Excerpt from Trapped published by Xlibris.

TRAPPED DANIEL C. MERRILL MD Introduction Dr Donald W. Hastings was Professor and Chairman of the Psychiatric Department at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center when the transsexual program began in 1966. This world renowned psychiatrist had spent much of his professional life studying gender identification problems and had become convinced that, irrespective of its cause, which remains unknown to this day, people with transsexualism could not be treated successfully with medication or any form of psychological or psychiatric therapy. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the best, and indeed the only, option for people afflicted with this kind of gender disorder was to grant their wishes and, by surgery, transform them into members of the opposite sex. At the time, these sex-reassignment surgical procedures were called sex-change operations by the lay press. The majority of transsexuals are men who believe they are females who somehow became trapped in a male's body. A few, about one in seven, are females who consider themselves to be males. I do not recall having been involved in any female to male sex-change operations during my tenure at the University from 1996 to 1973. However, my mentor Professor Colin Markland, who led the surgical team that performed the sex-change operations, informs me that he carried out four or five female to male procedures before the program was discontinued in the mid-1970's. Although it doesn't seem so today, the sex-change operations Dr Hastings purposed were considered to be extremely radical in the 1960's. A handful had been performed in Europe over the previous 20 or 30 years, but the operation had been outlawed in most of the civilized world. I doubt that he would have been able to get his research program approved in the culturally conservation state of Minnesota if it were not for the high esteem Dr Hastings was held in the medical community. In those days, there was a significant fear that transsexualism might be some type of temporary mental aberration and many of those who were skeptical of sex-reassignment surgery worried that a transsexual might change his mind after surgery, which was irreversible, and regret having undergone the procedure. Dr Hastings was not one them, since his extensive experience treating patients with gender disorders led him to the opposite conclusion. His experience, to the contrary, suggested that once an child or adult thought they were a male or a female, they never changed their minds. Furthermore, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to alter the way they viewed themselves, with respect to their sexual identity. Nonetheless, possibly in part to placate his critics as well as to assure that he didn't make a mistake, Dr Hastings set up an comprehensive program to evaluate prospective candidates for sex-change surgery. Patients who were candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had to be referred to him by someone in the psychiatric community before they were accepted into his research program at the University. Thus, prospective candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had been studied extensively before they walked through the front doors of the University hospital. Once considered a candidate for surgery he, or she, was admitted to the psychiatric ward where they underwent an extensive one month period of observation by a special team of doctors and nurses whose sole purpose was to determine if the candidate was a true transsexual. One can only imagine the chicanery these males were subjected to by the sexy and cunning nurses Dr Hastings had recruited to help him unearth unworthy candidates for his transsexual program. Apparently, one glance at the long legs of one of his attractive nurses was enough to send you packing. As we will see as the this novel unfolds, a person could be rejected as a candidate for surgery simply because an evaluator felt that something just didn't feel right about the situation. Dr. Hastings was taking no chances, his reputation and, indeed, the reputation of the University, depended on him making the right choices every time, no if ands or buts about it. Dr. Donald Creevy, a world renowned figure in Urology and a man in his late 60s, was Professor and Chairman of the Division of Urology at the University in 1966 when his staff performed the second sex-change operation in the United States. Dr. Hastings, a man of the same age, was one of his best friends and closest confidants. I knew Dr Creevy to be an extremely conservative individual and one can only speculate as to his reaction to Dr Hastings's request that the Urologists on his staff perform the mutilating procedures inherent in the sex-change operations. In the end, however, he agreed to allow the members of his staff perform the procedures. Dr Creevy was at the end of his long and distinguished surgical career at the time and no longer performed open surgical procedures, confining himself primarily to transurethral resections of the prostate, a procedure he had pioneered years before. He delegated the performance of the sex-change operations to his junior partner Colin Markland an Englishman who had immigrated to the United States several years before. Dr. Markland, who is now in his early 80s, tells me that Dr. Creevy had no interest in transsexuals or, more to the point, sex-change operations. In 1966 Dr Markland was rapidly establishing himself as a leading American Urologic Surgeon. As I recall, he had more innovative ideas each day than most stray dogs have flees. I can safely say, now some 46 years later, that Dr Markland could hardly wait to sink his teeth into the challenges inherent in the surgical transformation of a man into a woman. I came to the University as a first year resident in Urology in 1966. I was a third assistant in Shalimar's surgery in the fall of that year. It was one of the most exiting days of my young life. Six years later, as a junior member of the University's Urology staff, I was performing the procedures myself with the assistance of our residents and under the ever watchful eye of my mentor Dr. Markland. I have selected three of the fifteen or so transsexuals I met and cared for at the University as the main characters of this novel. These people were real and I have made every attempt to portray them as accurately as possible. Unfortunately, at this point in time, all these years later, I do not recall, with the exception of the Cuban dancer Shalimar's stage name, their actual names. I never did know much about their lives before, or for that matter after surgery, with the exception of one person, the truck driver. This person, and her husband, subsequently moved to California in the 1980's and I met her again when she resurfaced at the Martinez Veterans Administration Medical Center Hospital in Martinez California where I spent the last years of my career as Chief of Urology. I selected these three individuals because I felt that they each had a unique story to tell with respect to their lives as transsexuals before, and in one instance, after sex-reassignment surgery. Hopefully, the lives I created for these people reflects what they endured to become normal in the way that each of us considers ourselves to be either a normal male or a female. Finally, my experience strongly supports the hypothesis that Dr. Hastings championed nearly 50 years ago, once a transsexual always a transsexual. He was right, it's futile to try to talk them out of it!

