Mental Illness Cuts Another Life Short - Phillip Seymour Hoffman Dead

Phillip Seymour Hoffman was found dead from overdosing on drugs Sunday morning.  He was found with a needle still in his arm.  On the surface it is easy to say "so what".  He was just another actor who had fame and fortune who threw it all away with the selfish use of drugs.  A theme that is all too common when these things happen.  

But the truth is his problems started long before he was either.  The truth also is that his battle with depression had been ongoing for most of his adult life.  He went to rehab for the first time in his early twenties right after college.  So his problems had nothing at all to do with being rich or famous.  His problems had to do with the fact he was human.  He had the same frailties that all the rest of us have.  We all have issues.  We all have things we wish could change, do differently, react differently to, be better.  

Mental illness isn't something to mess around with.  It isn't something that will just "go away" in time.  It is a medical condition, not unlike high blood pressure or diabetes, that requires medical attention.  In some cases it requires medication, in others talk therapy will work just fine.  But in either event it is a medical condition.  

I was watching Hannity on Fox News last night.  Something I rarely do, as he isn't one of my favorites.  Last night he reminded me of why.  He was showing pictures of the last few days and/or weeks of Mr. Seymour's life.  The pictures were from another "news" organization that I avoid like the plaque, TMZ.  It is nothing more than an exploitative gossip organization that seems to get off on the tragedies of others.  I am not sure how much money they paid for the pictures, and for my own mental well being I am better off not knowing.  

Have your opinions on what drug addicts are, that is fine.  If you believe they deserve what they get, OK.  I will get to how you are wrong about that shortly, but that is your opinion.  But remember, famous people have families as well.  He had a long time girlfriend and three young children; Cooper, Tallulah, and Willa.  The youngest being only five years old.  These young children just lost their father.  

I grew up with parent with a substance abuse problem.  It is certainly isn't the easiest of childhoods.  It is downright painful in fact.  Which his relapse back into to the addiction cycle may have been part of the reasons that he was separated from his long time girlfriend.  That isn't something that is really any of our business in any event.  That is between him, her, and their children.  But that doesn't make the love they felt for their father any less than that of your children towards you or your love towards your parents.  They deserve time to mourn in private without the people from the cheap seats chiming in on how he deserved what he got because he was a no good addict.  

As I have stated mental illness is just that, an illness.  It isn't as simple as going to the doctor, getting a blood test, and be given a treatment that will help control or cure it.  For many, such as myself, it is a life-long struggle that requires care.  Care from others and care from myself towards myself.  It is very easy to say well people like this are selfish when their lives end in a tragedy such as a drug overdose or suicide.  The reality is far different.  

Drugs and mental illness are very closely related.  As I said it requires care.  Sometimes that care comes in the form of self-medicating.  It becomes the way to feel better, just for a moment.  One moment in time that you don't feel bad.  You don't feel that the entire world is closing in around you.  For many, which I firmly believe that my father was one of these people, the stigma of mental illness is far worse than self-medicating.  Being a drunk, an IV drug user, a pill popper, a snorter or whatever else your drug of choice may be is the better option.  It is easier.  

Dealing with a mental illness is painful and it is work, very hard work in fact.  You are surrounded by a society that doesn't even make the attempt to understand what you are dealing with.  You are just labeled.  You may as well just be the addict.  

As a society it is well past time that we start dealing with these issues.  Virtually every mass shooting in this country has roots in mental illness.  Our jail and/or prison system contains a very large amount of mentally ill people, almost half in fact.  The number is estimated to be about 48%.  Nearly one-third of our homeless are mentally ill.  We spend the money on the back end housing and feeding these people in our jails and homeless shelters.  Yet we do very little to help them avoid those pitfalls and get the medical help that they need.  Just in terms of dollars and cents, it makes far more sense to spend that money on the front end.  Because we are spending it.  That can not be denied, at least not honestly.

We stigmatize them.  We tell ourselves that people like Mr. Hoffman was just a selfish man who had fame and fortune who was too weak to stay away from powerful drugs.  We tell ourselves that the parents of these young shooters should have done more to help their children.  We tell ourselves these things because it is easier than looking at ourselves and saying we too are to blame.  We could do more a society, we just would rather not because if we did, we may have to look at ourselves and our frailties.  We would have to look at our families and admit there may be a problem.  It is far easier this way.  We will just label them, call them weak.  Nothing to see here folks, just move along.  

Rest in Peace, Mr. Hoffman.  I hope that you rest easier than you lived.  Your talent will be missed.  

Uh, Mr. Beckel, Head Start Doesn't Work

I am sure most of you have heard about Bob Beckel's appearance on Hannity last night.  If case you have not, he dropped the F bomb live on the air during a discussion on Head Start.  This is yet another feel good program that the left wants you to believe works, when it does not.  Virtually all data suggests that this program just doesn't work.  There are no significant improvements of the education of the students who attend this program.  It is now just a very expensive tax-payer subsidized daycare center.  


