Steve Jobs was legendary for demanding accomplishments of his employees that seemed scientifically impossible to them.  They characterized him as living in what they termed a “reality distortion field.”  America’s GOP is currently mired in a reality distortion field of their own, but not with the productive upside that flourished at Apple.

Ignoring the reality that Americans are tired of costly, counterproductive wars, driven by disinformation and deceit, the GOP has launched war on the EPA.   To attack the EPA as “job killing” is as much a con game as was attacking Iraq for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.   Justifying themselves as wanting to eliminate regulations of “mass job destruction”, this year the Republican controlled House has passed 168 measures that would weaken or gut core provisions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.   Regrettably, many conservative Democrats are playing along.

Almost by definition, conservatives always long for the good old days of decades past.  In pushing to abolish the EPA, they apparently are nostalgic for those good old days when the Cuyahoga River caught fire—seven times, when Lake Erie was devoid of fish, and when the air over Los Angeles was more appropriately chewed rather than inhaled.   But the idea that returning to the “glory” days of unrestrained pollution would bring us new jobs is as scientifically sound as advocating our health care return to leeches and bloodletting in the name of job creation.  A reality distortion field to be sure.

For less extreme lawmakers, Republicans or Democrats, to say, “We have enough regulations already, we can’t afford further environmental cleanup” is as absurd as my saying to patients, “Your family has had enough medical care already, we can’t afford to diagnose or treat any new diseases ...

Tis’ the Halloween season.  Be afraid, very afraid.  Eric Cantor, Orrin Hatch, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,  Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Herman Cain want you to be very afraid of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.  These politicians and pundits have called the OWS participants "badly educated," riot provoking, “dirty”, “lazy”, a “mob” of “anarchists”, “parasites”, “human debris”,  “marxists”, and “bizarre, aging hippies.”  Fox and Friends accused them of being “drug addicts.”  Glenn Beck warned, “They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill us.”  Well, I intend to join this mob of parasites and soon to be violent killers at Occupy Salt Lake City.  This is how scary I am.

I’m “a drug addict” that’s never used drugs...ever.  I’ve never even had a drink of alcohol...ever.  Never smoked cigarettes or pot...ever.   I went on a mission for the Mormon Church (just like you did, Mitt).  

Despite my “laziness” I have a job, work about 55 hours a week, plus 20 more hours for a non-profit, unpaid.  Despite my being a “parasite” I make enough money that I want the government to raise my taxes.  Despite being “badly educated” I have advanced degrees and have spent the last 37 years studying and teaching medical science.  Despite my wanting to “drag you out into the street and kill you,” I’ve managed to spend many nights during those 37 years helping drag some of you from the streets and provide life saving care for victims of car accidents and gun battles.

Despite being “human debris” according to Rush Limbaugh, I’ve managed to stay married to the same person for 40 years ...

Weeks ago I wrote an essay on America’s empathy crisis as the common denominator in our country’s hard right turn on a broad array of political issues.  The recent Republican presidential candidates debates revealed more than an empathy crisis.  The Tea Party audience of Sept. 12th’s debate revealed that for some of them callousness and selfishness are grossly insufficient to describe the depth of their inhumanity.One of literature’s and the movie screen’s most repulsive villains is Madam Defarge of Charles Dicken’s  A Tale of Two Cities.  She personified ruthlessness, revenge, and sadistic delight in other people’s pain, suffering and death.  Her ideological rigidity did not allow her to countenance any mercy.  Madam Defarge, meet your contemporaries, America’s Tea Party. My father was often the court appointed psychiatrist asked to evaluate the sanity of those accused of crimes, especially of high profile murders in Utah.  He interviewed the worst of the worst.  I remember in 1974 asking him about the accused killers in the “Hi-FI” murders, a brutal murder/robbery in a hi-fi store (that’s where you went to buy sound systems in case you are too young to know, or too old to remember) where several innocent people were tortured, raped and then shot by a pair of disturbed young thugs.In asking him about our justice system of jury trial, I will never forget his comment to me.  He said he would rather live in a society where nine out of ten murderers go free if that’s what it takes to make sure that an innocent man is not convicted or executed.  My dad was the anti-Rick Parry, and the rise of the Tea Party would make him roll over in his grave.Tea Partiers cheered when Rick Parry’s Guinness book of world records for state enacted executions was mentioned.  Parry, fresh from his stadium filled prayer ...

For Tea Party zealots it is impossible to utter, hear, read or write the words “freedom” and “liberty” too many times.  And of course to them the antithesis of freedom and liberty is the federal government, which they swear they will “take back.”  For them, taking back the government means restoring the freedom to not be able to afford health care, restoring the freedom to be unemployed without any unemployment insurance,  restoring the freedom to lose your home to mortgage fraud and your pension to criminal wall street bankers.  That doesn’t sound much like a “Party” to me, that sounds more like a nightmare.

