Unknown Buddhist

Paul Ryan squeezed in time on a four-stop, five-state day for a conference call with evangelical voters Sunday evening, issuing a warning about a second Obama term saying the president is putting the country on a “dangerous path” that compromises “Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values.”

“It’s a dangerous path,” Ryan said on his opening remarks on the call. “It’s a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great an exceptional nation in the first place.“

This is insanity. Ryan might have just as well painted Obama as the anti-Christ and painted 666 on his forehead.

And that’s precisely my point. WTF is wrong with our leaders?  Ann Coulter calls Obama a retard. Sununu claims former General Powell supported Obama because he’s black. Sarah Palin stated the President performed a ‘shuck and jive shtick’ over the Libyan Embassy. Missouri Senate candidate claims there is such a thing as legitimate rape and Senate Republican candidate Richard Mourdock’s remarks about pregnancies resulting from rape being God’s will are just sick.    There’s simply nothing loving about rape.

So in light of the above, I find ironic Paul Ryan can claim Obama compromises the Judeo-Christian values. Seriously? Mr. Ryan, you are whacked. Go to a hospital right now. You don’t deserve to be Vice-President.

Ironically, CNN Politics indicated Ryan, a Roman Catholic, asked a priest he met at a restaurant Monday to bless a rosary he carries with him.

If this is the vision that God has in store, then He can keep it. Instead, I prefer what the Dali Lama tweeted:

“A mind wishing to benefit other people and other sentient beings is the very basis of peace and happiness.”

While President Obama made the decision to cancel scheduled campaign appearances this week in light of the disaster that Hurricane Sandy has brought to New York City, New Jersey, and a number of other states, including the key battleground state of Ohio, Mitt Romney just couldn’t pull the plug. Instead of doing the respectful thing and canceling his campaign appearance on Tuesday, just after Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, the Republican presidential candidate decided to re-brand his “Victory Rally” and call it “Relief Rally” instead.

The campaign decided that it would stage a photo op of Romney accepting food donations from supporters and loading up a truck with food after the event. But campaign staffers soon began to worry about the last minute nature of the call for donations, and worried that people wouldn’t show up with anything. To ensure that Romney wasn’t left without any donations and an empty truck, BuzzFeed reports that the campaign went out the night before the event and spent $5,000 at a local Wal-Mart. They bought up supplies like granola bars, canned food, and diapers. These items were then used as props to put on display while they waited for the real donations to show up. For their part, the campaign says that it donated relief supplies, but would not confirm an amount. What makes it all even more ridiculous is the fact that the Red Cross didn’t even want the items that Romney’s campaign collected. They’d have been better served with a $5,000 donations. Of course that wouldn’t be as nice of a photo op as standing by a table overflowing with canned goods.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full (Matt 6:5).“

After listening night after night about the current polls, I put the 2012 US Presidential Election, and key Senatorial races to the ‘Magic 8-Ball.’  I prewrote the questions, basically asking the 8-ball the same question for each race. I did not slight the answer to any one candidate’s election. I simply asked the question and recorded the 8-Ball’s response.

Per Wikipedia, the Magic 8 Ball is a hollow plastic sphere resembling an oversized, black and white 8-ball. Inside is a cylindrical reservoir containing a white, plastic, icosahedral die floating in alcohol with dissolved dark blue  dye. Each of the 20 faces of the die has an affirmative, negative, or non-committal statement printed on it in raised letters. There is a transparent window on the bottom of the Magic 8 Ball through which these messages can be read.

To use the ball, it must be held with the window initially facing down. After “asking the ball” a yes-no question, the user then turns the ball so that the window faces up, setting in motion the liquid and die inside. When the die floats to the top and one of its faces is pressed against the window, the raised letters displace the blue liquid to reveal the message as white letters on a blue background. Although many users shake the ball before turning it upright, the instructions warn against doing so because it can lead to bubbles.

The Magic 8-Ball has responded to the following US Candidate races accordingly:

At this writing, I participate in a healthcare clinic in the farmlands of Washington. Due largely to the demands of their jobs and poor living conditions, migrant farmworkers have higher rates of work-related injuries, chronic conditions, acute illnesses and infectious diseases compared with other populations. Complicating matters is the fact that farmworkers often are impoverished, uninsured and foreign-born, which means many face financial, cultural and language barriers to receiving health care. Most migrant farmworkers earn annual incomes below the poverty level and few receive benefits such as Social Security or worker’s compensation.

