Christmas Pics 

The entire family, taken just a few days before Christmas 2004. 

Can therapy fix my parents?

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2005/01/06/parents_and_therapy/index.html

If, however, you do come to feel that it's your relationship with your parents that is holding you back, then try this: Ask yourself not how you feel about your parents but what you owe your parents. What are your obligations at this point in your life? They have put you through college but now you're on your own: How can you fulfill your obligations?

This is different from asking what your parents want from you. Our parents may want us to fulfill certain unconscious wishes they retain from childhood, from their own relationships with their parents. We cannot help them with that. You can determine, however, what your concrete obligations are. And I think you can probably fulfill many of those obligations.

So what are our obligations to our parents? In general terms, you might come up with a list something like this: To speak with them or visit at least once a month. Not to cause them undue pain. Not to shame them. Not to steal from them. To treat them kindly and with respect. To help them when they become no longer able to take care of themselves. To be a comfort to them when possible.

Beyond fulfilling such obligations as these, we can get into trouble. For not only do you have obligations to your parents, but they have obligations to you. One of their chief obligations is to provide an environment in which you can become who you are. So if you betray yourself, then you betray your parents as well. For instance, suppose you conclude it's your duty to your parents to become a plastic surgeon. If you are not suited to be a plastic surgeon, then in trying to become one you undermine your parents' chief duty to you.

So the best you can do, as an adult, is to fulfill your concrete obligations to your parents. The rest -- the emotional tenor of your relationship, your compatibility, your taste and politics and ideas, their projected wishes for you -- is chancy.

If you can satisfy yourself that you are doing what is right and necessary as a daughter, perhaps it will ease some of the pain that arises when you see your parents. Perhaps it will also allow you to limit your contact with your parents without an undue sense of guilt.

It's hard at 24 to imagine how a lifetime of experience has molded one's parents, and harder still to keep in mind that time will continue to change them, robbing them of both their acuity and their rancor. If you simply go about living, you will find that these things take place, slowly but surely, seemingly without anyone's effort.

Cary Tennis

Very validating. When I grew up I was made to feel bad for being pissed
when my sister stole from me.

There's no way a family can live together if you can't put your wallet down
on a table and be able to grope around later that night, or in the morning,
and find it, and dig out that receipt for the lamp that you got overcharged
for and say, Aha, see, I told you they overcharged me! I mean, that's the
very definition of shelter. Since the very earliest humanids began living in
social groups for mutual protection, the wallet stuffed with receipts has
been the key totem that delineated the domestic sphere from the wild. Proto-
humanid wallets have been found in the oldest archaeological digs -- some
even with the credit cards still in them! Amazing! But true. Because the
wallet is the central item of domestication. Elephant skin. Buffalo skin.
The wallet and the hearth. That's home and family.



I'm not sure there is a whole lot more to say than this: You cannot live
with people who steal your wallet and scatter your credit cards on the
sidewalk in a bad part of town; when family members do that they forfeit the
privileges of the familial bond -- you know, that gray zone where you
tolerate stuff from family that you wouldn't tolerate from a roommate. Theft
of money puts them on the other side of the fence. You can still talk to
them, and they can still be your family. But you can't live with them.

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue

Amazon.com Is For Republicans / Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue: "And the site, called buyblue.org (along with its more detailed but less intuitively named counterpart, choosetheblue.com), spawned a mini movement and the mini movement spawned this very column and now you are right now encouraged to go see for yourself and discover the moderately shocking truths regarding which big shiny companies suck up to the happy sneering homophobic enviro-slappin' warmongering Repubs and which give thousands to the whiny limping kick-us-when-we're-down Demos. "

Here's a few hints to help you watch those pounds this Christmas.

1. Tip: Eat a chocolate bar before each meal - It'll take the edge off your
appetite.

2. If you eat equal amounts of dark and white chocolate, that's a balanced
diet.

3. Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

4. Put 'eat chocolate' at the top of your list of things to do today. That
way at least you'll get one thing right.

5. A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories
in one place. Now isn't that handy?

6. Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all
count as fruit, so eat as many as you want.

