Sure enough, the so-called mainstream media did not disappoint me. Maybe I should rephrase that and say the mainstream media did exactly what I expected. And, they had help from an unfortunate source.

Terry Jones, who pastors a small Florida congregation, made good on his promise to burn a copy of the Koran. That ill-conceived action resulted in murderous outrage in many parts of the Muslim world and led to condemnations from religious, political, and military leaders in this country and around the world. 

The hard truth is that Muslim extremists do not need a publicity-hungry, Koran-burning preacher from Florida to go on a murderous rampage. They are quite ready to unleash their violence for a variety of reasons, and not just against Christians.

You would be hard-pressed to find stories about the murder a few days after the UN killings of at least 41 Muslims in Pakistan by other Muslims. In this case, as reported by the BBC, suicide attackers carried out the attack near a Sufi shrine in Punjab during an annual three-day festival. Sufis are a minority Muslim group regarded as heretics by Muslim hardliners.

This attack, which killed five times as many Muslims, followed an attack last October that killed six Muslims at a shrine in Punjab province, and an attack on a Lahore shrine earlier this year that killed at least 42 Muslims.

Fox News tried to tie recent violence against Ethiopian Christians to the Koran burning, even though its own story reported an on-going Muslim persecution of Christians in that country. On March 24, Fox News reported that Muslims torched about 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes earlier in the month, forcing as many as 10,000 Christians to flee for their lives after accusations that a Christian in their community desecrated the Koran. At least one Christian was murdered in the violence believed to have been instigated by Muslims promoting religious intolerance in the area in Western Ethiopia.

I’ve written about global Christian persecution since I started writing columns back in the late 1980s. In fact, that’s how I was introduced to the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Knights Templar. One member compiling reports of Christian persecution for the Templars’ application to be a United Nations NGO found my online writings and asked if I would like to help out. That was back in the mid-90s when Web searches were not as easy as they are today.

I haven’t written as much in recent years, mainly because search engines have made it easier to find such tales and keep this issue in front of people who care. But it appears that the reporting of Christian persecution is like preaching to the choir.

Here are some more examples of global Christian persecution not connected to the Koran burning.

An affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman caused Muslims to attack, plunder, and torch an ancient Coptic church near Cairo. While some of the attackers chanted “Allahu Akbar!”, others removed ancient relics of saints and martyrs and kicked them around in a soccer game before converting the church into a mosque. Thousands of Christians had already fled the village because of overall terrorism against the Coptic community, including the kidnapping and rape of Christian girls.

The Nigerian Compass reported that last Christmas Eve, Muslim bombers killed at least 30 people in the state of Borneo. One blast was in front of a Catholic church.

Last November, the Assyrian International News Agency reported that Muslim gunmen who took hostages in a Baghdad church killed at least 58 Christians, including two priests, and wounded 75 others before Iraqi forces rescued the survivors from their terrible ordeal.  A group called the Islamic State of Iraq took responsibility, calling the church “the dirty den of idolatry.”

Here’s a side note to that incident. The church was surrounded with concrete barriers and razor wire because church leaders feared an attack if Jones made good on his first threat to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Apparently, the al-Qaeda-linked group did not need the specter of a burning Koran as a reason to attack and kill Christians.

The terrible truth is that the sun rises and sets on many countries around the world with Christians hunkered down in fear for their lives because they live among Muslim extremists. We in the United States cannot relate because we do not share this fear. At least not since 9/11.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Cuba needs to let him go, or else it will hurt relations between the two countries.  That, my friends, is a topic for another day.

Now, William Shatner, who has provided us with lesser characters to emulate, such as T.J. Hooker and Denny Crane, gives a new role model to those of us who feel we have earned a certain level of, shall we say, eccentricity that comes with surviving to a certain age.

In the new CBS television series $#*! My Dad Says (www.cbs.com/primetime/my_dad_says), the Shatner character Ed Goodson spends the entire time wearing a khaki photographer’s vest, regardless of location or circumstance. Oh, yeah, he also delights in going “commando”, to which I like to point out to those in my family who will listen, is one word that has “man” smack dab in the middle. Selah.

Shatner’s vest is similar to the one my wife recently discarded because stuff kept falling out through the holes in the bottoms of the pockets. That well-worn vest was nearly identical to my original photographer’s vest purchased back in the last century, which disintegrated off my back.

These vests were perfect. Back when we had film cameras with exchangeable lenses, I could carry a camera, lenses, rolls of film, video tape, a bunch of pens, notebooks, maps, a raincoat, newspapers, snacks, cigars, and anything else that would fit in the 20 or so pockets. No need for a man bag or backpack when traveling. Just don the 10-pound vest and I was good to go.

My wife decided I needed to look more presentable if I insisted on wearing everything I owned, so she gave me one of those Scottevests (www.scottevest.com) for my birthday. These vests are all the rage with people who hate extra charges for airline carry-ons. Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement or a product placement.

As I filled up the vest the other day, I realized that by using my Android smart phone, I can wander around the house with almost 70 items and not look like a tinker rolling onto the ranch.

Indulge me a moment, and be amazed.

My phone has a host of applications that make up a good portion of the list. I’m sure others have many more. Anyway, what follows can be called $#*! my daughters’ dad wears, and, sadly, examples of what I use weekly, if not daily.

Android smart phone; digital still camera; digital video camera; photograph album and video library (we have a grandson); digital voice recorder; note pad; compass; stop watch; GPS navigation system; outdoor thermometer; bar code scanner; bubble level; calculator; calendar; address book; lie detector; alarm clock; dice; egg timer; language translator; night sky map; real-time Houston traffic map; metal detector; music library; police/fire scanner; radios (am/fm/Internet); Federation-style tricorder; newspapers and magazines; dream dictionary; currency converter; vuvuzela and other air horns; bartender guide; white noise producer; wind chimes; flight tracker; Congressional directory; maps; games; Internet browser; and a weather monitor among other applications too geeky to mention.

