The talk of Greek default and subsequent Euro exit suddenly went from crazy dirty fucking hippie talk to serious discussion of when instead of if and if instead of laughter.
The Greek president has called the four main parties, including the centre-right New Democracy and the Socialist Pasok, to try to form an emergency government to avoid new elections.
But Syriza said it would not attend because it could not back any coalition which supported austerity....
Elena Panaritis, an economist and MP for Pasok...Greece now having "conversations we should have had two and a half years ago," she said.
Go Fuck Yourself is a legitimate policy option and as the MP for PASOK notes, it is an option that should have been on the table thirty months ago:
Which politician wants to tell their constituents that they need to take a 30% to 50% reduction in their standard of living to pay-off a bunch of damn foreigners at near par and maintain allegiance to a monetary system that increases their pain? The current set may be willing to make that argument, but the next election will promote politicians who promise to take away some of the pain and screw the foreigners instead of their own people.
A single European currency without massive cross-border transfers and a central bank that is scared shiftless of the threat of transitory inflation has led to massive amounts of needless pain. The Greeks should have defaulted two years ago and walked away from the Euro when they still had some control over their long term internal assets instead of wasting two years of continued pain before walking away.
The Greeks, and the rest of the peripheral Euro-zone nations should consider that telling the Germans and the tight money Bundsbank that Go Fuck Yourself is a legitimate policy position and one that they are seriously considering embracing unless policy changes to both the ECB and the entire European economic integration project changes to allow for easier resets of relative prices between countries in the Euro-zone.
We have known for decades that there is lots of kerogen - pre oil - in the Green River formation in the western US. There have been attempts to convert the kerogen into a usable/affordable energy source and they all have failed. Over at the Agonist Steve Hynd reports that magic ponies and unicorns never die.
The Green River Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.
Keep in mind this is not the "tight" oil they are getting from the Balkan formation via fracking or the oil sands in Canada. It is 3 trillion barrels of oil that no one could afford. The first thing we have to look at is "energy return on investment" EROI - how much energy you have to spend compared to how much energy you get. This alone makes Green River formation kerogens uneconomical.
In addition since it's kerogen and not oil the EROI to refine it is less:
Since it takes as much or more energy to extract and refine the kerogen it is not economic.
And then there is the water. The Green River formation is located in an area that already has water shortages. Even if we ignore the probable ground water contamination issues it will still require 5 to 10 barrels of water for each barrel of oil.
We have known of this resource for decades and Royal Dutch Shell snd Chevron have made attempts to exploit this resource with no economic success.
There are environmetal concerns as well but since it will never be economical that doesn't concern me very much.
This is entirely political. One third of the Green River formation is on private land and when that is developed economically we can talk about government interference.
For reasons I can't understand, this morning's reading has more good links than I can cover one at a time. Any of the following would make a good blog post, but I simply don't have time. Scan the list and pick what catches your interest. A couple of technical / legal topics are not for everyone. But most of these strike me as important.
►Cancer 101: Male breast cancer Dr. Salwitz, blogging oncologist, provides crib notes for a statistically rare condition, listing risk factors and other minutiae. I am personally aware of only one instance of male breast cancer among al the people I know, but for him it is not a trivial topic. Here's a snip but there is more at the link.
There are several risk factors for male breast cancer. In men with Jewish background, there is an increased risk if there is breast cancer in the family. Men that carry the breast cancer gene (BRCA1 or BCA2) have up to a 15% lifetime risk (as apposed to 0.5% without). Other genetic abnormalities such as Klinefelter’s, Cowden’s and Lynch Syndromes increase the chance a man will get breast cancer. Men that have breast enlargement (gynecomastia), which is often related to medications, are more likely to be affected. Testicular problems such as recurrent infections, injury and undescended testes may increase the cancer risk, probably by changing hormone levels. It appears that cirrhosis increases male breast neoplasms. Men who have had breast cancer in one breast, are more likely to get cancer in the opposite breast.
