Back in 2005, Dana Connors, Maine State Chamber of Commerce president said, "This is not the time or place to expand Maine care coverage to more uninsured. “ He ignored that covering uninsured lowers health costs then. And 10 years later, United Health Care ignores that fact as well.

In 2005, Dana Connors, said people just didn’t “shop enough” to find affordable health insurance. In 2016, insurance companies limit those options further by pulling out of the Health insurance Marketplace created to help consumers shop around.

And United Health Care- with 11 billion dollars in profits last year- complains that Community Health Exchanges are unaffordable and unprofitable- so they‘ll be pulling out. In 2016, filling pockets- insurance companies pockets comes at the expense of providing healthcare.

A recent New York Times poll reported the highest paid individuals in healthcare are insurance executives. “The base pay of insurance executives, hospital executives and even hospital administrators often far outstrips doctors’ salaries: $584,000 on average for an insurance chief executive officer, compared with $306,000 for a surgeon and $185,000 for a general doctor.. The chief executive of Aetna had total compensation of over $36 million…A former president of a midsize health system in New Jersey, received total compensation of $21.7 million..”

In 2016, it is still true that insurance companies executives are paid outrageously. United Health Care paid its CEO 102 million dollars.

I am trying to care for the health of someone special by bringing him to my yoga class and his insurance is required!!..

Think Managed Care has changed health care? Wait until your car insurance company switches to Managed Car!

If we live in a we-contained world, shouldn't we all be Democrats?

The birth of managed care was surrounded by sounds called Click and Clack coming from an AM car radio.

Delayed gratification has changed. Social science experiments often mirror cultural values and our best learners absorb them well. They do what the advisor recommends. The children in the Marshmallow study are told to wait before they eat one marshmallow, and they will then earn two. Those marshmallow waiters sit and think, “Oh but the next one will be worth it. “ In the study, those kids who waited went to college, took out student loans, on good faith that they would be able to get jobs with health insurance when they finished. Occupy Wall Street told us that is the wrong lesson. We do not teach kids to ask- “How many marshmallows are there? Why 2? Is anybody getting 3? Show me the whole bag.” These are the questions of our time. Not- “Can you wait for the second marshmallow?”

A collection of observations from E.B. White, the Brooklin, Maine writer, has been culled by his granddaughter, Martha White. He was once described as a man who never "wrote a mean or careless sentence". That distinction falls to few in good times; during the Iraq War, more fell out of contention. Many saw the invasion of Iraq, as premised on a falsehood: that Weapons of Mass Destruction were hidden there, an evening of a political score tallied by one President, settled in the wrong country.
The enormous human suffering and sacrifice of Iraq will leave many granddaughters whose grandparents will never be known to them...

Deception is something we need to claim as what we do not like in politics and political life. This is not claiming the moral high ground. This is seeking to return politics and politicians to a respectable level of credibility with the public. But their staff members have to be equally accountable.

The peculiar thing about the News is that very often events of senseless tragedy and despair are juxtaposed with News of hope and compassion. Sometimes, the two kinds of News are on the very same page in the newspaper.

Party structure has always provided the legs for a candidate to stand on- supporting and staying in touch with a candidate's focus: the voters. Participation in that party structure has always been absolutely free- participation the only "dues" anyone pays. There are no oaths of loyalty. Voting by poll result, not grasping the difference between before and after and the reality that some people change their vote based on what a poll says, endangers fully this free enterprise- a party system. Without a standing party structure, that exists before, after and even without the highs and lows of the election season, candidates- so-called- "independents"- will re-invent that structure every time- or rather "buy" it. Electing candidates will become a matter of capturing- guess what- the most money- not the most voter credibility and trust.

In this season of gratitude, speak. Uphold civil liberties, the human rights that we have, that others will travel thousands of miles for, and when you see them violated, no matter what the justification others may offer, speak up. Here, there and everywhere.

The last we checked on managed car , a disappointed car owner was unable to receive prior authorization from his Automobile Behavioral Health customer service representative for a front end alignment. Managed Car you may remember is the automobile insurance industry's version of managed care. Now, he would like to get the car's oil changed.

