We were going over elections materials together in anticipation of voting Tuesday. He rolls his eyes at one or two of mine, I roll my eyes at one or two of his and we both fervently wish Jerry Brown, who’s going to win anyway, would drop the crazy-talk high-speed train that will do nothing but broadside a few stray cattle. Oh, and they hope to run it across the designated bike paths to about a dozen schools in our city about $99 billion from now.

But that judge who, in court, asked a criminal defendant for his phone number and a date?  Who assessed a $40,000 fine on a construction laborer for letting his worker’s comp insurance lapse? Whom the local bar association declared unfit? Out out out.

Amidst the prose and the impossible be-all-things-to-all-voters attempts, now that California has no gerrymandering and open primaries (YES!!!), the state Voter’s Guide shared the official statement of one Republican: “Most qualified for Controller.” The end.

Well, THAT settles it! Of course! Who else could we possibly have imagined?

Muttering puns about controllerfreaks…

VOTE!

A modest proposal ahead:

We as a society provide childhood vaccinations to rich and poor alike, without charge when need be for the good of everyone simply because it’s the right thing to do. Our grandparents suffered greatly but by the grace of God, our children don’t need to.

The old DPT shot is now the DTaP: diptheria, tetanus and acellular rather than whole-virus pertussis, just as effective but with no side effects, whereas the pertussis part was the biggest source of fevers and aches in the old version.

I chose to be a part of that change. My son was a newborn at Stanford when a researcher came to my bedside and told me that two million Japanese two-year-olds had been given a new DTaP vaccine with not. one. single. case. of reaction, and they hoped to be able to replace the old DPT entirely with this improved version that was so much easier on the children but that still clearly worked. It might require an extra booster later; they did not know yet. She offered me access to any information I might want about her team’s work.

But to be able to get that version in the US at any age would require finding parents willing to have their babies given this shot while it was still in study, Level III, if I remember right. It had not been given to anyone younger than those two-year-0lds. She explained the level of monitoring they would do and the care they would take to make sure my baby was okay and they would immediately discontinue it across the board if any problems surfaced whatsoever among the infants.

Of which there would be none. And so the FDA would later approve it and it would become the standard.

My oldest is allergic to the old DPT and, having reacted, cannot be fully immunized even with the new shot for all the wishing in the world.

So there was that, and, I pictured possibly millions of people spared a long night awake with a crying, unhappy baby in pain–my husband and I signed those papers. Which is why our youngest is part of why your children and my grandchildren have a safer, easier version of their shots now. There’s definitely an amount of pride in that.

Some don’t want vaccines for their kids. They haven’t seen their baby struggling for breath from pertussis or deaf from measles or paralyzed by tetanus so they don’t believe it could ever happen, and they put every immunocompromised person at risk too and don’t see it and don’t think it matters. They don’t know or they don’t want to know that the man who started the anti-vaccination fad had, by very many accounts, a huge financial stake in doing so.

I have an elegant, simple solution. A conservative solution, even.

Pass a law.  Aim it at any parent whose child does not have a valid medical reason and yet who knowingly outright refuses to immunize their child with the DTaP and MMR shots–the basic childhood shots, I’m not talking about Gardasil–any parent who cannot empathize with nor want to protect their own child from the harm these diseases could do to them, well, okay then, that’s their choice, even if I would want to argue with them that my real-world worst-case scenario, that their child dies, beats their imagined worst-case scenario, that their child becomes autistic.

But they should then be on the hook financially for the outcome of that choice. Hospitalizations, medications, therapies, hearing aids, doctors, nursing care, we can’t make them not risk their children’s suffering life-threatening or simply life-crummying illnesses but we can choose not to take the burden off those parents of the financial costs they expect to impose across the rest of us for it. Society already offered, they refused, they need to own it.

All we have to do to make this happen is to say that the insurance companies are, as of some date in the near future, not required to cover any costs incurred by a child’s illness of these specific and preventable types if this is why they were left susceptible and got sick.

The insurance companies will quite gleefully do the rest.

