REFLECTIONS: On the Congress

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio) writes the twice-monthlyReflections column for Time Goes By in which he comments on news, politics and social issues from his perspective as one of the younger members of the greatest generation. His other column, Gray Matters, formerly published in Newsday, appears each Saturday.

It’s great sport to watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert eviscerate members of Congress with video clips of their latest bits of idiocy. It serves to demonstrate the truth of Mark Twain’s comment: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Yet here’s a political puzzle that’s baffled me for years: The Congress, as a body of 535 or so men and women, almost always gets the lowest approval ratings of any Washington institution, lower even than the press. And some of the members, especially nowadays, are truly buffoons who, in the words of a former house speaker, never open their mouths but that they detract from the sum of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, most of the members, including the nuts, are re-elected every two or six years by constituents who then join in the chorus of derision for the congress. The simple explanation, of course, is that it’s easy to ridicule an amorphous body, but congressional politics is local and utilitarian, as the founders planned, and even the buffoons have aides who can solve a Social Security problem and Kiwanians who will support any warm body who wears a flag pin.

But I have digressed from my mission here, which is to tell you that there is something more profound at work when members of Congress, who should know better, act, speak and vote like fools. How else to explain Senator Charles Grassley, a veteran Iowa Republican who ran the committee on aging, actually saying, if not believing, that the health insurance reforms considered by the Senate Finance Committee, on which he’s the ranking member, would encourage the deaths of older insured people on Medicare?

What I have observed in 50 years of covering politics and the Congress is that members like Grassley, after many years in public life, often become removed from the realities of daily life. They’ll simply lose touch and their interests (like party loyalty and ideology) become increasingly irrelevant for the everyday lives of people they are supposed to represent.

I remember when I first realized this – without understanding it. It was during one the interviews I did when, for a time in my Houston tenure, I was assigned to cover luncheons and the like and write features about interesting visitors.

My technique was to ask my subject something out of left field. So I learned that then opera star Roberta Peters was a baseball fan and once sang the latest World Series score to her tenor. And I found that Socialist leader Norman Thomas had a great sense of humor.

The subject who confounded me a bit was one of my political heroes, Senator J. William Fulbright, the suave and liberal Arkansas Democrat, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Instead of talking foreign policy with him, I asked him a very pedestrian question which I no longer remember. All that I recall is that the technique didn’t work; Fulbright, a former college president, did not know what I was talking about. It was simply not part of his reality.

That was understandable. Like others in his station, he did not drive his own car, go to the cleaners, buy groceries, pay for the lunch or even type his speech. Others were paid to do things like that.

I remember participating in long lunch and bull session in Des Moines in 1980, with a gang of reporters and Senator Ted Kennedy. The long-suffering and hard-working waitress was stunned when Kennedy left without paying or tipping her. The explanation: He didn’t realize he had to; besides, he never carried money because he didn’t need it. His aides and the reporters paid. And someone (not me) wrote a nasty story about how Teddy nearly stiffed the waitress.

But even the privileged and protected have the capacity to learn, perhaps from personal tragedy and human encounters. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggle with polio and his months with plain folk at Warm Springs were reflected in his New Deal liberalism and passion for social justice. The murders of Kennedy’s brothers which left Ted the head and caretaker of the clan, and the serious illnesses of his two sons, gave him his liberal social conscience and determination to provide for all Americans the health insurance he had.

Former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, a heart surgeon and a bona fide conservative whose family corporation (Columbia HCA) ripped off Medicare for billions of dollars, now supports health care reform he would have opposed when he was in Congress. He had traveled the world seeing the need for health care in Africa, which he writes about in his new book, A Heart to Serve – The Passion to Bring Health, Hope and Healing. And he ridicules as nonsense the opposition statements of Grassley and company.

Frist had been freed from the narrow personal and financial interests that prevent legislators from looking around at the real world, learning new things and, God forbid, changing their views. If you watched the performance of the Senate Finance Committee, for example, you would have seen well-paid aides hovering over their senators telling them what’s going on and what positions they ought to take. (Some aides has worked for insurance and drug companies).

The Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia, who wrote October 1 of the “whispering brigade” of aides at the committee’s sessions, caught one of them speaking quietly to Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, which is not of the real world for most of us, “mouthing lines in Baucus’ ear almost Cyrano de Bergerac-style.”

I’m told that Senator Olympia (Hamlet) Snowe, of Maine, had to be instructed from time to time on how Medicare works. She was not alone in her ignorance. She opposed any “public option” among the choices in health care, she said, although she was not clear why because most of her older constituents have Medicare, which is a public option and most of the rest of the people in Maine appear to want the same.

Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, of Indiana, and independent Joe Lieberman, threatened to block or vote against health reform with a public option and almost no one in the press, save blogger Glenn Greenwald, noted their close ties to and the money they and their spouses get from the insurance and drug industries.

Indeed, much of the press. From the beginning, has aided and abetted efforts to kill a strong, health care bill that could lead to universal insurance.

As I’ve written elsewhere, despite appeals from some of the best experts in medicine and health care, much of the main stream press ignored and helped to toss off the table of consideration, Medicare for All. Then, as Chris Weigant wrote in Huffington Post on October 27, virtually every reporter and commentator pronounced the so-called “public option” dead. And they seem to applaud the members who confirmed their assumption, but they didn’t challenge them, or suggest that maybe the public option may be a good thing.

And despite its growing popularity, the public option was dismissed as supported by “liberals.” Why? Because too much of the press no longer pursues that which is outside their own narrow and conventional interests and career ambitions. Once journalism was a calling to right wrongs; now (except for some fine blogs like this one) it’s a career without values.

That’s a far cry from the kind of aggressive, participatory journalism practiced before 24-hour cable-infotainment. My colleagues and I challenged and argued with lawmakers who seem divorced from reality. We even fed them questions to be asked of witnesses, the better to get a good story.

With the help of a few reporters, including me, Ralph Nader began the consumer movement. One of the finest investigative reporters I knew worked closely with a member of Congress to root out union corruption. My needling questions and stories helped bring a senator I covered over to oppose the Vietnam War.

Now, however, almost no one (except perhaps Rachel Maddow and a few bloggers) pokes at the hypocrisy of, say, Senator John McCain who will vote to kill the health reform although he has been on the public payroll for all his life and never had to pay a medical bill.

How about that buffoon who proposed that all members of Congress be forced to sign up for the health reform? Doesn’t he know that that’s what he and his well-paid colleagues already have in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan and for only $503 a year? But I’ll bet that many don’t pay their own bills. Does anyone call them out on their hypocrisy besides Stewart and Colbert?

I miss being in the trenches covering these lawmakers many, if not most, of whom are valiant and tireless public servants. But, like Representatives John Dingell and John Conyers, both of Michigan, the two longest-serving members of the House, the really good ones don’t often get press because they are not buffoons.

I covered them both and had my difference with Dingell over his overt legislative support for the National Rifle Association. But Dingell, whose father was a New Dealer who helped give us our modern labor laws, and Conyers, who once worked as an aide to the younger Dingell, have for years championed universal national health insurance, which most Americans say they want.

Truth be told, I think even most members of Congress, would agree. But they are dismissed by other lawmakers and the press who ignore the real world of what is needed in favor of the narrow, conventional wisdom which as usual, is not very wise.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Nancy Leitz: The Theological Discussion

Religion's Intrusion into Health Care Reform

So the House finally passed a health care reform bill late Saturday night. Barely. The vote was 220 to 215. I felt more relief than elation.

Now the Senate needs to produce a merged bill to vote on and then another round of merging the House and Senate bills before another vote.

It is a discouraging process to watch. If you tune in to any congressional debate, you know what an embarrassment many of our lawmakers are. This time, several shouted "Objection" again and again interrupting normal procedural statements from other members and continued to do so after being called out of order. Let's send them all back to kindergarten.