Corrupting the Message: Remembering the Iraq War

Ten years ago this week, the Iraq War began. Like every other atrocity in history, or let's limit it to the twentieth century, it began with a corrupted message. Many knew that after September 11, 2001, the weapons and muscle of war would be flexed. We were horrified when we heard that one man, Saddam Hussein, had put together something the mass media had not openly expressed fear of since the invention of the atom bomb, weapons of mass destruction. What muscle they flexed with that corrupted message or rather what atrocity committed. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Ten years later, what we are left with is this: the names of the dead Americans and Iraqis.
This all brings back to the truth. We should treat it better than that.

"Updating your truth" is a term not much used these days. We read that somebody "denied", "vetoed", "denounced", "maintained", "refused to consider", "filibustered", "opposed", "fended off", or "attacked". But we never hear that someone has "upgraded their truth".

"Updating the truth" might lead us all to be in better service to the truth, less frightened of the real information that presents itself and says "Give this some real consideration". We know that currently, people often don't seriously consider new information because there is no safe way for them to change their mind. In psychotherapy, its called "resistance". In developmental psychology, "updating your truth" is what children and adolescents do, profoundly, albeit with subtlety, when they reach 2, 5, 8, 10, 13, 18,- whenever a great developmental epoch begins or ends. Isn't "updating your truth" what human experience is anyway?

The parades and camaraderie of the Fourth of July celebrate freedom.

This nation-wide celebration doesn't mean that the freedoms we have can’t be corrupted. Just this week, the Supreme Court eliminated laws originally intended to prevent states from interfering with the right to vote that has been broadly criticized as a corruption of our freedom to vote. What are the freedoms and rights of citizens?

Remember the sixty second moral inquiry asks questions about what is the right thing to do. Today, we ask "How can you tell If a government is becoming corrupt? Let us ponder Illinois, the political corruption hotspot. Let us imagine that each now jailed politician stood and said loud and clear, "I only have one rule and that is if you have to cry, go outside." And several at the meeting jumped up and said, "No. You have the rules in the Bill of Rights, in Civil liberties, in the Constitution, Federal and State laws. Are you following those rules?" Which no one asked or did. So, what are questions of moral inquiry when it comes to government corruption?

The Sixty Second Moral Inquiry asks questions about what is right. Thinking about what is right sometimes means finding the question that needs to be asked. Today's moral inquiry asks: How do you the tell the difference between mud-slinging and a reality check when criticizing a politician's' actions? Daily, political life begs this question, and certainly former Congressman Weiner's cyber-sex (that's what it is called) activities do. So, what questions might we ask in our moral inquiry?

To understand what civility is these days in times of tweets, smart phones, blogs and Facebook, we first have to look at "uncivil" and how "uncivil" comes to be.

There are three ways :
There's uncivil by you, yourself; uncivil by Chief of Staff or staff and Uncivil by Lawyer.

Boys' State is an experiment in Democracy that a select group of high school boys attend in Maine this week. We can hope they will learn about the dangers of the cooption of the democratic process. The current administration leaves us all wondering what do they do down there in Washington, sometimes. Using political party membership as a sledgehammer to force agreement just one questionable technique. A democratic process stolen by a small number of Senators or Representatives or Presidential executive order - those who want their opinion to count more than anyone else's matters enormously.
This incident described happened about 12 years ago but it raises some of the same questions about the Democratic process the new administration does . So we re-visit: Who Rules the World and Why It Matters.

After Nelson Mandela was freed from the life sentence he was serving in prison, he often spoke about refusing bitterness toward his captors. But he vowed he would never forget the cost of apartheid and its entitled derision of others. When he began that life sentence, in 1964, Winnie Mandela, his young bride, wrote "part of my soul went with him." Mandela's life though has shown us how to keep our souls and how to keep our souls free and that's what we will keep and keep and keep from Nelson Mandela.

The Sixty-Second Moral Inquiry asks questions about what is right and wrong. Today's Sixty-Second Moral Inquiry asks: Why not mangle,`distort the information, if you can? If we all have the ability to think, isn't it each person's responsibility to find out for themselves? Why not pick and choose the facts you like and the facts you don't, selectively leaving out the ones you don't?

Those who grew up in the era of Richard Nixon knew a time when "The Kingdom" took an especially frightening aura of power and glory. One speaking truth to power persisted only with great difficulty. It was called stone-walling. Really, it was just that the glass doors of transparency in government had long been replaced by big prison-like steel-bolted ones.