7. Two reasons why chocolate is a vegetable.
(a) Chocolate is derived from beans. Beans = vegetable
( Sugar is derived from either Cane of Beet. Both are plants, which
places them in the vegetable category

8. If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control pantyhose. An
entire garment industry would be devastated.

9. REMEMBER: "Stressed" spelled backwards is "desserts".

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Unembedded in Iraq: "The US Corporate media consistently characterizes the Iraqi resistance as 'foreign terrorists and former Ba'athist insurgents'. In your experience, is this an accurate portrayal? If not, why?

This is propaganda of the worst kind. Most Iraqis refer to the Iraqi Resistance as 'patriots.' Which of course most of them are-they are, especially in Fallujah, primarily composed of people who simply are resisting the occupation of their country by a foreign power. They are people who have had family members killed, detained, tortured and humiliated by the illegal occupiers of their shattered country."

Blonde Joke

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy efficient kind. But this week I got a call from the contractor complaining that his work had been completed a whole year ago and I had yet to pay for them.

Boy oh boy, did we go around! Just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I proceeded to tell him just what his fast talking sales guy had told me last year... that in one year the windows would pay for themselves. There was silence on the other end of the line so I just hung up and I haven't heard back.

Guess I won that stupid argument.

NEWS -- march to the right

Molly Ivans
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20413/

Mourning in America

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on November 4, 2004, Printed on November 6, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20413/

Do you know how to cure a chicken-killin' dog? Now, you know you
cannot keep a dog that kills chickens, no matter how fine a dog it is
otherwise.

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of
killin' chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could.
He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has
killed and wire the thing around the dog's neck, good and strong. And
leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog
or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing'll smell so bad the
dog won't be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the
last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won't kill
chickens again.

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the
American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to
sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

And at least Democrats won't have to clean up after him until it is
real clear to everyone who made the mess.

In some circles, that will be seen as sour grapes. But in Texas, we've
been losing elections to the demagogic triad of God, gays and guns
long enough to be pretty cynical about how it works out. I'm sure
millions of Americans voted for George W. under the honest impression
that he stands for moral values â?? family, patriotism, faith in God.
I'm sure it's the Democrats' fault that such a silly ruse is allowed
to stand. What Bush actually does stand for is nicely summed up by a
rather common news story that got stuck on the business pages lately.

In September, Merck & Co., the huge drug manufacturer, pulled Vioxx
off the market. Vioxx was a popular pain-killing, anti-arthritis drug,
but Merck said it was putting patients' safety first. A new study from
the Federal Drug Administration showed high doses of Vioxx triple the
risk of heart attack and sudden cardiac death.

From there, the story bifurcates â?? it takes two directions. Sen.
Charles Grassley of Iowa revealed that the FDA had tried to silence
the author of the study, Dr. David Graham, associate director of
science in the Office of Drug Safety. Grassley said the FDA first sat
on Graham's study and that then he was "ostracized" and "subjected to
veiled threats and intimidation."

The Wall Street Journal followed the other fork, finding internal
memos from Merck showing that company officials may have been aware of
the dangers of Vioxx as long ago as 1996, including a memo apparently
instructing its sales reps to "dodge" the question when doctors asked
about the cardiac record of Vioxx.

In short, we have a toothless regulatory agency in the pocket of the
industry it is supposed to patrol. We have an administration-wide
contempt for science and plain facts. And the allegation against the
folks at Merck is that they were making such enormous profits on a
drug that killed people that when they knew or suspected it was
killing people, they kept right on selling it. When the information
that Merck had known for a long time about Vioxx and heart attacks
became public, the company's stock fell by 9.6 percent.