(Edited 5/18 to add: No, I certainly don’t think children should go without medical care. I do think we must speak out more about the costs, of every kind, of this terrible fad. See my comment below about friends of mine who dealt with a major medical debt and how it got worked out; another thought might be to, rather than withhold all coverage, impose a huge co-pay with, if needed, long payoff terms.)

Interviewer: so what is your take on global warming?

Guest: Well, in the San Francisco area, the fog is traditionally supposed to come in on *little* cat feet, but…

CUT!

A mountain lion was spotted trotting through the park yesterday and down a congested street in a highly populated area.

Details are a little squirrelly, but note that it came within a few blocks of where President Obama will be speaking Friday. Peace officers were watching it like a hawk but deemed its actions not a capital crime. Was it flushed out by Secret Service members trolling for cougars during advance staging? Some may find it hard to stomach that the animal may be in Limbaugh at the moment (there’s certainly no lion under oaf) but plans seem to be to release it in the Santa Cruz mountains, because, hey, that’s where commie pinkos Neil Young and Joan Baez both live, right? (Unseen from off camera: Now, now, let’s make a Concerted effort to Bridge over our differences. Yes? Gracias a la vida!)

Announcer, continuing: Cat’ll Rove pounced on the story. Next on Coyote News, where the only legitimate predator is our species, not theirs. Top of the food-fighting yank-your-chain and bringing you the latest.

All that lion knows is it’s going to wake up in some other cat’s territory and there will be a whelp of a lot of explaining to do.

(But seriously, to our relatives in Los Gatos, which means, yes, The Cats, and everybody else up there–keep an eye out and stay safe, y’all.)

I thought I was going to blog about picking the first two, so perfect blueberries of the season today. Instead I’m going to go political on you for a moment–but wait: there’s something for both sides.

Here is the interview from a year ago with the lead researcher from back in the ’90’s before the funding for what he was doing at the Centers for Disease Control got outlawed by Congress. He spoke with the reporter while it looked, ever so briefly, that his work might finally be a go again.

And here is the interview with the professor of emergency room medicine, a doctor who sees the results of our gun culture on the daily job, who had been one of those CDC researchers into the effects of guns on the American public’s health.

When his funding got cut off, rather than folding up shop, he used his inheritance and his doctor’s salary and by living simply he had the means to keep his team of four going. It was too important not to.  He won’t accept donations from anyone with a side in the argument: not the Brady folks, not the NRA people, not Michael Bloomberg, nada (the State of California, though, yes.) It’s too important to him to be able to offer up the findings in a way that nobody can claim is tainted.

You could take someone with a string of misdemeanors and he’ll keep committing nonviolent misdemeanors. But if he buys a gun, the chance that he will commit a crime of violence escalates.

Okay, that didn’t surprise me.

Closing the gunshow loophole would have not much effect.

Okay, that quite surprised me.

There are very strong emotions on the whole subject of gun control.  We desperately need an even-keeled voice offering a tallying of what is done–or not done–with the guns that are bought, stolen, or used however and in whatever circumstances. We think we know.  Perhaps, though, not so much.

This man’s whole life is about giving us the information we need to have rational discussions on the subject and as we plan for the future. I’ve never been quite so glad that someone had a nice inheritance. He is multiplying its value three hundred thirteen million times over.

Thank you, Drs. Amy Reed and Hooman Noorchasm. You did it! The FDA has now officially declared morcellation of fibroids a dangerous procedure that should not be performed. http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm393689.htm.

And here’s the New York Times article (blog glitch still won’t let me link, sorry.) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/health/fda-tells-doctors-to-stop-procedure-used-to-remove-uterine-fibroids.html?hp&_r=0

Well done. And I was so relieved to read that the radical multi-organ surgery, as hard as it surely was and is, that was done on Dr. Reed gives her so much greater a chance of seeing her kids grow up. Wishing them all my best.

Thank you, everybody, I appreciate it; today was a relief after yesterday. I was pretty discouraged there.

Interesting political theater, meantime: watching Congresspeople before the State of the Union address.

One guy, clearly aware there was a camera pointed their way, was smiling quite jovially as Ted Cruz talked to him. Cruz, even seen mostly from the back, clearly was getting more and more intense, jabbing a finger hard in the air, lecturing, the camera lingering to capture the moment while the other guy (dunno who he was) was being easygoing in response.