Then there's my local city government and its manager who waited months and months watching one (or was it two) petition drives to recall every city councilor, plus thousands of dollars spent on a "credible" independent report written by a judge to let's see, discover a cure for cancer? Find the new best thing since sliced bread? Invent shoes that would let you fly home like Dorothy's did in the Wizard of Oz?

No. It was to tell the truth.

Just before the Olympics, the country if not the world received, from a bully pulpit, a message from my state's junior United States senator. On television, Angus King said he wouldn't send any of his family members to the Sochi Olympics because he feared the threat of terrorist activities there. This pronouncement came not too long after another one from him in which he called members of Congress who opposed the Affordable Care Act "murderers".

The "bully pulpit" these days, Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, and good old television, radio and newspapers has very grave significance. Any psychological projection of a US Senator's fear as if his experience must be the world’s- a world awaiting this event undermines trust.
Any abuse of the bully pulpit is not responsible leadership.

The protesters in Ukraine are showing us on a very public stage that criticism free from harassment and ridicule of the actions of public elected officials is or should be what a democracy allows. The protesters in Ukraine, those who we memorialize for their passion and those who stand and testify through their actions remind us that what we have in this country is always up for grabs- if not from foreign threat but from each other. We really do not know how democracy sustains itself here. Speaking up is dismissed as “passion”. Passion is the code word for somebody who doesn’t know that the preferred approach is Political gamesmanship even as it erodes- day in, day out, as we see in Congress and state governments the democracy we live in.

The civil liberties of the Constitution are wholesome, pure, and good. They sometimes require holding two ideas in the mind at the same time, not easy some days. And they can be exploited. Freedom of the press, our reliable civil liberties vacuum for the unseemly and dirty then placed on public display can be exploited very easily. The exploitation is non-partisan, can come from either side because civil liberties are non-partisan.

Even the venerable newspaper editor Abe Rosenthal at the even more venerable New York Times distorted facts about the iconic example of urban social decay, the Kitty Genovese murder, by claiming that more than a dozen passive bystanders listened for a very long time to her screams and did not call the police. In fact, there were only two, who thought it was a domestic dispute, a man beating a woman, which was not then and yes even to this day is often not- considered an entirely atrocious act calling for police intervention.

Here in Maine, what does the civil liberty "freedom of the press" mean in the wake of revelations that the upper echelons of state government with held and then shredded public information about the rating system for giving out "Healthy Maine Partnership" fund. Shall we soon expect some chest-thumping about which party civil liberties truly belong to?

I am a great admirer of bird nests and those who build them. They make them with twigs, string, down. You find them sometimes nestled inside the angle a piece of twisted baling wire makes found in a pasture or barn. You can see when you find one that it's labor intensive. I heard someone say recently that she collected bird nests but "only ones that had made it through the winter." Of course, that means that bird - if she made it through the winter-who comes back to look for the nest will have to start all over again.

Telling the truth is like that. There are those who build it from twigs and baling wire and no matter how hard someone tries to say that it's critical for survival, somebody will come along and take it down and you have to start all over again.

At a jazz performance, the lady next to me and I struck up a conversation. During World War II, she, a Czechoslovakian, and her family were exiled to Latvia. They were sent to an American-occupied section of Germany at war's end, and lived in Displaced Persons Camps for six years. "Then we came to America", she said. She, her husband and their daughter were there listening to the daughter's boyfriend play saxophone in a jazz quintet. She was, I knew, a woman who knows what it is to be a small fish in the very large pond called the world.
Dutifully, as mothers in every pond since the beginning of time have done, she took a sip of her daughter's just purchased martini. Turning in my direction, the mother grimaced as if she had just tasted 1000 proof alcohol retrieved from an ancient civilization where it was a fire substitute. Here was the mother as the forever big fish in the small pond in which her adult daughter still swam in which no martini eludes the mother's discriminating tongue to see how strong the drink.
These are the life experiences of which conscience is made, if we remember them: that we are always small fish in very big ponds and large fish in the very small pond of our home, our lives, our communities, our quotidian routines. It is the tension between keeping both in mind at the same time, the remembering the two- going back and forth as we live- that makes conscience available but also elusive to us all.