All of those fit nicely into one pocket of my vest. Non-phone items include press credentials; a steel pen; highlighter; prayer rope; lighter; knife (Gibbs’ Rule #9); flashlight; reading glasses; prescription glasses; sunglasses; contact solution; earphones; Bluetooth ear piece; facial tissue; key ring; and a 30GB flash drive.

Yet, I still have room for a hat; umbrella; water bottle; parka; sack lunch; bag of peanuts; a real book or two (not digital); flip flops; a change of clothes; and a power cord. Oh, yeah, hand-rolled, Central-American cigars.

I could put in a first-aid kit and a road flare, but that would be silly, not to mention incredibly risky given the possibility of the flare igniting while I’m sitting on it. Besides, the TSA drop-outs that frisk fans going into the college football stadium would confiscate it thinking it was a flask, which is ridiculous considering the flask is in another pocket.

The only thing lacking with my Shatner Scottevest is the one item every cool boy wants, but few possess: a real, for sure, Federation-issued phaser. Yes. That’s my next acquisition. Hey, my grandson would love it.

(The video commentary is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNZ8mD2UNyg)

The phone call interrupted the quiet routine into which I have settled over the past 16 months of unemployment. Each evening rolls into the next with little to distinguish one from the other except for the prime-time television lineup.

The lady asked if I would take part in a focus group looking at the social and political concerns of people living in my Texas county. And, I’d get $100 for three hours of my time and opinions. But first, she had a few routine questions to ask, which I thought would be the usual: age, gender, education, political leanings.

“What do you do for a living,” she asked instead. Nothing right now, I replied. I’m unemployed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My client wants only people who have jobs.”

She hung up before I could ask why the opinions of an unemployed professional communicator with a graduate degree were not as important as, say, a working fishmonger. Not that there’s anything wrong with fishmongers, just as, I would hope, there is nothing wrong with jobless communicators or journalists.

The sharp click from the phone sent an emotional stab to my gut. Once again, I was needed, but not wanted. And that seems to be the underlying condition facing today’s long-term unemployed of a certain age. It is a condition that creates the proverbial vicious cycle: you can’t get a job because you don’t have a job because you can’t get a job because you are long-term unemployed of a certain age.

The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/unemployed-job-applicants-discrimination_n_809010.html) recently ran a piece pointing out how employers use joblessness as a legal criterion for discrimination. The article began with a restaurant posting on Craigslist (http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/fbh/2114140232.html) for a bar manager that required current employment before applying.

Employment status, according to Bob Rose, an attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (www.eeoc.gov), is one factor employers and recruiters use to discriminate against job seekers, along with disability, race, age, and gender. EEOC figures released this month suggest people in my boat across the country are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. The agency received nearly 100,000 discrimination complaints in 2010, up 6.6 percent from the previous year, with at least 20,000 deemed valid, resulting in a record $404 million in monetary relief paid by employers.

Age, gender, and, by default, experience seem to be the obstacles I share with millions of other able-bodied workers on the streets for more than one year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov/cps) classified 4.5 million Americans, or 31 percent of the nation’s jobless, as long-term unemployed. That’s nearly twice the population of Houston, or roughly the entire population of Kentucky. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts (www.pewtrusts.org) released this week found those BLS numbers held through the end of December.

The BLS shows 816,000 workers 55 years of age and older account for 18 percent of the long-term unemployed. Men in this category total 2.77 million or 61.3 percent.

Alan is a Website publisher in the San Francisco Bay area when he’s working. He posted to a LinkedIn (www.linkin.com) discussion board that he last interviewed with a woman who appeared to be in her mid-30s. “I discussed my qualifications point by point with the job requirements, showing how I met or exceeded the entire list. When I was done, she went through the entire list as if I did not just say I had those qualifications. As I see it, a 35-year-old woman looked at me as if I were her dad.  I can't say it is age discrimination but, really, who will hire their dad to work for them?”

Kim, an unemployed sales coach in the Washington, D.C. area, replied that she believes the best way to deal with discrimination against age and experience is by facing it head on. “After all, we Baby Boomers have so many remarkable qualities: expertise, loyalty, persistence and an uncanny ability to learn new skills.”

We Baby Boomers make up about one-fourth of our nation’s population. The U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov) says an American turns 50 every seven seconds. And the AARP (www.aarp.org) says people over 50 will make up 45 percent of the population by 2015.

Baby Boomers gave the world rock music, marched for civil rights, fought our nation’s wars since Vietnam, and provided the high standard of living enjoyed by our offspring who now screen our resumes and toss them into the discard pile. Come to think of it, maybe we didn’t do such a good job teaching common sense to this next generation that will need our Social Security contributions (which we can’t make if we’re not working) to fund their retirement.

There’s that word “need” again. They need our retirement contributions and we need their jobs. They also need our skills, our experience, and our wisdom gained and honed over decades.  

I know employers large and small, public and private, need my skill sets and experience, because I see their postings every day. But needing is altogether different from wanting. And when you get right down to it, that’s probably the most depressing aspect of being among the long-term unemployed: realizing employers need what you can provide, but they do not want you.

The video version of this commentary at www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LCtAUxHEAw.

The regulars down at Sparky’s Diner were at a loss for words, and to be frank, so was I. This past week marked the one-year anniversary of being let go from my place of employment for the past ten years. The gang at Sparky’s never thought my unemployment would last this long.

I figured it might take a few months, given my history over the past quarter century. To use a good Texas phrase: this ain’t my first rodeo.

