A prayer for fire fighters; remembering the wildfires of 1994

The  tragedy in Yarnell, Arizona,  in which 19 hotshot firefighters were killed in a wildfire ,brought back some traumatic  memories of the hot summer of 1994 in Colorado. On July 6 fourteen young firefighters lost their lives near Glenwood Springs in the Storm King fire, formally named the South Canyon fire.  There were immediate impacts  and some long term ones. The tragedy of Storm King is  so similar to Yarnell’s, it gives me chills.

I did not witness the Storm King fire, but I was  close to another   wildfire that had erupted the same week a hundred miles away in southwestern Colorado that had consequences as well.. Firefighters in   the Storm King fire,  like the  ones in Yarnell , tried to escape a fast moving blaze by hunkering down in their protective blankets.    Inquiries and new procedures  followed Storm King  Those same new procedures should have saved the Yarnell victims, but something  went terribly wrong. Federal and state investigators have already announced they will  spend time to discover what happened and whether any procedures could be changed to avoid another tragedy like Yarnell.

 The Storm King fire’s  long term impact was  procedural and tactical.. There was an immediate impact, too, that changed  the strategy to battle the other wildfire.  On July 3,   wildfire broke out which nearly entered  the  town of Durango and gave me an eye opening dose of wildfire savvy. Among lessons learned  was that human power  was puny next to Mother Nature’s rage.  

Lightening struck the south side of a ridge fifteen miles west of Durango on July 3. Stiff winds from the west,  100 degree temperature  and  bone dry juniper  and scrub oak converged  to create a flaming holocaust of a crown fire..  In one day the  fire blew ten miles east,  nearly to the Animas River..  Had the wind shifted, coming  from the south instead, it could have jumped the ridge and taken out a large subdivision  to the north , and continued  across US 160   to our daughter’s home  in Durango West where I was, by chance, visiting.

The Black Ridge Fire, as it was named, burned mostly on Southern Ute Reservation land, but the wind blew steadily   toward Durango for nearly a week..  Parts of Durango were evacuated and   Durango West was  put on alert to prepare to evacuate.  .  During mornings  when the winds were calmer,  tankers and helicopters dumped retardant and water.  In the heat of the afternoons, fire and smoke  created a  horrifyingly awesome storm over the ridge.

With the Storm King fire fresh in fire commanders’ minds, nearly 1000 firefighters were dispatched to dig fire lines mostly night when the fire laid down.  Fortunately, only a few structures were in the fire’s path  so long as the fire was contained to the southern outskirts of Durango and on the south side of the ridge. After six days of  crossing our fingers   and avoiding a smoke choked Durango,   the 17,000 acre wildfire was declared under control.. It was on the 7^th day  the wind shifted from the south, blowing toward the house, but the worst was  over and we were safe. 

Since then, the Utes have built a firebreak to prevent any future fires from crossing over the ridge to the canyon and the subdivisions as part of the national fire plan.

That same year we were also building our home in Winter Park on the edge of a  mountain ridge , which  explains why  our home is clad in stucco and brick, not in the shingles we had planned.

The front range fires last summer, the Black Forest fire this year, and the Yarnell tragedy have rekindled emotions I felt those 19 years ago  and I utter a prayer for the victims and the firefighters every time.I watch the news reports.  .

The GOP's war on health care consumers

We are a country that is besieged by     a  political war on health care consumers.  . It is clear on whose side  is the GOP : it is not us, , the patients and the potential patients. We, the end user of health care, are collateral damage to political battles over how to repair a sick  system that leaves so many out and bankrupts many, with  the prognosis it will  get sicker.

The   GOP ,is dedicated and  determined  to repeal Obamacare or terminally delay it.  They want you to forget what a consumer oriented piece of legislation it is.

The current GOP hollering  is all about 2014 talking points in  individual races.  The campaign to repeal Obamacare  is a Don Quixote quest because  even if the Senate turns Republican in 2014,  Obama has two more years to veto any Congressional attempt to kill it.   

The GOP’s goal  also appears  to make sure their business base sees Obamacare as a bane, as  they spread misleading information, or commit  sins of omissions in characterizing the law. It is a strategy banking on  perpetuating  ignorance .:” It is too long to read; too hard to understand; so throw it all out.”