That's the system George W. Bush stands for: where a corporation can
knowingly kill people for profit and, when it finally comes out,
everyone knows the penalties will be so light the company doesn't even
lose a tenth of its worth. Hey, just a little bump in the road.

We sure don't want any of that terrible, burdensome government
regulation to control that kind of behavior, do we? We sure don't want
an FDA that listens to its own scientists and acts promptly, do we? We
sure don't want anyone to sue these monster corporations, do we? I bet
if it were possible to compare the odds of an American getting killed
by a negligent regulatory agency and rapacious corporate behavior
versus an American getting killed by a terrorist, it would turn out we
need to be a lot more scared of rank greed and its enablers than we do
of terrorists. And that's not counting what the corps. (pronounced
corpse) steal and mess up.

So, fellow progressives, stop thinking about suicide or moving abroad.
Want to feel better? Eat a sour grape, then do something immediately,
now, today. Figure out what you can do to help rescue the country â??
join something, send a little money to some group, call somewhere and
offer to volunteer, find a politician you like at the local level and
start helping him or her to move up.

Think about how you can lend a hand to the amazing myriad efforts that
will promptly break out to help the country recover from what it has
done to itself. Now is the time. Don't mourn, organize.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20413/

Interesting maps of the election results

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

This goes a long way toward illustrating how closely the nation split
-- much better than a purely geographic view.

Errol Morris: Election '04

Errol Morris: Election '04: "Listen to Real People who voted for George Bush in 2000, but will be voting for Kerry in 2004.

Why so many? Because people say some are better than others. The problem: no one agrees on which ones those are."

Joke - Shark

Shark!

There is this atheist swimming in the ocean. All of a sudden he sees a shark in the water, so he starts swimming furiously towards his boat.

As he looks back, he sees the shark turn and head towards him. He's scared to death, and as he sees the jaws of the great white beast open, revealing its horrific teeth, the atheist screams, "Oh God! Save me!"


In an instant, time is frozen and a bright light shines down from above. The man is motionless in the water when he hears the voice of God say, "You are an atheist. Why do you call upon me when you do not believe in me?"

Confused, and knowing he can't lie, the man replies, "Well, that's true I don't believe in you, but how about the shark? Can you make the shark believe in you?"

The Lord replies, "As you wish," and the light retracts back into the heavens. The man feels the water move once again.

As the atheist looks back, he can see the jaws of the shark start to close down on him, when all of sudden the shark stops and pulls back.

Shocked, the man watches as the huge beast closes its eyes, bows its head and says, "Thank you Lord for this food which I am about to receive..."

Very serious webpage concerning the importance of your vote

http://davechase.net/presidential_horror_show.swf

Not!

Fwd: Salon: The blind leading the blind

The blind leading the blind

Even if they don't like to say it out loud, lots of Democrats think
that George Bush's supporters are a horde of ignoramuses. Now comes
evidence that they're right! A remarkable new report titled "The
Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" from PIPA, the
Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of
Maryland, suggests that rank and file Republicans are more benighted
than even the most supercilious coastal elitist would imagine.

Analyzing data from a series of nationwide polls, the report finds
that a majority of Bush supporters believe things about the world that
are objectively untrue, while the majority of Kerry supporters dwell
in the reality-based community. For example, Bush backers largely
think that the president and his policies are popular internationally.
Seventy-five percent believe that Iraq was providing "substantial" aid
to al-Qaida, and 63 percent say clear evidence of this has been found.
That, of course, would be news even to Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier
this month told the Council On Foreign Relations, "To my knowledge, I
have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."

Though its language is dispassionate, the report lays responsibility
for this epidemic of ignorance at the White House's door. "So why are
Bush supporters clinging so tightly to these beliefs in the face of
repeated disconfirmations?" it asks. "Apparently one key reason is
that they continue to hear the Bush administration confirming these
beliefs."