From the moment I thought about universal health care my first impulse as a cafeteria manager was to see it as a long-awaited resolution to one of the most expensive "controllable" costs of operating any business -- workers compensation for job related illnesses and injuries. Silly me. I actually thought the whole point was making people well and getting them back to work. No way. It has a little to do with health care, but the serious money has to do with insurance costs. (One euphemism is risk management but the costs include a good many fixed expenses having nothing to do with risk. Liability, labor laws and the infrastructure expenses of the insurance industry also have to be paid for -- sales bonuses, advertising, executive compensation, and shareholder dividends and profits come to mind.) But I digress as usual...
Anyway, this little insight about state and federal regulations is germaine to the national discussion about universal health care. With the fate of ACA still in the balance and one of the main GOP talking points being that foolishness about purchasing insurance across state lines, this caught my eye. (My emphasis here and below.)
While McCarty et al may decry the interference of federal authorities in the insurance process, payers may be less negative after considering the additional costs inherent in state-specific regulation. According to a report in Insurance Journal earlier this week,
"Tyler Leverty, a professor of finance in the Tippie College of Business, says that the expenses associated with meeting regulations in every state in which an insurance company does business drive up compliance costs by 26 percent when compared to companies that are regulated by only one state.
"These high regulatory compliance costs reduce the technical efficiency of firms, deter firms from operating in additional states, and increase the price of insurance," says Leverty."
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These next four links from The Health Care Blog have little in common other than that site, but all four drive home important subjects. I have noticed that the last few months The Health Care Blog seems to have multiplied its output exponentially. I haven't seen anything about that from Matthews Holt, blogmaster, but either he's making more money or getting more contacts yielding a raft of good posts.
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►Making Privacy Policies Not Suck Aza Raskin, former head of user experience at Mozilla Labs and creative lead for Firefox, now runs Massive Health, a startup that aims to help people take control of their health. This post originally appeared at his blog. In this brief post he advocates the use of icons and graphics to streamline a layman's understanding of privacy issues. I'll get there some day, I guess, but meantime I'm still skipping the mouse-print and clicking the little boxes that follow.
This is a quickie but I'm including it mostly for the fun factor in the comments thread. The subject of privacy is a legitimate ongoing concern, not only for medical records but everything in life, it seems. I'm not getting into that quagmire other than saying that I gave up on meaningful privacy expectations long ago. I'm not careless, but I'm not obsessive, getting overcome by righteous indignation if someone wants to see ID. And I quit using a screen name on the Internet a couple years ago. John Ballard is my real name (along with a few thousand other John Ballards).
He makes all of these traps easy to grasp, but I really like #8 about caring hospitals.
The commercials boast of how local hospitals are “there for you when you need them most,” and “your advocate for your health.” This is horse hockey. The people in the hospital may be caring and kind. The doctors, nurses, and even administrators may want you to be healthy. But the hospital is a business which requires people to be sick and have lots of procedures done to be profitable. Most health care dollars are spent in hospitals, and many times those dollars do no good to the patient. I’ve seen end-stage cancer patients get heart catheterization, people with dementia spend weeks in the ICU, and countless other procedures are done with no benefit (other than income to the hospital).
Don’t be fooled. Your goal is to stay healthy and stay out of the hospital; your doing so is bad for the business of hospitals.
Boy, this one has been a long time coming. I've been railing for years about the difference between health care and risk management, reflected in the different missions of insurance companies and health care providers. We have been spoon-fed from infancy the idea that health care comes from insurance when it always comes from a medical provider. The mission of insurance is not managing health but setting the boundaries of what is or is not "affordable" (whatever the hell that means).
The end of medical underwriting in the ACA, combined with other demographic, regulatory, and economic factors, made health insurers’ business model increasingly untenable.
These changes will not go away, one way or another, no matter what the Supreme Court does, no matter who is elected in November. These changes are directly tied not just to legislation but to underlying demographic and economic realities
This is not a terrible thing. “We got pulled through the crucible against our will and have been reshaped because of it,” he said. “For most of what has already been implemented, it has been a pretty good thing.”