The vision of Gorbachev now is destroyed by Vladimir Putin. A sonnet will remind us of what Gorbachev made possible and what is now lost by Putin's polarization.

I watched a program the other night about a 500 pound gorilla, or maybe it was a monkey whose owner taught him sign language. Whatever. I am beginning to think that maybe it was the gorilla who taught the owner to sign. That gorilla, all grown up- would move his finger an inch off his massive thigh- and that owner would coo and delight with immediate recognition. “Oh, that’s his sign when he’s whispering- kind of like at a cocktail party when you tell someone something from across the room so no one else will know.“ I would prefer a gorilla- any day- his place or mine- who was more straightforward. Or maybe- since I don’t know any gorillas personally- people who are straightforward.

This reminds of many things in life, but since the political season is upon us let’s start there. We have become a populace that will fill in the rest of the sentence, thought, public policy and legislative document for any gorilla. The gorilla gestures “gun control”, we fill in the sentence. The gorilla says “pro-life”, we fill in the rest. The gorilla says “fiscal irresponsibility”, we know what he means. I take this opportunity to remind you, we don’t know what the gorilla actually thinks. This is worse than sound bites. This is human beings reading gorilla’s minds.

Internet search engines have no way of taking context into consideration. The closest Google has come is to hone the search by user’s zip code, which is none of their business anyway. They have not, and probably won’t ever, come up with an algorithm able to take into account all the contextual features of the above scenario that would make the results as useful or irrelevant as possible. We have no way of knowing absolutely what is like for another person in their context but being a good observer of context and sorting through its relevance to our thinking is probably one of the things that has brought us to the top of the food chain. Thus this Citizen's Guide.

Legislative ethics exist to put the brakes on political gamesmanship- whether it’s trading votes to pass a bill, get a fat salaried new Federal job, or for financial gain, all placed ahead of making good governance. But they didn’t work in this case. Congress is at its lowest public approval rating ever. Congressional candidates flaunt “working across the aisle” as a goal. But really they mean “political gamesmanship.” This is not a mystery buried right next to the Gnostic Gospels beside the Tigris River. Just read the daily newspaper.

What is the price of political gamesmanship by legislators and Congressional Representatives and Senators? Five years ago, I - one person- tried to engage legislators in finding proof that a rural asphalt plant would harm the migratory bird population- and the environment because of the noise and pollutants it creates. Let us- now 5 years later - go the migratory bird site. It does not take many years before migrating birds go elsewhere or die because they can‘t find another place. Birds must hear each other to breed and survive. This is why the music of birdsong evolved. It kept them alive. Without them, and citizens who can voice their concern, there is silence. Here is one citizen's guide to that silence.

Legislative ethics exist to put the brakes on political gamesmanship- whether it’s trading votes to pass a bill, get a fat salaried new Federal job, or for financial gain, all placed ahead of making good governance. But they didn’t work in this case. Congress is at its lowest public approval rating ever. Congressional candidates flaunt “working across the aisle” as a goal. But really they mean “political gamesmanship.” This is not a mystery buried right next to the Gnostic Gospels beside the Tigris River. Just read the daily newspaper.

What is the price of political gamesmanship by legislators and Congressional Representatives and Senators? Five years ago, I - one person- tried to engage legislators in finding proof that a rural asphalt plant would harm the migratory bird population- and the environment because of the noise and pollutants it creates. Let us- now 5 years later - go the migratory bird site. It does not take many years before migrating birds go elsewhere or die because they can‘t find another place. Birds must hear each other to breed and survive. This is why the music of birdsong evolved. It kept them alive. Without them, and citizens who can voice their concern, there is silence. Here is one citizen's guide to that silence.

The cost of the truth is not tied to inflation. It’s tied to tolerance, inversely. The more tolerance that exists, the lower the price paid for the truth. In places where there is little tolerance, the price of the truth is very, very high, impossibly high at times. Witness the beheading of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, whose exclusive purpose was to bear witness to the truth where it lives. The truth can be our moral antidote, a medicine, the vitamin that- yes, keeps us alive and human.

The truth remains very, very powerful. It can be exploited, spun, distorted and taken away . No truth is self-evident . These fallen journalists were its witness and prover, its protector, its deeply aggrieved mourner because someone was trying to diminish it and yes, we too are all of things.