HHS released the Head Start Impact Study Final Report last week. There are several remarkable things about it:

1. The study demonstrated that children’s attendance in Head Start has no demonstrable impact on their academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade. That’s right. If you were a mother who lost the lottery, couldn’t get your child into Head Start, and had to care for her at home, she was no worse off at the end of first grade than she would have been had she gotten into Head Start. That isn’t to say that she was well off. In the critical area of vocabulary, 3-year-olds entered the study at the 29th percentile in terms of national norms and finished first grade at the 24th percentile whether or not they attended Head Start. That is not good.
2. The study went virtually unnoticed. You can’t find anything about it in the Washington Post or theNew York Times or the Wall Street Journal or any other media outlet that serves the general public. The Post has 11 reporters covering education. Why isn’t a report on the effectiveness of the nation’s largest federally administered education program, one that serves thousands of needy children within the Post’s metro area, deemed worthy of newsprint? Is Head Start so sacrosanct that bad news about it is to be ignored?
3. The report of the study was inexcusably delayed. Data collection for the first grade follow-up was completed in the spring of 2006. Best practice in federal agencies would have seen a report released 12-18 months later. In fact, a draft report was provided to government officials in 2008 but wheels turned for long periods afterwards as the contractors were pushed to try different analytic techniques in the hope that something positive for Head Start could be found. Residuals of that effort are apparent in the released report, wherein findings are reported as suggestive or moderate that do not meet well accepted standards for statistical significance. The inexcusable delays continue as a report on a follow-up at the end of third grade, on which data collection ended in the spring of 2008, is no where in sight.

The above is from a report that comes The Brookings Institute.  Hardly a bastion of right-wing thinking.  This is from January of this year.  Brookings isn't even suggesting the program be done away with, they want to "improve" it.  I guess we throw more money into it we can get a better result than what we have seen in the past 4 plus decades.  


Oh, and as an aside, Bob Beckel continued to his classy behavior by blaming Hannity for his use of the F word live on the air.  I would like to see the headlines today had that been a conservative man using that word towards a liberal female instead of the other way around.  


I wonder how big the fine from the FCC is going to be and will Fox make Beckel pay for it?   

Bachmann on Budget Deal & Presidential Run

Santorum V. Sharpton on Abortion in the Black Community

First, Al Sharpton never addresses the question of abortion. Second, he completely dismissed the meaning of what Rick Santorum was saying.

Rick Santorum was saying that it wasn't until the 14th amendment that U.S. recognized blacks as fully human. Once that amendment passed they were then considered "persons" under the constitution. The court case that legalized abortion in this country said that a fetus was not a person, not that it wasn't human. Science says that a baby is human life upon conception; that is not in dispute, nor was it the basis of Roe V. Wade. 

Some of the arguments to keep abortion legal in this country use the 14th amendment as the constitutionality of it; pregnancy is the same thing as slavery, therefore forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy she is being held captive by the fetus. So, it isn't that the baby is not considered human life; it is that it isn't considered a person under the law. There is a distinction that Sharpton completely overlooks.


I also love how he completely glosses over Margaret Sanger's role in Planned Parenthood and what her intentions for the black community really was. This from the same man who called Glenn Beck a race baiter and hater because he held a rally to restore honor and faith in our country on the anniversary of MLK's I Have a Dream Speech. He doesn't even seem to understand the hypocrisy.

Al Sharpton is a man who is a Reverend and a civil rights activist and the question he was being asked is why as a black man was he ok for a fetus to be treated as not a person the same way slaves were at the time of the founding of this country, one that he would not or could not answer.  He also has sat back and allowed people to call Senator Santorum a racist when it is Santorum who is trying to stop the destruction of the black family that abortion has tried to do.  Rev. Al, you should be ashamed of yourself. 

Go and take a gander at the comments written under this video on you tube; Santorum is the racist and Sharpton is the man who is trying to help the black community.  How did their thinking get so backwards? 

The 2012 Race Begins, At Least in Virginia

There may be those that are not familiar with this story, but for me this is local.  Five years ago the senator from Virginia was running for re-election and during a stump speech he used the word Maccaca about a supporter of his opponent, who happened to have a video camera with him.  The video made national news and sunk his campaign.  Jim Webb became the junior senator of Virginia and George Allen's promising career seemed to be over. 