Health insurers are unlikely to disappear. But their primary role in the future will be using new technologies to help accountable health systems serve their customers and drive out costs — and the health systems, not the health insurers, will increasingly be the face, the brand, of that improvement. “We can use technology to make it easier for the consumer. Convenience is the new word for quality.”
I'm not worried about the insurance industry. They have many other products to offer and plenty of customers eager to buy, happy to pay experts to assess the fine points of risk management. Auto collision and liability, home theft, fire and flood, life insurance (term, universal and all the so-called "investment" variables in between), the list in endless...
And as long as company-sponsored group plans are offered the TPA market will always be out there. But the days of treating essential health care as a market commodity are slowly but surely (one can hope) coming to an end.
Dr. Dr. Victoria Sweet, a general internist, came to Laguna Honda for a two-month stint more than 20 years ago and ended up staying. Laguna Honda was home to the patients who had nowhere else to go, who were too sick, too poor, too disenfranchised to make it on their own. The vast open wards housed more than a thousand patients, some for years. Laguna Honda was off the grid, and this, Sweet discovered, was to the benefit of the patients.
Unencumbered by HMOs and insurance companies, the doctors and nurses practiced a very old-fashioned type of medicine, “slow medicine,” as Sweet terms it. There was ample time for doctors and nurses to get to know their patients, and ample time for patients to convalesce. Many a written-off patient recovered within the comforting, unhurried arms of Laguna Honda.
Sweet realizes that the inefficiencies of this old-fashioned hospital – from the doctors who had time to fully research their patients’ complicated histories, to the nurse who knitted a handmade blanket for every charge on her ward, to the chicken that wandered regularly through the AIDS ward, bringing a spark of life to even the most demented patients – were actually its secret weapon. The inefficiencies were actually quite efficient, if your metric was healing patients.
This is the sort of report that makes me want more time in my life for recreational reading. But when you're already in the choir, it's sometimes tedious to sit through the same old hymns, no matter how much you may have liked them growing up. **Sigh**
As usual, here is a link to American Book Exchange, my favorite book source. (Sorry, Amazon. Eat your heart out.)
►NwHIN: Government Governance of Governances Reader advisory -- this is geek city stuff. Procede at your own risk. Margalit Gur-Arie is a specialist in health information technology. She's really smart. I keep up with her for the same reason I follow any other expert I hope never to need in my life.
When political types toss a piece of legislation into the burearucratic fire (think campers discarding a lit cigarette) they leave it up to technocrats to see it doesn't cause a forest fire. This is where the Margalit Gur-Aries of the world come in.
We're all familiar with the Good, Bad and Ugly metrics. To these three she appends a great new category she calls The Exaquisite. (I'm not gonna try to splain all the acronyms. Readers who get it will already know and the rest of us can just admire what she says in the same way we are happy the washing machine comes with an electrical schematic on the back so the repairman won't get lost.)
After what seems like an eternity, ONC officially recognizes that de-identified information can be rather easily re-identified and that those who happen to own the hardware infrastructure where people’s medical records are stored do not have an inherent right of ownership to those records. I would very much like to see ONC extend this regulation to every HIT vendor, not just those specializing in exchange of information, since if it is pertinent to NVEs, it must be also pertinent to EHRs, HIEs, ancillary software vendors and, yes, pharmacy software vendors. I am not naive enough to believe that CTE [S-6] will survive the rule making process, but for the moment, the detailed description of the dangers inherent in the wholesale of patient data is reason for celebration.
(==>Incidentally, I think this is related to the privacy issues mentioned above.)
This link-filled post by Naomi Freundlich is the red meat of this morning's menu. I'm not going to parse what she says because in this instance the reader MUST go to the link prepared to read it carefully and ingest what she says. This is too important to skip.
The imminent expansion and also specificity of the data pool as more and more information is recorded and dumped into large computerized repositories begs for a new kind of analysis that identifies “hot-spots” and outliers that resist the trends; local areas, single hospitals, particular members of ethnic or racial populations and other demographic subsets that defy the odds when it comes to national health outcomes or usage of medical services.