Indeed, it says, "an overwhelming 82% [of Bush supporters] perceive
the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63%) or a major
WMD program (19%). Only 16% of Bush supporters perceive the
administration as saying that Iraq had some limited activities, but
not an active program (15%) or had nothing (1%). The pattern on al
Qaeda is similar. Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters think the
Bush administration is currently saying Iraq was providing substantial
support to al Qaeda (56%) or even that it was directly involved in
9/11 (19%). Further, 55% of Bush supporters say it is their impression
the Bush administration is currently saying the US has found clear
evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda (not saying
clear evidence found: 37%)."

These people aren't going to be swayed by the argument that Bush has
alienated American's allies and left the country isolated in the
world, because they don't believe this to be the case. "Despite a
steady flow of official statements, public demonstrations, and public
opinion polls showing that the US war against Iraq is quite unpopular,
only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in
the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq," the study says.
Bush supporters also think that world public opinion favors Bush's
reelection. In a poll taken from September 3-7, the study says, "57%
of Bush supporters assumed that the majority of people in the world
would prefer to see Bush reelected, 33% assumed that views are evenly
divided and only 9% assumed that Kerry would be preferred."

In fact, a PIPA study released in early September found that a
majority or plurality of people from 32 countries preferred Kerry to
Bush. PIPA surveyed 34,330 people, ages 15 and above, from regions all
over the world. A Pew poll released this spring similarly found that
"large majorities in every country, except for the U.S., hold an
unfavorable opinion of Bush."

Bush supporters are also mistaken about the president's own positions
(a pattern of misapprehension that an earlier PIPA report also
documented). "Majorities incorrectly assumed that Bush supports
multilateral approaches to various international issues -- the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines
(72%); 51% incorrectly assumed he favors US participation in the Kyoto
treaty -- the principal international accord on global warming... Only
13% of supporters are aware that he opposes labor and environmental
standards in trade agreements -- 74% incorrectly believe that he
favors including labor and environmental standards in agreements on
trade. In all these cases, there is a recurring theme: majorities of
Bush supporters favor these positions, and they infer that Bush favors
them as well."

According to the report, this reality gap is something new in American
life. "So why do Bush supporters show such a resistance to accepting
dissonant information?" it asks. "While it is normal for people to
show some resistance, the magnitude of the denial goes beyond the
ordinary. Bush supporters have succeeded in suppressing awareness of
the findings of a whole series of high-profile reports about prewar
Iraq that have been blazoned across the headlines of newspapers and
prompted extensive, high-profile and agonizing reflection. The fact
that a large portion of Americans say they are unaware that the
original reasons that the US took military action -- and for which
Americans continue to die on a daily basis -- are not turning out to
be valid, are probably not due to a simple failure to pay attention to
the news."

The analysis says that the roots of this denial could lie in the
trauma of 9/11 and people's desire to hold on to their image of Bush
as a "capable protector." It offers no guidance, though, on how
ordinary Republicans might be coaxed back to reality.

And while "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" may be
perversely satisfying to Democrats in its confirmation of blue-state
prejudices, it carries a pretty disturbing question for all rational
Americans: How can arguments based on fact prevail in a nation where
so many people know so little?

-- Michelle Goldberg

Is the President losing it?

Is the President losing it?

First it was presenile dementia. Now, it's a stroke.

A rash of armchair-diagnosis speculation about President Bush's health, based on his faltering speech

in the first debate to his drooling and drooping Wednesday night, is
flying around the Web. And there's nothing to feed
"is-he-really-fit-to-lead?" grousing among Democratic partisans in the
blogosphere like the fact that President Bush, who was pronounced
healthy at his annual check-up in August 2003, has refused to get his annual physical this year before the 2004 election.

A letter by one Dr. Joseph Price of Carsonville, Mich., to the Atlantic Monthly in response to James Fallows' July/August cover story on Bush and Kerry's debating styles, first raised the idea that Bush's mental faculties might be in decline.