The Last Days of Saint Nicholas Daniel C. Merrill MD

"I'm definitely getting too old for this," Nicholas said to his best friend and lead reindeer Rudolf. "How long have I been Santa Claus do you think?" "I don't know that I can rightly recall," replied Rudolf, "but it must be close to 300 years, give or take a decade or two." Nicholas' sainted father, the first Santa Claus, had learned to communicate with reindeer years before Nicholas was born. His father taught Nicholas the reindeer language shortly before he was killed by an errant meteorite that hit his sleigh while he and his reindeer were making their rounds on that fateful Christmas eve night in the year 1842. Nicholas had inherited his father's job and, with the help of his faithful reindeer, had been navigating through the cold Christmas Eve nights ever since. With the exception of a few times when the weather was so bad that mail could not be delivered to the north pole, Nicholas and his reindeer never failed to deliver the books, toys and dolls that the good boys and girls of the world had requested in their letters to Santa. Nicholas also made sure that he never ran out of lumps of coal for the stockings of children who had not been so good. But Nicholas was getting old and Rudolph was also beginning to feel the ravages of age."You know Rudolph," Nicholas said, " my eye sight isn't what it used to be and I'm having a fair amount of difficulty navigating by the stars now days." "I'm a little afraid that we might not be able to find our way home this year." "I'm not feeling so great myself," replied Rudolph, "My poor old nose isn't as bright as it used to be and the arthritis in my right rear hoof won't let me fly nearly as fast as I could when you first asked me to lead your sleigh." "In truth, I just don't know how much longer I can go on. I know Vixen and Prancer aren't feeling very well either. Vixen was saying just the other day, when the elves were packing the toys in the back of the sleigh, that his arthritis was so bad that he could barely walk. Our Prancer can't exercise anymore and has gained so much weight during the off season that it will be difficult for him to get into his harness, let alone fly any great distance." "Obviously, it's time to call it quits," Nicholas said, "in fact, it's long past time that we retired." Rudolph placed both of his front hoofs on Nickolas' shoulders, looked sadly into his old friends eyes and began to cry as he shook his stately antlered head in agreement. It was only a month before Christmas and that left Nicholas very little time. He had to make certain that those presents were delivered on Christmas Eve night, just as they had been for almost three centuries. Nicholas called his friend, billionaire Bill Gates, and asked for help. "Bill," he said, "we're in big trouble up here at the North Pole. My reindeer and I are too old and infirm to make the Christmas run this year. An awful lot of children are going to be very disappointed if we don't deliver their Christmas presents on time." "I've made a tentative deal with UPS They have agreed to deliver the presents on Christmas Eve night as has always been the case. Our friend Scott Davis at UPS has even agreed to dress their drivers up in Santa Clause suits if we are willing to pay a little extra for the deliveries. Unfortunately, Mrs. Nicholas and I do not have the resources to finance an operation of this size, could you help?" "Of course, I can," Mr. Gates Replied without hesitation. "Look Nicholas, I'm a little tied up right at the moment with some pressing problems involving the famine in the Congo. Just have Scott send me the bill, If he wants to, he can call me." So it came to pass. The children's Christmas presents were delivered on time and no one was the wiser. Nicholas gave his toy factory at the North Pole to his grandson Max who wanted to become the next Santa Claus. He packed up all of his possessions, including the sleigh, and moved to an island in the Caribbean. He and his beloved reindeer spent their last days swimming in the warm ocean water and building sand castles with their newfound monkey friends on the beautiful black sand beaches under the shade of the magnificent palm trees which lined the island's shore.

What would be the best Christmas present ever for our children? Arm their teachers!

The resent Newtown massacre of innocent children and their helpless teachers was a blow to all of us and a indelible stain on what little is left of our degenerate society. I expect most of you have spent a sleepless night or two struggling with the implications of this senseless slaughter, as I have. We all can agree that something should be done to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy but there is no consensus of what that something should be. As usual, the politicians have turned this catastrophe into a political tug of war between the uninformed liberals (think stupid) who never saw a gun they did not dislike and the conservatives who will not give an inch on the gun rights issue, come hell or high water. A pox on both their houses! Let me say up front, that I have nothing against reasonable gun control, whatever that is, because, it will not make a lick of difference how many AK 47s or machine pistols you have hidden away in your house when the Feds come up your driveway with that humongous Sherman Tank, none at all! Furthermore, I would be willing give up all of my firearms if it would prevent future Newtown like massacres. Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that gun control laws, no matter how strict, reduce the crime rate one iota or increase the safety of our children while they are attending their pathetically ineffective socialist schools. In the first place, the most horrendous massacres ever on American soil were carried out by malcontents who used dynamite (1927 Bath school house massacre in which 34 children and 6 adults were killed) and a fertilizer bomb (Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 160 adults and children with ingredients he bought at the local feed store) to carry out their evil deeds. Second, cities like Chicago, which have the highest murder rates, not surprisingly have the strictest gun laws in the United States. Similarly, countries which have the toughest gun laws (Brazil, Russia and Mexico) also have the highest murder rates in the world. Finally, one more example to nail this thing down once and for all! Norway has extremely strict gun laws yet Anders Britvic was able to mow down 69 individuals, mostly youngsters, with an automatic rifle. No Mable, strict gun laws do not prevent crimes of any type and most assuredly they do not prevent mass murders! Along these same lines, as John Lott points out in More Guns Less Crime, that states with the fewest guns have the most crime and the states that have the most guns have the least crime. This is particularly the case in states that allow their citizens to carry concealed weapons, these states have the lowest crime rate of all. By the way, remember the Los Angles riots of 1992? Watts was literally destroyed except for the businesses ran by the Korean shop owners who protected their property from the roof tops with automatic weapons. The fact is that guns do not kill anyone any more than does an SUV. No, bad guys kill people, especially mentally ill bad guys. There are not enough mental hospitals in all the world to lockup all these walking time bombs. So what do we do? Fortunately, for our most precious treasure, our children and grand children, the answerer is quite simple. We arm our teachers! Yes, I am proposing the only solution to the school massacre crisis that makes any sense. Not only should we encourage our teachers to learn how to shoot a gun and carry firearms, but we should pay them an extra bonus to do it. I also suggest that any school employee who kills one of these evil crazies who threaten our children should be rewarded handsomely, say immediate retirement at full salary and free medical care for life. Maybe even a onetime gift of $500,000 as a show of appreciation for preventing a school ground massacre would be appropriate. No locked doors, no hiding under the desks or in the closet, no razor wire fences, no metal detectors, no well meaning unarmed fools standing around in camouflage fatigues twiddling their fingers, none of that expensive and meaningless BS. Just teachers that will shoot your sorry ass if you look cross-eyed at one of our children. There I've said it and I feel much better for having done so! Happy Christmas!

