so — “I feel uncomfortable asking you, but… ” That’s the truth. To circle around it is to avoid the truth.
BROKEN CONTRACTS
How often have you made a promise and failed to keep it? Not keeping your word is a kind of lying that can seriously harm a relationship by undermining trust.
Even when the promises are trivial — maybe you agree to start projects but fail to follow through — breaking your word can make everything you say seem unreliable.
There is a concept in psychology called “secondary gains.” It means that someone gets positive reinforcement from negative patterns.
We’re all guilty of occasional broken promises. Someone who consistently “forgets” may be unconsciously creating emotional distance — forgetting puts the other person off — so that the “forgetter” feels less vulnerable.
Solution: If you’re a forgetter, try to understand the secondary gains that arise from disappointing your partner. Merely understanding this concept can be a powerful step.
Also helpful: A quid pro quo, which roughly means “a favor for a favor.” If someone is persistently forgetful, his/her partner can insist on having something done before giving something in return. While this is a bit adversarial, it’s sometimes warranted.
Example: The forgetter asks you to mail a package at the post office. You respond, “Absolutely — as soon as you clean out the backseat of the car as you promised to do two weeks ago.”
WITHHOLDING INFORMATION
We all have a right to privacy, but some people take this to extremes and withhold important information. This is a form of concealment that borders on lying — and is the opposite of true intimacy.
Example: A husband might avoid certain issues — for example, his feelings about a mutual friend — because he feels that his wife is critical of his opinions.
If he gets in the habit of not saying what he thinks, she might criticize his persistent silence — at which point, he’ll conclude that his wife is too critical.
Solution: This is a slippery slope and should be addressed by sharing everything. It is the premise of a good partnership.
Sharing private personal thoughts with each other creates intimacy. If sharing is met with harsh judgment, don’t withdraw. Talk this out with your partner to clear the way for future nonjudgmental discussion.
BLAMING
When something goes wrong, the aggrieved party knows precisely whom to blame. It’s the other person’s fault. When a person blames someone else, he/she is omitting his part in the issue — that’s the lie.
In all of my years as a therapist, I’ve rarely encountered a conflict that truly was just one person’s fault — and blame never makes things better.
The person who is blamed feels defensive. He/she will probably respond with counter blame and anger.
Solution: Instead of pointing fingers, the partners should avoid the language of blame. Substitute sentences that start with “I” for those that start with “you.”
Example: Rather than saying, “You never help in the kitchen,” say something like, “I feel resentful when you don’t help out.”
Unlike “you” statements, which typically lead to adversarial reactions, “I” sentences are more honest and less confrontational. They can lead to understanding rather than a continuation of the disagreement.
SEXUAL SECRETS
Sexual desires are among the most sensitive secrets. A partner might reveal something about his/her sexual desires (or sexual history) and then be judged harshly. It’s natural for that person, under these circumstances, to be reluctant to reveal himself again.
At the same time, sharing sexual desires with one’s partner can build intimacy.
Solution: When you take responsibility for what pleases you, you increase the probability of being pleased. For a couple to have a satisfying sex life, both partners need to be aware of their preferences.
If you find it hard to initiate this kind of conversation, perhaps an opportunity will arise while watching a sexy scene in a movie. “Would that kind of thing be exciting to you?” could be a way to start the conversation.
Personal interviewed Joel D. Block, PhD, senior psychologist at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Glen Oaks, New York, and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York. He is author of Naked Intimacy: How to Increase True Openness in Your Relationship (McGraw-Hill). http://www.drblock.com.
August 15th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Here is the latest about earthquakes around Guam.
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Earthquake of 7.2 magnitude hits Guam and Northern Mariana Islands
August 14th, 2010 9:10 pm
Earthquake of 7.2 magnitude hits Guam and Northern Mariana Islands
Early Saturday morning, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the South Pacific, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
There were no reports of injury or damage on the islands with a total population of over 260,000.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued no alerts for the area.
The temblor took place at 7:19 a.m. at a depth of about 2.9 miles and was located 230 miles west-southwest of Guam and 275 miles west-southwest of the Northern Mariana Islands.
According to reports, had the quake struck closer to the inhabited territories, loss of life and property damage may have been extremely severe. In addition, rescue efforts would have been hindered by the islands’ remote location.
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I pray Guam will not be harmed by aliens or anyone else.
Hafa Adai
Anna
August 15th, 2010 at 11:54 am
THESE REALLY WORK!!
I checked this out on Snopes and it’s for real!
AMAZING SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES:
3. FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE SUFFERERS ~ SIMPLY CUT YOURSELF AND BLEED FOR AFEW MINUTES, THUS REDUCING THE PRESSURE ON YOUR VEINS.
REMEMBER TO USE ATIMER.
August 15th, 2010 at 11:55 am
Interesting Huh?
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Josh HorwitzExecutive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Posted: July 7, 2010 08:19 AM
Passing the Sword
Two summers ago, I blogged with great concern about a statement made by Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Scalia found an individual right to keep and bear arms and opined that, “If…the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia …
If, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment’s guarantee — it does not assure the existence of a ‘citizens’ militia’ as a safeguard against tyranny.”
Regrettably, since the Heller decision, many gun rights commentators have used Scalia’s construct to link the need for unfettered access to firearms with a right to engage in political violence against an administration that has been described as “a secular socialist machine [that] represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
The past two years have seen several disturbing acts of politically-motivated violence and a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the president and Members of Congress.
Equally troubling, gun rights activists have begun to openly carry firearms to political events and presidential speeches in a threatening manner.
The High Court’s latest high-profile Second Amendment case, McDonald v. City of Chicago, was decided last week.
The same five-justice majority as in Heller incorporated the Second Amendment through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby determining that the holding in Heller applies to the states.
In January, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s sister organization, the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (Ed Fund), filed an amicus brief in the McDonald case calling attention to Justice Scalia’s dangerous insurrectionist rhetoric in Heller.
“Inherent in the logic of a right to possess firearms for the purpose of resisting a perceived threat of governmental tyranny is that, to some point, individuals are entitled to take the next step and use violence if the government refuses to yield,” the brief stated.
To express the Ed Fund’s concern that “‘tyranny’ means many different things to many different people,” we urged the Court to “correct this misapprehension before incorporating the Second Amendment.”
Justice Alito, writing for the majority in McDonald, did not openly refute Scalia’s insurrectionist idea. He did, however, avoid the use of this rationale in explaining the Second Amendment, making it clear that the core purpose of the right is individual self-defense — specifically, to defend “hearth and home” with a handgun.
The two dissents in the case — written by Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens –showed no reluctance in criticizing Scalia’s insurrectionist reading of the Second Amendment.
Justice Breyer made it patently clear that “the Civil War Amendments, the electoral process, the courts, and numerous other [democratic] institutions today help to safeguard the States and the people from any serious threat of federal tyranny.”
Justice Breyer also wondered why the U.S. Congress would have supported a “substantive right to bear arms free from reasonable state police power regulation” in the wake of a bloody Civil War.
“Why would those who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment have wanted to give such a right to southerners who had so recently waged war against the North, and who continued to disarm and oppress recently freed African-American citizens?” he asked.
“The many episodes of brutal violence against African Americans that blight our Nation’s history do not suggest that every American must be allowed to own whatever type of firearm he or she desires —
just that no group of Americans should by systematically and discriminatorily disarmed and left to the mercy of terrorists.”
As we noted in our amicus brief, “The defeat of the Confederacy cemented the Union’s commitment to quell insurrection and rebellion.”