But it was Bush's less-than-lucid performance in the first presidential
debate against Senator John Kerry that sparked the creation of a short video montage
juxtaposing footage from that debate with video from George W. Bush
sparring with then-Texas Governor Ann Richards, ten years ago. (You can
see more footage of the younger Bush's debating prowess here.)

"In the 1994 video he was going along and having no trouble having a nice flow of language. But now he's so faulting and labored and

limited," says Robert McInerney, a retired internist in Pittsfield,
Mass. "He's getting as inarticulate as I am, and I'm in my senior
years," adding this caveat: "[But] I think it would be foolish to make
a diagnosis over a one-minute video clip."

Bush's insistence on tightly-controlled appearances has other doctors

wondering, too. "I think he's deteriorated in terms of his problem with
word-finding, repetition of phrases and understanding what other people
are saying," said Dr. Justin Frank, a professor in the Department of
Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, who is the
author of "Bush on the Couch."
But Dr. Frank also stressed: "He would need to be tested to see if he
has dementia. This is all speculation without testing. He could just be
extremely acutely anxious. Anyone can get anxious and sound
disorganized."

Still, Dr. Frank said that during his book tour this summer from L.A.
to Philadelphia, seven or eight different physicians and psychologists
came up to him at readings to discuss their concerns about the
President's mental health: " Four people said they thought he reminded
them of their patients in the early state of Alzheimer's. Several
people wondered if there is a gradual deterioration from chronic substance abuse.

But Bush's improved performance in the latter debates made others doubt
that there's anything organic amiss: "In someone who has got a
developing dementia, they have good days and they have bad days. But it
isn't 90 minutes of bad debate one day, and 90 minutes of good debate
one day. It's much more subtle than that," says Dr. Raymond A. Wertheim
of Bethesda, Md.

After Bush's performance in the third debate, Dr. Frank changed his own
at-arm's-length diagnosis: " I think that the reason he looked demented
in the past debates is that Kerry figured out how to make him anxious.
And when he's anxious he gets disorganized. But Kerry did not make him
anxious this time. So, the issue for him is trying to manage anxiety.
That's his main concern."

Now, that still doesn't explain Wednesday night's spitting.

Is the President losing it?

First it was presenile dementia. Now, it's a stroke.

A rash of armchair-diagnosis speculation about President Bush's health, based on his faltering speech
in the first debate to his drooling and drooping Wednesday night, is
flying around the Web. And there's nothing to feed
"is-he-really-fit-to-lead?" grousing among Democratic partisans in the
blogosphere like the fact that President Bush, who was pronounced
healthy at his annual check-up in August 2003, has refused to get his annual physical this year before the 2004 election.

A letter by one Dr. Joseph Price of Carsonville, Mich., to the Atlantic Monthly in response to James Fallows' July/August cover story on Bush and Kerry's debating styles, first raised the idea that Bush's mental faculties might be in decline.

But it was Bush's less-than-lucid performance in the first presidential
debate against Senator John Kerry that sparked the creation of a short video montage
juxtaposing footage from that debate with video from George W. Bush
sparring with then-Texas Governor Ann Richards, ten years ago. (You can
see more footage of the younger Bush's debating prowess here.)

"In the 1994 video he was going along and having no trouble having a
nice flow of language. But now he's so faulting and labored and
limited," says Robert McInerney, a retired internist in Pittsfield,
Mass. "He's getting as inarticulate as I am, and I'm in my senior
years," adding this caveat: "[But] I think it would be foolish to make
a diagnosis over a one-minute video clip."

Bush's insistence on tightly-controlled appearances has other doctors
wondering, too. "I think he's deteriorated in terms of his problem with
word-finding, repetition of phrases and understanding what other people
are saying," said Dr. Justin Frank, a professor in the Department of
Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, who is the
author of "Bush on the Couch."
But Dr. Frank also stressed: "He would need to be tested to see if he
has dementia. This is all speculation without testing. He could just be
extremely acutely anxious. Anyone can get anxious and sound
disorganized."