Read what others have said about Trapped.

"I think the author is right, people with gender identification and sexual preference abnormalities are born with their wires crossed and there is nothing we can do about it, so we might as well accept them for what they are and get on with life." - Jim Bell "I had no real idea of what it might be like to be a transsexual before reading Trapped. Dr. Merrill's book should be required reading in every high school in America, in the world for that matter. Maybe Secretary of State Clinton should take a copy or two along with her the next time she visits one of those Middle Eastern countries where they stone gays and lesbians." - Cecil Hardgrave "The material in this book is amazing! I had no real understanding of the condition called transsexualism before reading Trapped or to what lengths a person would go to change their sexual identity. The author paints a bigger than life picture of the characters in his story. Reading about their attempts to escape the bodies in which they were born changed my whole perspective on the issue of gender identification and made me take another look at the plight of homosexuals and the issue of gay and lesbian marriage." - Jim Hipkins "As Dr. Merrill points out, there is a lot we don't know about gender identification problems. The author makes a compelling case for those of us who were somehow born with the wrong genitalia or sexual orientation. I hope this book leads to a better understanding of what it means to be a transsexual, gay or lesbian person. Hopefully, society will accept us for what we are and forget about trying to change us into something that we aren't." - Philip Hillier

Lets Pay Them Not To Have Babies!

Lyndon Baines Johnson, that shining star of liberal logic who gave us the great society, did more to destroy America than any person in the twentieth century. You recall this is the guy who picked up his beagle dogs by the ears and told us they liked it. This buffoon didn't know much about dogs and knew even less about human behavior One of the lessons to be learned from Johnson's failed social experiments is this, it doesn't pay to reward single women for having children, especially if they are women of color. There simply are not enough black grandmothers to raise all of these unwanted children and not enough prisons to house them when they get into trouble with the law as teenagers and young adults. Now here's a thought. Paying women to have kids does not work, but what if we paid them not to have children? To test my theory, that it would be cost effective to pay single women not to have babies, let's begin by paying the 13.7 million single moms in the country not to have additional children. All of the monies now provided to them to support their broods will be continued, but we will give them an additional $5000 if they agree to have a Norplant injection to prevent them from becoming pregnant again for the next five years. At the end of the five years we will give them an additional $5000 if they agree to have a second Norplant injection. This voluntary birth control program would be continued for a total of 20 years at a cost of $20,000 per participant; thus, assuring that the vast majority of single mothers who participated in the study would not conceive again during their child bearing years. I think you will agree that this is one social policy that we all can get behind. Lots of free stuff and far fewer unwanted children to feed, cloth, and educate. The total cost of the program, assuming full participation by all single mothers, would be around $27.5 billion dollars annually. Admittedly, that's a lot of money to spend on a trial balloon of this kind. But maybe cheap at twice the price given the alternative, which is to continue the status quo. Consider this statistic for a moment. Benjamin Scafidi PhD, a Georgia State University economist, has shown that single mothers cost the tax payers of this country a whopping $112 billion a year. These expenditures in tax, or more correctly debt monies, does not begin to reflect the burden of single motherhood on society, because you can't measure the pain and suffering of rape and murder victims in dollars and cents. Now you may be thinking, after all these years we should have learned our lesson, why not just stop paying single mothers to have endless numbers of children? Sure would be a hell of a lot cheaper, wouldn't it? Well, sure it would, but you are never going to be able to sell such a change in social policy to our gimme-gimme twenty-first century society, not in a million years you won't! But, for the most part, we are dealing with a greedy bunch of low-lives here and I'll bet my last dollar that if you pay them enough they will end up doing the right thing, despite their natural tendencies to reproduce like rabbits. Yes, Mable, not having kids you can't afford out of wedlock is the right thing to do, no matter what the liberal meatheads tell you! Now, if this trial policy to reduce the numbers of children born to unwed mothers is successful, as it certainly will be, we can expand the program to include all unmarried females of child bearing age. The Sandra Fluke's of the world are going to love this one. Just imagine, not only are we going to pay for their birth control pills, or in this case shots in the arm, but we are going to give them $5000 to spend on drugs, booze, and other fun things every five years for the next 20 years. Sounds like a sure winner to me. Now, one last thing. If you are a single mom with a good job who can afford to raise and educate your own kids, go for it. I don't care how many children you have out of wedlock or, for that matter, in wedlock or how much you spend on a new Mercedes or your next trip to Vegas. Its really none of my business, as long as my tax dollars are not used to pay for it! This should get me the meanie award of the year from the National League of Women Voters, if there is such a thing.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