Perhaps most importantly, however, Justice Stevens pointed in his dissent to a remarkable statement made earlier in the Court’s Term by Chief Justice John G. Roberts.
In the case in question, Robertson v. United States ex rel. Wykenna Watson, the Court decided not to examine the question of whether a private person can bring an action for criminal contempt in a Congressionally-sanctioned court.
In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “Allegorical depictions of the law frequently show a figure wielding a sword — the sword of justice, to be used to smite those who violate the criminal laws …
A basic step in organizing a civilized society is to take that sword out of private hands and turn it over to an organized government, acting on behalf of all the people.
Indeed, ‘The . . . power a man has in the state of nature is the power to punish the crimes committed against that law. [But this] he gives up when he joins [a] … political society, and incorporates into [a] commonwealth.’”
Chief Justice Roberts’ statement is of course a reference to Max Weber’s axiomatic definition of a state. The German political economist proffered in the early 20th century that a political entity is not a state unless it possesses a monopoly of force (i.e., the power to enforce the law).
The concept of a monopoly of force is anathema to those who embrace the insurrectionist idea because it forecloses the use of political violence; which rhetorically — and in some cases in action — seems to be all the rage on the political right.
Nonetheless, Roberts was correct. America’s Founding Fathers recognized that a State does not — and cannot — exist unless it upholds its claim to the monopoly on force.
As the author of the Second Amendment, James Madison, put it at the Virginia Ratifying Convention: “There never was a government without force.
What is the meaning of government? An institution to make people do their duty. A government leaving it to a man to do his duty, or not, as he pleases, would be a new species of government, or rather no government at all.”
In the interest of domestic tranquility, let us hope that the Chief Justice’s words are embraced by Newt Gingrich (“The Second Amendment is in defense of freedom from the State”), the Cato Institute (“Second Amendment protections are not for the state but for each individual against the state”), and others who are viewed as the intellectual leaders of the modern Conservative movement.
They have a responsibility to make it clear to their admirers that under no circumstances can firearms be employed as “tools of political dissent.”
Follow Josh Horwitz on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/CSGV
August 15th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Those of you on the Island interested in a great time shouldn’t miss this.
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GVB Accepting Applications for Vendors For Micronesia Fair
Written by News Release
Thursday, 29 July 2010 12:09
Guam – Community Events
Guam – The Guam Visitors Bureau (GVB) is now accepting applications for vendors, cultural arts performers, and musicians interested in participating in the 23rd Guam Micronesia Island Fair.
The Fair takes place between October 15th and 17th 17 at Ypao Beach Park in Tumon.
Artists already registered with the Guam Council on the Arts and Humanities Agency who would like to showcase their work at the three-day event should contact Jackie Balbas at Guam CAHA at (671) 475-3661 or via e-mail at jacqueline.balbas@caha.guam.gov.
All other vendors interested in obtaining a booth may contact Sally Malay at Ruder Integrated Marketing Strategies (RIMS) at (671) 635-1126 or via e-mail at salmalay@gmail.com.
Cultural arts performers and musicians interested in performing should contact Sonja Lujan-Sellers at GVB at (671) 648-1493 or via e-mail at sls@visitguam.org.
Registration forms for all vendors are available online at http://www.visitguam.org or may be picked up at the GVB office in Tumon. Applications must be submitted with payment to GVB by Sept. 15, 2010.
This year’s signature event will not only unite cultures from across Micronesia at one interactive cultural venue but also contribute to a new effort to build Micronesia’s reputation as a food destination.
The theme, “Celebrating the Tastes of Micronesia,” will give visitors a taste of the regional culture through dishes like fina denné and barbecue, show them what produce and seafood are grown locally, and what hotels and restaurants serve authentic Chamorro cuisine on Guam.
Sponsors and a schedule of events for the 2010 GMIF will be released at a later date. The 2009 GMIF, which attracted more than 20,000 visitors over the course of three days, featured authentic cuisine and crafts from Guam, Saipan, Rota, Tinian, Palau, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati.
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Sorry I wasn’t able to insert this in time for those of you who might have been interested in opening a booth. But sometimes one can not post here.
Hafa Adai
Anna
August 15th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Oh yeah, let me remind those of you interested in starting a business on Guam about the seminar.
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Thursday, August 19, 2010 (8:30am-11:00am), Fee: $10
HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN: Writing a business plan can be an intimidating task. But it doesn’t have to be if you take it one step at a time. This workshop will help guide you through the steps needed to write a business plan. Remember…a written business plan will help you avoid mistakes and save you grief, time and money!
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Ok, now you have plenty of notice.
Hafa Adai
Anna
Thanks Michelle for allowing me to monopolize your blog for a few entries.
August 15th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Oh my goodness!! this is so crazy!… it might be a helpful invention, but it also makes me sad that rape offenses are so common in Africa, especially with young girls.. that this was necessary. Hopefully it will help.
August 15th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Zen Lill
You are the one. Most people seldom get my daughter to be so revealing on a personal level. Let this also be a notice to you child of mine, for you to be as forth coming with your mom -). Oh and the girls (4) of them spoke to Harris during the different times he called. They want to meet your sweetie(who I told them he was to you).
They have not stopped giggling. As if I don’t know that they are talking about boys. Way too young. But it says, even in an all girls school, the topic comes up. They keep asking me to make you come before your scheduled (No I won’t say here) visit. I told them I would ask.
I really think they could stand to wait because they just want to know if you “kissed your sweetie?” I said that I don’t think you know him that well, you tell them what you wish.
I remember when you told me you had your first kiss, I’m absolutely positive that that was not true as I caught you kissing little Russell two years before that date. But being a mother I didn’t say anything. So if you feel you must re confess, mother is waiting.
Funny, when I think about it. It never came up between my mother and me when I had my first kiss. Times were different then I guess. God knows she worried about you enough.
Oh, yes the reason I am writing in is because a mother of 12 little ones, a few of whom are in the hospital form time to time. I thought this would be a little something I could share.
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Rising hospital infection risk
If the thought of a hospital stay terrifies you, you’re not alone. You’re not irrational, either–because hospital patients die every day for no good reason.
Or, as the Washington Post put it in a recent headline, “Hospital infection deaths caused by ignorance and neglect, survey finds.”
That survey of nurses, conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, found that common deadly hospital infections could be prevented with just a little more attention and a little more money for training.
In this case, they’re referring to catheter- related bloodstream infections, or CRBSIs… but they could just as easily be referring to any of the other completely preventable infections running rampant in our hospitals.
CRBSIs strike when hospital staff inserts or removes a catheter without washing up first, without disinfecting the catheter site, or when the catheters are left in too long.
If you’ve spent any time in a hospital, you know how easily that can happen. That’s why at least 80,000 patients suffer these infections every year–and 30,000 of them die, accounting for nearly a third of the estimated 100,000 annual deaths due to hospital-acquired infections.
There’s no excuse for it… but 70 percent of the 2,075 survey respondents–mostly infection control nurses–said they simply don’t have enough time to train other hospital workers on the procedures that could prevent infections.
Is that scary or what?
In addition, a third of the respondents said they have a hard time enforcing the simple best-practice guidelines– such as proper hand-washing–that would cut back on these infections.
And 20 percent said hospital bureaucrats won’t spend the money needed to prevent these infections– despite the fact that preventing them now would be much cheaper than treating them later.
Meanwhile, half the nurses said they’re still in the bureaucratic stone age–using paper records to track infections instead of the computerized systems that can quickly spot the warning signs and identify infection clusters.