It was an historic day in that in decades of trying, health care reform has never gotten this far before, but it was at the expense of women. The Stupak amendment, adopted in a 240-194 vote, extends to the public option in the bill the long-established prohibition against using federal funds (allocated through Health and Human Services) for abortion procedures. It also restricts use of federal affordability funds to purchase policies on the exchanges that include abortion coverage. Read more here.

We can only hope that the Senate has a better handle on Roe v. Wade and that a woman's right to choose will prevail, but don't count on it. Last week, I was surprised, shocked even, to discover that two of the three bills that will be merged into one in the Senate would raise faith healing to the level of clinical medicine.

The provision would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care” and would require insurers to consider covering such non-medical procedures as prayer treatments such as those used in the Christian Science Church.

This is not a new idea. Three years ago, when the state of Massachusetts instituted statewide universal health care, the Christian Science Church successfully lobbied for a provision that allows people to opt out of the mandated coverage for religious reasons. Soon thereafter, the church was again successful in securing reimbursement through taxpayer dollars for faith healing treatments.

To her credit, House Leader Nancy Pelosi stripped similar provisions from the House reform bill after several representatives objected on grounds of separation of church and state. That alone should put an end to such nonsense as government funded prayer treatment but Phil Davis, described in the Los Angeles Times as a senior official of the Christian Science Church, says prayer is an “effective alternative to conventional healthcare.”

“'We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,' said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

"'We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,' he said.”

Well, we can agree on the cost part. For those as ignorant as I was about Christian Science, apparently, “trained prayer practitioners” are paid $20 to $40 a day by patients to pray for them and the Church's newsletter regularly publishes testimonials from those who say prayer cured their prostate cancer, breast lumps and assorted other serious conditions.

To my further surprise, there is additional precedent for government sanction of prayer as medical treatment. According to the same Los Angeles Times story:

”The Internal Revenue Service allows the cost of the prayer sessions to be counted among itemized medical expenses for income tax purposes - one of the only (sic) religious treatments explicitly identified as deductible by the IRS. Some federal medical insurance programs, including those for military families, also reimburse for prayer treatment.”

In other words, you and I and all taxpayers are being forced to make donations with our tax dollars to support religious organizations with which we have no affiliation to practice woo-woo medicine.

People should do all the praying they want, but not paid for with federal money. If this provision is allowed to stand in the health care reform bill that eventually emerges from Congress, what can stop anyone from declaring their religious practice to be on a par with science-based health care and demanding reimbursement?

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Jeanne Waite Follett: Old Letters, Old Friends

ELDER MUSIC: Promised Land

You never know who you're going to meet on the internet and I came to know Peter Tibbles (bio here) via email over the past couple of years. His extensive knowledge of most genres of music and his excellent taste became apparent only gradually (Peter's not one to toot his horn) but once I understood, I knew he needed his own column at Time Goes By - or, better, that TGB needed his column - which appears here each Sunday. You can find previous Elder Music columns here.

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I had so much fun doing the Route 66 post a few weeks ago in which I allowed the lyrics of one song about a journey to suggest other songs, I thought I’d do another song. There are several that could be used but the first one that came to mind is Promised Land.

Chuck Berry performing, of course.

Promised Land

I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,
California on my mind.
Straddled that greyhound, rode him past Raleigh, On across Caroline.

This is Norfolk Virginia (sort of).

I couldn’t find any songs about that city, I’m sure any readers from there will come up with them and let me know. Nor any about Raleigh:

However, as Chuck seems to be dreaming about California, there’s an obvious one right away: The Mamas and the Papas' California Dreamin'.

Click to play: California Dreamin'

Stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill,
And we never was a minute late.
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin’ cross the Georgia state.

I bypassed both Charlotte (below) and Rock Hill (under Charlotte) and rolled straight into Georgia with the Atlanta Rhythm Section performing Georgia Rhythm.

Click to play: Atlanta Rhythm Section - Georgia Rhythm

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Half way cross Alabam,
And that hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown Birmingham.

Here is Birmingham.

The mention of Alabam leads me directly to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.