Senator Allen was also the governor before becoming our senator. He was much beloved in the state of Virginia and was on the short list for a run for the presidency in 08.  Of course that didn't happen, as he was still considered dead in the water.  Today, George Allen announced his candidacy for the senate.  He will be going up against the same opponent, the now senior Senator Jim Webb.  Webb, was once a Reagan republican, who ran as a moderate.  He has supported much of the Obama agenda.  He disagrees with Obamacare, but voted for anyway.  There are rumors that he may not even run for re-election, 

But, even with all this intrigue this isn't the most interesting part of the story.  Senator Allen once had an employee named Jamie Radtke.  Jamie is the founder of the Richmond Tea Party and is one the main organizers of the states Tea Party organization.  Virginia's Tea Party's are very well organized on a state level.  While they are all individual groups, there are mechanisms in place to organize on a state level for different pieces of legislation and to lobby our Governor.  We also had the first state Tea Party Convention.  Jamie was instrumental in getting this organized and it came off without a noticeable hitch, so needless to say she is well respected within the tea party community in the state. 

Jamie worked for Allen during his time as Governor as well as when he was in the senate.  She is also running for the republican nomination for the senate seat.  It is going to be an interesting nomination process. 

Senator Allen is very well respected in conservative circles (there are detractors of course, but he is mainly well liked) and has the huge advantage of being able to get a big megaphone.  He made his "official" announcement on Hannity, this after being interviewed by Virginia resident Mark Levin. 

Herman Cain on Run For Presidency

Thomas Sowell on the Economic Recovery

Thomas Sowell is a brilliant man when it comes to economics.  Obama should be hiring him.  Hey, one can dream. 

Go West - Allen West on the New Black Panther Party and the DOJ

Seriously, I just love this man.  He was interviewed today on the Hannity radio show in regards to an interview that he gave to The Hill.  In this interview he talks about how Obama is exploiting race and his disappointment in the lack of the prosecution of The New Black Panther Party. 

The thing that is being missed in all of this is the FACT that had it been a white man wearing a sheet in front of that polling station the charges would not have been dropped.  Nor should they be.  Racism is racism is racism.  If we are to reach the dream of Dr. King, it cannot matter what color the person is who is doing the discrimination.  But the liberal mantra is that only whites can be racist.  NBPP proves that is simply not the case.  Lets hope that LTC West gets into office and helps move this country towards a more colorblind society. 

The Tactics of Diversion are not Working - White House VS. Fox News

As the saga between Fox News and the white house continue, I have been pondering what the real reasons for this are. I would have to fall on the side of diversion. While I agree that they seem like crybabies and need to throw a bone to the far left base, it seems to me that can’t be the only reason.



Today is a good example of why a diversion is a welcome thing. Iran has been offered a deal that would allow them to have the means to have nuclear energy and get the rest of the world off their backs; and they have, yet again, backed out. The questions of our troop’s safety in Afghanistan while the President decides whether he is going to listen to his hand-picked general that is on the ground continue. The unemployment rate continues to rise. An announcement from the administration today noted the fact that the stimulus has done all it is going to do. The votes for a public option are not there in either the house or the senate. None of this is good.


To further complicate matters, Time Magazine will be printing a piece on the president that includes sections of his college thesis. Again, not good news for the President; it calls the founding fathers “so-called” and basically says that the constitution is flawed and needs to be changed. So, the “fundamental change” he promised us is in jeopardy.


People have stood up. We have shown up at tea parties and town hall meetings. We are writing and calling our congressional offices to voice our concerns. The politicians only say they want involvement. The truth of the matter is that they would be much happier if we all just continued to bury our heads in the sand and let them run roughshod over the freedoms that we are guaranteed. If they take them away slowly, we may just not notice. That is what they were counting on.


The problem is that, as the republicans did eight years ago, the dems are now over-reaching and doing too much too fast. The founders of the country very specifically and smartly designed our government to move slowly. While it may be annoying at times, it is for the best.


Fox News is talking about these issues. I will be the first to admit that they lean to the right. But, leaning to the right doesn’t mean that they are liars or are falsely reporting the stories of the day. The reality is they are really just going after Beck and Hannity. Beck and Hannity are doing commentary. Both are conservatives, even worse Beck is a libertarian leaning conservative. That means he really doesn’t like anyone in the government. Both of them stand up five days a week and give their sometimes stinging criticism of what this administration is doing.


The fact that I can refer to Beck and Hannity by their last names and people know who I am talking about says everything that needs to be said. You can say that you don’t agree with them, but you know who they are. They both have a clear voice on what they believe and have the megaphone in order to say it. Beck hammered away at Van Jones and ACORN. He won those battles; at least for now. Van Jones is out of the white house and ACORN is going to be more closely monitored; at least for now.


The administration may think that they are doing a good job at diversionary tactics, but the facts are that the ratings of Fox News have increased. Which only means that more people are hearing the stories of what this administration is doing that is against the constitution and endangering our freedoms. More people are hearing about what is contained in the so-called healthcare reform bill. More people are realizing that it isn’t about healthcare; it is about consolidating power for the executive branch. This is something that the left hammered President Bush for. It isn’t healthy whichever party is doing it. Beck is pointing that out to his ever growing audience. This is exactly what the Obama administration doesn’t need. But as far as I am concerned, keep up the war. You are only making my job as part of the new “community organizers” easier.