RECKLESS JOURNALISTS AND ALL GOVERNEMNT IS BAD

STAY OUT. IT AIN'T WORTH IT.

This message goes out to young, inexperienced aspiring journalists.

There are some stories that are not worth it, especially when the story becomes you.

This week's announcement that the regime in North Korea sentenced Americans Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years of hard labor following their arrests a couple of months ago for illegally entering the country, should come as no surprise. This is on the heels of a similar set of occurrences in Iran where Roxana Saberi was arrested, tried and sentenced, but then released and returned to the U.S. roughly a week later.

The simple fact is that to get youself in such a perilous situation is nothing short of stupid. Dogs and small children use more common sense. In the case of Ling and Lee, both were working for Current TV, which is owned, at least in part, by Al Gore. I am a long time admirer and supporter of Mr. Gore but in this case, either he and/or his associates demonstrated a glaring lack of common sense and responsibility in allowing the two women to cross over the NK border from China to do this story. They were apparently investigating whether North Korean citizens were slipping over the border into China in search of food as well as rumors of North Korean women being trafficked into China for sex (geez, don't you think you were a male in a country of 1.5 billion people there would already be a fair number of babes for you to have sex with?) Anyway, Ling is especially well known for her daring (and often risky) reporting on everything from the drug war in Columbia to reports from the field in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a former journalist, I appreciate, especially when so much of reporting has gone "soft" in recent years, the willingness to do stories on difficult subjects. Nevertheless, you do reach a point where you need to be prudent and put on the brakes. Regardless of how brutal the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il is and how equally repressive things are in Iran, the fact is that the careless behavior of three people has forced the U.S. Government into a tricky and quite unnecessary series of diplomatic moves to get their asses out of jail. In the case of North Korea, this mucks up trying to get them to get out of the nuclear weapons business.

In the end, the stories the three sought to report have been eclipsed by the stories about them and their lack of clear thinking.

I WANT A NURSE STANDING BETWEEN MY DOCTOR AND ME!!

One of the latest arguments by the Republicans, who are trying their best to scuttle anything resembling health care reform, is asking the question of whether we want the government "standing between us and our doctor." I suppose, at least in my case, the answer is "no" especially if he is about to given me a digital prostate exam. Otherwise, I am rather OK with the idea and especially after the evidence clearly shows that riding the train of private insurance for many decades has lead to a nightmare derailment for the majority of Americans.

This position by the Republicans and their supporters triggers in me a need to look at the bigger picture and to shed a little historical light on this subject of government in our lives.

Whenever we start to whisper about a national or public health care program in this country, invariably there is comparison to the rest of the world. The all-government-is-evil crowd somehow dredges up the arguments that have been thrown out there for years that once our health care system becomes run by the government, Americans will start dropping like flies because the system won't be able to deliver, we won't get the treatment we need, you will have to wait at least seven years to get in for a routine physical and America has the best health care system in the world otherwise why would kings, queens and prime ministers all come to the Mayo Clinic. All those people in Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Spain, Luxembourg, China, Japan, the Netherlands, etc., are racked with disease, rarely live past seventy-five, have unhealthy babies, are fat, out-of-shape slobs and spend a disproportionate percentage of their annual income on health care.

No, sorry. That's the situation in the U.S.

Which brings up another, yet related, issue. The anti-government mind set in America.

For almost all of my life (and I'm 65) a very large segment of the American populace has bought into the premise that all government is bad and dysfunctional. Despite the recent, massive and well-publicized failures of huge segments of the private sector, too many Americans automatically assume that bright, competent and successful people all reside in the private sector while the public sector is mostly comprised of knuckle-dragging, lazy, paper-shuffling, stupid louts.

So, let's take a look at some of the many things the government does so badly:

* Delivers the mail.
* Fights fires and quickly responds to medical emergencies.
* Runs the military, which for over 200 years has had a very high success rate (OK, there was Vietnam.)
* Controls the takeoffs and landings of thousands of aircraft every day.
* Operates the largest national park system in the world.
* Gets tens of millions of people their Social Security checks on time each month.
* Monitors the foods and drugs we ingest.
* Oversees a legal system, which is the envy of almost all of the rest of the world.
* Issues you a fishing or hunting license in a matter of minutes.
* Administers a system of voting which, despite occasional screw-ups, works wonderfully.
* Enforces a document and its attached amendments, which protects us from them and each other. That would be the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Mr. and Mrs. Anti-Government. I hope you appreciate it. It gives you and all Americans the right to openly voice your opinion without reprisal even though your opinions are often flawed.