Click to play: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama

Straight off, I bought me a through train ticket,
Ridin’ cross Mississippi clean
And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham
Smoking into New Orleans.

Ah, New Orleans, an embarrassment of song riches, which of the thousands do I select? The obvious one is Walkin’ to New Orleans, although, in the song, Chuck is taking the train. Doesn’t matter.

Here’s Fats Domino.

Somebody help me get out of Louisiana
Just help me get to Houston town.
There’s people there who care a little bout me
And they wont let the poor boy down.

I immediately though of Rodney Crowell’s album, “The Houston Kid,” and the song from that called The Rock of My Soul. This is a dark song and not easy listening, but it’s a fine song from a great album.

Click to play: Rodney Crowell - The Rock of My Soul

Sure as you’re born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands, And I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the promised land.

There are several songs with Albuquerque in their title, most notably one by Neil Young, but I’m not too keen on these, so I’ve decided to go with the most famous song that mentions the city and that is By the Time I Get to Phoenix, the Jimmy Webb version (well, he wrote it, that’s good enough for me).

Click to play: Jimmy Webb - By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Workin’ on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying over to the golden state;
The pilot told me in thirteen minutes
We’d be headin’ in the terminal gate.

Swing low sweet chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone;
Cut your engines, cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone.

Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia,
Tidewater four ten o nine
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’
And the poor boys on the line

I really don’t think that the poor boy on the line is Elvis but it’ll do for me. Here’s Elvis performing Poor Boy.

Click to play: Elvis - Poor Boy

GRAY MATTERS: Long Term Care

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio) writes the weekly Gray Matters column which appears here each Saturday. His Reflections column, in which he comments on news, politics and social issues from his perspective as one of the younger members of the greatest generation, appears here at Time Goes By twice each month.

If you have a friend or a loved one in a nursing home, with the holidays coming on, this would be a good time to check closely on conditions in the home and the quality of his or her care. For this economic downturn and Medicaid reductions in some states may be affecting the level of care, especially in for-profit homes that may cut corners to save money.

I say “may’ because some nursing homes are warning of staff layoffs and even closures, but there is little real evidence that residents are being affected. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently updated its lists of so-called Special Focus Facilities (SFFs), which include scores of homes that have a history of serious problems such as the conditions and staffing of the institution and the level of care.

In August, the Government Accountability Office surveyed the ten-year-old SFF program and estimated that 580 of the 16,000 nursing homes in the country “could be considered the most poorly performing.” In addition, CMS lists dozens of other homes on the SFF lists – at least one in every state - have not shown substantial improvement in the past year or so.

CMS, which uses state agencies to monitor the homes, separates the SFFs into five categories:

• homes recently added to the list that need improvement


• those that have improved


• those that have not improved


• those that have improved enough to be removed from the list


• those that are so poor they have lost Medicare and Medicaid participation

You may check out the list of homes considered SFFs for your state here [pdf].

Also, last December CMS began a five star rating system for the nation’s nursing homes. This compares the level and quality of care for facilities by area.

The concern about the recession’s effect on nursing home care was touched off, in part, by a widely circulated wire story last month in which an official of the American Health Care Association saw the possibility of layoffs in nursing homes. The story said the nursing home industry was in crisis, partly because “Congress is debating slashing billions more in Medicare funding a part of health care reform.”

But there are a number of pending proposals to strengthen long term care. And while Medicaid funds have been cut in many states and Medicare is cutting some direct payments to nursing homes over the next decade, the GAO and the official Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) say the nursing homes have enjoyed billions in overpayments, especially for skilled nursing facilities, where patients who are supposed to get one-on-one therapy are among three or more getting treated at the same time.

With aides paid too little (less than $10 an hour) to attend to too many residents, MedPac found that nursing homes profits exceeded 10 percent for seven consecutive years. And the profit margin for nursing homes in 2007 was 14.5 percent.

The GAO noted, incidentally, that “the most poorly performing homes tended to be chain affiliated and for-profit and have more beds and residents.”