And another new survey conducted by the association found that only a third of California hospitals have these computerized systems in place.
It’s stunning and downright inexcusable when you think of how many people–even kids–carry computers in their pockets these days.
Meanwhile, a new study finds that simple screenings could prevent many of the 750,000 annual cases of blood infection that strike after surgical procedures.
Researchers looked at the data on 363,897 patients who underwent surgery between 2005 and 2007, and found that 2.3 percent of them experienced those blood infections, called sepsis, while 1.6 percent suffered dangerous dips in blood pressure caused by those infections–a condition known as septic shock.
Meanwhile, just 0.2 percent of the patients suffered a heart attack. That makes sepsis more than 10 times more common than that better-known surgical risk. And since the two conditions are equally deadly, that means sepsis kills 10 times as many patients. Sepsis can also lead to coma, long hospitalizations and amputations.
The researchers wrote in the Archives of Surgery that sepsis screening should be mandatory for patients over 60 who need emergency surgery and suffer from at least one other disease or condition.
But at this point, it’s safe to say that anyone who spends time in a hospital should be screened for infection.
Even the visitors.
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I wash my hands throughly when I return home before I accost my other children. I seldom take them with me to the hospital to visit their siblings. I have explained that a hospital environment could be a source of infection so I think they understand.
When one considers that 80 thousand people are infected needlessly when they are hospitalized and at least 30 thousand of them die, going to a hospital can be a very risky proposition.
If you know that you are going to hospitalized for a period of time, you need to take the above very seriously. If you have loved ones that will be you need to warn them and to take the above information very seriously.
Ruth
August 15th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
It appears that those that live below are attempting to exit through a tunnel below the plates between the Philippines and Guam. A sudden exit on their part could cause a massive earthquake along that fault.
The plates will be moved by the exiting parties. It is my assumption that the US government are aware of the intention of the parties to leave because of the pollution of their environment. The US government are preparing to assist Guam if a massive earthquake occurs as a result.
I have been asked to assist in the departure so as to minimize the effect their departure will have upon the plates. A sudden departure could produce a 7.2 to 9 in an area from 0 to 250 miles from Guam under the Phillipine Sea.
Xur
August 15th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
The Right consistently promotes Newt Gingrich as the voice of the Conservative movement.
The major news outlets often have him on to rebut a democratic party point or to establish the moral and conservative stance of the Right.
Often this blog has mentioned the mythical poor white trash person. The one who being white is his only real claim to fame.
The ignorant white part of the white race that is all too easily impressed by a person’s position, status and fame. The person who money is his only true god.
Newt is the Poster Boy for your male poor white trash. He has no moral values, only ones he puts before others to adhere to.
He has never seen a dollar he didn’t covet. Hence he is always for sale to the highest bidder. And he will do and say anything to gain power, or status and of course money.
What do you really know about this “Moral, upstanding representative” of the Right. I am not asking you to take my opinion of him as gospel.
How about a little something from his second wife as quoted from her interview with Esquire Magazine.
It’s been twelve years since his extraordinary political career — the one in which he went from being a bomb-throwing backbencher in the seemingly permanent Republican minority to overthrowing the established order of both parties — collapsed around him.
And yet, stunningly, in all that time Newt Gingrich hasn’t been replaced as the philosopher king of the conservative movement.
And as the summer rolled on, a revivified Gingrich sat atop the early polls of Republican presidential contenders, leading the field in California, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas and polling strongly in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
This year he has raised as much money as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee combined. He is in constant motion, traveling all over the country attending rallies and meetings. He writes best sellers, makes movies, appears regularly on Fox News.
=======================================
http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910
Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican
In the twelve years since he resigned in defeat and disgrace, he has been carefully plotting his return to power.
As 2012 approaches, he has raised as much money as all of his potential rivals combined and sits atop the polls for the Republican presidential nomination.
But just who is Newton Leroy Gingrich, really? An epic and bizarre story of American power in an unsettled age.
She was married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years, all through his spectacular rise and fall, and here she is in a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt, with warm eyes and a big laugh and the kind of chain-smoking habit where the cigarettes burn right down to the filter — but she’s quitting, she swears, any day now.
We’re having breakfast in a seaside restaurant in a Florida beach town, a place where people line up in sandals and shorts.
This is the first time she’s talked about what happened, and she has a case of the nerves but also an air of liberation about her.
Since he was a teenager, Newt Gingrich has never been without a wife, and his bond with Marianne Gingrich during the most pivotal part of his career made her the most important advisor to one of the most important figures of the late twentieth century.
Of their relationship, she says, “We started talking and we never quit until he asked me for a divorce.”
She sounds proud, defiant, maybe a little wistful. You might be inclined to think of what she says as the lament of an abandoned wife, but that would be a mistake.
There is shockingly little bitterness in her, and she often speaks with great kindness of her former husband. She still believes in his politics.
She supports the Tea Parties. She still uses the name Marianne Gingrich instead of going back to Ginther, her maiden name.
But there was something strange and needy about him. “He was impressed easily by position, status, money,” she says.
“He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know. He has to be historic to justify his life.”
She says she should have seen the red flags. “He asked me to marry him way too early. And he wasn’t divorced yet. I should have known there was a problem.”
Within weeks or months?
“Within weeks.”
That’s flattering.
She looks skeptical. “It’s not so much a compliment to me. It tells you a little bit about him.”
And he did the same thing to her eighteen years later, with Callista Bisek, the young congressional aide who became his third wife.
“I know. I asked him. He’d already asked her to marry him before he asked me for a divorce. Before he even asked.”
He told you that?
“Yeah, he wanted to — ”
But she stops. “Hey, turn off the tape recorder for a second. This is going to go places …”
Back in the 1990s, she told a reporter she could end her husband’s career with a single interview.
She held her tongue all through the affair and the divorce and even through the annulment Gingrich requested from the Catholic Church two years later, trying to erase their shared past.
Now she sits quietly for a moment, ignoring her eggs, trying to decide how far she wants to go.
(ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Why Marianne Gingrich Finally Spoke Out)
It’s been twelve years since his extraordinary political career — the one in which he went from being a bomb-throwing backbencher in the seemingly permanent Republican minority to overthrowing the established order of both parties — collapsed around him.
And yet, stunningly, in all that time Newt Gingrich hasn’t been replaced as the philosopher king of the conservative movement.
And as the summer rolled on, a revivified Gingrich sat atop the early polls of Republican presidential contenders, leading the field in California, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas and polling strongly in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
This year he has raised as much money as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee combined. He is in constant motion, traveling all over the country attending rallies and meetings. He writes best sellers, makes movies, appears regularly on Fox News.
And Marianne Gingrich, his closest advisor during his last fit of empire building, sits on the boardwalk chain-smoking her breakfast.
He thinks of himself as president, you tell her. He wants to run for president.
She gives a jaundiced look. “There’s no way,” she says.
She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. “He could have been president.
But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”
She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.
“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says.
“If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.”
Sitting on a bench, she squints against the light. “He always told me that he’s always going to pull the rabbit out of the hat,” she says.
To visit him, you start in a marble lobby of a building on K Street, Washington’s Lobbyists’ Row. The guard checks your ID, you go up the elevator. At Gingrich Group, he has two floors and dozens of employees.
You sit on the sofa by the reception desk manned by a neat young man, and you study the magazine covers with Gingrich’s face on them and the copies of his books lined up on a row of mahogany shelves:
Winning the Future, Real Change, Gettysburg, Rediscovering God in America, Paper Kills.