People from third world countries like Mexico come to the United States primarily for two reasons. First, the illegal's come here to take advantage our ever expanding welfare state. Subsidized housing, free medical care, free education free everything is here for the taking if they can simply get here. Which is not that big a deal considering the porosity of our borders. The second reason illiterate minorities from south America come to America is to work at the low paying and menial jobs that Americans refuse to take under any circumstances. Such employment is everywhere and includes jobs in agriculture, yard maintenance, construction and numerous other commercial endeavors that require a serious amount of manual labor. Recognizing the problem, that unskilled illiterate minorities come here for the free stuff and to fill low paying jobs that American low-lives will not take, is the key to implementing the comprehensive immigration reform that members on both sides of the isle are always yapping about. The solution to the illegal and costly immigration problem we have faced in America for the past 50 years requires only three simple steps. First, we must have some type of national identification card that can be used to readily identify every single legal citizen of the United States. Second, we must insist that all social programs, from education to health care, be restricted to legal citizens and that not a dime of government money be spent on illegal's, except possibly to deport them. Finally, we should do everything possible to make sure that illegal's are not hired for any job in our country irrespective of how menial it is or how little it pays. Now, if draconian policies like this are implemented, who will pick the grapes and who will cut my lawn you may be asking yourself. Again the answer is quite simple, Americans must be put back to work whether they like it or not! Just think of it, there are nearly 50 million unemployed people in this country. The monies we pay these people in unemployment benefits threaten to bankrupt the country. Why are they not required to work? Similarly, our prisons are bulging at the seams with men and women who sit on their fat asses day after day, week after week and year after year watching television on the flat screen TVs that the taxpayers provide for them at great expense. Why are these people not required to make some contribution to their upkeep by working in the fields and filling the jobs that Americans won't take? In this respect, the prisons should be moved to areas that need workers to produce the food that working Americans eat. I'm not talking about chain gangs here; rather I am talking about a forced work program that will provide meaning employment for huge segment of our population that reside in our prisons. In the same vein, I am not suggesting that the inner-city blacks be returned to slavery or that low-live whites be forced at gun point to work. I am purposing that these individuals be given a choice, either take the jobs that are readily available to them or they starve! No more free stuff, no more slaps on the wrists when you burglarize the local 7-eleven store. No, if you go to jail you are going to sentenced to prison and that means that you also are being sentenced to work whether you like it or not. Similarly, if you are unemployed and fit to work, you are going to work or you are going to starve, no one is going to bail you out with a never ending series of unemployment checks ! It will be clear to the reader that by employing the tactics I suggest to solve our immigration problems we also will have gone a long way towards dealing with the chronic unemployment problem in this country. These two social issues are joined at the hip and require a joint solution based on our resolve to restrict jobs and social benefits to legal citizens while requiring the unemployed and incarcerated members of our society to get off their duffs and go to work. There, problem solved, we have killed two birds with one stone! Wasn't that clever of us?

Lets join hands and go over the fiscal cliff together!

The so-called fiscal cliff is fast approaching and politicians on both sides of the aisle are predicting Armageddon and the end of times. When liberals and conservatives agree on anything, even going to war, I immediately become very suspicious and conclude that there is something very wrong in Denmark. While it's true that the drastic cuts in military spending, which are part of the sequestration, might not be the wisest move in a world that is becoming increasingly more third world and anti-American as each day passes, it also is true that the military is one of the most wasteful institutions on the face of the earth. Certainly the cuts in military spending resulting from the sequestration would not be nearly as crippling as the military hawks would have us believe. Similarly, taxing the rich is nothing more than a redistributive liberal scheme to buy votes from non-productive members of society; but it is a meaningless exercise in futility because, if we confiscated every last penny from the so-called rich, it would fund the government for less than three months. The liberals in Washington DC know this and only continue with this erroneous line of propaganda to stir up their clueless base, you know the 20,000 who lost their good paying jobs when they forced Hostess (the maker of Twinkies) into bankruptcy. These witless wonders will believe anything because they live in la-la land! They also don't have a worry in the world because they know Obama will take care of them. In any case, I am willing to cut the military and take a little more from the so-called rich to get to the second part of the sequestration which forces a significant reduction in federal spending. No one in recent memory, not even Reagan, has been able to make a significant dent in the growth of the government and the accompanying escalation of the national debt over the long haul. Oh, Reagan slowed it down a little, and there was actually a small budget surplus for a couple of years in the late 90's when Clinton was president and the republicans controlled both the house and the senate, but these were simply exceptions that make the rule. As a whole the moneys spend on everything the government gets its grubby hands on has been growing at an exponential rate since the Eisenhower administration in the 50's. Things have become so bad that the Obama administration ran up more debt in his first four years than did all of our previous presidents combined! At this point our national debt exceeds 16 trillion dollars, that's a 16 with 12 zeros after it. I don't know about you, but I can't begin to fathom numbers of this magnitude. In any case, the only way to slow down this monstrosity, that is our government, is to significantly curtail the multitude of social programs that have been the bread and butter of both the democrats and liberal main stream republicans for over 60 years. The sequestration forces such a change in public policy by greatly reducing the millions of unemployed who are dependent on programs such as food stamps, never ending unemployment insurance, affordable housing and unlimited healthcare (think sex-exchange operations for all public employ union members in San Francisco many of which are sexual misfits) to name only a few of the worst offenders. Medicare and Medicaid also will take a hit under sequestration, a well deserved hit I might add. By the way while I'm at it, as long as there is a single grape to be picked in our great central valley, or a single artichoke to be picked in beautiful Monterey county, the unemployed low-lives in our inner cities should be forced to pick them. Agriculture is a year around operation in many areas of our country and the able bodied unemployed should be forced to perform this work. If they refuse they should be allowed to starve. I will bet my last dollar that few will elect to starve. A policy like this would go a long way towards solving our problems with illegal immigrants. I got a little off the track here, but my main point is that sequestration seems like our best option at this point of time. Yes, it might be painful on the near term and, yes, it might lead to a second recession of short duration, if we are not already in one, but in the long run it seems to be our best option. I for one do not trust that despicable cry baby John Boehner to work out a meaningful compromise with Obama, he simply doesn't have the balls for the job, well in truth he hasn't any balls, that's the long and short of it! So, let's join hands with the liberals and jump off the fiscal cliff together. I for one will be wearing gloves so as not to dirty my hands!