John McCain was just in front of the two of them and smiling in bemusement at the harangue going on behind him and lifting but not quiiiite entirely rolling his eyes but oh so close as to call it. Then they all sat down for the address and as the camera panned back their way my impression that that had to have been Cruz was confirmed.

I didn’t knit as the President spoke because I was at that indecisive what-to-start-next stage and besides, I didn’t want to miss a word. This was the proverbial and actual Leader of the Free World and I wanted to hear what he had to say.

President Obama laid out the challenges before us, invited Congress to help him meet those challenges and then, acknowledging reality, laid out what he personally was going to do to move us forward. He basically asked them to work together, take the credit for it and run with it.

When my uncle was a freshman in the Senate, there was no one law and in many states, anybody–anybody–could access your medical records for the asking *except you*.  You were legally barred. My uncle’s proposal was for a Federal law saying that other than in specific psychiatric cases where there is clear cause to shield the record, all patients should be allowed to access their own and others would need to meet a standard to do so.

The members of his party were quite upset. This would be a Federal law on something the states should regulate. States’ rights!

Uncle Bob responded by saying Senator (I don’t remember who but a ranking Democrat) is against it.

Oh well in THAT case! And his fellow Republicans rallied behind it.

Then-President Clinton ran with it and took credit for it when he signed it and that’s fine, presidents always do get the blame and the credit, the point was to get it done. Probably nobody outside the family associates my uncle’s name with that law. He doesn’t mind a bit. It needed to happen.

Given today’s political realities, I think any member of Congress willing to buck the trend of intransigence and (just) do their (bleeping) jobs would get quite a bit of personal and political credit from a grateful country.

(I started a Malabrigo Mecha hat during the rebuttals. An easy decision.)

According to the Washington Post, the drug companies average a 19.9% return on revenue, and the problem isn’t the strength of the insurers (who make 2.2%), it’s that they’re weak: they can’t band together to negotiate lower prices. So.

Another year, another first time in January at the pharmacy. Same guy. He’s the manager now.

He looked at me with a wry smile after entering my insurance info and the amount rang up. “You want to know what it’s going to be this time?”

“Like last year when we met the year’s deductible in one day here?”

He handed me the slip and let me see for myself. Not quite three thousand. Fun times. Having no choice, I handed him my credit card.

The grocery clerk noted my I Voted sticker and proudly pointed out his own.

Eighteen out of 32 precincts reporting, Measure D is going steadily down, now at 56-44% despite opponents having been outspent 10-1. I should hold off on the victory party for the moment, but I like those early results. Maybe the developers won’t get to rewrite all of the zoning ordinances in town after all.

And in Texas, re the new voter ID law that was pushed hard by the tea-party state attorney general: it is deliciously ironic that Greg Abbott on the voting rolls found himself face-to-face with the reality of Gregory Wayne Abbott on his driver’s license. Not a match. Bounce. He had to sign an affidavit saying he really was him and then jump through all the hoops he’d helped put in other rightful voters’ way.  Karma, up close and personal.

Update: all precincts in, 43.89% vs 56.11%. WE WON!!! Time to break out the chocolate and dance!

Hope all your election results are a fine, fine thing in the morning.

I’m knitting it in a straight line rather than a circle so as to be flexible re the length.

I am a firm believer in not running out of yarn. Part of my childhood included watching my mother spending months knitting my dad an elaborate Aran and coming up short right at the end. She had no idea then how many times she would be saving me in the future from the same fate.

Which is why I have nearly a thousand yards of that qiviut-merino blend in a muted raspberry; the price definitely helped, too. The brown of the musk ox dominates far more than their photos or mine show.

It had not occurred to me till I read the comments on yesterday’s post that I had another cone of that cherry silk/lycra that I’d made that shawl out of  that would match that qiviut well, too. I just had never thought of them together, even after pairing it with the unlikely baby alpaca and having it come out so pretty. OH! Of course! I exclaimed quite out loud. Anne had nailed it!

Thank you everybody for your input, it really helped.