Then another neat young man comes and leads you down a series of halls, telling you that Gingrich is the kind of guy who loves McDonald’s and never stands on ceremony, has five ideas before breakfast, and tweets “because he understands it’s the future.”
And there’s Newt Gingrich with his big square head. His features are surprisingly small and precise, and his deep-set eyes have a cool distance that feels vaguely scientific.
You ask him if he feels vindicated by the Tea Parties, if he thinks that his third act has come around.
No, he says. “I see myself as a citizen leader trying to understand three things:
• What the country has to do to be successful.
• How you would communicate that to the American people so they would let you do it.
• And then how you’d actually implement it if they gave you permission to do it.”
He’s the first person you’ve ever met who speaks in bullet points. In fact, he sometimes more resembles a collection of studied gestures than a mere mortal, so much so that he gives the impression that everything about him is calculated, including the impression that everything about him is calculated.
Which can make him seem like a Big Thinker but also like a complete phony — an unsettling combination.
The failure of the Republican leadership under George W. Bush created an opening for him, he says. Obama’s “radicalism” made that opening wider.
Now a lot of Republicans are starting to ask, What Would Newt Do?
Or, he puts it another way: “The underlying thematics are beginning to be universalizable in a way that has taken years of work.”
At minimum, he expects to be a “sort of a teacher/coach/mentor.” At maximum, a leader who may yet assume the role he has prepared a lifetime for —
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, he says. The next couple of years will answer that question.
(ON THE POLITICS BLOG: More of Newt on Newt in 2012)
Still, isn’t there one major problem with all this? The Tea Parties only embrace half of the Gingrich vision, the one that ties bureaucracy and corruption around the neck of the Democratic party like a dead cat.
But some of the policy proposals he’s thrown out over the years suggest that Gingrich also supports massive government spending on education, technology, high-speed trains, national parks, health care, Social Security, and a host of odd pet projects:
compulsory gym class for every public-school student in America, forcing teachers to take attendance every hour, paying kids to read, even compulsory health insurance — isn’t that exactly like the “Obamacare” that drives the Tea Parties mad?
“I’ve always said you should have a choice between either having insurance or posting a bond, but that every American should provide for their medical future,” Gingrich answers.
He seems a bit annoyed by the question — his tone is somehow both unruffled and peremptory at the same time.
And didn’t he support the bank bailout, too?
“Reluctantly.”
Gingrich bats these questions away like pesky little flies. He gets brittle if you try to pin him down.
You call Obama’s Iran policy appeasement. But what’s the alternative?
“Replace the government.”
You’re advocating war with Iran?
“Not necessarily. There’s every reason to believe that if you simply targeted gasoline, and you maximized your support for dissidents in Iran, that within a year you’d replace the regime without a war.”
That’s it? After such an incendiary charge, your only solution is sanctions and speeches?
“The only thing you have to stop is gasoline,” he repeats.
But that just seems like nuance, and only a minor difference with Obama’s position.
“The difference between replacing a regime and appeasing a regime is pretty radical.”
But you won’t replace the regime that way. You’re just tinkering with sanctions, which have never worked.
“I would cut off gasoline, and I would fund the dissidents,” he repeats.
He wears the tight smile of a man who has very little room to move.
He is known for his rhetorical napalm and is not accustomed to acknowledging that he often deploys it for its own sake, facts and gross exaggeration be damned.
You don’t build a movement by playing fair. He didn’t single-handedly topple forty years of Democratic rule in the House by strictly keeping Marquess of Queensberry rules.
And so in Newt’s world, putting Barack Obama in the company of Neville Chamberlain to win a news cycle is just the way it’s done. The grimace on his face says, What part of this game don’t you understand?
His assistant looks at his watch. “We have three minutes.”
He will not relax, will not let down his guard, not this time around. He did that once when he was younger, spent three days with a reporter who got his staff to complain of his sexual adventurism and saw him yelling at an assistant.
Afterward, he mentioned the episode to Robert Novak, who said, “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“It was terrible,” Gingrich says, “because I relaxed.”
But this is his last chance, and if Newt Gingrich is going to fulfill his destiny, he will not relax.
It is a stunning return to relevance for someone who quit his job as Speaker of the House of Representatives and resigned from Congress while having an affair with Bisek — twenty-three years his junior — followed by an ugly divorce and their subsequent May — December marriage.
But now Gingrich is trapped in a tricky balancing act. Here he is meeting with a group of small-business owners at the waterfront Hilton in New Orleans.
They’re seated around a long brown conference table, a couple of women and a couple dozen middle-aged men. Gingrich sits at midpoint with two assistants and a reporter behind him.
“I’m here to listen,” he begins, his tone respectful. “This is your meeting.”
The business owners seem like ordinary folks — a builder, a man with a small boat shop, a woman who plans parties, a real estate investor or two.
They seem cheerful enough and take their turns politely, but they’re fired up with the Tea Party’s sense of impending apocalypse:
Obama is a socialist who’s trying to “equalize us with the rest of the world,” our tax system penalizes “doers,”
49 percent of the people in the country pay no taxes at all, we’re like Germany in the 1930s, all they teach you at college is “self-loathing 101,” and 60 percent of Americans are on some kind of government program.
“Katrina gave a lot of these folks the largest check in their lives,” says the woman who plans parties. “They live on unemployment because they can.”
When they finish, Gingrich speaks in a voice that is thoughtful and measured. “At historic crossroads there is seldom unanimity,” he reminds them.
“We have 90 percent employment in this country. An amazing number of people get up and go to work.”
It is a startling trait that you witness over and over again as he meets with different groups of conservative activists:
When Gingrich — the godfather of the leveling attack and the politics of apocalypse — is surrounded by doomsayers and radicals, he takes the long view and becomes the very soul of probity.
But a reasonable and sober Newt Gingrich would never have gotten anywhere. Hence his ability to be scandalously extreme with great ease.
This incoherence is at the heart of today’s conservative movement, and no one embodies it more than Gingrich. He is both sides of the divided Republican soul in a single man.
(ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Gingrich Blasts the Obama ‘Machine’)
But today, among this group of conservatives, Gingrich the statesman presides, calming the troubled waters.
Liberals with unhappy memories of his slash-and-burn approach may never believe it, but this is a consistent theme in his life:
Civil rights inspired his first work on a political campaign, he sent one of his daughters to a mostly black Head Start program, pushed “compassionate conservatism” long before the term existed, tamped down the hard-liners during the Republican revolution, and made a secret pact with Bill Clinton to salvage Social Security.
Next comes a delegation from the Tea Party. “Obama poses an existential threat to the Constitution,” one man says. “I seem to remember that I swore an oath to protect America against ‘all enemies foreign and domestic,’ ” says another.
But when one of the Tea Partiers makes an ugly comment about immigration, Gingrich walks him back. “People who come here overwhelmingly come to work.
They come from a culture where work is important.”
Like the business owners before them, the Tea Partiers seem puzzled. “Don’t you think that when they get here, they’ll learn to be lazy?”
“No, I worry about them learning to be Americans.”
His behavior is bracing and principled.
But with both groups, in the same placid and sensible voice, he moves quickly into darker themes:
The work ethic is fraying, the feds are piling up debt, there are pizza parlors passing themselves off as HIV-treatment facilities and teachers who can’t be fired
and the Democrats passed a $787 billion stimulus bill without reading it, which proves they are the most radical “secular socialist machine” in American history.
“The more angry we get, the worse it is for Obama,” he tells his audiences. “I don’t care how many three-point jump shots he makes.”
“There’s a large part of me that’s four years old,” he tells you. “I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there’s a cookie.