Analysis Of The 2012 Presidential election.

When I wrote my novel Escape From Chaos- 2015 and the Second American Revolution (Merrill Publishing, Xlibris Corp)  over two years ago, I predicted that Obama would be re-elected in 2012. This was somewhat of a gamble since, if he had not been re-elected, the very premise of the book would have been baseless and 18 months of work would have gone down the drain the moment he was thrown out of office. However, I felt extremely confident of my prediction despite the widespread belief of most conservative political pundits that the voters would not support such an incompetent anti-American boob as Obama for a second term in the Whitehouse. Well, they were wrong, every last one of them including Limbaugh and Levin!

 My prediction had nothing to do with Obama's record, nothing whatsoever! It is my  strong belief that the liberals would have won this election no matter who their standard bearer, even Daffy Duck would have prevailed as long as he had a D beside his name. Similarly, it made no difference to me who the republicans might have chosen to run against Obama. The scarlet letter R would have been enough to defeat any republican candidate. No, the outcome of this, and all future national elections, has nothing to do with the candidates; to the contrary, it has everything to do with what America has become.

We are no longer the bright shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan spoke of. The majority voting bloc in America today consists of a loose association of Mexican, Asian and Afro-American minorities who, with the brain-washed youth of our country and a host of single white mothers, form a insurmountable voting bloc  which, in national elections, is impossible to defeat irrespective of who runs for office in either party.

These people have many things in common (low IQs, shallow foreheads, naivety, ignorance of the issues,  immorality, a tendency towards criminality,  laziness and slothfulness to name only a few of their more obvious characteristics) but the common thread that binds them together, more than any other, is their dependency on the government for all their worldly needs from the day they are born until the day they die.

I knew two years ago that the game was up. The underclass of our country, supported by the liberal elites who buy their votes ever election cycle, had become the controlling political force in America. Because of this simple fact, Barack Obama could not have been defeated this November, irrespective of how poorly he performed or who ran against him. So there is no reason to beat ourselves up over the outcome of this meaningless election or to second guess the efforts of Mitt Romney, or any other member of the conservative party, who attempted to prevail against the most incompetent American administration ever. Nothing any of us could have done would have made the slightest difference.

In fact, nothing of a political nature will change until the United States suffers a total financial collapse which, of course, is inevitable. In Escape From Chaos I predicted the government and our economy would crash in 2015, however, it could happen as early as next spring.  

Just consider this fact for a moment. At present, with interest rates below one percent, 20% of every dollar the federal government receives in taxes goes to pay the interest on the national debt. If the economy should recover the interest rates will increase to the historic norm of 3 to 4%. When this happens every single dollar the Feds receive in taxes will go to pay the interest on our monstrous national debt! There will be no money left over to fund the military, to feed the poor, to fund education,  to care for the sick or to fund our bloated bureaucracy. No, at that point we will be bankrupt. Sure, the feds will be taking in more in taxes due to our economic rebound but nowhere near enough to pay the interest on the nation's debt while  funding the government.

At this point one of two things will happen. The government will simply cease to exist and we will fall into a state of anarchy.  More likely, the Feds will massively deflate the value of the dollar, to decrease the significance of our debt, and the value of our saving accounts and retirement plans will, for all practical purposes, evaporate before our eyes. Either way, it's not going to be a pretty picture.

So what to do? Well, two things come to mind. First, buy guns and learn how to use them so you will be in a position to protect yourselves when the intercity low-lives invade the suburbs after the local, state and the federal governments collapse. Second, protect yourselves from inflation by buying gold and silver, as much as you can possibly get your hands on! Of course, you will not want to store it in a bank vault that's the first place the government will come to confiscate  what little remains of you wealth, better to bury it under the old apple tree behind the house! Oh,  there is a third possibility, you can bury your head in the sand and pretend that nothing will change no matter what happens in Washington. Good luck on that one!

Prostate Cancer-To screen or not to screen, that is the question!