Still, Dr. Frank said that during his book tour this summer from L.A.
to Philadelphia, seven or eight different physicians and psychologists
came up to him at readings to discuss their concerns about the
President's mental health: " Four people said they thought he reminded
them of their patients in the early state of Alzheimer's. Several
people wondered if there is a gradual deterioration from chronic substance abuse.

But Bush's improved performance in the latter debates made others doubt
that there's anything organic amiss: "In someone who has got a
developing dementia, they have good days and they have bad days. But it
isn't 90 minutes of bad debate one day, and 90 minutes of good debate
one day. It's much more subtle than that," says Dr. Raymond A. Wertheim
of Bethesda, Md.

After Bush's performance in the third debate, Dr. Frank changed his own
at-arm's-length diagnosis: " I think that the reason he looked demented
in the past debates is that Kerry figured out how to make him anxious.
And when he's anxious he gets disorganized. But Kerry did not make him
anxious this time. So, the issue for him is trying to manage anxiety.
That's his main concern."

Now, that still doesn't explain Wednesday night's spitting.

Curious George Replaces A Light Bulb

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb?

The Answer is TEN:

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed.

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either "For changing the light bulb or for darkness".

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb.

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a stepladder under the banner:

"Light Bulb Change Accomplished".

7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally "in the dark".

8. One to viciously smear #7.

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light bulb changing policy all along.

10. And finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

Salon.com Politics

Salon.com PoliticsThe GOP ticket's week from hell

Last week’s presidential debate might very well turn out to be the pivotal moment in the 2004 election, with an unfiltered Bush finally revealing his full limitations before 66 million Americans. But it is this week that will go down in history as the point when the wheels began to come off the Bush-Cheney juggernaut. The Republicans' week started on a dismal note with a massive report on page one of the Sunday New York Times that exhaustively detailed how the administration built its case for war on a false claim that aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were intended for manufacturing a nuclear bomb. It went quickly downhill for the Bush team after that. On Monday Defense Secretary Rumsfeld suddenly veered off-message, telling a Council on Foreign Relations luncheon that he knew of no "strong, hard evidence" proving a connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. The same day, just in time to give John Edwards more ammunition for his face-off with Cheney, former U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer told an insurance conference in West Virginia that the Bush administration had gone into Iraq with too few troops to secure the peace.

By Tuesday night the Bush campaign was hungry for a one-sided Cheney triumph in the suddenly critical vice-presidential debate. Instead, the stoop-shouldered and weary-looking vice president was forced up a tree by his aggressive opponent, with the gruff old veep growling down at the snapping, young hound below him for over 90 miserable minutes.

It was more political meltdown on Wednesday, with chief U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer declaring in his final report to Congress that Saddam had no WMD program after inspectors left Iraq in 1998, once and for all knocking out the key Bush argument for war. Meanwhile there was more carnage on the war front, and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad sent out a sobering e-mail, warning American personnel to steer clear of the Lone Star restaurant and other popular spots in the supposedly top-security Green Zone and to "conduct a thorough search of your vehicle prior to entering it." Oh, and oil prices continued to spike, in part because of the instability of the Iraq supply.

But hey, other than that, as Bush and Cheney keep insisting, things are looking up! Maybe they’re just channeling Richard Farina, the ‘60s folk singer who authored "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me."

Meanwhile, after promising a major policy speech on Iraq on Wednesday, Bush simply ratcheted up his increasingly shrill rhetoric, calling Kerry "dangerous" on foreign policy and suggesting the Democratic candidate picked his running mate for his hair. Bush’s wild punches are beginning to take on the same whiff of desperation his father gave off during the last stretch of his losing battle with Bill Clinton in 1992, when the elder Bush began bizarrely referring to Al Gore as "ozone man." As the AP reported Wednesday, "Political analysts see alarm bells ringing inside the Bush re-election effort."