I don’t know where it is but I know it’s mine and I have to go find it. That’s how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun.”
He says this in the same office, with the same assistant at his side and a digital recorder on the table.
Last year, at sixty-five, he converted to Catholicism. He credits this to Bisek, a willowy blond who sings in a church choir.
“Callista and I kid that I’m four and she’s five and therefore she gets to be in charge, because the difference between four and five is a lot.”
Speaking of childhood, he makes his sound ideal. His family were the kind of people that “Norman Rockwell captures in his pictures,” he says, stiff-necked individualists who “came out of the mountains from small farms” and served in World War II, people who had “an old-fashioned deep belief in citizenship” that was “like living at Mount Vernon kind of stuff.”
He speaks fondly of the “lovely older lady” who used to listen to his stories, the newspaper editor who first published him, the aunt who made sugar pies, the grandmother who had an “old-fashioned belief in citizenship,”
even the crusty old bureaucrat who spent an afternoon telling a ten-year-old why the town couldn’t afford to build a zoo.
And no, he never felt like an oddball. “I felt unique in a way that I think every American should feel unique — if I wanted to open up a lemonade stand, I opened up a lemonade stand.”
Actually, he grew up on a series of Army bases in Kansas, Georgia, France, and Germany.
His father was raised by a grandmother who passed off his real mother (Gingrich’s grandmother) as his sister.
His mother married his father when she was sixteen, left him a few days later, and struggled with manic depression most of her life.
His stepfather was an infantry officer who viewed his plump, nearsighted, flat-footed son as unfit for the Army.
By the time he was fifteen, Gingrich dedicated his life, he says, “to understanding what it takes for a free people to survive.”
By the time he was eighteen, he was dating his high school geometry teacher. He married her a year later, when he was nineteen and she was twenty-six.
It sounds like a complicated childhood, I say.
“It was fabulous.”
Fabulous?
“Lots of relatives, lots of complexity, lots of sugar pies, when I could talk my aunt and grandmother into making them. They had an old-fashioned cast-iron stove where you cut wood…”
Just as Ronald Reagan created an idealized version of an America that never quite existed, so has Newt. And just as Reagan curated a fantasy version of his own life, so, too, has Newt.
Aren’t you sugarcoating it a little bit?
“What do you mean?”
It sounds like a troubled domestic situation.
“It’s troubled if you decide that’s what it is.”
True, you can choose to look at the bright things. But there are also less bright things.
“There are for everybody.”
Yeah, but I’m asking you.
He doesn’t respond.
Both your fathers, the stepfather and the biological one, were angry men.
His expression is flat, and he answers in his scholarly voice, like a professor telling a legend from distant history.
“I think by the time I knew Newt, my biological father, he was no longer particularly angry. I think Bob was very tough. But I look back now and I realize that Bob imprinted me in a thousand ways.
He taught me discipline, he taught me endurance, he taught me to take the long view, he taught me the notion of teams, he taught me a depth of patriotism, he taught me to be prepared for things not to work —
you sleep as often as you can because you don’t know when you’ll be able to sleep again, you drink water when you can because you don’t know when you’ll be able to drink again, you rest as much as you can because you don’t know when you’re going to rest again.
If you come out of an infantry, World War II, Korea background, that is how the infantry functions. Well, it turns out that’s pretty good if you’re going to be a politician.”
(Follow @ESQPolitics for the latest on Gingrich, Obama, and more)
Sitting in the Florida sun while she annihilates a long series of Benson & Hedges, Marianne Gingrich paints a very different picture.
“He didn’t talk to his mother much. He just didn’t have patience with her. And she was pretty drugged up for a long time.”
But he said his childhood was like Norman Rockwell.
She laughs. “You’re kidding. That’s funny. Well, I liked his dad. He was outspoken.
He was a down-home, practical kind of guy. But you know, he was a drinker.”
Marianne loves long stories, straight talk, and rueful laughter at the infinity of human foibles. Her eyes go wide when she hears his line about being four to Callista’s five.
“You know where that line came from? Me. That’s my line. That’s what I told him.”
She pauses for a moment, turning it over in her mind. Then she shakes her head in wonder. “I’m sorry, that’s so freaky.”
But she’s happy to say nice things about him, too. As a husband, she says, he was affectionate, fun, awkward, eager, endlessly inquisitive.
Once, she asked him why he was always so full of questions, and he said, “I found that if I listen, I’ll learn more. And people like to talk to me.”
That’s completely Newt, she says. There was something missing inside, so he had to think his way into doing the right thing.
“Newt trained himself. He wasn’t a natural. He doesn’t have natural instincts and insights. Everything has to be a thought process first. It took years and years.
It wasn’t, ‘I have this insight, I am compelled, I can do no other.’ It was step by step by step by step, and it was all mental, all learned behavior.”
It’s kind of touching, really. “He was a shy boy underneath it all,” she says
.
She met him in 1980, at a political fundraiser in Ohio. She was twenty-eight, the daughter of a small-town Republican mayor. He was thirty-six, a brand-new congressman from Georgia just emerging from an emotional crisis so severe that he drank heavily and contemplated suicide.
She told him about the local economic decline, he said somebody needed to save the country. She said that he couldn’t do it alone, he asked about her plans for the future.
Even then, he was making rash pronouncements that reasonable people made fun of, such as that he would be the next Republican Speaker of the House.
They kept the conversation going on the phone, often talking late into the night. Although he was still married to his first wife, Jackie Battley, Gingrich told Marianne they were in counseling and talking about divorce.
That summer, she went to Washington to visit him, and soon afterward he introduced her to his mother and stepfather.
“They were thrilled because they hadn’t wanted Newt to marry [Jackie]. I think his stepdad wanted to be able to say, ‘Look, we always knew this wasn’t going to work.’ ”
At first, she had no idea that the wife he was divorcing was actually his high school geometry teacher, or that he went to the hospital to present her with divorce terms while she was recovering from uterine cancer and then fought the case so hard, Jackie had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills.
Gingrich told her the story a little at a time, trusting her with things that nobody else knew — to this day, for example, the official story is that he started dating Jackie when he was eighteen and she was twenty-five.
But he was really just sixteen, she says.
The divorce came through in February. They got married six months later, in August of 1981.
There were immediate stresses. They had no money at all. Marianne had to take over the budget because it was too stressful for Newt.
On a congressman’s salary, which was then about $70,000, Gingrich had to maintain households in Georgia and Washington, plus alimony and personal debts and child support.
She remembers one reception when a woman asked Newt to buy a charity ticket for ten dollars. Between them, they didn’t have a dime and didn’t know how they were going to eat for the rest of the month.
“Ask Marianne,” he said, so the woman came up to her and she had to say, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have ten dollars.” When she looked over at Gingrich, he was smiling.
But they shared a thrilling sense of commitment, talking endlessly about the future and how to make things better. “The choice to try and change things consumed both of us,” she says.
The challenge was huge. People in Washington called Gingrich “Newt Skywalker” and snickered at his pretensions.
“He’d walk into every meeting clutching books, trying to send a signal of intellectual gravitas,” says Mickey Edwards, then a prominent Republican congressman from Oklahoma.
His own administrative assistant called him “bold but careless, imaginative but undisciplined, creative but sloppy.”
He would rattle around his office in the Rayburn House Office Building until well past midnight, restless and pacing, brainstorming with his staff or talking on the phone to Marianne.
His mantra was that the Democrats were a corrupt permanent majority. And the Republican establishment was the biggest impediment to changing that.
“How do we move the politics so that conservative is acceptable?” he would ask. That was the main question.
