Hasta La Gadget!

We have all been there before. White knuckles wrapped around the steering wheel, constant glances at the clock, turning down the radio while you go over your mental packing list. That frantic ride to the airport, the one that began fifteen minutes later than originally planned. We love that moment of relief that happens the moment after the airport is in sight; a sense of “we made it” is short lived because we know the journey has just begun.

The daily life of ALS is constantly filled with challenges for everyone involved. It is not just me, the patient (I hate that word), but for everyone around me. This is never more true than when travel, especially air travel, is on the horizon. If caring for someone with ALS was like juggling, caring for someone with ALS and traveling would be like juggling while riding a unicycle on a treadmill.

Thanks to my acrobat-like girlfriend and a group of dedicated friends, I was recently able to travel to NYC, the city I called home for almost seven years. The trip was the perfect blend of business and pleasure. We had a jammed packed itinerary, but the highlights were a A Life Story Foundation meeting with our NYC chapter and a dear friend’s off-Broadway premier.

A late morning flight out of Milwaukee meant a relatively calm start to the trip. That is only because I am leaving out the hours my girlfriend spent packing the night before. Remember, she is not just packing for herself (a challenge within itself), she has to pack my clothes, medications, equipment, and enough food for my feeding tube to last for four days.

I used to scowl at the family of five trying to maneuver their way through the security line with their car seats, baby bottles, and what seemed to be more little shoes than there are feet. Let’s just say I kindly smile at them these days. After Betsy (the girlfriend) explains why she has bottles of water and Boost cartons and I am done getting felt up by the TSA agent, we are off to our gate.

If there is one good thing that comes with ALS it is being able to board the plane before everyone else. Before ALS I was a frequent traveler and typically avoided Southwest Airlines because I hated the “cattle call” boarding required. However, now I fly Southwest exclusively. Their customer service from the ticketing desk to the ramp operators who are responsible for handling my 250-pound wheelchair are always incredibly kind and professional.

Once our boarding passes are scanned, I zip down the jetway and say goodbye to my wheels as Betsy helps me with the short walk to the first row of seats. Once I am seated, she reclines my seat and puts on my foam neck brace, then scampers back to the chair to take off the headrest and seat cushion, both of which are very important and could be easily damaged in the cargo hull.

Imagine that feeling of anxiety and that increased body temperature that occurs when you trying to secure your items in the overhead compartment. Standing in the aisle, people looking and wondering why you are moving so frantically, all the same while all you want to do is sit down and get this plane in the air!

As the jet taxis to the runway, Betsy has her hands on my forehead so my head does not fall down due to the weakening of my neck muscles. We always get nice smiles and small talk from the flight attendants who are seated a few feet in front of us. There is no better sound than the intercom bell that indicates we have been cleared for takeoff. It is not the excitement of the destination, it is actually the speed that the jet hits in order to take off, the “g” forces gently press my head against the seat until the moment we land in the Big Apple.

By the time we are “wheels up”, I think we are already on hour five or six of the trip. That seems excessive for an hour and a half flight, doesn’t it? But that, unfortunately, so is traveling with ALS.

The Senate just voted for a fourth time to open debate on a budget bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, coupled together by the House with poison-pill language to block President Obama’s new policies on immigration. For the fourth time, the bill failed to gain the 60 votes necessary to move forward. This time around, Republicans could only muster 47 votes in favor of the legislation — fewer than any of the previous three times the Senate had voted on it. (The bill has never even gotten 55 votes, much less 60, and the only bipartisanship has come from one Republican voting with the Democrats, for those of you keeping score at home.)

The reason the fourth vote was held is a simple one: Mitch McConnell is stalling. He is buying time until the last minute looms, which will happen later this week. Republicans will not back themselves out of their self-induced corner until the absolute last possible opportunity to do so arrives. What is amusing in this contest of wills is that the endgame depends not on a fight between Obama and the Republicans but on the outcome of the power struggle between John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Perhaps “power struggle” is the wrong term; what it really amounts to is “avoiding being the tea party’s scapegoat.” One way or another, there will be conservative blame. That blame will be laid at the feet of whichever Republican leader is seen to cave first, and neither McConnell nor Boehner wants to be that target. This is why absolutely nothing productive is going to happen until much later in the week.

There are other amusing aspects to this standoff, seen from the point of view of the Democrats. Republicans, now that they are in power in the Senate, have shifted their tactics and their rhetoric accordingly. What this means is that they are now all in favor of procedures they used to be dead-set against, and they are now horrified at the use of procedures they used to enthusiastically embrace. In other words, the hypocrisy is on full display, at least for anyone who remembers what Republicans have been saying for the past few years.