The transient nature of the work often prevents migrants from establishing any local residency. That simple fact excludes them from benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps. The majority are either U.S. citizens or legal residents of the United States. Some foreign workers enter the United States under guest-worker programs when there are not enough available workers to satisfy the demand.

Still, like the one I currently am at, there are approximately 159 migrant health centers scattered across the country. These clinics and associated healthcare fares are partially funded by federal grants. Unfortunately, many clinics are poorly located. For instance, in Louisiana, there is only one such clinic. It sits in the rural town of Independence, which is tucked in the southeast corner of the state near the Mississippi border.

Although many of the migrant farmworkers seen are relatively young, many have complicating diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and other metabolic conditions. Chronic diseases tend to develop earlier among migrants because many are too poor to buy nutritious food and few receive preventive care. And from our informal poll, only 20% of migrant and seasonal farmworkers reported seeking any health care services during the past several years.

Upon further research, I learned farmer workers have virtually no rights under federal labor laws: no right to days off, no right to overtime and no right to collective bargaining.  On average, migrant field workers earn about $26.00 a day or about $.06 per piece of fruit picked. An onion picker usually nets 60 sacks of onions daily equating to $.65 per sack for a whopping $39.00.

Children of migrant farm laborers stay at home. There is no education. Many start working in the fields at 8 years old. Within two years they work as hard as as others, but it’s still a lot of work at just 10 years old. When children work, they don’t keep any of all the money. Their parents keep most of the money earned to pay bills or other things.

As I sit and watch the workers move about, it seems very strange. Slavery is one of the things that everyone agrees is unethical. In fact there is such general agreement that most people would probably say that ‘slavery is wrong just because it’s wrong.’ Yet, when we go to the market and complain about the high cost of fruits and vegetables, do we really think about it? We do not find this at all that unethical?

I will continue to think in the moment … and just how damn lucky I have it.

Krista Tippet of “On Being” interviewed the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks in 2010. He’s one of the world’s great thinkers on the promise and perils of religion.

The following is an excerpt:

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Lord Sacks: … the thing that really changed my life, was standing at Ground Zero, you know, a couple of months afterwards. In January — well, it was January 2002 — together with the Archbishop of Canterbury and religious leaders throughout the world. And we were looking at this wreckage, this sheer harm that hate can do and yet, at the same time, here we all were in friendship, fellowship, and shared prayer. And I just saw how clearly that those are the terms of the equation. Do we go that way, or do we go this.”

Ms. Tippett: And I wonder if when you became Chief Rabbi in 1991 if it would have surprised you that, at this point, 10 years into the 21st century, even just a few years into the 21st century, religion had risen so utterly to the surface of global life.

Lord Sacks: No, actually. In 1990, the BBC asked me to give the Reith Lectures. They’re given once a year. There are six lectures on radio, first given by Bertrand Russell in 1948. I was only the second religious leader to give them, and I called them The Persistence of Faith. It was probably the first response to Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the end of the history. You know, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Soviet Union had collapsed, end of Cold War. Everyone was seeing what he foresaw as the, you know, seamless spread of liberal democracy over the world.

And I said no, actually. I think you’re going to see faith return and return in a way that will cause some problems because the most powerful faith in the modern world will be the faith most powerfully opposed to the modern world. So that was in 1990, the year before I became Chief Rabbi. Nothing that’s happened since has surprised me, though it has saddened me. Religion is a great power and anything that powerful can be a force for good or, God forbid, for evil. But it’s certainly fraught and dangerous and needs great wisdom and, you know, great — if I can use this word — gentleness.

Ms. Tippett: So I’d like to talk about the ideas that you brought forward in The Dignity of Difference and I think have continued to develop ever since. You know, I remember a very intelligent, excellent American journalist commentator after September 11, 2001; he made a statement that what those events demonstrated was that, in order for the three monotheistic religions in particular to survive and be constructive members of society in the 21st century, they would have to relinquish their exclusive truth claims. I think that sounded like it made a lot of sense to many people.