I dropped out of the job market in the mid ‘80s to finish my college education when it became painfully apparent that employers valued a degree of any kind over experience. The head of the former Texas Tourist Development Agency pulled an offer for communication director because I did not have a degree as required. That I used to teach at a college, or that I had several years of professional journalism experience, or that I served as a political media adviser for a Texas office holder did not matter. This was a state job and the posting required a degree.

Lesson learned, so we moved to Louisiana where I finished my undergraduate degree in two years and my MBA in finance in one year by going full-time. I got out of school just as the stock market crashed and created a surplus of newly minted MBAs. I took a gig at a newspaper after two years on the hunt, during which time my wife also returned to school to get her degree.

We moved to New Mexico for my wife’s job, and I needed eighteen months to land mine. Two years later, my wife took a job back in Texas, and I was once again looking for work.

A couple of back-to-back jobs ran nine months before deficit budgets and a reorganization had me unemployed again. This is when I found my last job, which I kept for nearly eleven years, during which I survived three bosses and a transfer. The end came a year ago when I became a victim of a reduction in force. For those who don’t know, a RIF occurs when an organization eliminates a position. They do not fire the employee, they just eliminate the position. 

Many organizations, particularly state agencies or universities, try to place RIF employees in similar jobs. Not mine. No, it has riffed about 100 positions in the past year, saving about $10 million of its nearly $1 billion budget. One hundred lives and families forced to face their greatest economic fears during the worst downturn since the Great Depression just to save one percent in salary and benefits.  It is a curious thing.

As the months roll past, keeping a positive attitude and not succumbing to fear, depression, despondence, or bitterness, becomes increasingly more difficult, particularly as you watch the savings disappear while learning who gets interviews and who gets hired.

A female public relations executive in Albuquerque back in the 90s explained to me right up front that my gender prevented pr firms from considering me. As she explained, the women who ran the pr firms in town had worked their way to the top over many years. Now that they were in a position to hire, they looked for young females to bring on board at lower salaries, a practice they deplored in their male counterparts.

It seems the same today. About a dozen jobs for which I was fully qualified but not interviewed went to females between the ages of 30 and 40. And these are just the ones I know. So, for me, it seems that I hit the unhappy trifecta of age, gender, and experience.

But there is no comfort in numbers. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that of the nearly 15 million Americans looking for work today, more than 2.2 million of us are over the age of 55 and have been without work for at least six months. The unemployment rate for my age group is 7.3 percent, more than twice what it was when the bottom dropped out. Last month, older workers took more than 39 weeks to find a job, the longest of any age group, according to the Labor Department.

The number of horror stories about human resources departments that reject applications within minutes, or programs that scan resumes for key words and not applicable experience, are legion. I belong to a LinkedIn forum about hr and recruiters that has more than 9,300 comments, with nearly all of them negative. Another LinkedIn forum has nearly 2,000 comments regarding the unemployment experience, all negative.

So, what do you do? You cannot hide your age or gender and at some point you have to tell a potential employer about your experience, which will be used against you.

As of today, I’ve been in radio, television, cable, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet in a journalism career covering more than 30 years. Although I have not worked in a newsroom since a short stint in Albuquerque, I have received sixteen awards in the past ten years for Internet opinion writing, including seven first-place awards.

And that’s just the journalism side. My pr, communication, and marketing experience started in the 80s and continued up until my RIF one year ago.

So, what do you do? Well, like I told the folks down at Sparky’s Diner, I just keep trying, keep applying, and keep praying (literally) that the right fit comes along before the savings, the house, and what we thought would be a comfortable future are just things of the past.

(View the companion video at www.youtube.com/jdp1953)

In the test, a starship receives a distress call from the Kobayashi Maru, a freighter on the brink of blowing up. Rescuing the crew requires entering the Neutral Zone and inviting Klingons into a fatal encounter for the starship or risking all-out war.  Abandoning the crew saves the starship and prevents war, but allows the destruction of the freighter with all hands on board.

James Kirk was the only Starfleet cadet to pass the Kobayashi Maru, only because he hacked the computer program and changed the test parameters. Some called that cheating. He received a commendation for original thinking. Such is the world of science fiction.

The Ground Zero debate, whether over a mosque or an Islamic community center, is a real-world scenario that tests our national character by presenting no-win alternatives: support the project and dishonor those who died in the 9/11 attack or oppose it and ignore the Constitution and appear to harbor ill-will toward a religion and its billion and half adherents.

This debate has become an emotional orgy that distracts us from defining once and for all the events of 9/11. Until we, as a nation of diverse political ideologies and religious beliefs, put a true and lasting label on the attacks, we will continue to be ruled by emotions and we will surely miss the next attack because we failed to identify its source.

By defining the 9/11 attacks, we change the parameters of this no-win scenario by making it possible to arrive at an answer devoid of the emotions that paralyze even the most clear thinkers among us and send us down rabbit holes that emerge into a labyrinth containing traps disguised as good intentions.

Opponents of the project use the terms “sacred” and “hallowed ground” to describe Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The use of these words, however, and others like them, implies the people who died, including Muslims, were innocent victims, martyrs in a holy war, a jihad. If so, then we must define that war and identify the people who wage it against our country.

Who among us, except kooky conspiracy theorists who believe George W. Bush played some weird role, does not believe the 9/11 hijackers acted on a perverse and narrow interpretation of their religion? The alternative is to define the attacks as acts of a political or economic war, even though everyone claiming credit or rising in support of the attacks says otherwise.

Also, we must determine the 9/11 attacks were not acts of terrorism. The FBI (www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terrorism2002_2005.htm) defines terrorist incidents as criminal actions designed to promote political or social objectives. The Oklahoma City bombing by fringe followers of white supremacy and abortion clinic bombings by criminals with a warped view of Christian dogma are terror incidents. 