My now 86 year old brother , is still, and has been his whole life, a sailor. His boat “Significant Other”, a J-24 racing yacht will carry two. But, when he races, he is the captain and the boat carries five. He and the boat have sailed many times in many places where, yes, the water is wide. At 77, he and the crew of the “Significant Other” competed in the J-24 World Racing Championships in the waters off Newport, Rhode Island. He has always been a sailor, even when his body prevented it. I rooted for him then, as I do now crossing wide, probably rough water, to some finish line, in his boat , his “Significant Other”.

If Woodward and Bernstein and Ben Bradlee had gone for the “gotcha” instead of the truth, the cost would have been the truth. The integrity that Watergate returned to American politics might never happened. There’s no “gotcha” in that. That’s history and the story of the disappearance of candidates with integrity who fall by the wayside because of a Director of New Media, short-sighted journalist or political party operative who are best versed in the “gotcha” and not in the integrity that the truth bring. Let' us pay a little more attention to the difference between the truth and the “gotcha” in “gotcha” politics.

Sometimes, there is an ineffable quality to the offensiveness of negative campaign ads. We turn here to the sonnet to express deep concern about negative political ads. Thus, for this 2014 Election Campaign season, "A Sonnet for Negative Ads".

With the election season over, the next phase of elected politics has settled on our plates like a bowl of jello. How can you tell when the age-old moral question “What is right or wrong- civil liberties-style-?” is still high on the legislative agenda? When it’s camouflaged under a political party claim “You are us and we are you and…“ thus leaving you to complete in your own mind the sentence the party wants you to fill in without you first asking “How so?“

In many parts of the world, torture, harassment and persecution are used to target individuals who criticize , believe, have secrets or religions (like Tibetan Buddhism by the Chinese ) disliked by those in power. It happens everywhere even in this country. Thus the Sixty Second Moral Inquiry asks: What’s wrong with targeting individuals because of what the individual criticizes or believes?

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Arizona’s 2000 law which created an Independent Commission to determine Congressional Re-districting boundaries is constitutional. Arizona ‘s Legislature wanted it the old way: elected legislators deciding who would be in the pool of voters who elect them by defining the boundaries of voting districts.

The attorneys for the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission argued that returning redistricting to the legislature would be “the loss of the last great hope for addressing partisan gerrymandering.” The attorneys who wanted re-districting to return to the Legislature wrote that “Plenty of options remain for addressing partisan gerrymandering with the ultimate backstop being the ability to vote the gerrymanderers out.” The last great hope in this case is that respect for constituents- citizens- not the injured Arizona Legislature- is what the Supreme Court would protect and they did.

I read a column in which the author tried to express what I’m guessing is her moral outrage. I am all for expressing moral outrage. At least it puts it on the table for a free speech kind of discussion. Thinly masked hatred or an incendiary invitation to violence is hate speech and hate speech is hate speech . Expression of moral outrage used for hatred defeats the purpose. The writer linked a congressional representative’s boycott of Prime Minister Netanyahu speech to a joint session of Congress to shunning of Elie Weisel, the author of a twentieth century indictment of the Holocaust who attended the talk and then to pro-choice health policy, abortion, and the Holocaust.

What shapes this kind of moral outrage ?How do we distinguish it from moral outrage never updated by the day-to-day awareness of the moral emotions, shame and empathy? Hatred driven actions -those locked into political policy and the political gamesmanship that goes along with it become hypocrisy- the gap between moral outrage and what actually happens. Expressions of moral outrage that become political hypocrisy tap into a very shameful truth in this country- broad disgust with the political process and complete lack of trust by the public in voting - which some see as our only opportunity to tailor some of that outrage.

The piece excluded any mention of the violence of Israel, how children are treated pre-natally, after birth, or during childhood, in utero, in daycare, in their mothers’ arms, at the grocery store, the fact that Elie Weisel’s attendance at the talk was maybe not out of agreement with everything Netanyahu says but -true progenitor of moral outrage that he is- Weisel’s effort to update his own. To be true to intention, moral outrage needs daily updating.