Richard Mollot, executive director of the New York-based Long Term Care Community Coalition, a watchdog group, told me that while it would be wise to keep a special eye out on the care given to loved ones:

“Providers are always crying that they don’t have enough money...basically there have been cutbacks to the raises facilities were expecting.”

And he noted that inflation has been minimal. He cautioned against buying into the predictions that cutbacks are necessary and cited the wire story‘s report on layoffs at three homes in Brooklyn in the Metropolitan Jewish Health System. In 2004, The New York Times, discussing the poorly paid aides, reported that the head of the system, Eli Feldman, earned over $1 million in salary.

Whatever the finances of the nursing home industry, the Obama administration, elected a year ago this week, has encouraged the Democratic Congress to propose a host of bills to fix problems large and small with long term care. One bill, for example, would make it easier for families to file complaints on behalf of patients and open the books on who actually owns, runs and profits from the homes. Another bill would strengthen programs to prevent patient abuse.

The most important proposal is part of the Senate Health Committee’s bill for health care reform. Introduced by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, it’s called the Community Living Assistance Service and Support Act, or CLASS.

Among other things, it would enroll workers over 18 to gradually build a long term care fund financed by a payroll tax. They could opt out, but the fund would in five years finance the long term care of enrolled workers who need help. The initial benefit, about $100 a day, for home or nursing home care, is small, but it would relieve some pressure on Medicaid, and supporters see this as a start to solve what AARP has called “the greatest unmet health need,” the lack of public long term nursing care.

The bill is also included in the House version of health care reform and is expected to survive after it is combined with the more conservative one from the Senate Finance Committee. But not surprisingly, it’s opposed by the American Association of Long Term Care Insurance which fears it will put private insurers out of business. That would not be a bad idea, but we can talk about the worth of long term care insurance at another time.

Need help? You may reach me at saulfriedmanATcomcastDOTnet

“Gray Matters” Moves from Newsday to Time Goes By

Regular Time Goes By readers know the twice-monthly Reflections column written by 80-year-old, veteran journalist, Saul Friedman (Bio here). Reflections has become one of the most popular features on Time Goes By.

Today I am pleased to announce there will be more of Saul's work in a regular Saturday column titled Gray Matters which, until a week ago, had appeared in the Long Island paper, Newsday, for the past 12 years.

Saul made news early this week announcing that he had severed his relationship with Newsday when Cablevision, which owns the paper, placed the online edition behind a paid firewall allowing free access only to people who subscribe to the print edition or to Cablevision. Others pay $5 a week.

The policy shift meant that not only would Saul's many readers throughout the country lose access to his popular column, even he, living near Washington, D.C. and not a Cablevision subscriber, would be locked out.

In an email, Saul explained further:

“About a dozen years ago, when my aging legs were giving out after more than 40 years of covering cops and crooks, presidents and wars, I founded what has become a unique enterprise, a column that serves as a survival guide for those of us of a certain age.

“I called it Gray Matters, which is a deliberate triple entendre. (You figure it out). It was and is still the only column of its kind, for it sought to explain, report on and probe the nitty gritty of virtually every issue confronting people over 50 - and their care givers. And it was designed to provide help in negotiating the thickets of Medicare, Medicaid, Long Term Care, IRAs, Social Security.

“I have been an unabashed, unapologetic advocate for America’s still inadequate Social Insurance programs. I’ve used my sources to get help for readers. And from time to time I’ve dispensed advice, always based on expertise. But because aging is not just about Medicare and Medicaid, as Time Goes By has demonstrated, no subject is out of bounds.

“The column has been published in Newsday, for which I had worked as a reporter for a dozen years before I took a buyout. And Newsday has generously supported the column since 1997. But alas, like so much of the newspaper business, Newsday has undergone changes, for better or worse.

“As a result, Gray Matters is moving to Time Goes By and will appear each Saturday, supplementing with some timely reporting the wit and wisdom of its writers. In addition, because it will give me a chance to search my mind and memory for the lessons I’ve learned in a most exciting, action-packed half-century of journalism, I shall continue to contribute my Reflections.”