The 9/11 attacks were one-sided acts of jihad, not attacks upon capitalism. Need proof? When was the last time you heard a jihadist cry “Death to the dollar!”?

And that brings us to the reason why the Ground Zero project is a no-win scenario: our nation chose to let emotions and hubris rule our hearts instead of allowing logic and foresight to rule our brains, and understandably so. Evil men attacked our country and killed nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians, including people from 70 other countries. In those first sad and confusing days we vowed as a nation to rebuild the towers as a mighty “up yours” to those who knocked them down.

That is where we went wrong. We fix it by changing the parameters. First, we define the 9/11 attacks as acts of jihad, thereby classifying the victims as martyrs and the site as hallowed ground. Next, we declare the site a national monument, joining the nine sites associated with the War in the Pacific (including Pearl Harbor), the Little Bighorn Battlefield, Fort McHenry, and other battle sites (www.nps.gov/applications/contacts/contacts_atoz.cfm). 

The Antiquities Act of 1906 (www.nps.gov/history/local-law/anti1906.htm) gives the president the authority, “in his discretion”, to declare the site a national monument provided the owners give the property to the federal government. For this to happen, the owners of the property would forgo economic gain to honor the war victims and the president would agree those who died deserve such commemoration by this nation.

If we, as a nation, place greater importance on making a buck than on setting aside hallowed ground as a memorial to victims in a holy war not of our making, then objections to the Ground Zero mosque seem hollow and petty and portray a national character unbefitting those who died.

Our nation has no beef with Islam. We have a large animosity toward those groups waging a religious war against us. By defining the 9/11 attacks as acts of war by jihadists, we provide the means and the moral authority to take all appropriate measures to protect our nation and our Constitution against these enemies, whether foreign or domestic.

(Video version available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miF3Bil7ANQ)

Two political blunders this month, one by an overly seasoned professional and the other by an arrogant rookie, show the low levels occupied by today’s political rhetoric. Gone are the days of clever cuts and brainy barbs. Maybe that’s because clever and brainy are not adjectives associated with a growing number of public officials.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs may have been correct in his description of individuals who earn their livings by being professional liberals, whether as elected officials or as political operatives. In an interview with The Hill, Gibbs expressed disapproval (and by extension, the disapproval of his boss) of Democrats who publicly criticize the president, calling them the “professional left” and suggesting liberals who compare Barack Obama with George W. Bush should be “drug tested.”

It is true that many people on the left, and on the right, make their livings by sticking to a political ideology. For instance, I know of a fellow who made his living by being a professional community organizer. This professional liberal, in the words of Gibbs, went on to become a United States senator and then president of the United States.

Oh, and I wouldn’t bring up the issue of drug testing to the boss if I were Mr. Gibbs.

So, in this case, the opportunity to take a cheap, insulting, and snarky position in defense of a professional liberal by bashing professional liberals seems a bit weird.

And, speaking of weird, did you hear about Keith Halloran? The former (emphasis on “former”) Democratic candidate for the New Hampshire state legislature used the occasion of the plane crash that killed former Alaska senator Ted Stevens and four other passengers to wish former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had been onboard?  Halloran posted his wacky wish on Facebook as a response to a posting about the crash by a New Hampshire republican lawmaker.

Halloran apologized and dropped out of the race, which from what I could tell from searching the Internet, is not a great loss to the state’s Democratic Party or to the fine people of the “Live Free or Die” state.

But the Halloran fallout didn’t stop with him. For some strange and unfathomable reason, state representative Timothy Horrigan posted a comment on Halloran’s Facebook page in which he said he didn’t wish for Palin’s death because a dead Sarah Palin would be more dangerous than a live one.  Horrigan resigned the next day and discontinued his re-election campaign.

I’m not sure who or what to blame for this decline in political rhetoric. Gibbs attributed his statements to watching too much cable news. Messrs Halloran and Horrigan might blame Facebook for tempting their baser instincts with that inviting comment box, which seduced them like a street-siren promising quick and empty satisfaction.

Or, maybe we, as a society, have lost our sense of humor. Maybe we take much too seriously every word that comes out of the mouths of people schooled in the art of the pithy sound bite. Maybe we have become so politically high-minded that we have lost our appreciation for low-brow rhetoric.

There was a time in the history of our republic when political rivals settled their differences with fisticuffs on the floor of the House of Representatives or a duel at dawn in Weehawken. No, we don’t need a return to those violent days of yesteryear, but maybe we need a return to those days when people allowed their politicians to vent their feelings much like professional wrestlers challenging their opponents to a Texas cage grudge match. In that case, we would let them rant and rave, point and posture, and then get down to the business at hand.

And really, is it not fair to compare our political system to professional wrestling where bad guys become good guys, and former opponents form tag teams to deliver some whuppin’ on the other guys? A bit of a metaphorical stretch, you say? Not in a world where Linda McMahon, co-founder of the WWE, may be the next U.S. senator from Connecticut.

With that in mind, maybe we should grow some thicker skin and allow our professional liberals and conservatives the opportunity to engage is some good, old-fashioned, name calling and mudslinging. 

For example, Thomas Paine told George Washington that “the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?”

Texan Sam Houston said a political contemporary had all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty. 

And, my favorite, which you will never hear today, came from U.S. Sen. William Jenner regarding New York governor Averell Harriman: “He’s thin, boys. He’s thin as p*ss on a hot rock.”

So, how do you think that would play in today’s fragmented and tweeting world? I’d like to find out.