So I did not rip out what I started yesterday, as many of you were hoping I wouldn’t and because I didn’t want to either, and that chorus of no, please don’ts persuaded me on what I already knew; I simply started over on other needles. I would have enough for two. Cowls, at least, the classic qiviut project anyway.

The 5% lycra grabs the other fibers and keeps the silk from slithering out while the silk justifies diluting that qiviut as much as anything ever could.

I will do the airy one later in its own time when my hands are up to it, and now I have one I know will get done in time. It’s on a comfortable pair of rosewood size 7s, coming along nicely.

A lined matching hat would be great for Alaska, too, but we’ll see how far I get.

—–

Edited to add: please vote Tuesday. In our town, a developer wants a mega project justified by affordable senior housing off to the side (and right on the designated bike route for four schools clustered there). But it comes with a parking space for every other apartment. As if seniors never drive. Never volunteer. As if nobody ever visits them. As if it made any sense.

And a 90-year-old’s birth certificate (it has to be certified, which you have to pay for, and how is that not a poll tax), his ID as a professor, and his expired (because, hey, he’s 90 and is being responsible like that) driver’s license are not enough: he was denied a voter ID card by the great state of Texas.  Lives in Ted Cruz’s town. His attendant drove him to go check it out and sure enough, they turned him down, no, you can’t vote with those.

The fact that he used to be the Speaker of the US House himself did Jim Wright no good. What about all the people with less name recognition or nobody to drive them?

Vote.  Did you know that our bitterly bickering House actually quietly passed a bill to kill the desperately-needed derivatives reform of Wall Street that Dodd-Frank had enacted? Our democracy depends on you and me making our voices heard, in every election, on every issue. Please don’t miss it.

I shocked Steve. I let them have it.

I went up to him afterwards to apologize for being so emotional, saying that I’d surprised myself– “But then, I realized, I WAS angry!”

He looked at me with this grateful smile on his face getting bigger and bigger and finally, looking in my eyes, said, “Wow. Of *all* the people… I would NEVER have taken you for such a tiger!” and he thanked me. “That was straight from the heart. You were great!”

Nearly five hours into the two hour meeting I had had to put down the knitting and just listen to them drone on and on and sent Richard a note and my Iphone autocorrected that phrase to “inane,” capturing it perfectly, and it was oh please, please let me have my needles back.

Backstory: as I’ve mentioned, we only have one car now because we spent near the equivalent of a small car on my new hearing aids. Which are fabulous. And so, when the Mountain View City Council scheduled their meeting that was essentially the redeveloper vs Milk Pail at 5:00-7:00, Stage II, Richard and I were stuck: it could go to any hour and I couldn’t strand him at work and he didn’t want to strand me from going and supporting Steve, the owner of Milk Pail, on behalf of both of us.

I almost rented a car.

He decided I really did need to go no matter what and made arrangements at work and simply called me at 3:45 to my surprise and said, I’m coming home now. You can go.

Last time I was in those council chambers, I sat there unable to decipher any of the proceedings in that room, even with what was then state-of-the-art aids, simply a mute presence in Steve’s support, so when he shook my hand before it started tonight and thanked me for coming and asked if I would speak, I said, no, no, I don’t think so.

I heard every word coming out of the councilmembers’ microphones. Who knew! Thank you Oticon! Everything, and so when they asked for public comment I leaped to my feet–yeah I had something to say, definitely. With the 1.15 million square feet the developer wants to build along SA Road, I said it was laughable that they claimed it would have zero impact on traffic on SA Road in the adjoining cities just a few blocks away (and near us).

I told of the community that Milk Pail creates, where rich and poor alike come to shop, where the poor can afford fresh veggies because Steve’s prices are so low. Because his costs are so low. He’s been there a long time. (I didn’t say the obvious, that it’s stupid to tell him to move his business–given Proposition 13 and the fact that he’s owned his land for 38 years, he would lose his low property tax edge entirely and the fact that he owns the place outright and would have to raise his prices. Come ON people. But yes, Council asked innocently why he didn’t just move. Duh.)