What Saul did not mention is that during those 40 years of "covering cops and crooks, presidents and war," he received a Pulitzer Prize for his part in coverage of the 1967 Detroit riots, is a Nieman Fellow and has the distinction of being among the journalists and others targeted by the White House on Richard Nixon's infamous Enemies List. (For some of us of a certain era, that may be his most distinguished award.)

I'm pretty sure there is nothing around that could be a better fit with the goals of Time Goes By than Saul's Gray Matters column and I am proud to host it here. Be sure to stop by for his first column tomorrow and each Saturday thereafter.

Vintage TGB, which Gray Matters replaces, will appear occasionally in the future on weekdays.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Ann Berger: Sharing My Birthday Pony

Health Care Reform (Again)

[Where Elders Blog: Clarence Bowles of Southern Roomers added his photo to the Where Elders Blog feature. You can see it here, and you can add yours to the collection too. Instructions are here.]

The health care reform drum beat in Congress moves forward at the pace and feel of a dirge. Now Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid says there may not be a vote on the Senate bill until 2010. House Leader Nancy Pelosi expects a vote on the merged House bill this week or next weekend or sometime, depending the source you read. But until the Senate votes, there can be no work on a final bill for the entire Congress.

As the bills now stand, here are some key points from one or another or both. None of this is guaranteed as there is no way to tell what the final bill will contain:

In the Senate version, the public option would apply only to people whose employers do not provide coverage and who cannot buy private coverage for whatever reason. States would be allowed to opt out of the public option.

In the House version, according to reports prior to the vote, the public option is stronger and does not allow states to opt out. It also forbids the federal government from bailing out the private option.

That last item represents doom for any public option because in either the House or Senate version, the pool of public option participants too small to successfully spread the risk. Is it possible that among all 535 members of Congress, their thousands of aides and me, I am the only one who has noticed that failure of the public option is built in? Or am I naïve to think it isn't being planned that way?

There had been a provision in the House bill that would allow individual states to create single-payer systems if they chose to, but it was stripped out.

The House bill expands Medicaid to more people, and provides for a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge for singles earning $500,000 or more and couples earning $1 million and above to help pay for the bill.

The House bill also provides more generous subsidies to families buying coverage from exchanges and – good news for elders - it lowers the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries by authorizing CMS to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. The Senate bill only reduces the doughnut hole a bit.

There are hints this week that the execrable trigger option, the brainchild of Maine Senator Olympia Snowe may be back on the table. If it is passed in place of any version of a public option, a public option will never go into effect.

These items don't begin to explain the bills in any detail which, anyway, seems a waste of good brain cells to try to do since there is no way to know what the final bill from the two houses of Congress will contain.

What is evident overall, as we have discussed, is that aside from preventing private insurers from rejecting insurance applicants for most pre-existing conditions, the bills generously preserve the status quo for private insurers, even guaranteeing tens of millions of new customers, in one of the bills, by mandating purchase of insurance and limiting the number of people eligible for a public option.

That's what millions of lobbying dollars buys; billions for private companies and minimal help for everyone else.

Having spent the entire summer deeply embedded in following the progress of health care reform, I am terribly disappointed in what we now have before us. The only thing that could improve my mood about health care reform would be a knight in shining armor riding in with a single-payer system and magically persuading Congress and the president to see the light.

However, since that will not happen...

There is no choice but to support what we've got. If some kind of health care reform is not passed by this 111th Congress, there won't be another chance for 15 or 20 years. And in the interim, health care costs will skyrocket leaving millions more than now unable to afford coverage or treatment.

It is better to pass even as weak a bill as we will apparently get and have something to work with – to amend, tweak, change and fix (even the best bill would need some of that) – than to face the collapse of Medicare in a few years and perhaps the entire health care system.

What worries me most about Senator Reid's retreat on a Senate vote before early 2010 (remember that the Senate already missed a promised August vote) is that the mid-term election campaign will be gearing up and senators facing voters next year will be a volatile bunch as they try to please all the people in their states all the time.