First, let me be crystal clear on this issue of screening for prostate cancer. There have been a lot of advances in the field of Urology since I entered the field 56 years ago. None, however, were as important as the development of the PSA test for the early detection of prostate cancer. This simple blood test greatly increased the chances that we could detect the cancer while it was still confined to the prostate gland and remove it before it had metastasized and become incurable. A recent article in the New England Journal Of Medicine, the PIVIT study, suggests that males treated by surgery for the prostate cancer fair no better than those who forgo treatment. The authors of this 16 year study also stress the complications that result from radical prostatectomy. There are several aspects of this study that raise serious questions as to its validity. I expect the first thing to emphasize is that the lead author, Timothy J. Wilt, is an internist. Internists have a very superficial understanding of prostate cancer and the vast majority of them have never treated a patient with the malignancy. Urologists treat patients with prostate cancer, not internists, family physicians or nurse practitioners. Look at it this way. Would you believe anything I, an urologist, wrote about the survival rates of people who had surgery for brain tumors. I certainly hope not! Even if you would, please keep this in mind. This study was performed by physicians who have no firsthand experience with the disease they are writing about. If they did have experience treating men with prostate cancer they would not have made so many glairing errors in their article, a few of which I will point out below. Also remember that this VA study was funded by the federal government which is doing everything it can to reduce the cost of health care. Just think of the monies that can be saved if the Feds can convince males that they have nothing to gain by being treated for early prostate cancer. This goes way beyond death panels since it suggests that we, as a society, ignore from the get-go a malignancy that kills over 28,000 American males every single year, more than any malignancy other than lung cancer. How is it possible that we should ignore a disease that kills so many people! Doesn't pass the smell test does it? The authors claim that this was a study of males with early prostate cancer yet the PSAs in the group who were randomized for surgery had a mean PSA value of 10.1. Thus, for every male in the treatment arm of the study who had a PSA around 5 or 6, which would have made him an ideal candidate for surgery, there was someone with a PSA of 15 to 16 which would make him a questionable candidate for curative surgery. In fact, men were entered into the study as long as their PSAs were less than 50. I have never heard of a man with prostate cancer being a candidate for surgery with a PSA approaching 50 or, for that matter, even in the 15 to 20 range! Such men invariably have metastatic disease and can't be cured by surgery, or anything else for that matter. Although the title of the article, Radical Prostatectomy versus Observation for Localized Prostate Cancer, implies that this is a study designed to compare the results of surgery with watchful waiting (doing nothing) in men with prostate cancer, it is not! In fact, of the 364 men randomized to have surgery, only 281 actually had surgery and of the 367 males who were assigned to the observation wing of the study, only 292 were, in fact, observed! When all was said and done, 53 of the males who were assigned to have surgery ended up being observed and 36 of those who were initially assigned to be observed underwent radical prostatectomy. The authors of the paper completely ignore this important fly in the ointment and apparently so did the journal's reviewers. Why were these men allowed to change horses in mid stream? Well, most likely because they became aware of the bill of goods they had been sold when they agreed to enter the study and changed their minds as they watched their PSAs climb to higher and higher levels during the observation period. The question is how long did they wait before insisting on surgery and how high were their PSAs when they finally had surgery. We have no idea because the internists that wrote this paper do not understand the importance of early detection and rapid intervention in this deadly malignancy, as such, they simply ignored the issue. What should have been obvious to them, however, was the fact that they had muddied the waters in a significant way when they allowed men who had been observed for a period of time to be added to the radical prostatectomy arm of the study. This is so because the chances of curing these men decreased significantly with each passing day as their PSAs continued to climb to higher and higher levels. This gave the study a strong bias against radical prostatectomy. Obviously, these patients should have been dropped from the study. So why weren't they? Well, there are several possibilities. It seems clear that the authors had a pre-study bias towards watchful waiting and did not buy into the concept that, with respect to prostate cancer, treatment delayed is often treatment denied. To them it made no difference when a man had surgery. After all, with a few very limited exceptions, surgery wasn't going to accomplish anything anyway, except, of course, to make their lives more miserable as a result of the complications of the prostatectomy. Second, and equally likely, is the fact that they were obviously having difficulty recruiting men who were foolish enough to enter the study. The authors originally had set a goal of 2000 men for their study. After 8 years of trying they could only recruit 731 individuals who were willing to put their lives at risk for the sake of humanity. This study was based on statistics, it was a numbers game. As such, the authors could not afford to lose a single person from the study, let alone 12.3% from the observation arm and 18.8% of the radical prostatectomy side of the study. In any case, the paper should have been rejected because of the large number of switchovers between the two components of the study and it was not! Shame on you New England Journal of Medicine. But the tangled web the authors weave doesn't end there. No not by a long shot! Although the authors of the PIVIT study do not address the issue in the text of their paper, Figure 1 ( Study Enrollment and Treatment) reveals that the males in this study were not treated solely with radical prostatectomy. Nor were the men in the observation arm simply observed! To the contrary, men in both arms of the study were treated with everything but the kitchen sink! In fact, in addition to the 36 men in the observation group who ended up having radical prostatectomies; 29 received external beam radiation; 8 were treated with radioactive seeds; and one even underwent the barbaric cryotherapy (freezing). The statistics from the radical prostatectomy arm of the study were equally messed up as, 76 of the 281 males in this group were either observed or treated with some form of irradiation. The authors do not tell us who got what or for what reason. Apparently, they relied on their statistical analysis to sort out the mess that resulted from their poorly randomized study which got progressively more convoluted as time went on. The newspaper reports of the PIVIOT study have been baffling to say the least. It seemed impossible, as the reports claimed, that 12.2% of the men who had radical prostatectomy had some form of bowel dysfunction or, for that matter, that 11.3 of those that were selected for observation complained of the same. I also had difficulty swallowing the claim that 17.1% of those treated by surgery had significant urinary incontinence. The incontinence rate following radical prostatectomy should be around 1 to 2%, not 17%. If the true incontinence rate after radical prostatectomy was a whopping 17% no man in his right mind would agree to have the procedure and no surgeon worth his salt would perform the operation, except maybe on his worst enemy. Certainly, I thought, Rosie Mestel of the Los Angeles Times and the other columnists writing articles on the PIVIT study had got this wrong. But that was not the case, the journalists had reported exactly what was written in the article. Under the section titled Surgical morbidity the reader is referred to table 2 which lists the complications for males treated by surgery or observation. No mention is made of the fact that large numbers of men in both arms of the study had also received various forms of irradiation, all if which are associated with significant side effects including urinary incontinence and bowel dysfunction. The author's base their claim that men with early prostate cancer do not benefit from surgery on statistics assuming a median survival of 10 years. Well, the men with prostate cancer were entered into the study between 1994 and 2002 and the study ended in 2010. Thus, men who entered the study in 2001 and 2002 could not have been followed for 10 years! The authors admit this discrepancy but dismiss it as unimportant, stating that their use of Kaplan-Meir survival plots overcome this discrepancy. And to some extent they due. However, the data used to calculate the Kaplin-Meier plots was so flawed that the survival pots are meaningless. This statistical methodology was not designed to be used in a study such as this where men were switched willy-nilly from one arm of the study to another and received a multitude of different treatment modalities other than radical prostatectomy, any one of which could have affected the Kaplin-Meier survival plots. There is an old saying in medical statistics, shit in shit out, and that's what we have here! Finally, not a word is said about the local complications associated with the do nothing approach to prostate cancer. I expect this is so because Dr Wilt and most of his co-authors do not have a clue as to the quality of life issues that a man faces when he has an uncontrolled cancer in his prostate gland. Many of these men's lives are a living hell because of the urinary obstruction and bleeding caused by their cancerous prostates. Men with locally advance prostate cancer commonly require repeated transurethral resections of the prostate to relieve their urethral obstruction and when the cancer invades the external urethral sphincter, as it often does, these operations commonly result in total urinary incontinence. More troublesome, and difficult for the patient and his urologist to manage, is the bleeding associated with a rapidly growing cancerous prostate gland. The bleeding prostate gland not only causes clot retention but the blood clots also invariably obstruct the catheters that are used bypass the obstructing and bleeding prostates. Some of these unfortunate men end up spending more time in the emergency rooms than they do at home. It is extremely important to address the morbidity associated with watchful waiting for prostate cancer because these local complications of prostatic cancer do not occur in men who are treated by radical prostatectomy. Men who have the gland surgically removed may die from metastatic disease if the malignancy has already spread before surgery, but they do not suffer the ravages of a bleeding obstructing prostate during the last years of their lives. Thus, there are significant quality of life benefits to the procedure, even if it does not cure them. It is well known in academic medicine that statistics can be made to show almost anything and there is a great deal wrong with the way the authors employ statistics in this study. The PIVIT study is so flawed that it never should have been accepted for publication, certainly not it the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Is this esteemed medical journal going the way of the New York Times? I write this blog in the hopes that any male, of appropriate age, who reads it will think twice before forgoing their PSA tests. I also hope that the reader will consider his options very carefully before letting himself be talked into some silly none-treatment plan involving watchful waiting, if he is unfortunate enough to be one of the 17% of American males who will develop the cancer during their lifetime. It's really quite simple. If your prostate cancer can be detected while it is still confined to the prostate gland, you can be cured by surgery 100% of the time. No if ands or buts about it! If, on the other hand, you chose to ignore the cancer it will ultimately kill you if you live long enough, of that there can be no doubt! I can't cover all important aspects pertaining to the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer in this blog. If you would like to learn more including when to start being screened for prostate cancer; when to stop being screened for the disease; and what to do if you are unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with the malignancy, read my e-book What You Should Know About Prostate Cancer- Get it before it gets you!