And then I got down to what I knew they knew: one small halal shop had refused to sell. So the developer had cut off their parking and starved them out and now owns what was their property. They’re trying to do the same thing to Steve. (And the Council itself had abrogated the existing longterm parking agreement that Steve had paid for and then they’d individually denied having voted for any such thing, till Steve showed them chapter and verse at an earlier meeting where they had. I did not bring that up.)

Having mentioned I lived in the town just over one, I told them, “I have shopped at Milk Pail for twenty-six years.” I cited the halal owners and told them “That is why my family and I have boycotted every business built in Stage I. My husband and four grown kids have not and will not step foot in the new Safeway; we used to shop at the old one on California Avenue” (now closed). “IF YOU SHAFT STEVE”–I looked around at them– “you are telling us You. No. Longer. Want. Our. Dollars. Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Safeway, Costco.

We have our own.”

And I sat down. (Thinking, well, except for the Costco, we’d have to go to Redwood City or Sunnyvale if we skip yours. Close enough.)

I didn’t even use up my allotted two minutes. I didn’t have to.

It was great seeing the developer’s head honcho getting defensive and angry in response to some of Council’s questions later.

But they were too divided, and could only decide not to decide yet. Steve’s not out of the woods yet. But with 200 emails pouring in from the community and a record turnout tonight for such a meeting, demanding that Milk Pail be saved, things may be looking up.

Maybe.

We have to keep up the pressure on the City.

After sixteen days of the shutdown, as a Washington, DC-born native and political addict I happened to catch the Washington Post just as they were going live with the one-minute-limit speeches and then the vote in the House.

It took me back to my grandfather’s funeral, where his former Senate chief of staff told of another staffer telling him, You don’t know how lucky you are. You always know your guy will vote his conscience. Ours hides in the cloakroom to see which way it’s going.

And so the vote began slowly tonight, especially on the Republican side and with their Ayes two-to-one to their Nays–until they hit that magic number that meant the Democrats were going to win now, period: we would not default. We would reopen the government. The deal was done.

And so now they could play to the folks in their districts back home without being responsible for bringing the country and even the world down around their heads, and suddenly the Republican Nays doubled, then in short order doubled again.

Made for interesting political theater.

Now, whichever side one might be on politically, there is one thing that hasn’t gotten much press that I think we should all be able to agree on. Standing House Rule 22 Section 4 was described by James Madison thus: “If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.”

Thus: if the House amends a Senate bill and the Senate rejects the amendments and sends it back to the House, any member of the House can then call for a straight up-or-down vote on that bill. That was Rule 22 Section 4.

Chris Van Hollen, during the standoff, asked to be able to do exactly that and was denied. The Republican-run Rules Committee had met the day before the shutdown and had changed that centuries-old rule so that now only the Majority Leader–that would be Eric Cantor of the Tea Party–had the authority to call such a bill up for a vote.

Jason Chaffetz (the guy who wants to sell off chunks of Yosemite) tried repeatedly to refuse to allow Van Hollen to be heard.

“Democracy has been suspended,” said Van Hollen after his attempts at getting a straight answer out of the guy as to just what they had done, and he wrote a piece for The Guardian laying out the details.

There’s been a lot of press about the Hastert rule, but even Dennis Hastert says it wasn’t really a rule.

This, however, is something that everyone needs to tell their House representative to overturn: even if it serves your side now, it will be used against you later. It gives control over the entire House, and as we saw these last two weeks the entire country, to one man in one party in one half of Congress that is one third of the three branches of the government. One individual, under Citizens United, denying liberty and administering injustice to all.

And that is no way to run this great country.

Write your Congressperson. Reinstate House Rule 22 Section 4. By law.

And now, at long last, two-year-olds in teddy bear suits will get to go see Smokey the Bear at the National Zoo again.

(Edited to add: find links to your Senators’ emails here. Your House members, here.

Being sick is boring, so I’m going to mention other stuff.

Congress is trying to sell off parts of Yosemite for logging and mineral rights, along with a fair number of other public lands. Firefighting the Rim fire, that was expensive, you know. You can’t go in there, because they’re not funding the parks, but if the bill passes, the corporations can (and you never will again where they will be).

The studies and facts for anyone worried about whether or not to vaccinate their kid or how to answer someone who won’t.