So keep writing and calling your representatives in Congress. Tell them what parts of the bills you like and what you don't like. Let them know that their vote will affect your vote in the mid-term election next year.

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The PBS series Life (Part 2), hosted by my friend Bob Lipstyte, is continuing on television and online. This week it's about dating - the second time around. Here's a clip:

You can watch the full episode here.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: Looking Backwards

Happiness

I doubt what has happened to the “pursuit of happiness” in recent years is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Happiness has become a research industry, being poked and prodded, dissected and investigated with the intensity of fetishists. Hardly a week goes by without a new happiness study.

Most surprising to me are untold numbers of people who call themselves “happiness coaches.” Go ahead, google “happiness coach” and see how many returns you get. Never mind – it's nearly 35,000, almost all of whom are selling books and expensive seminars mostly about how to become a happiness coach.

French president Nicholas Sarkozy wants to replace the traditional GDP as a measure of a country's economic health with a happiness GDP. Talk about squishy statistics.

One happiness study reports that to be happy, you need friends who are happy. In fact, according to the year-old study, if the friend of a happy friend of yours is happy, your chances of being happy increase not by five percent, nor 10 percent, but by precisely six percent. Uh-huh.

Last month, they told us that women aren't as happy as they were 40 years ago and in fact, men are happier than women. This is being called the “happiness gap” and no doubt someone somewhere takes this stuff seriously, blaming it on women's success in overcoming the “gender gap” that was a popular talking point in the women's movement 40 years ago.

A year ago, just a week or two before the presidential election which was looking good for Barack Obama at that moment, a Pew Charitable Trust survey found that 37 percent of Republicans were “very happy” compared to 25 percent of Democrats. Go figure.

Poor people are happier than rich people. Oh, wait. There's another study that says the opposite - that is, if happiness is measured by the amount of leisure time one has.

One survey reported that all types of parents – married, single, stepparents and even empty-nesters - are less happy than childless couples. This caused an uproar of belligerent emails from parents who disagreed.

And several surveys report that money won't make you happy. They're probably right, but it does pay the bills. Another survey says that financial security is more important than wealth in determining happiness.

Time Goes By being what it is, I'm most interested in what researchers say about happiness in old age. There was much to-do last year when a study reported that people become happier as they get older. But not so fast. Other reports say that women become less happy than men in old age or, if you that bothers you, try another study that says men become less happy after age 65. Take your pick.

In keeping with the dubious nature of all this happiness stuff, you can find a study to prove anything you want to believe about it which shouldn't be a surprise. Happiness is like a joke – try to explain it and it's ruined.

Most of these studies are done with what is called the Day Reconstruction Method. For a day, subjects keep a diary of every activity. The next day, they rate their mood and feelings about each of those activities as they were doing them, on a 12 point scale.

Some people give high unhappy numbers to such things as paying the bills, dusting and washing dishes which seem odd tasks by which to judge happiness. Dusting may be boring, but it's not important enough to cause unhappiness.

While I've been writing this, I've been trying to check my happiness meter which is difficult because I have never been able to say what makes me happy. Joy, I think, those momentary events that elate us for a short period of time, aren't related to overall happiness and well being and, in fact, can happen even during miserable times.

The reverse is also true – that terribly unhappy events take place during times of general happiness so the negative measurement of such an event hardly bears on one's overall well being.

Right now, I've just finished (I hope) a two week period in which car repairs, a broken furnace and computer problems cost me about $2,000 – a hefty sum for someone to whom a surprise $200 expense can make a serious dent in the budget. Does it make me unhappy? Not particularly. Annoyed would be a better description as it will cramp my style until it's paid off.

But I've got a secure roof over my head, enough to eat, something to do every day that I enjoy and I'm healthy. Is that happiness? I don't know. Is satisfaction, curiosity, interest in the world happiness? I don't know.

What I do know, however, is that happiness is too subjective, personal and ephemeral to be picked apart and entered into charts as all the researchers think they can do.

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At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: Wings