Release Those Tax Records Now Mitt!

Our dear leader Barack Husain Obama is making a big deal about Mitt Romney's refusal to release his tax records for the past 30 or 40 years. I have no idea why Mr. Romney is so reluctant to comply with this simple request. Undoubtedly, his tax forms will confirm what we already know. Mr. Romney has made gobs of money over the years and has paid gobs and gobs in taxes. After all, that's what successful business men and women do, make money and pay taxes. So release those tax records Mitt, as soon as possible, and end this meaningless distraction from the real issues we face in the coming election. But here's the deal. Release them only after our first black president has agreed to release his college and law school transcripts, and not a day sooner! Why has our president refused to release his school records? That is the $64,000 question. Nope, it's not that his grades were so poor, after all grades do not mean a thing to the liberal idiots that vote for demorats like Obama, Gore, Pelosi, Reed, Boxer and the like. After all, Gore flunked out of both Law School and Divinity School and he still came within a gnat's eyelash of becoming president. Think of that Mable, how in the hell do you flunk out of Divinity School? That must take some doing! No, our community organizer America hating president has a far more sinister secret that he is trying to hide from the public and it is this. Release of his college and law school transcripts will reveal that he registered as a foreign student, probably from Kenai where he was born. Yup, that's the dirty little secret that Reverend Wright's favorite son is trying to hide from us. I'll bet my life on it.