Okay, and for something far more fun, this article says a Carnegie Hall orchestra was plunked on a random street corner in New York City with a sign: “Conduct us.” The first person to step up on the conductor’s podium (with encouragement from her mommy) was a little girl who had to have stood way high on her tippy tippy toes to reach the music stand, where she opened her coloring book to just the right page and started waving that baton for her daddy and his friends to start the music.

No line was formed, there were no rules anywhere, and yet everybody noticed who had been waiting longer than themselves and waited their turn, strangers looking out for strangers and laughing together while appreciating the magic of the moment. Move the baton slow or fast, point at this player or that and the musicians watched and honored their efforts and played along for the sheer joy of it.

Can we send them all to the halls of Congress?

Clearly Washington needs more musicians. They would bring out the best in the people who need it the most.

Why are they acting like this? Why did, to paraphrase the President, one faction of one party of one house of one branch of the government shut down that government over one already-established law?

Here’s the best explanation I’ve found so far. There’s the small-government issue and there’s the funding of right-wing politicians via the uber-rich Koch Brothers, whose dad co-founded the John Birch Society and now with the help of Citizens United call the shots behind the scenes with all the corruption that engenders. (If they wanted employers to fund insurance or employees to just go buy it themselves, they and the Waltons and the like who run a goodly percentage of the economy should have paid them enough to be able to do so. And the health insurers should never have been allowed by Republican governors twenty years ago to change to for-profit status and throw tens of millions per year at their CEOs instead of patient care, and, business profits or no, should never have been allowed to turn applicants away.)

But the big point the writer makes is that when so many of the working poor no longer have to live in dire fear of being one medical emergency away from total catastrophe, it may be that they’ll start to vote their gratitude and relief and away from the party that, certainly in the Southern states, many of them belong to now.

The House is certainly making it a stark choice.

Speaking about how this is all going to play out for the Cruz types is an op-ed by a former Senator who was considered one of the most right-wing in his day. I didn’t always agree with his politics but I love him dearly. Go Uncle Bob–you tell’em.

The dark navy, almost black stripe? That one went really slowly as my hands recovered. But now the new green yarn is coming along nicely. I’m second-guessing myself, I always do, on whether the green really meshes so well with the others, but it’s very clear that once the denim blue is in after that it will be perfect in there. Colors have conversations amongst themselves, and those two will huddle at the end of the room, catching up.

And the green is already making the navy less black and more blue around it.

Re this morning, we all drove to the airport so that there would be someone in the car with the driver coming back to make sure he didn’t fall asleep. Not to mention that with the bridge closed, we actually had to use the carpool lane from San Jose, even before 6:00 am.

And I just poured myself a glass of milk partway down the outside of the glass. I think maybe I won’t get up at 5:15 tomorrow morning.

Meantime, our daughter Sam got her second paper from her PhD published here, making her Mom and Dad burst with pride all over again. (And if you’re waiting for a medical breakthrough for any disease, go bug your Congressperson hard. The sequester is ending careers for researchers as years of work are abruptly coming to a stop, and knowledge is being lost along with the jobs.)

Okay, enough kvetching, back to the happy anticipation. I can’t wait to see that baby blanket finished!

This amaryllis is dedicated to the people in Boston. It’s supposed to have a good two feet of stem, but due to its exposure to red virus last year, wasn’t able to grow one. It refused to let that stop it from offering the blooming it was meant to give to the world.

Meantime, they caught the guy (and I’m sure that story will be updated by morning). He was arrested today and accused of sending ricin-laced and threatening letters: the President was sent one, as were five members of Congress, some of them hand-delivered, and what looked like a bomb was left at a Senate building entrance; thousands of staffers were locked down.

Those Congressmen’s peers still voted to make it so that, should this man get out of jail, on bail or for time served, he then can have access to any gun of any capacity he should so choose without submitting to a background check against his mental or criminal state. The Senate wasn’t even willing to say to Heller with you. (Paging Scalia.)

Wow.

But I thank those those worked so hard at identifying and stopping this guy so fast and I pray for all the other investigators needing the help, as well as for the wounded and those tending to them.

Of whom there are now more. My heart goes out to everybody in the town of West, Texas tonight.