As Bush heads for St. Louis and his second debate with Kerry, the table has turned on him. Now he’s the one under pressure to revive his stumbling campaign with a powerful performance. If he fails, his week from hell could become a month from hell.

Autistic child transcended boundaries

Autistic child transcended boundaries

Teen killed riding bicycle had an extraordinary mind

By Melissa Ludwig

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

Zev Garfinkle's bar mitzvah was perfect. The 13-year-old read from the Torah with perfect diction, without stammering or slurring. Poised and calm, he behaved like the man he became that day, according to Jewish tradition.

A month later, Zev was hit by a car while riding his bicycle to McNeil High School, where the Deerpark Middle School eighth-grader took advanced math and science classes. Even with a helmet, Zev suffered severe head injuries, and he died Sept. 23, the day after the accident. Department of Public Safety troopers said the driver was not at fault.

In middle school, Zev stuck out like a parrot in the snow. He had a form of autism that garbled his speech and robbed him of social skills. An orthodox Jew, Garfinkle wore a kippah, or skull cap, and tzit tzit, ritual fringes, to school every day. He ate only kosher food his mother packed in a lunch for him.

But Zev's extraordinary brilliance and surprising wisdom touched people, said Sari Garfinkle, Zev's mother.

"He transcended any kind of boundaries," she said. "He could be really infuriating, but at the same time he left a really big mark on anyone who worked with him."

She said teachers, doctors and friends who had known Zev came from all over the state to see him in the hospital before he died. His funeral was jointly officiated by Yosef Levertov, a rabbi who practices the ultra-orthodox Hasidic form of Judaism, and Neil Blumofe, cantor of the town's conservative Jewish congregation, Agudas Achim. Christian pastors also attended.

Sari Garfinkle believes her son's legacy is to show what can happen when children with special needs are given the right tools to succeed.

"I think he opened a lot of people's eyes," said Barbara Murdock, Zev's special education teacher. "They are all amazed at the huge progress that he has made."

From birth, Zev had problems with speech and motor skills, Garfinkle said. At school in Boca Raton, Fla., Zev would throw tantrums that lasted for hours, she said. When the family moved to Austin in 1995, his problems continued. At age 7, a doctor diagnosed him with autism.

"I was thrilled," his mother said. "I am a big believer in meeting problems head-on, and you can't meet them head-on when you can't define them."

Once his parents and teachers began to understand what was going on in Zev's head, his behavior turned around, she said.

To control his environment, Zev clung to routine. He was a devout Jew and prayed three times a day.

Like many autistic children, he was sensitive to smells, sounds and touch.

For a whole year, he wore only red from head to toe, she said. Idiom and the delicate dance of body language and social niceties that most children learn effortlessly were utterly foreign to Zev.

"Do you know what the closest quasar to the earth is?" was Zev's standard opening line in a conversation.

"Small talk was completely lost on him," Garfinkle said. "He used to say that if he could make people into equations, he might be able to understand them."

Zev, who scored off the charts on intelligence tests, loved math and astrophysics.

"He was a pure and logical thinker," said Lori Ollmann, who taught geometry to Zev when he was in the seventh grade. "He had such a beautiful mind."

Zev began blossoming in school, Garfinkle said. Unable to sit in a regular class for more than five minutes in elementary school, Zev was attending a math class at McNeil that lasted an hour and a half -- and making the highest grades in the class.

His parents expected him to go to college -- Zev was set on Princeton -- and his classmates expected him to find a cure for cancer, teachers said.

This is the way his mother will remember him: "He was shining."

AlterNet: Debate This

AlterNet: Debate This: "This column is not about the presidential debate. It's about Other Stuff. Particularly eye-catching are the updates on the price of gasoline, your overtime pay, why the company most likely to hold the mortgage on your house could go broke, why you're getting peanuts from new tax cuts just passed by Congress and how the government is kicking hundreds of thousands of kids off health insurance while promising not to. Cheer all around."