 They war whooped  with glee when the President  delayed  one part  until 2015:   collecting a penalty that  would be imposed  on businesses with more than 50 employees that failed to offer insurance. It only affects those which did not already offer health insurance. That affects no more than 1% of all employees,  6%  of all  businesses (only 2%  with over 200 employees) . Everything else takes effect in 2014,  including individual mandates and the exchanges.

Here is what the GOP  would want to  happen to all of us who are  consumers  if they could repeal Obamacare:  

We would again be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions,  30 million of us will not be able to get affordable insurance,   college age kids will no longer be required to be on their family’s insurance, and once again there will be high deductibles for mammograms, prostate screening, and colonoscopies .Once again there will be  bankrupting deductibles for our insurance or  too high employer  provided premiums .  Obamacare premiums will be subsidized by income level to make costs affordable. With Obamacare’s repeal, those provisions go away.

Repeal Obamacare and insurance companies would  be able to return to their prior practices of raking off more than 20% of  premiums for their overhead and profits.  Their virtual monopoly will continue. . In fact, the exchanges will be the first truly free market for insurance since all premiums and  all benefits will be open to large numbers of insurers and published side by side comparing apples with apples.    

Businesses, too, will benefit  since they can use the same public  information to negotiate better deals for insurance they offer their employees and small businesses will have access to their own exchanges and group rates only offered to large businesses before

Here is how the competition in  open market exchanges have already worked to drive down costs. In California and Oregon  insurance premiums offered through the exchanges came in as much as  25%  below the actuarial  forecasts or prior published rates. This is also  good for the cost of the program, since subsidies for lower income customers of the exchanges  will also  be lower.  

Piously, some members of the GOP pay lip service to the consumer benefits they like. However, they offer no way to cover the 30 million  uninsured or to pay for parts they like as covering pre-existing conditions. When you hear such pontifications, challenge them to tell you how they would pay for them.  It is that latter problem Obamacare addresses and the critics of health care reform who profess to care for consumers are blowing hot air.

For more, visit and www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com

Egypt needs the grace and glory of compromise

The Egyptian coup by the military should help us remember  why we celebrated the 4^th of July this month.  In 1776, America  set a course  to democracy   that ended   in a constitution that is the framework for the form of government that we have now.

 The Egyptians’ climb to a stable democracy has been fits, starts, wrong turns, and near death. Giving birth to democracy is  hard and painful  labor, but in spite of so many differences among the colonies, we pulled it off.  We should not take that feat for granted and we deserve to celebrate it. As we found our way, other countries, like Egypt, are trying to find theirs and we should wish them the best.

How did it happen we succeeded?  1776 was our first step.   The  debate was about whether to revolt from England . No one was excluded; all colonies sent representatives,  and a sincere attempt was made to reach consensus through compromise.   That same spirit of consensus building, in spite of passionate differences and stumbles with the Articles of Confederation, continued into the Constitutional Convention beginning in 1787 and its subsequent ratification.  As historian Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote in “Miracle at Philadelphia”, “The spirit of compromise reigned in grace and glory”.

The interpretation of  our  Constitution is always  evolving,  and we have always had our divisions .In fact, we fought a bloody civil war over  the admission and permission  of slave or non slave states. We despair today over a Congress that is  paralyzed  by a “ no compromise” mentality, but divisions are nothing like the passions of 1861.

Our democracy has reached a stage of maturity that to think our military would step in, conduct a coup, throw out the constitution, arrest the deposed leaders ,and shut down media outlets,  as just happened in Egypt, is not even on any rational American’s radar.

The form of democracy we devised to keep some  strong man  or one party  from seizing complete power was to divide our  government into branches that checked and balanced each other and we put the military under civilian control .  The Constitutional Amendments protect  many other specific civil rights.

As seen through the eyes of seasoned Western journalists on the ground ,  there is  agreement that the  Egyptian course toward democracy went wrong after Tahrir Square in several ways.