The case you make in The Dignity of Difference is also aimed towards the traditions being constructive parts of the 21st century, but you take that in a different direction. So let’s talk about how it is possible in your imagination to retain the essence, the truth claims, of Judaism and also, as you say, honor the dignity of difference, understand one’s self to be enlarged rather than threatened by religious others.

Lord Sacks: Thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, we know that all life, everything, you know, all the 3 million species of life and plant life — all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God.

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I believe we are all brothers and sisters, totally interdependent. What hurts one, hurts us all. And how we handle and resolve of difficulties and trials is totally dependent upon whether we become a population of peace or a population of hate.

So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all our emotional needs would be met and realized. Thus we would have everything to be happy. That very sentence already reveals the fate of happiness: destruction.

To have everything, as if we miss something. And also, when things go wrong, we try to repair and control everything, but our control is limited, transitory, and misconception. For example, in the Middle East, in looking at all that violence for the Prophet Muhammad I have one question, “What exactly did all that killing accomplish?” What did all the hatred and anger create? How did all this better your world or humanity? Instead, as the days and months move forward, I look to the message of love Ambassador Christopher Stevens had for the people of Libya versus the despicable acts of Terry Jones, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and others, by looking the depths of our soul, at the very anger itself.

Wouldn’t it be nice to build something greater from within than hatred itself?  Wouldn’t it be nice to live in the love that God and Allah had chosen for us? Isn’t it possible to transform our minds, to transform the very nature of who we are?

Our world is not that unlike a mirror, after a long sleep, everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, rises to the top and becomes reflective. Thus, the violent protests which erupted in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories is nothing more than a part of our soul, of the world’s soul. It’s hurting. And thus, like any pain sensor of our own body, it rises and finds its way to all who surround us.

On CNN’s Belief Blog, noted author Brian D. McLarenr phrased the argument quite well:

“If I could get one message through to my evangelical friends, it would be this: The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety.

The broad highway of us-them thinking and the offense-outrage-revenge reaction cycle leads to self-destruction. There is a better way, the way of Christ who, when reviled, did not revile in return, who when insulted, did not insult in return, and who taught his followers to love even those who define themselves as enemies.

Yes, “they” – the tiny minority of Muslims who turn piety into violence – have big problems of their own. But the way of Christ requires all who claim to be Christians to examine our own eyes for planks before trying to perform first aid on the eyes of others. We must admit that we have our own tiny minority whose message and methods we have not firmly, unitedly and publicly repudiated and rejected.“

Meditators and great meditators (unlike me) alike have been reflecting on pain for a very long time. In truth, meditation will not pay the bills, feed to poor, trim your nails, complete your daily tasks, paint the deck, wash the car, or fill the gas tank. But what it does do is allow us to release the pain and negativity of all that hatred and resentment.   And by releasing anger, we reveal compassion. And compassion is what can be placed into accomplishment.

If we do so, we will never have to hide.

Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan spoke at the Values Voter Summit. A couple of quick comments are quoted as follows:

“We’re all in this together” – it has a nice ring. For everyone who loves this country, it is not only true but obvious. Yet how hollow it sounds coming from a politician who has never once lifted a hand to defend the most helpless and innocent of all human beings, the child waiting to be born.

Giving up any further pretense of moderation on this issue, and in complete disregard of millions of pro-life Democrats, President Obama has chosen to pander to the most extreme elements of his party.

“In the Clinton years, the stated goal was to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” But that was a different time, and a different president. Now, apparently, the Obama-Biden ticket stands for an absolute, unqualified right to abortion – at any time, under any circumstances, and even at taxpayer expense.

When you get past all of the President’s straw men, what we believe is plain to state: These vital questions should be decided, not by the caprice of unelected judges, but by the conscience of the people and their elected representatives. And in this good-hearted country, we believe in showing compassion for mother and child alike.

We don’t write anyone off in America, especially those without a voice. Every child has a place and purpose in this world. Everyone counts, and in a just society the law should stand on the side of life.”

Ideally Mr. Ryan is right, but reality is far off the mark. Do you want a vision of what compassion for mother and child alike? Rebecca Onie, founder of Health Leads, has a viewpoint. Here’s a summary of her thoughts.