(Video of this column available at www.youtube.com/user/jdp1953#p/a/u/0/SZjxXztazyo)

The Palestinian question is the third rail of Middle-East politics that will bring political or professional harm to anyone who unwisely touches it, regardless of intentions. Helen Thomas is an example of how quickly the jackals of journalism will throw one of their own under the wheels when they sense an opportunity to score political points at the risk of exposing their true biases.

To recap, Thomas, 89, a native Kentuckian of Lebanese descent, has covered the White House since 1960. During John Kennedy’s term, Thomas was the first female to close a presidential news conference with the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President.”

She served as president of the Women’s National Press Club, the first female officer of the White House Correspondents’ Association and its first female president, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club and its first female president. In 1975, she was named Woman of the Year in communications by Ladies Home Journal.   And, the World Almanac named Thomas one of the twenty-five most influential women in America.

Conservatives had good cause to name her Bleeding Heart of the Century, if they had such a title. By her own admission in a 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5O-ShWgw6g), Thomas is a brazen liberal who wishes her colleagues covering the White House were more in line with her political views. 

During that same interview, Thomas pointed out that the woman who was like a second mother to her was a Palestinian, born in Bethlehem.

Thomas brought about her own demise when she exercised her First-Amendment right to free expression. During the White House Jewish Heritage celebration on May 27, Thomas engaged in what appeared to be a good-natured, on-the-record video banter with Rabbi David Nesenhoff for his web site (http://rabbilive.com/RabbiLIVE/Helen.html).  

When asked to comment about Israel, Thomas said, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” She and Nesenhoff chuckled briefly before she added these fateful words: “Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land.  It’s not Germany.  It’s not Poland.”  

When asked by Nesenhoff where Jews occupying Palestine should go, Thomas answered, “Poland, Germany, America, and everywhere else.” She did not rule out Israel as a destination, even though she didn’t include it.

This topic came up over the weekend at Sparky’s Diner.   I won’t go into detail of who said what to whom, but I will offer five personal observations that don’t bring me near that third rail.

1) At no time does Thomas advocate the murder, systematic or otherwise, of any human being, regardless of the hyper-hyperbolic reporting, aimed at inflaming passions, that followed in various media accounts. In fact, some sites use the word holocaust as a tag for search engines. She did not use the word in the interview nor did she mention a final solution.

2) I may have had a small-town education in history, but I do not recall acts of the Holocaust on U.S. soil. I do know about "relocation" camps for Japanese-Americans during WW2 and about government efforts to eliminate the Native American population and cultures.

3) I'm tired of people misusing the term "anti-Semite".  Arabs are Semites.  You can't be an Arab promoting Arab causes and be an anti-Semite.  By the way, Phoenicians are Semites, and we sure don't hear enough from them these days.

4) People who use anti-Semite are really saying Jew Hater.  So, come on, just say it.

5) “You can say what you like, as long as I like what you say” is the interpretation of the First Amendment by members of the political left, and now, it seems, from members of the objective media and the political right.  The sad and disturbing irony is that the same liberal colleagues in the White House Correspondents’ Association, the ones who gave Thomas a place of honor on the front row during news briefings, the ones who applauded her when she skewered conservative presidents and policies, were shocked - shocked I tell you - to discover she was too old and too opinionated to be a member of their club. Or maybe she got too close to that third rail and started giving off sparks that shed light on bi-partisan Beltway hypocrisy.

Mundus vult decipi

(The video commentary is available at www.youtube.com/jdp1953)

I’m approaching my seventh month without a job with nothing promising on the horizon. My laptop allows me to tailor my resume and cover letters to meet the requirements of potential employers. Because of ethical standards, and because of my years as a journalist, I avoid even the hint of resume creep.

I don't know if that is an actual term, but here are my definitions: Resume creep 1) The result of exaggerating or lying on one’s resume. 2) A person who knowingly exaggerates or lies on a resume to get a better job.

As many as 40 percent of all resumes have false information, according to executive recruiter Sunny Bates in a 2006 article in Forbes. A few years ago, INFOcheck, Ltd., based in Toronto, Canada, looked at 500 resumes evenly split by gender. Two-third of the men and one-third of the women fibbed or fudged on their resumes. HireRight, another resume checker, discovered misleading information in 80 percent of the resumes it investigated in one year, phony references in 27 percent, and fake degrees in 20 percent. Resume creep is so bad in the high-tech industry that some human resources experts believe more than 80 percent of Silicon Valley employees engage in outright lies.

Jobs seekers do not have a lock on lies. Massachusetts authorities this week charged Adam Wheeler, now 23, with 20 criminal counts related to a plethora of lies that got him into Harvard and nearly $50,000 in scholarships and awards. Reports say Wheeler supplied fake high-school and college information, including phony transcripts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Colleges and universities are notorious for not conducting thorough background checks on job applicants. After all, why would someone with a Ph.D. lie about degrees and experience? Let me provide a couple of examples of resume creeps I met in Louisiana.

Mr. Karate Man was a goofball who thought he discovered one of my sources at a university I was investigating. He threatened to tell the school’s president, whom I hammered weekly.  When confronted with his error, the man told me he knew karate. Yeah, but I knew the state’s open-records law.  Mr. Karate Man’s claim to have a Ph.D. from a school in England was pretty easy to check out, and it did not.  The university kicked him off the faculty a few weeks later.

Then there was the guy whose alibi died somewhere in Siberia. Among his long stories was a master’s degree from American University. He told me the only person who could verify his non-existent degree was an alleged adviser who died in a traffic accident in Siberia. And, this fellow’s claim to have a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University also was a lie. He ended up in a federal prison, but not because of his phony academic record.