Great affirmation of human purpose is the victory for those who watch the runners and wheelchairs racers come in at the Boston Marathon. They are all in it together because they chose to race. The world grieves the terrorization of that event. They question the "radicalization" of two brothers- the older maybe blocking the younger’s escape route for any hesitation the younger might have had.

Where did all that hatred come from?

The strident opponents of a rapid, unregulated re-introduction of alewives to the St. Croix believe that at one important juncture in the river, the topography has been such that alewives have never been able to swim further up the river. Any prospect of passage was exacerbated by the stinking stench and chemical debris of a paper mill located upstream of this topographical barrier whose pollutants all made their way seaward. They maintain that these factors have kept alewives out of the upper reaches such that they have never been native to the watershed. Re-introduction of alewives means that they will provide competition for a more highly valued fish- the small-mouth bass- who lure many to fish in the lakes spewing off of the St. Croix, in particular, West Grand Lake. The people making this argument earn their living by guiding these occasional fishermen who come to the area just for that reason, to fish. The strident are the fishing guides who spend their entire working days reading the water of lakes and rivers, and seeing the fish that lie just beneath them.

Well, in my state the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting published a lengthy article about a veteran lawmaker who is strongly supporting a bill to allow copper and zinc mining in pristine rural parts of the state by the brother company of a firm that has forgiven a debt of about $150,000 that the legislator owed the company. In our Department of Poetic Justice (and Poetic Reckoning) we today offer this poem "All I Want Is My Debt Deferred" which can be sung to the tune of "Wouldn't it be loverly" from "My Fair Lady" from The Great American Wrongbook.

In 1948, the United Nations said seeking asylum is a basic right to seek protection from government persecution. In my state, there is now a controversy because the Governor says he does not want funds for the basic necessities of asylum seekers to be in the state budget. Our biggest fear is a big budget, he and the state legislators say, who voted against giving food and shelter to asylum seekers.

In this country we sometime forget all the things there are to fear in this world. We have forgotten the fear from a government that with no explanation detains, persecutes and murders. We have forgotten the fear of government that comes to your home at night and threatens you with the disappearance of family because you disagree with policies or because you are targeted by race, religion, ethnicity We are at risk of losing our fear of the loss of human rights. The Representatives, Senators and the Governor say provision of asylum to protect fundamental human rights costs too much. When a budget is more important than the sustenance of Asylum that gives people a place to go if they fear genocide, we should all be filled with deep apprehension

Recently, two Washington Post reporters looked at how human beings are valued in Donald Trump world, now, and as he turned the $200000 his father gave him into billions. The values of Trump world are very different from a rural state like Maine where deer, beavers, fish, rare endangered wildlife , serene forests, trucks that work, no traffic and enduring cold, long winters well have special value. There are Maine virtuosos who celebrate the values of rural life. Listening to them is an antidote, to the queasy feeling left in the stomach by the lip-smacking exclusionary greed of Donald Trump world.

"It's not what you're given. It's what you do with what you get," the bootstrapping virtuoso blues singer, Pat Pepin, sings. She riffs about free Wal-mart’ overnight parking for campers and RVs , and cherishes her “long-haul trucker”. Another virtuoso is Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, whose oldtime jazz radio program is now making its way into New York City radio air waves. Humble’s program was removed from Maine public radio for - I guess you could call it - political insubordination - for criticizing the Iraq War. Humble has all the qualities necessary for a Donald Trump world antidote because humble really does value money, not quantity, but every breathing atom and neutron and ounce of chemical valence on its surface.

We hope his listeners will drink deeply of this antidote, the radio detox- for the money culture-the Donald Trump world that’s forgotten that $.99 can be far far better quality than several billion because, as Pat Pepin sings, it isn’t what you’re given. It’ s what you do with what you get.

A Town Clerk in Kentucky has refused to give out a marriage license to a gay couple, risking jail time, because the two of them marrying “does not fit God’s definition of marriage“, which presumes that there are job definitions , including for civil and government jobs, that go along with her religious beliefs.