We’re already seeing this in the realm of Medicare payment data; the Dartmouth Atlas has for years been identifying regional variations in the cost of care in different parts of the country and even between neighboring towns. Now, as the first step toward linking reimbursement to efficient care, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released new findings from its own study of hospital and post-discharge cost variation. According to coverage in Kaiser Health News, “the figures show wide variance among hospitals around the country, even ones just a few miles apart. In Los Angeles, for example, the average patient admitted to Los Angeles Community Hospital cost Medicare nearly $24,644 during the stay and in the month afterward, 37 percent above the national median. Across town, according to the data, an essentially similar patient admitted to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center cost Medicare $17,628, or 2 percent below the median”
This is about two subjects: dollar costs and social phenomena. Figuring out how these two variables puzzle together an how best to measure and control them is more challenging than finding a cure for disease. As I read this my mind wanders back to the book report above. And even though I have not read the book, I already know that the links between costs and results are tenuous and difficult to manage at best.
A line from an old spiritual comes back to me this Sunday morning...
If religion were a thing that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die.
"If elections mattered they would be illegal". This statement was from a citizen of Greece. The Greeks are expeirencig this first hand as the technocrats working for the big banks have taken over their country - an economic Third Reich. Over at The Moderate Voice Pete Barnes has a must read post - What Capitialist Don't Know: Without Democracy Capitalism Dies,
Here is a teaser:
In the 1990s renowned political scientist and author Ben Barber wrote in Jihad vs McWorld that global capitalism was at war with democracy. He was right, of course, and the intensity of that war has only increased since then. Global corporations are battling democracy’s environmental regulations, taxation, labor laws, legislation aimed at fairness or income equality. They are battling democracy’s concern for the long-term survival of community or any values more human than economic.
Go look at these. (17 images in all) Photos are mirrors that reflect what we do. In this Dec. 18, 1971 file photo shot by Associated Press photographers Horst Faas and Michel Laurent, part of Pulitzer prize winning series, newly independent Bangladesh guerrillas in Dacca use bayonets to torture and kill four men suspected of collaborating with Pakistani militiamen who had been accused of murder, rape and looting during months of civil war. Faas, a prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with The Associated Press, died Thursday May 10, 2012. He was 79. Photo: Horst Faas, Michel Laurent / AP
Today, the day following the president's endorsement of marriage equality for gays, this story made footnote status on the national network news. Those who would accuse the media of pandering to the president should reflect on how much more juicy the story could have been with little or no tweaking. That's why we have blogs. And I'm here to twist the handle of the knife to make certain it hit the mark. This is how I was about to connect the dots before watching NBC.
Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.
The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.
Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.
In less than half a day there are already over five thousand comments at the site. From the 1500 "top comments" the mood seems less than charitable.
Romney's response is that he doesn't remember the incident. Riiiight. Like several of the commenters I don't think that response passes the smell test. If he's telling the truth the man's even more unfeeling than I thought.
As I’m reading and pondering this, I’m marveling at the political strategery of Davids Axelrod and Plouffe. Think about it:
On Sunday, Vice-President Biden comes out in favor of same sex marriage.
On Wednesday, President Obama comes out in favor of same-sex marriage, leaving some to speculate that he was backed into a corner, or that he should have done it sooner, or later, or whatever it is that people complain about when they simply can’t shake the need to be outraged about something, like, all of the time. (asiangrrlMN already covered this, but long story short, Obama’s record on LGBT rights is second to none; and he announced his support for the Respect Marriage Act last year, legislation which would repeal DOMA, so can we all calm down for a minute, please?)
Then today — Thursday, a front-page article drops in The Washington Post about how Romney was a big ol’ gay-hating gay-basher.
Back when President Obama was a young man, trying to figure out who he was and writing pensive letters to his girlfriend about T.S. Eliot and other philosophical shit, Romney was picking on and assaulting gay people.