The good folks of Connecticut will have to decide if perpetuating false recollections about military service is enough to deep-six the political career of Richard Blumenthal, the state’s Democratic Attorney General who wants to be a U.S. Senator. News reports this week laid out how “Blarney” Blumenthal has gone around the state inferring, and sometimes outright detailing, his service to the nation during the Vietnam War. Instead of fighting enemy combatants, Blarney fought the Selective Service and obtained five deferments between 1965 and 1970, the year he joined the Marine Reserves, thereby assuring his tour of duty involved gardening and community service.

When confronted, Blarney held a news conference to say he misspoke, or, in plain language, he lied.

Blarney Blumenthal carries the bulk of the shame for his invented life, and the good people of Connecticut and the state’s intrepid journalists carry their share. More people live in the Houston area than in the entire Nutmeg state, so it is hard to believe no one in his family, in his neighborhood, or in his schools remembered how people spat upon him when he returned from ‘Nam, or that he was the captain of the Harvard swim team, two subjects existing in print but not in reality.

Adam Wheeler broke the law for reasons only he knows, and the courts will decide his future. Blarney Blumenthal fabricated a war record for his political gain, and the people of Connecticut will decide his future. In doing so, they should consider that the character of a person chosen to lead says much about the people who choose to follow.

It is one thing to be a resume creep and another thing to condone one. 

(Video of this commentary www.youtube.com/user/jdp1953#p/a/u/0/kqQJfbWlTz8)

 (Video commentary available at www.youtube.com/user/jdp1953#p/a/u/0/52FPFSJy5HM)

We said goodbye to Sheba this week. It was a fast, slow ending to a long, good life.

In these days of terrorism and wars, of heated and shallow debates at the margins of political ideologies, maybe it’s good to stop and consider Sheba’s remarkable life.

She was a stalker when we met in New Mexico. I don’t know how, but she would sneak into a slightly opened rear window of my minivan secured inside the garage and bolt out before I drove to work in the morning. She would return at night, when the family gathered for dinner, to press pathetically against the patio door, face turned away in feigned disinterest.

As her visits became more frequent, my wife and daughters took more interest in her. My daughters sat on the patio after school and allowed her to jump into their laps as they napped in the afternoon sun. My wife encouraged me to think about leaving some food by the door.

We learned more about her life after she moved in. She ran away from a neighborhood family, figuring her survival chances were better in the wild than as the tormented prisoner of a cruel child. A pellet in her leg came from the gun of our neighbor’s boy who tried to keep her from feasting on the birds in his father aviary.

She was a quiet shadow, preferring solitude while she healed her wounds.

Sheba was part of our family for so long that we really can’t remember the exact day she moved in. Was it 15 years ago? Maybe 16. How old was she when we met? Her small size from her life on the streets made determining her age difficult. We settled on 17, maybe 18. That’s around 90 in human years.

She learned to talk. She could say “lasagna”, one of her favorite dishes. She could not say “chicken”, though, which she got every night for the past year or so. And, she liked to play Marco-Polo. Ask visitors, if you don’t believe me.

Sheba and I formed a stronger bond during the two years of The Separation, the time my wife moved to Utah and my daughters were out of the house. She greeted me at the door each evening, and we sat together, alone, in my chair until overriding fatigue forced me to bed, where she slept by my side until morning. 

She returned to being her mother’s cat when my wife moved back to the ranch with two more black cats. It’s a witch thing, being surrounded by ebon familiars. She reached an uneasy acceptance of the two usurpers, but demanded to be the first to sit in her mother’s lap in the mornings.

Sheba’s kidneys failed her in the end. Her eating dropped off dramatically. We took her to the vet on Thursday. She stopped drinking on Friday. She had a couple of tablespoons of cantaloupe Saturday morning, the last thing she would eat or drink. On Sunday, we cried and told her it was time.

Monday morning, after a long and sleepless night, we carried her to the hospital where we met our daughters and our new grandson. We stood by her and stroked her and whispered to her our love as the drug quickly, too quickly, let her pass from us in peace.

It was a good day. No rain, no clouds. Sunlight through the window of the hospital created an inviting spot on the floor, and a bird on the roof peeked inside.

So, why it is so hard to lose a pet? I believe some people should not be allowed to have pets, just as some people should not be allowed to have children. Pets and children should be only for people who love them and appreciate them, in happy times and in bad. When the bonding is true and good, we project upon them our love and not a small amount of our personality. We look at them and see a little bit of ourselves. We see facial expressions and expressions of love others will not see. And the love we take is equal to the love we give.

Our children move on and create lives of their own. Our pets, however, stay with us and become a greater part of our lives, so that when the time comes to say goodbye, the ache we feel is truly heartfelt because we lose a part of ourselves, the good and loving part.

I don’t know, but I believe God has a place for animals, just as he has a place for us. The God who created all things in heaven and on earth, who knows and sees all, even unto the falling of a single sparrow, surely must have created a Paradise for pets. And it is there, I am sure, that Sheba sleeps in the sun, upon her own princess perch, and dines on fresh chicken and tuna.   And it is there she visits with our first cat, Mrs. Chinchilla, who will learn from Sheba all about our family, our sorrows and our joys, and about our love for them.

(Video commentary version at www.youtube.com/jdp1953#p/a/u/0/_s2imoxIcXs)

A series of events continuing to unfold in a rural Texas county underscore the fact that the national healthcare reform debate has little to do with health care and even less to do with reform. 

Unless you have more than a passing interest in healthcare waste, fraud, and abuse, you probably missed the acquittal of a hospital administrator charged with a felony for doing her job. This case is another example that proves my belief that state and federal agencies need to enforce existing rules and regulations instead of being saddled with sweeping legislation that will not guarantee your healthcare providers take care of you.