Now, we can get out our Constitutions and re-visit the part that separates the power of the church from the power of the state. But then there’s the issue of separating the individual’s perception of their own power from the government job they do- in this case a town clerk whose whole beating spiritual heart has infused her job, or visa- versa. But politicians and government officials do that all the time and never get called out on it because they neatly avoid public displays of how much their own beliefs infuse their perception of their personal power- thus the job they do- the communication directors adding a tone of derision and insult against someone who does something she doesn’t like, the government lawyer giving out favors to someone who will return the favor later on. Town Clerks do the nitty-gritty of daily life so when one of them confuses her personal power - in this case- a heart laden with spiritual belief- with a paying job- well, the abuse of power becomes more obvious. But, this particular form of the abuse of power likely happens far more often than we notice.

This all came to mind when I told my grand-nephew I'm a Buddhist and then said "You probably don't know what a Buddhist is." "Yes, I do. They help people carry stuff up Mt. Everest." Thus a need for clarification between the personal power spirituality brings and infusing one's work with it.

In my state the Governor has decided that any childless adult who owns more than $5000 in cash or leisure vehicle assets cannot receive food stamps. Who he is targeting is difficult to say. Many pregnant women in this state eat because they receive food stamps. Previously, he has made every effort to drive away asylum seekers who cannot work for six months after applying for asylum. Then there are the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, and unemployed women who then become pregnant. This Governor refusing to allow any single pregnant woman who has put away more than $5000 in assets from keeping it, if she wants to feed herself and her unborn child is a withholding that is yet another example of hatred, now accepted as a political fuse in this country. If you read what a pregnant woman needs to eat- to bath the baby- once born- in love and health, you'll see that the nutritional requirements of hatred are not enough and never have been.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against two psychologists who developed a program to pair torture with interrogation of “suspected” terrorists held in the CIA’s Afghanistan prison, code named COBALT. The psychologist defendants created practices that intricately examined every aspect of human suffering , then made a program to pair torture with interrogation.The practice of Psychology is premised on compassion, not hatred. The discovery of human tools to sustain compassion in the face of atrocity, is one of its accomplishments. The ethics of the field are, as always, a work in progress because the actions human beings come up with to deny compassion and manifest hatred change all the time .The violations cited by the ACLU suggest that the professional guilds of psychology have not been vigilant or vociferous enough in rejecting exploitation of psychology’s mantle to mask political intentions. Hatred manifests differently all the time. And there is no question that finding sustenance for compassion in time of great violation is very difficult to do. But hatred disguised as compassion is still hatred. I am a psychologist who provides intervention. If psychology and its professional guilds cannot provide sustenance for compassion- in the face of great human atrocities- then we should all just go home and get different jobs. Because understanding why people disguise hatred is an ethical use of psychology. Making up and selling techniques up to do it is not anything other than more hatred.

Over 100 people have died from heroin and fentanyl-laced drug overdoses this year, in Maine. Maine’s governor says he will call in the National Guard to deal with the heroin problem by December 10 if whoever he thinks could do something doesn’t do it by then. What does the Governor think the National Guard will do ? Impose marshall law? Strip search anyone who looks high or take a urine sample right then and there and arrest them? Break into homes and steal clothing to check for drug or other residue? Search cars at the York toll booth?

Surely he is not thinking of funding substance abuse prevention and treatment. He refused all federal funding for healthcare for low income young adults over 18. He eliminated funding for almost all the drug detox centers. There’s only one left in Maine’s largest city, Portland and one up north somewhere .He severely cut funding for in-patient substance abuse treatment.- so there is little or none of that either. And out-patient treatment- well, since health care coverage is not available to those over 18 who are un or underemployed, listlessly trying to find their way out of severe emotional disorders or apathy, paid a minimum wage they can‘t live on, who someone convinces can recreationally use heroin and live to tell- - there are no services available to them- unless they pay for it themselves on minimum wage jobs. Right-wing ideology in hand, this Governor refused to support the Affordable Healthcare Act provision that makes health care available to the most vulnerable young low-income adults. And the hand healthcare providers offer to prevent substance abuse in the first place is held back, at every turn.

This civil liberty loving country listens with astonishment to Donald Trump, ignore religious freedom and propose that no Muslims be allowed into this country until our representatives figure out what the heck is going on. Today’s Sixty Second Moral Inquiry asks, whither the good Donald Trump?

First published on the eve of Martin Luther King Day , we turn to our preferred form of political expression, the sonnet, to acknowledge the compassion President Obama has brought to the Presidency. Today, we offer a "Sonnet for President Obama's Tear''.