“We’ve had a clients about to be evicted because they haven’t paid rent. But they can’t pay rent because they’re paying for HIV, cancer, diabetes or some other medication. They simply can’t afford both.  One mother brought her in daughter. The daughter has asthma but wakes up covered in cockroaches. But since she is uneducated, has little access to resources paying better than minimum wage, she paid 60% of her income in a rancid housing unit, in one of the worst blocks of the city. Every day mothers bring children with an ear infections. The doctors prescribe antibiotics. But the real issue is there’s no food at home. The real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment. And we don’t even ask about those issues because there’s nothing we can do.

Each doctor has 13 minutes with each patient. And because the need is so great, patients pile up in the clinic waiting room. And for these people, help is rare. In one clinic in Boston, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients. That’s better than the rural poor.”

So, do you really think we, as in America, truly shows compassion for mother and child alike? And do you really believe either the Republican or Democrat Party will?

According to the 2012 Republican National Convention: “Romney claims to have a plan that will create 12 million new jobs.”

More or less, I believe the statement is a sales pitch to long-term unemployed who believe Romney and Ryan actually have a plan.  And while it sounds ambitious it’s not entirely impossible. But Romney would need to create 250,000 jobs per month for four years from the moment he takes office.  But Romney’s job plan specifics don’t exist and without them, there’s no telling how he and Ryan would increase military spending, cut taxes, restore over $700 billion to Medicare, meet the government’s core obligations and bring down deficits. In other words, it’s a pipe-dream to anyone willing to smoke it.

But’s let’s explore this a little. Maybe the economy will become reignited once the ‘Job Killing,’ ‘Job Crushing,’ ‘Job Destroying’ Health Care Bill gets repealed?  Yeah, yeah! That’s it. It’s about healthcare. Boehner and company have often quoted the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as the source of their original analysis. But the budget office, which referees the costs and consequences of legislation, never produced an excessive ‘Job Killing,’ ‘Job Crushing,’ ‘Job Destroying’ number.

What the CBO actually said is that the impact of the health care law on supply and demand for labor would be small. Most of it would come from people, once covered, would no longer have to work or those that can downshift to less demanding employment because insurance will be available outside the job. That would reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount, roughly half a percent. And that half-percent equates to 650,000 jobs.

So, that leaves Romney with about 11.4 million jobs left to create. Well, damn … then it has to be the “…out of control government spending.” Yeah! Yeah! That’s it: an out of control government. According to Boehner’s website:

“The policies of the Obama Administration – out-of-control government spending, excessive regulations on small businesses, unnecessary barriers to responsible production of American-made energy, and the constant threat of increased taxes on private-sector job creators – continue to present a great challenge to economic growth in the United States. “

But as its been noted time and time again, on paper, the U.S. has a high statutory corporate tax rate. However, U.S. corporations actually pay incredibly low taxes due to the ever-proliferating loopholes, credits, and deductions in the tax code and the use of overseas tax havens.  Thus, U.S. corporate taxes actually paid fell to a 40 year low of 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2011, despite corporate profits rebounding to their pre-Great Recession heights.

The U.S. both taxes its corporations less and raises less in revenue from corporate taxes than its foreign competitors. In truth, US companies are still sitting on a trillion dollar plus cash mountain, but this hasn’t changed the fact that U.S. corporations continue to tuch away hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.

So in keeping with a “right speech” theme, I will lay it out for you. At the end of the day, the Republicans want the White House back and Romney does not need a job plan. So what’s the secret Romney-Ryan don’t expound upon? Well as the Washington Post points out, Moody’s Analytics predicts 12 million jobs by 2016, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

That’s why Romney cannot produce a job’s plan: it’s simply part of the natural employment cycle.

From a perspective of ‘right speech,’ I give Romney a lot credit for pretty much holding to the higher ground.  Thus, when comparing Mr. Ryan with Mr. Romney, one appears to get the ‘good cop-bad cop’ routine. In rewinding Romney’s speech through my head last night, I remembered an email I recently read, “…he’s banking on Americans having total amnesia about 2001-2009, including failed wars and a multiple increase of the national debt.”

In truth, for a ‘speech of a lifetime,’ the policy portion was void of any detail. As listener, I found myself affirming the question that yes indeed I may not be better off than I was four years ago, but I certainly found no substance in how Mr. Romney and Ryan would actually make my life any better.