On Feb. 11, a state court jury in Andrews, Texas, took less than an hour to acquit Anne Mitchell of felony charges that she misused official information when she reported improper medical practices performed by a physician at Winkler County Memorial Hospital, a 19-bed facility in Kermit. The county prosecutor in January dismissed similar charges against Vickilyn Galle, another hospital administrator.

The following comes from published reports, state court records, and a federal lawsuit filed by the women against various hospital and county officials (www.casewatch.org/civil/mitchell/suit.pdf).

Mitchell and Galle, registered nurses, worked at the hospital for 25 and 24 years, respectively. Mitchell served as compliance officer, utilization review back-up, and co-medical staff coordinator. Galle was head of quality improvement and utilization management and was the other co-medical staff coordinator. The credentialing of all hospital physicians and the review of patient quality issues were among Mitchell’s responsibilities.

Mitchell was in her position in April 2008 when the hospital, contrary to its bylaws, hired Rolando Arafiles, Jr., MD, who, at the time, was under a three-year restriction from the Texas Medical Board, which kept him from supervising or delegating prescriptive authority to a physician assistant or advance practice nurse, or to supervise a surgical assistant. 

A year later, after the hospital’s board ignored reports by Mitchell and Galle regarding medical-related incidents involving Arafiles and five patients, the women filed an anonymous complaint with the TMB, as required by law and hospital accreditation rules. Mitchell and Galle alleged Arafiles performed improper medical procedures and was using herbal medicines not dispensed by the hospital’s pharmacy.

The TMB sent Arafiles a letter, as required, telling him about the complaint, which he turned over to his friend, patient, and alleged partner in an herbal supplement business, Winkler County Sheriff Robert Roberts, Jr. The high sheriff started an investigation, but not into the doctor’s questionable medical practices. No, the high sheriff took it upon himself to find out who ratted out the good doctor. In doing so, the women and the TMB, thinking the high sheriff was conducting a legitimate probe into the allegations, fessed up to the women’s identities.

One thing led to another which led to the eventual indictments and arrests of the women in June 2009 for obtaining and disseminating confidential patient information, a third-degree felony carrying jail time of up to ten years and a fine of up to $10,000. The high sheriff was the only witness to testify before the grand jury.

By the way, the hospital canned the women just before the indictments.

The jury foreman said the six men and six women didn’t know why Mitchell was arrested. The high sheriff chalked up the acquittal to a good spin by the defense.

Three months after the indictments, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services conducted an investigation, what CMS calls a survey (www.winklerpost.com/postforum/index.php?topic=26.0). CMS found the hospital medical staff violated the facility’s by-laws by approving Arafiles for active status privileges while he was under the three-year Texas Medical Board restriction. 

CMS determined the hospital failed to prevent Arafiles from performing a non-emergency room procedure in the ER, a procedure Arafiles botched, requiring a referral to a plastic surgeon in another city. CMS also found that Arafiles used oxygenated olive oil, an herbal creme he carried in his car, on a patient, not once, but three times.

And CMS said the hospital improperly fired the women who were doing their jobs as required.

Hospital honchos responded to each finding by saying, in effect, it happened as described, that they were really, really sorry about it, and that they promise to try to not let it happen again, really.

In some Texas towns, running a red light can cost you $75. In Texas, it seems, a hospital can hire a physician in trouble with the state, allow improper medical procedures, and punish employees for following the law in the protection of patients without having to pay anything except an apology.  If Congress really wanted healthcare reform, it would give CMS the authority to punish with high fines and misdemeanors slimy hospital administrators and physicians who consider quality patient care an inconvenience.

(Video commentary at www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iDGNswVs-k)

All of the politics, posturing, and punditry in Washington surrounding sweeping healthcare reform fail to consider one sad, yet important, fact:  you can’t legislate common sense and customer service. Give away health care, hand out free prescription medication, provide total access to every living human being on the planet, and you’ll still have people and processes that fail to do the jobs for which they’re paid or for which they’re designed.

And that’s because you can lead healthcare providers to reforms, but you can’t make them think.

A recent incident placed me in the overlapping positions of unhappy customer and curious journalist. My frustrations began last month when my group health insurance expired after I lost my job at a Texas university because of a reduction in force. The confusion stemmed from statements from the university’s human resources personnel who assured me I would have no break in coverage if I signed up for COBRA, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act that allows the continuation of health plans for a limited time period and under certain circumstances. The HR people should have said my regular coverage would cease at the end of my last pay period, but that COBRA coverage would be retroactive. There’s a big difference between “no break in coverage” and “retroactive” coverage, especially when doctor visits come before the arrival of the COBRA enrollment forms, as happened with my wife.

When the paperwork finally arrived, I asked the university’s benefits coordinator where to send the form to verify the university booted me to the street for no fault of my own, but she didn’t know much about COBRA and gave me to the data control clerk who said to send it to her attention. Several days later, I learned the data control clerk took medical leave two days after we spoke and that my form was unopened in a folder on her desk.

Several more days went by before I could send the form and payments to the Employee Retirement System of Texas, which administers my insurance benefits. I called ERS on a Thursday when a week went by without word that my COBRA was activated. The man checked and said it was activated on Wednesday, retroactive to Feb. 1, which was good because I had to pick up my wife’s epilepsy medicine on Friday.

Imagine my dismay when the pharmacist told me I did not have prescription-drug coverage. Over the next 30 minutes, I learned I didn’t have medical or prescription coverage. Both providers accessed the ERS data base during my telephone call and saw the activation, but they could not re-enroll me for at least another 24 hours. They explained this happens frequently because ERS doesn’t notify third-party administrators until the end of the day on Friday, even though ERS activates people all during the week. Knowing my circumstances and appreciating my agitation, both providers manually reinstated me that afternoon.