Even though many of their devotees don’t realize it themselves, what the Tea Party Nightmare is actually selling is not freedom for you, but more freedom for corporate America to deny your freedom.   And this year no freedom is more important to the Tea Party Nightmare than the freedom for corporations to make you sick by polluting our air and water.  Every Republican presidential candidate and virtually every Republican Congressperson has joined the Tea Party Nightmare chorus in ranting against the EPA, and not just the EPA regulating greenhouse gases, but against everything the EPA does.  Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party Nightmare’s charmingly oblivious and truly frightening presidential pin up girl, proudly wants to abolish the EPA.  Not to be out done, pistol packin’ Rick Perry sounds like he wants to torture everyone who works there and shoot it with his gun before he abolishes it. 

The 1979 movie China Syndrome brought to life the danger of a nuclear reactor melt down.  Within weeks the first of real life melt downs occurred at Three Mile Island, then Chernobyl, then Fukushima.   China is now in total environmental “melt down”, a new version of the China Syndrome if you will.  ...

While the train wreck of the phony debt ceiling crisis occupied the media and voters for much of the last several weeks, public health and the environment were quietly being mugged in the back alley on Capital Hill by a ruthless gang of Tea Party Congressmen armed by a cabal of dirty energy corporations, chief among them Koch Industries. But this mugging will have permanent consequences for all Americans, including diminished quality of life, more cancer causing contamination of your water, dirtier air, poorer health, shorter life spans, and higher medical bills. Yes, you and your family are going to take a quite hit for the Koch Brothers team. But it will provide more billions in profits for these Titans of fossil fuel which is their noble contribution to “shared sacrifice.”

Multiple tactics and weapons are being used in this mugging. Contradicting every study that’s ever been done, the Tea Party gang started labeling the EPA, and its enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, “job killing” to persuade voters there was something sinister about environmental protection. Then they started their legislative machinations, like attaching dozens of “are you kidding me?” riders to the appropriations bill that funds the EPA.

Those riders include such gems as allowing uranium mining on the door step of the Grand Canyon, with the likelihood of contaminating the lower Colorado River and the drinking water for 30 million people. Mind you that right now the federal government is spending a billion dollars to clean up 50 year old uranium tailings near that same Colorado River at Moab, Utah. Other riders are as deranged and senseless as blocking the tougher fuel standards the Obama ...

 I'm sure everyone reading this already knows that our "debt crisis" is a mirage, a canard manipulated by the radical right wing who are theologically devoted to allowing society's rich to become even more so. Our supposed spending problem is nothing more than a "We won't tax the rich no matter what" problem. The media has played along; Pres. Obama and many of the Democrats are also playing along. And the political barometer has taken yet another sharp lurch to the right. But while we don't really have a debt crisis, we do have an empathy crisis and it's the empathy ceiling that has come crashing down on us and desperately needs to be raised.

Recall that in campaigning for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush actually advertised himself as a different breed of conservative, a "compassionate conservative". I'm under no illusion that this was anything other than Karl Rove branding "W" solely for the purpose of electability. (I went to high school with Karl ...

In the 2006 satirical science fiction comedy, Idiocracy, the protagonist Joe Bauers, “Mr. Average American", is selected by the Pentagon for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakens 500 years in the future, to discover a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive and their only hope for survival.With the Republicans bullying their way through state and federal legislation, the movie has become prophetic to the point where the only thing that isn't believable is that this devolution will take another 500 years. Idiocracy already has its living, fire-breathing poster child, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking Republican and former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.You may remember Rep. Barton as the Congressman who on behalf of the American people apologized to the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, for having our Gulf of Mexico get in the way of Hayward's oil spill. "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure. [It] amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."How about Barton’s grasp of CO2 as a greenhouse gas? “It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, doesn’t cause cancer... there’s nobody that’s ever been admitted to a hospital because of CO2 poisoning. Hell, “CO2 is in our Coca-Cola!”Even better is Barton's explanation of how wind power could speed up climate change. "Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to ...

Radiation from Japan is now detectable in the atmosphere, rain water and food chain in North America. Fukushima reactors are still out of control and hold 10 times more nuclear fuel than there was at Chernobyl, thousands of times more than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The official refrain is, “No worries here, perfectly harmless.” Our best scientists of the previous century would be rolling over in their graves.

In the 1940s many of the world’s premier nuclear scientists saw mounting evidence that there was no safe level of exposure to nuclear radiation. This led Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, to oppose development of the hydrogen bomb.

In the 1950s, Linus Pauling, the only two-time winner of the Nobel Prize, began warning the public about exposure to all radiation. This opinion, ultimately endorsed by thousands of scientists worldwide, led President John F. Kennedy to sign the nuclear test ban treaty.

In the 1960s, Drs. John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso and Karl Morgan, all researchers for the Atomic Energy Commission or the Department of Energy, independently came to the conclusion that exposure to nuclear radiation was not safe at any level.

The government terminated their services for coming up with what Dr. Gofman called the “wrong answer,” that is, the opposite of what the AEC wanted to hear. The top Russian nuclear physicist in the 1960s, Andrei Sakharov, also a Nobel Prize winner, and Vladimir Chernousenko, who the Soviet Union placed in charge of the Chernobyl cleanup, are among other international experts who drew similar conclusions.

To distract from the danger of man-made radioactivity, we hear from nuclear cheerleaders that watching TV and airline travel also expose us to radiation. True, although they never mention that flight crews have higher rates of breast and skin cancer. ...