The best example of this is how Republicans now talk about the filibuster. When they were in the minority, they brought a whole new era to the Senate, one in which even the most routine of bills had to gain 60 votes to move. This expansion of the filibuster was unprecedented in American history, as Senate Republicans filibustered literally hundreds of bills. Now, however, they are decrying the use of the filibuster by Democrats. They whine and whinge about how unfair having to get 60 votes to move legislation now is, after being the filibuster champions for the past few Congresses. They are desperately trying to portray Democrats now availing themselves of the filibuster as being some sort of radicals for using the parliamentary tool that they themselves used so effectively up until two months ago. Their complaints are downright laughable, but Boehner and his ilk seem unaware of this hypocritical hilarity contained within their public statements.

Republican whining about the filibuster isn’t the only amusing spin they’re now trying to sell, however. Remember their rage when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) passed? One major complaint (out of many) from the Republicans was that the law was passed on a party-line vote; in the end, not a single Republican voted for it. This was supposed to be the mark of a bad law, being partisan as all get-out, and Republicans denounced the fact that Democrats had “jammed the bill down the throat of the American people” without any hint of bipartisanship.

Well, now that Republicans are in the lead, there is absolutely zero effort to get Democrats on board other than holding a department’s budget hostage. A certain percentage of congressional Republicans (most of them in the House) have convinced themselves that, magically, at the last minute, a whole bunch of Senate Democrats will suddenly see the light and vote for their bill. There’s really no other reason Mitch McConnell has held four votes on the same bill in the past week. In each vote the result was the same. Democrats did not cross the aisle. The only Senate votes for the bill were Republican votes. In other words, using their previous terminology, Republicans are trying to pass a purely partisan bill on a large and important issue. Remember when they were against that sort of thing?

The third biggest irony (or hypocrisy) of the Republican position on the DHS bill comes from the fight that preceded it (and should indeed supersede it) on immigration reform. Almost two years ago the Senate actually passed a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. It got an impressive and bipartisan 68 votes. The bill was sent to the House, where it died. At the time, the big complaint from House Republicans was that the bill was “too big.” This was also a complaint often heard about the Obamacare bill: It had too many pages and too many words and therefore was beyond the comprehension abilities of the House Republicans. That would sound like a slur if it were not, in fact, exactly what they were arguing at the time.

The relative bigness of bills had never before been much of a partisan issue in Washington, but for some reason the House default position became (to paraphrase Orwell’s Animal Farm) “Big bills bad, little bills better.” Rather than just hold a vote on the Senate immigration bill (which, by all accounts, would have passed with a bipartisan majority), the House would instead slice and dice the issue into lots of little bills that each dealt with one specific aspect of immigration reform. They were going to start with border security (of course). The Senate bill would have doubled the size of the Border Patrol, but that wasn’t good enough for the House Republicans.

After much waiting and many promises, the House did absolutely nothing on comprehensive immigration reform. No small bills passed and were sent over to the Senate. No big bills either. Even with this record of utter failure, the core concept seemed to remain and become the Republican go-to position: The smaller and more targeted a bill is, the better.

Right up until it became time to fund the Department of Homeland Security, of course. Then House Republicans demanded that the two issues be jammed together. The DHS budget could not be passed, the House Republicans vowed, without additional measures to register their anger over President Obama’s immigration policies. They’ve been working hard on immigration reform in the House for years now, with absolutely nothing to show for it — no bills, big or little — and now they are determined to make a simple budget bill bigger by hitching immigration policy to it. That this goes counter to their entire strategy for the past few years apparently does not bother them a bit.

In fact, this is likely how the standoff is going to end. Mitch McConnell is going to have to bow to the reality that the big bill the House Republicans sent over cannot pass his chamber (and would get vetoed even if it did). So the only real possible answer is going to be to separate what the House passed into two discrete bills: one that contains a clean budget for DHS and one that allows all the Republicans to vent their rage at President Obama to their heart’s content. The first bill will pass both chambers and be signed by the president. The second will not. The only real question is whether the clean budget bill will fund the department all year or just for the next few months (so that Republicans can have this pointless and unwinnable battle all over again later).

Congressional Republicans who cannot do basic math will be outraged. Call them the “Ted Cruz wing” of the Republican Party — those folks who don’t understand the reality of not having a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress and therefore think that merely “holding our ground” will somehow magically win the day for them in the end. They will denounce the tactic of splitting the bills apart, because they will see all their supposed leverage disappear as a direct result.