When I got home, I traded my ERS-member hat for my journalist hat and tried to contact an ERS spokesperson for an explanation that I could include in this column. ERS, however, does not publish contact numbers other than the main number for benefit inquiries. No media contacts listed on the Web site, news releases, newsletters, annual reports, or on any publication. 

Drilling into the Web site turned up a telephone number for the chief financial officer, which went to a voice message from someone else who said to dial “0” if I needed immediate attention. A recording told me the operator was not available before the system disconnected me.

Undeterred, I called the main number and waited for the phone tree to connect me with a real person who found someone who might have answers. That person was not available, though, but another person listened to my tale and my request to speak to an ERS spokesperson. She suggested I visit with the director of communication and research, but the director was out of the office. She said she’d ask the director to return my call.

The person who handles media relations called instead Monday afternoon. She said she would check around to see if my situation was common and if ERS could change its procedures to provide more frequent updates to third-party administrators. As far as she knew, no one has complained about the procedure.

My experience was a minor irritation. Imagine the frustration associated with this scenario: A father takes his child to the emergency room at 10 p.m. because the child has sliced open a vein, only to learn he has no COBRA coverage (because it’s Tuesday night and ERS won’t send out updates until Friday afternoon). Even if the father stopped taking care of his child to call his health-insurance provider, there’s no one to answer the phone after regular business hours. Yes, everything will be straightened out the next day, but the anxiety and anger and frustration will build throughout the night because of a system designed for the convenience of ERS personnel, not for customer service.

The current debate has exposed many areas broken within the nation’s healthcare system. Most of them fall under the headings of common sense and customer service, factors no amount of sweeping legislation can correct.

(Video commentary at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IUoLYV3aMA)

The Obama Administration plan to put new generic drugs on the street faster is another example of how Washington healthcare reformers just don’t get it. While it is true that more generic drugs will reduce healthcare costs, it also is true that health risks will increase for many individuals sensitive to even the slightest changes in their medications.

The Obama drug plan imposes $10 billion in fees over ten years on the brand-name pharmaceutical industry, to be parceled out among big drug makers to eliminate the so-called donut hole, or gap, in Medicare prescription drug coverage. The idea is to help patients continue taking their original drugs instead of switching to cheaper generic versions, or going off their meds entirely. 

The plan’s second part prohibits pay-for-delay deals, where brand-name drug makers pay generic drug companies to drop patent challenges. Proponents of this idea say pay-for-delay costs Americans up to $3.5 billion each year. 

Generic drugs account for more than 70 percent of all prescriptions filled each year in the U.S. at a savings to patients of about $8 billion a year. A different, and insidious, cost to patients comes from the leeway given by the Food and Drug Administration in the manufacture of generic drugs.

The FDA requires a generic drug to be the same as the original in dosage, safety, strength, performance, intended use, and the way it’s taken. The rules, however, allow for a 20-percent variation in the active ingredient. In other words, the good stuff may be 80 percent less than, or 20 percent more than, what’s in the real deal. This broad range may work for antibiotics, but it creates nasty reactions among patients with heightened sensitivities to their medications. 

Internet discussion boards teem with anecdotal evidence. One person tells how his symptoms went away during the year he took the real drug, but returned after three months on the generic version, forcing him to go back to the original that cost seven times more, but with “tremendous results.”

A mother describes how her 11-year- old son, who takes several generic anti-seizure drugs, received a different generic for one prescription that made him extremely sedated and “drool like a faucet,” which put him at risk for drowning in his own saliva. She calls this another example of why the FDA should tighten its regulations and monitoring of generic drugs.

I don’t have to go to the Internet to know about the dirty little secret of generic drugs. My wife has temporal lobe epilepsy, in addition to being very sensitive to generics. We knew generic over-the-counter drugs may include inactive ingredients that cause bad side effects, but we assumed generic drugs were the same as real ones. We discovered the difference when she received a generic anti-seizure drug because our insurance company wouldn’t pay for the original. The doctor and pharmacist insisted there was no difference, but a quick search of epilepsy forums turned up person after person with horror stories similar to hers.

Doctors and federal agencies many times require more than a patient’s story, which makes you wonder why the people charged with watching out for our health apparently ignore a study by Giuseppe Borheini published in the 2003 issue of Clinical Therapeutics (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12860486?dopt=Abstract). Borgheini’s team looked at available data going back to 1975 that compared the effectiveness of brand-name psychoactive drugs and their generic counterparts.

One of Borgheini’s more disturbing discoveries was of a study that showed plasma levels of phenytoin were 31 percent lower after a switch from the original anticonvulsant Dilantin. He also learned that when the FDA investigated the sudden recurrence of seizures on the generic valproic acid substituted for Depakote, it found a difference in how the drug gets to where it supposed to go. 

Other data showed statistically significant differences in favor of Valium over the generic diazepam in terms of the body’s absorption and distribution.

Borgheini’s research led him to conclude the FDA’s “ essential-similarity requirement should be extended to include more rigorous analyses of tolerability and efficacy in actual patients as well as in healthy subjects.”

This would mean the FDA would have to reconsider its formula variation requirement, demand realistic trials of different formulations, and make sure the active ingredient in the generic drug delivers its bullet to the same target as the original drug.

The FDA will say, however, that it doesn’t have the resources to guarantee generic drugs do no harm. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently told attendees of the annual meeting of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association her agency needs more people to review the 2,000 applications for new generic drugs, a number that’s doubled in five years.

Her plan is not to take more time to ensure a generic drug doesn’t harm the patient. No, her plan is to charge generic manufacturers an application fee that will fund additional staff to push out more potentially harmful drugs as part of the Obama Administration’s effort to make medication affordable to everyone, regardless of the cost to health.

(Video commentary at http://www.youtube.com/user/jdp1953#p/u/3/jJtBj8n25Xw)