To that end, I found Romney’s speech more a checklist speech. Discuss family background. Check! Honor women. Check! Disparage the Chinese and Iran. Check! Check! Check! Check! But unless I feel asleep, we heard no plans for the country. There was almost no mention of his budget, tax, health care or Medicare plans.

To answer those magic questions, I visited the Romney-Ryan campaign site. So here’s a quick summary:

1. On Taxes: Mr. Romney supports a fundamental redesign of the existing U.S. tax system. Great. Every four years, some candidate throws out the gauntlet of redesigning the tax rate. Unfortunately, his website does not actually detail exactly how’s he’s going to do that nor how he would manage the subsequent mess of said redesign.
2. On Taxes: Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax.  Tax Policy Center (TPC) reported the four major new tax cuts in the Ryan plan, including repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, and repealing the tax increases in health reform would cost $4.6 trillion in lost federal revenue over the next ten years. All four revenue-losing measures would disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans. Romney fails to mention how his policies would replace the $4.6 trillion.
3. On China: As President, Mr. Romney will work to enforce stronger protections of our Intellectual Property in an effort to ensure proper renumeration for our technological accomplishments. This is nothing more than a sound bite. Every candidate says this. But to get an entire business community who rely upon cheap Asian labor to manufacture their products in supporting actual sanctions would be on par with the second coming of Christ.
4. On Spending: Governor Romney wants major cuts in spending, by a reform of Medicaid, wage alignments, federal workforce reductions and undertaking a major restructuring of government programs and services. Mr. Romney supports capping federal spending at 20% of GDP and wishes to pursue a Balanced Budget Amendment. Another sound bite. Sounds great. In truth, needs to be done. However, Romney’s fails to clarify his definition of ‘major.’ There are no details of what Romney would restructure, which federal workforce would be reduced.

Continuing the entitlement perspective for a moment, Ryan lambasted Obama for failing to act on a deficit-reduction plan that he himself helped to kill. He chided Democrats for seeking the same $716 billion in Medicare cuts he sought. And he admonished Obama for the nation’s credit rating, which was downgraded after a debt-ceiling standoff that he and other Republicans instigated.

Borrowing a quote from the movie “The American President,” all I’ve heard from Democrats and Republicans is “… two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.” In truth, while I can unequivocally state I dislike where America is at the moment, I still don’t know what Romney’s for, except to say he seems to be for winning and against Obama winning.

Damn … Where’s the beef?

If it’s clear to anyone, most Democrats and Republicans have vastly different visions about of America, but for Paul Ryan to openly critique Obama’s vision as “a government-planned life, where everything is free but us” pretty much insults everyone. And blaming Obama for an auto plant closing that occurred under the Bush administration was one of many pretty blatant lies.

But that’s the difficulty in politics; it is the listener who must spend endless hours vetting the parched words of hypocrisy.

What’s missing from both Democrats and Republicans, and most campaigns for that matter, is that right speech is truthful and life giving. It is caring, straight forward, peaceful, never vulgar or hypocritical. Would any man, of any good faith, be honored by either campaign? Probably not!

Right Speech has four aspects:

1. Not lying, but speaking the truth;
2. Avoiding rude and coarse words, but using gentle speech beneficial to the listener;
3. Not slandering, but promoting friendliness and unity; and
4. Avoiding frivolous speech, but saying only what is appropriate and beneficial.

An essay written by Thanissaro Bhikkhu stated right speech means speaking in a trustworthy manner. All of us need to be harmonious, comforting, and worthy. When one makes a practice of right speech, one’s words become a gift to others. In response, other people will start listening more to what you say and most are likely to respond in kind. This gives the speaker a sense of the power of actions. Thus, the way you act in the present moment does shape the world of your experience.

From a view point of the RNC crowd, Paul Ryan made a great speech. Many will dispute much of the points made, but what both Democrats and Republicans know is that the listener cannot adequately scrutinize content as its being delivered. A speech like the one given by Ryan gives the speaker an unchallenged platform to define the RNC party and his world.

Was Ryan’s speech a gift to all listening? Was the speech truthful, honest and unifying? Not on your life.