First, the constitution was written by a commission chosen by a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist  dominated parliament . The commission   cut out any special  protection of the rights of women, secularists, and minority religions and they based the constitution in conformity with  Shariah law.  The genie of modernization   had already been released from the bottle and stuffing  those rights back into the bottle within a year was more than much of Egypt could accept.

 Only 30% of registered voters went to the polls,   though  of those voting,  64% were in favor of the constitution.  The vast majority’s preferences were not reflected in the approval process.

 President Mohamed Morsi, elected by a bare majority, did not make good on his campaign promises to be inclusive, and he attempted to consolidate his supporter base of Islamists, instead.  In November , he  decreed to legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts. Public outrage forced him to annul the decree. He also  persecuted opposition journalists and  failed to revive the economy.

Egyptians should not mistake mass demonstrations for democracy any more than they should continue to accept military rule as their salvation. . The military has promised to give them an opportunity to rewrite a constitution. The opposition to Morsi may be disorganized. However, to avoid a long and bloody struggle,   Morsi’s opposition and Morsi’s supporters, must  participate and  compromise with “grace and glory” on a constitutional framework that will be more inclusive and will protect democratic institutions.

For more, visit www.mufticforumblog.blogspot.com and www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com

Glad the GOP House failed to pass the farm bill...SNAP was saved

Shame on the conservative members of the House of Representatives for trying to insert into a House farm bill a very cruel provision, to cut the food stamp program by nearly 30%.. Defeat means the cuts will not occur for now.  Democrats and even some Republicans  could not support the bill. It died  and rightly so.

All of these cuts would have come when more than 25% of working families in Colorado do not have enough food to meet their basic needs, according to the Census Bureau’s  American Community Survey 2011.

 The House bill would have cut  spending in farm and nutrition programs by nearly $40 billion over the next 10 years nationwide. $20.5 billion  of that total would have come from cuts to the $75 billion food stamp program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP.

Politifact, a respected fact checker of the Tampa Bay Times examined Democrats’ claims  cuts in the House farm bill would leave 2 million people without food stamps and remove 210,000 children from the school breakfast and lunch program. The fact checker concluded that “Ultimately, both numbers go back to the Congressional Budget Office, which is generally seen as impartial. …  We rate the statement Mostly True”

In the debate over the farm bill spanning the past two years,  members of the House who wanted the kill SNAP  dusted off  the same time worn  complaint used to object  to food stamps in years past, that  welfare queens abused the program so can the program..    Times have changed and those old views are  fossils.

 “So make these welfare slackers get a job”, a conservative friend of mine grouched.” Get  yourself  current” , I retorted. Families receiving food stamps  now hold jobs three time more than those who rely solely on welfare benefits according to  a July 2010 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorites. That is a significant reversal from 1989 when  only 20% of food stamp recipients held jobs.

Most recipients who can work are working, but their income is so low, they cannot afford enough food and their rent, too. Cigarettes and alcohol have long been ineligible for food stamp purchase.

So who gets food stamps now? In 2013  most are kids and elderly. Per the US Department of Agriculture which administers the programs,  three-quarters of food stamp recipients are families with children. Nearly half (47 percent) were under age 18 and another 8 percent were age 60 or older. Even in the recession, the numbers of food stamp recipients have not increased.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, some members of the GOP  called for even cutting nutrition and school lunch programs and some of those funds were part of the farm bill cuts.  Who would they hurt?. Of the nutrition programs for the poor (8.7 million recipients), 4.3 million are women with children, 2.2 million with infants. National school lunch programs: 30.5 million kids benefit, per the  Department of Agriculture.   

 What is the solution other than federal government programs for those who are concerned. Food banks provided by charitable and church organizations make up some of the difference often on the local level, serving even those  who also  receive food stamps.  Think what the size  the need would be if food stamp programs were cut by 30%.

Our own Grand County Mountain Family Center is handing out lunches to 50  kids in Fraser (population  1224 ) who are home for the summer and who had received subsidized  lunches and breakfasts served them during  the school year.  The center will be collecting non perishable canned food items to stock their food bank shelves. Such is the situation of hunger in our own county.. (www.mountainfamilycenter.org)

It is time  for those who care to step up to the plate both in politics and in works of charity.

Visit www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com for more