It serves them right, though. For years now they’ve been arguing against big, comprehensive bills and insisting that the best bills are the smallest ones, targeted to one individual issue (or even sub-issue). So it is now amusing for Democrats to watch them try to defend their big bill, just as it will be amusing to watch them howl later this week when it gets split in two. All a Democrat will have to do to really rub it in will be to affect a mock-surprised tone of voice and say, “But you’ve been saying all along that immigration reform can only be done one tiny step at a time! Why are you now so upset at such a targeted bill?” Then stand back and watch the apoplexy.

Chris Weigant blogs at:

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In the aftermath of the 2012 Presidential Election, many on the far right — including Ted Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Brent Bozell and Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots — said that the Republican Party lost the presidential election because its presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was not conservative enough.

Whoever knew these people to be wrong?

If it were not for that Socialist buttinski Romney, the GOP would have nominated a real conservative, and he or she would have been elected president instead of you-know-who. In 2016, Republicans must nominate a true conservative, who will not compromise but rather double down on ring-wing ideas.

The GOP may lose the presidential election in a landslide, but nobody will say its candidate was not conservative enough.

The GOP should take the following positions at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C. on February 25-28.

Global warming. The liberal media continually quote scientists who claim global warming poses a danger to life on Earth. Such stories ignore the opinions of scientists who work for oil companies. If the earth is becoming warmer — and we’re not saying it is — it is because of solar energy, which increases the amount of heat from the Sun. One doesn’t need to be a scientist to see that fossil fuels are safer than solar energy.

Illegal immigration. If the United States is serious about controlling its borders, it isn’t enough to deport illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin-American countries. We must do something about the million or so illegal immigrants who are here from other countries throughout the world, like Canada and Africa.

And what about all the Europeans who came to this country before we had immigration laws? It’s too late to deport the people who settled here without documentation in the 1800s, but we can do something about their descendants!

Our position on illegal immigration should be as follows: Anyone who cannot prove they are in the United States legally must be deported to their home country.

Gay marriage. Socialist politicians, activist judges, and the liberal media have convinced much of America that gay marriage is acceptable. This is an affront to the Bible, which gives homosexuality a few dozen of the Book’s 750,000 words — and only tens of thousands of words to such things as love, compassion, kindness, forbearance, and mercy.

There are more passages in the Bible prohibiting leavened bread than there are passages prohibiting homosexuality. How can we call ourselves Christians if we sit idly by while so many people are eating leavened bread? What if there’s a link between leavened bread and homosexuality? Or vice versa?

Conservatives must not only intensify their fight against the spread of homosexuality and leavened bread, we must insist that other Biblical prohibitions be mandated by law.

This includes eating pork (Leviticus 11:7-8), shellfish (Deuteronomy 14:9-10), and anything with fat (Leviticus 3:17); cutting the sides of your hair and trimming your beard (Leviticus 19:27); wearing polyester or anything else with more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19); or having women teach or have jobs where they have authority over me. (1 Timothy 2:12).

The Bible also instructs us to execute anyone who works on the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14). This admittedly would be unpopular with the National Football League. But how can anyone argue with us? It’s God’s will.

Washington politics always involves a high level of silliness (does President Obama really love America?), but when it comes to trade policy it shifts to full-fledged craziness. Anything is fair game when the political establishment wants to pass major trade agreements like NAFTA or the Trans-Pacific Partnership. At such times we see respectable Washington types making pronouncements bearing so little relationship to reality they would cause Sarah Palin to cringe.

The Washington Post gave us one such gem last week when it took issue with those saying that currency rules should be part of any new trade pact. Its lead editorial last Thursday argued against including any provisions on currency. Its main point is best summarized by a paraphrase of an old Barbie doll line, “currency values are hard.”

The Post argued that it would be impossible to distinguish between policies intended for other purposes, like the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) program that was designed to boost growth, and policies whose main purpose is to depress the value of the currency. An assertion like this in the context of a debate on trade is laughable.

Every provision in trade agreements will have ambiguities most of which are much more difficult to resolve than this one. Trade deals all prohibit export subsidies, almost by definition. But what about publicly funded vocational training in which the government picks up much of an exporter’s training costs? What about publicly financed infrastructure that reduces the exporter’s cost to send its products out of the country?

What about publicly financed research (e.g. the National Institutes of Health) that hugely reduce the cost to private firms of innovation? What about below market interest loans provided by the Export-Import Bank? If the Post is really concerned about potential ambiguities raising difficult enforcement issues then it would be staunchly opposed to restrictions on export subsidies, since many of these issues actually are hard.

As a practical matter, it really is not difficult to recognize governmental actions to affect currency values. Fred Bergsten, the former president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an ardent supporter of free trade, came up with a list of conditions a few years back.