The answers he came up with made him so powerful that he would humble the president of the United States.
The first answer? Well, of course, Newt Gingrich would become Speaker of the House. That was essential.
The second came from Richard Nixon, who told Newt to build up a cadre of young Turks to take on the Republican moderates.
Gingrich had been thinking about this kind of thing since he visited Verdun at fifteen, followed by an obsession with a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation who “plotted the social and economic trends” of his world and figured out how to manipulate mass psychology by inventing a fake religion.
Political change was also the theme of his Ph.D. thesis. A big reader in management theory and military history, he loved graphs and charts and maxims like LISTEN, LEARN, HELP, LEAD.
After the election of 1982, he recruited twelve disciples and named them the Conservative Opportunity Society.
Then he took control of a much larger group called GOPAC and turned it into a giant recruitment-and-training operation, sending out a stream of audiotapes and videotapes to promote his slogans and strategies.
He began comparing himself to Churchill, FDR, and Benjamin Franklin.
He became a master of wedge issues, calling Democrats unpatriotic, accusing them of sympathizing with communists, even blaming them for Woody Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi and Susan Smith’s murder of her children in South Carolina.
To badger the moderates in his own party, he called Bob Dole the “tax collector for the welfare state” and threatened House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois with extinction.
But it was the nakedness of his attack on Speaker Jim Wright of Texas that shocked traditionalists of both parties.
Working the press relentlessly all over the country, Gingrich began calling Wright the “least-ethical Speaker of the twentieth century” and leaking vague but ominous charges:
Was he involved in the teenage-page scandal? Did he scam a pension out of the Air Force Reserve? Did he lobby a foreign president on behalf of a Texas oil family?
Eventually a few stories got printed and Gingrich passed them out, sparking more stories.
A couple of senior Republicans looked into his evidence and told him he didn’t have anything, others looked a second time and told him the same. But Gingrich would not relent.
One charge finally stuck — that Wright failed to report income from a vanity book he sold in bulk to supporters, earning about $60,000. The charge seems especially brazen given Gingrich’s own adventures in creative financing:
A few years before, he had taken $13,000 from a group of wealthy friends to write a novel; he took $105,000 to promote another book, and would later use at least $1 million of GOPAC’s money to underwrite a satellite-TV college class that fed the staff that produced his books and strategy memos.
But it was enough to humiliate and destroy Wright.”He was just full of hate and venom,” says Beryl Anthony Jr., a Democratic congressman in those years.
“He was driven mainly by trying to tear down the leadership and gain political power.” “I’ve known Newt now for thirty years almost,” says former congressman Mickey Edwards.
“But I wouldn’t be able to describe what his real principles are. I never felt that he had any sort of a real compass about what he believed except for the pursuit of power.”
From that pursuit he would not be deterred. And so by the morning in the fall of 1994 that he gathered three hundred Republican candidates on the Capitol steps to announce his ingenious Contract with America, his transformation from fool to conqueror was complete.
Newt Gingrich’s ridiculous prophesies that he would change the world had come to pass.
At this point, the sun is getting low in the sky. Marianne is sitting at an outdoor table at an Irish pub eating Chinese chicken salad, laughing and talking with the easy flow of the South.
She veers from one subject to another, drawing lessons and breaking off into stories that break off into other stories.
She’s so spontaneous and good-natured, it’s hard to picture her in Washington — and no surprise that when she decamped to Georgia in the late eighties, she spent her time finishing her college degree and doing makeovers and selling beauty supplies.
It gives her an unusual perspective on the seductions of power.
“Newt always wanted to be somebody,” she says. “That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves.
And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, ‘Oh, I’m drinking, who cares?’
Then you start being a little whore, ’cause that comes with drinking. That’s what corruption is — when you’re too exhausted, you’re gonna go with your weakness.
So when we see corruption, we shouldn’t say, ‘They’re all corrupt.’ Rather, we should say, ‘At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?’ ”
For a man operating at his level, Gingrich was keenly vulnerable. His welcome as Speaker was a furious controversy over yet another book deal, this time a $4.5 million advance from Rupert Murdoch he had been offered before he was even sworn in.
Though Gingrich had made history and achieved extraordinary power, he still felt like an outsider, and the hatred touched something primal inside him.
“All he wanted was to be accepted into the country club,” Marianne says. “And he arrives at the country club and he’s just not welcome. ‘Yeah, but I belong here,’ he said. ‘I earned my way to this. I earned it.’ ”
Next came the government shutdown of late 1995, which so alarmed the country that the poll numbers for Republicans went into a steep overnight decline.
“Newt’s shocked, doesn’t know what to do,” Marianne says. “He’s like, ‘Whoa, wait, wait! This isn’t just my fault! We need to work this out!’ ”
Behind the scenes, Gingrich began pushing the social conservatives and hard-liners to compromise, even abandoning his own cherished school-prayer amendment and enraging antiabortion activists by telling them to back off.
But he would make the same mistake over and over again — no matter how hard he tried to be the cool, analytical leader, no matter how harsh his assaults on others, Gingrich couldn’t help taking the retaliation personally.
“You know what he hated most?” Marianne says. “When they talked about him being fat. That weight thing was personal.”
His bitterness only deepened when the House Ethics Committee started investigating GOPAC’s donations to his college class and caught him trying to hide his tracks by raising money through a charity for inner-city kids called the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation.
Another charity of his called Earning by Learning actually spent half its money supporting a former Gingrich staffer who was writing his biography. Gingrich even gave out the 800 number for videotapes on the House floor.
The Ethics Committee found him guilty of laundering donations through charities, submitting “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable” testimony, and making “an effort to have the material appear to be nonpartisan on its face, yet serve as a partisan, political message for the purpose of building the Republican party.”
Seven years after he had destroyed Jim Wright for a lesser offense, the committee punished Gingrich with the highest fine ever imposed on a Speaker of the House, $300,000.
He had no way to pay it. “We didn’t have anything,” Marianne says. “Just a house that was fully mortgaged.”
Down in Georgia, the press piled up outside their door.
The irony was downright painful: At the same time he was facing that huge fine with no way to pay it, not so long after fate snatched $4.5 million out of his grasp, Gingrich’s success at raising money turned his party around.
In the year after he became Speaker, the GOP raised $60 million, twice as much as the Democrats. Other conservative leaders saw what he was doing and started their own PACs. He had the golden touch, but he couldn’t touch the gold.
That left just one way to pay the fine — he had to write another book. So the staff set aside blocks of time and he began sitting alone for hours, typing with one finger and piling up the pages. The book taking shape amounted to a dramatic apology.
When his inner circle saw what he was writing, they were shocked. “He beat the crap out of himself,”
Marianne says. “I mean, it was weird. It was the most self-blaming — we were all just like, ‘Newt, what are you doing?’ ”
They all gathered at a long table in Gingrich’s office and took out their red pens, cutting one page after another. Newt’s mea culpa would remain unpublished, a secret.
After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate. There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly “overfocused” on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time.
He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked.
The staff responded with gallows humor: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.”
One day during the summer of ’97, senior members of the Republican leadership tried to stage an intervention on the Speaker’s balcony.
Newt was late arriving, and his leadership met first with Marianne, pleading their case, asking that she help them reason with her husband.
His temper was by then volcanic. Would she stay for the meeting? And then they opened the door and Gingrich was standing there.
They told him a softer version of what they’d told her — that the dysfunction was causing a dangerous level of anger in the Congress and the country.
The members actually left in a more cheerful mood — Gingrich was always good at letting people think he agreed with them, Marianne says. But from then on his behavior only got more erratic.
