Free Republic

This is one issue I agree with Obama on. We just have different reasons for opposing NASA. His problem with NASA is that the benefactors of this massive bureaucracy and middle class welfare system are simply not the favored class he represents.

I oppose NASA for the same reasons I do for almost everything else the federal government is doing. Someone show me in the constitution where the federal government is empowered to take money from me to give it to a bunch of dead meat bureaucrats to build space rockets? Unlike Pete Olson, Hutchison, and Cornyn from Texas, I’m just not a hypocrite when it comes to pork for my state. I’m against all the pork and all the grand ideas the fickle majority has for the federal government. I want less government, more freedom.

I thought they both missed the point. Grayson was talking about these corporations robbing the tax payers. It’s Congress that’s robbing tax payers. Both Grayson and Cavuto are only quibbling over shutting the doors after that horse has already left the barn. Cavuto was supporting government regulation of pay. His main beef seemed to be how Congress was going about it.

We don’t need Congress curbing corporate pay. All we needed was for Congress to leave the tax payers out of it altogether. The market and the bankruptcy court could have done a much better job. You don’t get paid obscene bonuses and salaries when a corrupt company is chopped up, sold off, or otherwise dissolved in bankruptcy court. You get laid off. You get zero!

In 1999, my two year old twin daughter was ravaged by e.coli poisoning. She went through 24 hours of expolosive vomitting and bloody diarrhea just for starters. She was left so weak, she couldn’t lift her head for almost two weeks. Two days after the onset, she had just enough energy to get out of bed and have a few crackers. I thought she was getting better.

That afternoon though, she took a turn for the worse. She was turning ashen, and I told my wife I thought she was dying. She was dying. Her kidneys were damaged by the e.coli toxins and the damaged structures were destroying her red blood cells. The damaged red blood cells were clogging her kidneys as she headed into full kidney failure. When she arrived at the emergency room, there was no doubt which of the twins was severely ill. She was ashen, severely anemic, and she was in full kidney failure.

I’ll never forget the look of satisfaction the doctors and interns had when they announced they had a diagnosis, Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome. They could only deal with it as just another case. They were rightly proud of their quick diagnosis, and we later understood just how important that was. They immediately took her to intensive care, and started her with a transfusion. For a week, they gave her only enough water to survive, and the worst day of my life was when they inserted a shunt into her leg to hook her up to the dialysis machine.

She survived. After two weeks in the hospital, she didn’t have the strength to stand. She was back in diapers, but slowly, she got better and regained her strength. She now faces a lifetime risk of hypertension and kidney failure because of an unknown amount of damage left by the e.coli. We realized e.coli had also hit her twin sister just a few days earlier, but fortunately it only caused her a bad bought of diarrhea. This could have happened to both of them.

As I read this article ten years later, it’s disappointing that nothing has changed. In our case, we never knew where the e.coli came from. Was it from a hamburger? Was it cross contamination from raw hamburger at home or from a restaurant? We’ll never know. I will always know from now on, all to well, that I’m making life and death decisions when I handle ground beef in my home. Have I handled the ground beef safely enough? Is that hamburger really cooked well enough? Those questions will always haunt me.

We haven’t done enough. Children shouldn’t face death or what my daughter went through to enjoy a hamburger. I don’t want beef regulated off our tables, but I also don’t want a powerful beef lobby to keep anything from being done about these well documented problems that we’ve known about for years.