At the center of this list was the accumulation of a massive amount of foreign exchange reserves and large and persistent trade surpluses. It also helps that most of the countries accused of currency “manipulation” explicitly target the value of their currency. If the Post editorial board and others can’t tell the difference between these actions and QE then maybe they are in the wrong line of work.

As crazy as this story is, the rest of the argument is even better. The Post tells us that adding currency rules:

“at this late date could cause a rebellion by TPP negotiating partners, possibly scuttling the entire project, along with all the benefits, geopolitical and economic, of knitting major Pacific Rim economies together under the aegis of U.S.-style free trade.”

Actually many of us had been complaining about currency values for a long time. The reason that the issue is being pressed at “this late date” is that there was no opportunity for action earlier. With fast-track trade authority finally being taken up by Congress this is the first chance for the public to weigh in on the trade deal. So the Post’s argument here is essentially that we kept the deal out of public sight for so long (it is still secret) that it is now too late for the public to weigh in.

The issue about a rebellion by our trading partners is also entertaining. There are many issues in the TPP that our trading partners don’t like. They don’t like rules that will force them to pay more for drugs from Pfizer and Merck. Nor do they like rules that will make them pay more money to Time-Warner for Hollywood movies or Microsoft for software. But President Obama and the Post were willing to risk a rebellion from our trading partners to get higher profits for the pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industry. It is only when the question is one of jobs for U.S. workers that the risk of such a rebellion becomes an unacceptable price.

Finally the bad story that we are supposed to fear, “scuttling the entire project,” should arouse howls of derision everywhere. Wow, all those industry folks spent years trying to craft a deal that would boost their profits by circumventing laws and regulations in the U.S. and elsewhere, and now their efforts may prove pointless? Pass the handkerchief I can’t hold back the tears.

On the serious side, we could have trade deals that would advance the interests of workers in the United States. For example if we focused on reducing patent and copyright protections nationally and internationally we could save hundreds of billions annually on drugs and other products. We could also loosen professional barriers that cause our doctors to earn twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries, leading to huge savings in health care costs.

But these items are not on President Obama’s trade agenda. Rather it is dominated by a list of measures that are likely to increase inequality. And if his trade deals are defeated because they refuse to take any steps to redress the trade deficit and the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs to trade, it will not be bad news for the country.

Photographer Douglas Kirkland’s new book of photographs is a collaboration with his wife and partner of 47 years, Francoise. It is a love story as well as a story of innocence and freedom and of a time past that remains in their hearts and on the pages of this new book.

When We Were Young is the pictorial story of the summer in 1972 when, newly in love, they spent a month at Francoise’s family country house in the south of France. So different from his last book, A Life In Pictures, a weighty, gorgeous coffee table collection of celebrity shots he’s taken over the last five decades which is a tribute to every single person in the book as well as to his outstanding career, When We Were Young is an intimate look into Douglas Kirkland the man, the lover, and the free spirit he still, at 80, is. It is a public Valentine. And it’s a ride back to a simpler, freer, and more innocent time for many of us.

The book opens with a quote from Judith Thurman; “Every Dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” (Cleopatra’s Nose, 39 Varieties of Desire) This sentence both stopped me, causing me to ponder and agree, and prepared me for the black-and-white photos that followed. Using another couple that they had brought to spend their month at the seaside with as stand-ins for themselves, Douglas spent several days photographing them living, loving, and lusting with the abandonment Francois and he were feeling for each other and their life together. Capturing the beauty of their young bodies and the spirit of innocent love, open fully like a flower, head to the sun in full bloom, each photo takes us back to a time when we too were young.

The photos are accompanied by text written by Francois that is a mixture of poetry and prose that, without trying to be anything it isn’t, fits in perfectly with each scene.

Like an old song, maybe by Marvin or Al Green, that can take us back to a day, a time, a person and a place, these photos took me back to ’72 — to who I was with, to feelings still etched inside like faded dye on the fabric of my soul.

Francois and Douglas Kirkland have been lovers and partners in each others creative journey for almost half a century. They’ve made family and friends all over the world. They are as young at heart, if not in body, as they were when Douglas took these photos in the summer of ’72. The secret to their eternal youth can be seen in the openness and complete freedom exuded in these photos. Although models, and not them, it is their openness, their abandon, their freedom of spirit, we’ve seen in each sensual photo.

When We Were Young is a love story spanning nearly fifty years and still counting, inviting us on each page to come in and, wherever we were, and whoever we were with, to make it our story too.

When We Where Young by Douglas and Francoise Kirkland
Available at Mouche Gallery
Address: 340 North Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Phone:(310) 858-8114
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