But that was also the period of his greatest political achievement.
After getting rolled by Clinton on the government shutdown, Gingrich was convinced that Republican fortunes were dependent on his ability to at last deal with the White House.
He worked hard to persuade reluctant hard-liners and eventually hammered out a compromise in exchange for tax cuts — for example, he gave Clinton $24 billion to pay for health care to uninsured children. And the budget was balanced, driving the economic boom of the next three years.
These days, Gingrich takes all the credit. Liberals prefer to focus on the effect of Clinton’s 1993 budget. Others point to booming revenue from a growing economy.
But the truth is, it never would have happened without Gingrich. His relentless pressure forced Democrats to make painful cuts.
But it wouldn’t have happened without Clinton, either, who had done things that had been thought impossible for a Democratic president.
That’s why Newt’s next move was the secret negotiations to put Social Security and Medicare on the path to long-term sustainability.
For years, the two parties had refused to agree on the necessary taxes and cuts, but Gingrich and Clinton hashed out a rough draft in a few intense weeks.
Gingrich remembers their peculiar bond to this day. “Clinton and I used to talk like it was a graduate-school session,” he says.
“We both like books, we both like ideas, we both like exploring language and exploring concepts and trying to find solutions.”
But then in 1998, Monica Lewinsky exploded and war broke out between the parties.
Of all the ironies in Gingrich’s paradoxical career, this was certainly the most bitter — at the very moment when he tried to rise above the ugly partisanship he had done so much to foster, it dragged him back down.
In all his years of partisan warfare, Gingrich’s talent had been in never overplaying his hand. But now his party was doing just that in spectacular fashion.
Tom DeLay took charge of the impeachment, as the rest of the Republican leadership was concerned that Gingrich was “too close” to Clinton and too vulnerable to the girlfriend charge himself.
And suddenly, even though Clinton was the one being impeached, it was the Republicans who were in danger of losing Congress.
One night, Marianne says, Bill Clinton called from the White House. She answered the phone and the president asked if he could please speak to her husband. Could the Speaker come over immediately?
After he hung up, Newt summoned his driver and went in the back door to the Oval Office. During that meeting, he would tell her later, Clinton laid it out for him:
“You’re a lot like me,” he told him.
Whatever else happened at that meeting, Newt Gingrich was muzzled in the critical run-up to the ’98 midterms.
Three weeks before the election, Gingrich got a visit from Kenneth Duberstein, a senior Republican who had served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan.
“He says, ‘What’s going on? We’re gonna lose seats if something doesn’t change.’ ” Marianne jumped in, too. “I asked Newt, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t we out there blasting them?’ ”
This was his true turning point, she believes. As his personal failures and his political contradictions closed in on him, she began to entertain fears about his fundamental decency.
“I used to tell him I don’t care if you lose Congress as long as you’re standing for what you believe in and what we’ve worked for — as long as you don’t sell out,” she says.
“But he wanted the life he wanted. You can call it opulent. You can call it self-indulgent. You can call it anything you want to. But that’s not me.”
Marianne remembers watching the election results with Gingrich in their war room down in Georgia, the dismal feeling as one Republican after another went down. The Republicans held on to the House majority, but not by much.
The next morning, Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston of Louisiana threatened to run against Gingrich if he didn’t resign as Speaker. His unpopularity was dragging the party down.
He faxed a list of demands to their house in Georgia, Marianne remembers, insisting that Newt cede him complete power over the appropriations process.
The next day, Gingrich called Marianne into his office and told her he had come to a decision. He was going to step down as Speaker. And resign from Congress, too, though he had just won another term.
Later that week, on a conference call with a few party confidants, Gingrich said, “I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals… . Frankly, Marianne and I could use a break.” His political career was over.
In the history books Gingrich loves, exile is a defining moment when a leader’s true strength of character is revealed. But his own behavior just became more erratic in the months after his fall.
Some days he was full of bravado, conspiring with Duberstein and Marianne on a five-year plan to restore his reputation and rebuild his power base so he could run for president someday.
He even turned down an American Express commercial that would have paid $500,000, Marianne says, because acting in a commercial didn’t have sufficient gravitas for a man of his once and future stature.
And he got some good news from the IRS, which said his college course didn’t violate the tax laws after all.
But other days, Gingrich was bleak and hopeless. He was like a “dead weight” at times like that, Marianne says. You just couldn’t get him to move.
The contrast reminded her of his mother and her manic depression, and she told him he needed help.
But Marianne was having problems of her own. After going to the doctor for a mysterious tingling in her hand, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.
“About what?”
He wanted to talk in person, he said.
“I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.’ ”
He went quiet.
“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”
She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ ”
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.
He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.
The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
When they got to court, Gingrich refused to cooperate with basic discovery.
Marianne and her lawyer knew from a Washington Post gossip column that Gingrich had bought Bisek a $450 bottle of wine, for example, but he refused to provide receipts or answer any other questions about their relationship.
Then Gingrich made a baffling move. Because Bisek had refused to be deposed by Marianne’s attorney, Newt had his own attorney depose her, after which the attorney held a press conference and announced that she had confessed to a six-year affair with Gingrich.
He had also told the press that he and Marianne had an understanding.
“Right,” Marianne says now.
That was not true?
“Of course not. It’s silly.”
During that period, people would come up to Marianne and tell her to settle, that she was hurting the cause.
Ten years later, Gingrich has built an empire of wealth and influence by turning the fundraising scandals of his past inside out.
His American Solutions for Winning the Future is a political-advocacy group similar to GOPAC or the PACs that support regular candidates like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, but with a twist:
Regular PACs can’t take corporate money or personal donations larger than $5,000.
Instead, American Solutions is a “527″ group, which can accept unlimited contributions as long as it doesn’t promote the interests of a specific candidate.
So Gingrich takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal and oil companies and spends it to fight energy regulations and promote conservative leaders at critical moments —
as the archconservative Townhall.com observed, the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign he launched in the spring of 2008 was “likely the source of John McCain’s miraculous rebound in the polls.”
And American Solutions is not just another advocacy group. Its reach is enormous.
The $17 million it raised in the first five months of 2010 is more than double the money raised by the second-biggest 527 group, the Service Employees International Union — one of America’s largest unions.
That makes American Solutions the biggest political-advocacy group in America today, with an expansive issues agenda that just happens to advance the political fortunes of Newt Gingrich.
Then there’s the Center for Health Transformation, another group Gingrich runs.
On its Web site, it describes its work in Georgia as a model for all its efforts and says the “cornerstone” of its work is a group called Bridges to Excellence.
But CHT “had zero role in creating Bridges to Excellence,” says François de Brantes, the group’s CEO.
CHT helped with organization for one year and hasn’t been associated with them since 2008.
The CHT Web site also singles out the “Healthy Georgia Diabetes and Obesity Project” as its major diabetes effort, but that was news to the American Diabetes Association.
“We were not able to find any information about this,” says the ADA’s communications director, Colleen Fogarty.
“The person that was in contact with them is no longer here.” It turns out that the CHT is a for-profit outfit that charges big health insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield up to $200,000 a year for access to the mind of Newt Gingrich.
But it is not a registered lobby. Neither is American Solutions.
So if Gingrich talks to a politician about energy policy while energy legislation is pending, he’s just an intellectual exploring ideas.
And he can go on TV and/or write articles without declaring his financial interest in pending legislation.
One of Gingrich’s former advisors told The Washington Post that he’s “making more money than he ever thought possible, and doesn’t have to tell everybody where it’s coming from.”