Face? Meet brick.
And here’s the kicker — here’s the dark chocolate inside this croissant d’awesome: Romney’s behavior most assuredly would have constituted a hate crime under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act which President Obama signed in 2009, if such a law had existed at the time and had Romney been prosecuted under that law. (The Hate Crimes Prevention Act expanded the existing hate crime law to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, and is the first federal law to extend protections to transgendered persons.)
You cannot convince me that this was not planned. At the very least, the Obama campaign knew the article was going to drop and decided to announce sooner rather than later that President Obama supports same-sex marriage (he had already planned to announce it at some point before the convention.)
This is how it’s done, folks.
Mr. Romney, sir? I do believe you have been served.
What's going on in Europe? They are just saying no to an economic Third Reich.
It is a revolt against the plutocrats and the technocrats and yes the bankers. This is the sort of the thing that has resulted in revolution - think Cuba, Venezuela and yes pre Communist Russia. Sometimes violent sometimes through the ballot box.
The music and video is background for reading. If the reader finds it distracting, don't play it. I think it seems appropriate.
The ambulance crew rolled him into my ER breathless in his pajamas, O2 mask on his face, gasping for air, his short cropped hair a mess, standing straight up. Eugene was what the staff called a “frequent flyer.” As the nurse injected some IV Lasix I reviewed his chart to find a classic downward spiral.
It was a busy evening. The bays were full of the usual cuts, broken bones and chest pains, the waiting room with snotty noses and chronic pain patients hoping for a refill from the new kid in town. I was a freshly minted family practice doctor taking a year after residency in this rural California emergency room to take a break, get some experience and make a little money.
I came to call this “a MASH Unit in reverse.” We had no on-site surgery. It was my job to keep the life threatening cases alive until the helicopter arrived to take them to the trauma center a 40 minute flight to the south. In MASH they flew the wounded in. Here my job was to keep them alive until we could fly them out.
I had vowed that no one would die in my Emergency Room if I could help it. Until I met Eugene and Mary Ann.
She was a stark contrast to Eugene. Looked like she had just finished dressing to go to church on Sunday morning: immaculately pressed with perfect hair and her knitting in hand. She had obviously been here before. It was clear from the first second I laid eyes on her that she adored her husband of 56 years. Despite the mask and the respiratory distress, I could see the same love for her in the old man’s eyes.
This was his 6th visit to the ER in the last 18 months. He had a bad heart and it didn’t take much to throw him into pulmonary edema despite 14 pills and over $200/month in medication. On a good visit he spent 4 days in the hospital getting his meds adjusted. On a bad visit he was on the ventilator for 3 days and in the hospital for 10. Each time he emerged weaker. Lately he was wheelchair bound and Mary Ann had learned to deal with adult diapers and getting him around the house. This would be one of the good visits.
I sat down with them once his breathing was easier and asked, “How are you feeling about the quality of your life lately?” Mary Ann wiped some tears as Eugene told me how miserable he was, how much he hated being a burden and what a good life he and his wife had in days past.
None of us said anything for a while. Mary Ann set her knitting aside and sat as close as she could to the bed. They held hands – as the nurses said they always did.
“We can keep giving you medicine and even putting you on the breathing machine if you want, and here is what I am afraid of. It is only a matter of time before you won’t be able to get off that machine. When that happens Mary Ann will be faced with the decision of whether or not she tells the doctors to turn the machine off. I am pretty sure none of us want to put her in that position if it can be avoided. It sounds like you have been pretty miserable lately and you are getting weaker as time goes by.
I want you to know that each time you come in on the Ambulance is potentially the natural end of your life. We are stopping that with our medicines. If the two of you want, we don’t have to do that. If you two have a discussion and decide you would like the next time you come in to be the natural end of your life, and I am in the ER when you come in, I can help that happen for you.”
He was breathing easier. We switched him to the nasal cannula and his sats held. I left the room and let them talk about this new option for a few minutes.
When I returned she was standing by the bed. Eugene spoke. “We want you to help us do that doctor.” I looked them in the eyes and nodded. Both of them were crying in a way that I knew the foundation for their emotions was love – the love everyone sensed when in their presence.
I had them fill out his Living Will and No Code paperwork. Everyone wished them well as they were wheeled to the medical ward. Before the end of the shift I huddled with the staff and told them the plan, secretly hoping – and dreading – I would be on staff the next time.
6 weeks later, at 10PM on a Saturday shift, the call came in. Eugene was on his way. Severe respiratory distress. Rales to the apices. O2 mask in place.
We wheeled him into the room with Mary Ann holding his hand. Eugene was barely able to maintain his consciousness, panting with blue lips. They immediately recognized me. I looked at each in turn. They both nodded and quickly looked away. I gathered the staff and told them what we were not going to do, pulled the curtains around the bed, and held Mary Ann’s free hand.
The noises of the ER receded to a background hum. Mary Ann stroked his forehead as his breathing worsened. She gripped my hand, looking up to me from time to time.
It only took 10 minutes for Eugene to die. At the point of his last breath — we witnessed his passing — that span of seconds when we could sense his spirit leaving, almost see it happening. Joy, memories, love, grief, pain, longing for more time, relief that it was finally over, the last goodbye, filled the room.
Mary Ann was so happy, so sad, so intensely remembering all they had shared. We hugged. She thanked me and everyone on the staff.
I stepped out into the full blast of the sights, smells and sounds of my next patient and the remaining 10 hours of my shift.
Eugene was the only patient I lost in the ER that year.
In 2008 the United States elected a black President – the result was a very negative reaction by about 25% of the population. It's not the first time there was a reaction to shifts in racial equality. In his concession speech in 2008 John McCain mentioned T.R, Roosevelt's dinner with Booker T. Washington in 1901. Like most of us this was the first time author Deborah Davis had heard of this historical event. She became curious and researched the history of the event -*-and wrote Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation.
The first half of the book is a mini biography of both T.R Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington. For me this was very informative since I had little knowledge of this period of US history. TR was born into wealth and privilege and Booker T. was born a slave but their lives had many parallels. They first met in 1898 when they discussed the performance of the black soldiers that were part of TR's Rough Riders.
While Booker T. continued to build Tuskegee TR used the popularity of the Rough Riders to become governor of New York. Being TR he manged to upset the New York Republican political machine. The machine convinced McKinley to choose TR as his Vice President just so they could get him out of the State House. TR continued his communication with Booker T and agreed to visit Tuskegee. Fate had other ideas and when McKinley was assassinated TR suddenly found himself President and Booker T suddenly found himself an adviser to the President of the United States.
On October 16, 1901 TR had a evening meeting with Booker T. In addition TR had a big family meal planned that included a hunting friend from Colorado. He made the decision to invite Booker T to dinner. Both men recognized the danger – TR almost withdrew the invitation and Booker T almost turned it down. But the dinner happened and the next morning it was reported in the press.
A summary of TR's daily agenda was read by a reporter at the Washington Post and suddenly realized that a black man had dined with the President at the White House.
“Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Ala., dined with the president last evening.” he wrote in his column. That one line caused the telegraphs to start clicking furiously in the capital, their shocking message reverberating across the nation like a thunderclap.
In the South the reaction was immediate and angry. TR was blasted for the invitation and the “uppity” Booker T for accepting. The loss of slavery was bad enough for the South but the idea that “coons” were social equals was just too much. The press in the North was for the most part positive.
Although both men were able to accomplish a great deal that dinner haunted them for the rest of their lives.
This is a very readable book covering the history of the US 30+ years after the civil war. It is valuable because it gives us not only a picture of how things have changed in the century since TR was President but also how much really hasn't changed. I recommend this book to anyone interested in this short period of history.
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One of the most relaxing places to read is in barrel saunas. The soothing scent of the wood in these cedar saunas is something everyone has to experience at least once in their lifetime!