Gingrich also is a central figure in Citizens United, the fourth-largest political-advocacy organization in America, the group that tested the limits of corporate power in politics by taking Hillary: The Movie to the Supreme Court.
Was it legal for a corporation to pay to show the movie — a shameless piece of campaign propaganda masquerading as a documentary — just before an election?
As it happens, Gingrich has released five of his movies through Citizens United. Most are faux documentaries just like Hillary: The Movie.
The great conservative scholar James Q. Wilson captured their spirit perfectly with comments that were included in the Congressional Ethics Committee special counsel’s report about Gingrich’s history course:
“It is bland, vague, hortatory, and lacking in substance… Philosophically, it is a mishmash of undefined terms… Scientifically, it is filled with questionable or unsupported generalizations…
I could go on, but I dare not for fear I have misunderstood what this enterprise is all about… If this is not to be a course but instead a sermon, then you should get a preacher to comment on it.”
Throughout, Gingrich’s modus operandi has been startlingly similar to the way he shifted money from GOPAC to the charities that were secretly supporting his college course.
And here’s a mystery: According to Bruce Nash of Nash Information Services, a company that tracks movie sales, these films — some directed by a man best known for a TV show called Bikes from Hell — are spectacular failures.
“The most popular appears to be Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny, which is most likely selling a couple thousand copies a year through major retailers.
Rediscovering God in America sells perhaps two thousand units.”
But the lavish productions do afford Gingrich and his wife luxurious world travel.
At the premiere of the latest, Nine Days that Changed the World, a film about how Pope John Paul II toppled communism, the producer joked from the podium about Gingrich’s champagne tastes. “We didn’t travel steerage, that’s for sure.”
Most of all, the religious emphasis of his documentaries underscores his recent conversion to Catholicism, and perhaps helps to dim the memory of his ugly divorces.
When asked about his conversion, Marianne laughs.
Why is that funny?
“It has no meaning.”
It has no meaning?
“It’s hysterical. I got a notice that they wanted to nullify my marriage. They’re making jokes about it on local radio.
The minute he got married, divorced, married, divorced — what does the Catholic Church say about this?”
She’s not angry at all. She just thinks it’s the only path Gingrich could take after his idealism died, threatening the self he had invented out of the biographies of great men.
“When you try and change your history too much,” she says, “you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”
In New Orleans, Gingrich strides onto the stage at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.” Thousands of activists in a party looking for deliverance rise to their feet.
Gingrich stands there grinning, soaking up the applause
When he begins, his voice is strong and confident.
“When you speak from the heart, you don’t need a teleprompter,” he says, launching into his slashing and scholarly indictment of the Obama secular socialist machine that wants to take away their rights.
And once again, when a man from the audience says we should just end the goddamn income tax already, Gingrich walks him back. “We’ve got to pay for national security.” He even defends spreading the wealth.
“None of the Founding Fathers would have said that George Washington, owning Mount Vernon as the largest landowner, should pay the same tax as somebody who was a cobbler.”
At a moment of doctrinal crisis in the Republican party, Newt Gingrich is the only major figure in his party who is both insurgent and gray eminence.
That is why twelve years after his career ended — twelve years after any other man in his position would have disappeared from view — he is ascendant.
“Will he run?” Marianne asks. “Possibly. Because he doesn’t connect things like normal people. There’s a vacancy — kind of scary, isn’t it?”
One thing is certain — Newt Gingrich loves the question. “That’s up to God and the American people,” he tells you, in the serene tone of a man who already knows what God thinks.
http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910
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So you tell me. Would you vote for this man as President of the United States of America?
Probably not, unless you are a white conservative. They can certainly say they have voted for and elected worst to that office.
But as in my earlier contentions in my post to this blog. It proves my point that whites will elect any despicable person to office as long as they feel that he will keep them America’s AFFIRMATIVE ACTION baby.
You will see this creep again come 2012. Unless he passes away first. And if you don’t get your asses to the polls and vote. He could be the next white male bigoted asshole sitting in that office.
Robert
August 15th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Hafa adai
TAO,
Mr/Mrs/Miss Xur:
You may or may not be an alien from another planet. But you most certainly know a lot about the US government’s actions.
This news release by the US Military just arrived.
=======================
Navy & Air Force Takes Aim on Warning Area – 517 This Week
Written by News Release
Monday, 16 August 2010 07:27
Guam – Guam News
Guam – The Air Force will conduct training on Warning Area-517 today, Monday, August 16, and this coming Thursday the 19th and Friday the 20th.
The training will last from 7 am until midnight.
The Navy takes its turn on W-517 on Tuesday and Wednesday from 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
The general public especially fisherman, commercial pilots and marine tour operators are advised to stay clear from these areas during the times and dates indicated.
W-517 is an irregular shaped polygon comprising of 14,000 nautical square miles of airspace that begins south of Guam and extends south-southwest in international waters.
W-517 supports surface and aerial gunnery, missiles, and laser exercises. This will affect fishing in the vicinity of Santa Rosa Reef and Galvez Bank.
W-517 is contained within the following coordinates: 13° 10″N/144° 30″E, 13° 10″N/144° 42″E, 12° 50″N/144° 45″E, 11° 00″N/144° 45″E, 11° 00″N/143° 00″E, 11° 45″N/143° 00″E, 12° 50″N/144° 30″E.
==================
It would seem that our government is acting to protect or minimize the damage in the area you were discussing.
Hafa adai
Peter
August 15th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Evelyn, I’m touched by your response to me, thanks for the play by play : ) I will also heed your advice re: public outings. Thanks for the kind thought about me and my girl : )
Ruth, I have often had my friends cover their ears while I asked their daughters personal q’s, like ‘did you kiss him? (Sometimes code for ‘are you sleeping with him?) and much more, kids/teens/young adults tend to trust me…I give my disclaimer: I only tell your mamma (and daddy) if it involves drugs and pregnancy. Sex is open to the situation at hand : ) from what I’ve gathered of your essence here it seems your very competent in handling several adolescents. I’m quite sure Anonz wouldn’t have chosen you unless you had a stellar background. I certainly hope he’s just fine but gone underground.
Bob, all previous quips always made me Mona Lisa smile but the past 3 days I have laughed out loud.
Time to walk my staring (or is it glaring) doggie, caio for now, Luv, Zen Lill
August 16th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Credit Card “Protection Plans” Are Not Worth the Cost
Sandy Shore
Nova-debt
These plans from credit card issuers, which promise to pay all or a portion of your credit card bill if you become disabled, lose your job or die, are especially popular during this time of high unemployment and mounting debts —
but there are many loopholes. The plan may not kick in if you lose your job for performance reasons… if you are disabled but can do some other kind of work…
or if you have other disability coverage. The monthly fee ranges from 35 cents to 99 cents per $100 of debt.
Better: Build up an emergency fund or purchase extra life insurance.
August 16th, 2010 at 8:40 am
I have had a real experience with bedbugs. That was a great article.
August 16th, 2010 at 9:34 am
I love aliens. This is great stuff. Oh and your article about Bed Bugs. I stayed in a hotel when I was in my late 20′s that had plenty.
I was cheating on my wife with her cousin. We ended up accusing each other of giving the other crabs.
It wasn’t until about 4 months later that she informed me that she was sorry for accusing me. I asked her how she knew I didn’t give it to her.
She said that her parents who were staying in another room got the bedbug infection too.
Roger
August 16th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Michelle
I bought this light from Costco that is supposed to kill bedbugs. I hope it works.
Jenette