The Tax The Rich Scheme- A Meaningless Exercise in Futility

Let's see if I have this right. The people who work the hardest in this country we call America, are not paying their fair share in taxes. As the liberal pundits are quick to point out, the one percenters, those who earn $380,354 or more pay only 38% percent of the taxes collected by the federal government. Clearly they should be paying more, a lot more! Similarly, it is unconscionable that the five percenters, those households with a yearly taxable income of $159,619 or more pay only 58.72 % of the federal tax burden. Clearly these scoundrels, which include most of the small businesses in the country, should be paying more, a lot more. After all, how can we provide tax rebates to the 50 percenters who pay no federal or state income taxes if we don't force the rich to pay their fair share? Can't be done, even I can see that. There is one small problem with this tax the rich scheme though, and it is this. If we confiscated every last penny of those making over $250,000 a year it wouldn't be enough to run the government for even one single year, no not even 365 days. Now, I am not talking about a 100% tax on the income of the rich here, no I'm talking about confiscating, stealing if you will, everything they own- houses, cars, cloths, boats, kids shoes, everything of any material value at all! Well, you might argue, it's not all that bad an idea, after all it is enough to fund the government for nearly a year, that's a lot better than a sharp stick in the eye! The problem with this kill off the rich scheme, of course, results from the fact that if you steal everything the productive members of society have there will be no one to tax next year, or the year after. You can only kill the goose that lays the golden eggs once. Dead geese are incapable of laying eggs, let alone golden ones. The point of all this rhetoric is this. All discussions pertaining to tax rates are meaningless. Political discussions on tax rates only severe to distract us from the fundamental problem we face in this country, we are spending too much and we have been spending too much for at least 75 to 100 years. As of this moment, 8:19 a.m. on 6/2/2012, our national debt is $15,777,499,714,009.83 give or take a billion or so. It is, of course, impossible for any of us to comprehend such a figure, but we should be able to understand the implications of such a horrendous liability. The most important thing to understand is that our national debt is so large that it never can be paid off, not in a billion years, no matter how much we reduce federal spending or how much we tax the rich. We have been spending like drunken sailors for nearly a century and, at this point in time we have, for practical purposes, spent our way into bankruptcy. It's really as simple as that! Yes we are bankrupt as a nation, we just don't know it yet. Think, for a moment, of the implications of the financial mess we find ourselves in. The interest we pay on the national debt consumes about 20% of all the federal government collects each year in taxes. Small potatoes the liberals say; not a big deal, the republican politicians agree. Only the libertarians seem to get it. Big deal or not, here is the problem. Interest on the national debt is, at least for the present, manageable for only one reason. The Federal Reserve has kept the interest rates artificially low. Interest rates of 1% or less have had an extremely adverse effect on the economy as a whole, but low rates has made it possible for us to pay the interest on our national debt without having to declare a national state of emergency and bankruptcy. But, no one in his or her right mind can believe that the Federal reserve can continue to maintain the present low interest rates indefinitely. No, interest rates will have to rise eventually and when they do, it's Katy bar the door! Just think of it. If interest rates increase to their historically normal levels of 3 to 4 %, the interest on the national debt will consume every dollar the federal government collects in taxes. There will not be a single dollar left for, national defense, Medicare, education, aid to the homeless or any other of the endless federal programs. When that happens the Feds will have no choice but to deflate the value of the dollar so that the massive debt we have accumulated will be less burdensome. Will this kind of manipulation of the dollar solve the problem? In truth, I have no idea. One thing seems sure though, when that happens, gold and silver will be king! Well, I've wondered a little off the path here. The point of the essay was not to point out how hopeless our national financial situation is. Rather my goal was to argue that any discussion involving tax rates is a red herring designed to distract us from the real problem, our addiction to deficit spending. The problem, as Regan so apply pointed out, is not that we do not tax enough, it is that be spend too much and, I might add, have been doing so for nearly 100 years. As Reverend Wright said, "our chickens have come home to roost," and at this point there is precious little we can do about it.

Excerpt #1 from Escape From Chaos

Jim Hipkins, the oldest member of the gang, was a 75 year old retired Air Force Colonel. Uncle Jim, as Max called him, had flown 25 missions in the Vietnam war. Jim despised the government who, he rightly believed, had refused to recognize the contribution he and his fellow combatants had made during the Vietnam debacle. Jim had been badly injured when his plane was shot down on his 25th and last mission over Nam 45 years before. Sam, who was in his Urology residency at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center at the time, helped patch him up. The two had been best friends ever since and Jim had followed Sam when he and his young family had returned to California in the early 1970's. Jim opened a private security agency in Walnut Creek and had done quite well providing his services to Nordstrom's Department Store and several other high end retailers in the area. All had gone well until the east bay shoplifters decided to shift their focus from the impoverished cities of Oakland and Richmond to the more prosperous retail outlets in Walnut Creek. This, of course, was good for the private security guard business, at least initially. All went reasonably well until Jim and his employees busted three inner city blacks who were caught red handed while leaving Nordstrom's with several shopping bags full of expensive merchandise, including a $5,000 ladies hand bag, they had not paid for. The arrest was routine but what followed was not. The defendants pleaded no contest to grand theft and were sentenced to two years probation. The prosecutor for Contra Costa County had agreed to the defendants proposed plea bargain because there was no room to house the petty thieves in the Martinez County jail. The local jails in California were bursting at the seams because Governor moonbeam decided to return all prisoners, who were deemed to be nonviolent, to the local lockups in the cities and towns where they had committed their crimes. So far so good, Nordstrom's got their expensive merchandise back and the shoplifters got a slap on the wrist, business as usual in twenty-first century America. Jim's rent-a-cops got a high five for stopping another heist and, with the good publicity the episode generated in the local press, Jim picked up two more clients. Then things took an unexpected twist to the left, the hard left. It was a quite Sunday afternoon and, as was their usual custom on Sundays during the spring of each year, Sam and Uncle Jim were sitting on the deck overlooking the serine valley below the house while consuming a couple of adult beverages. Sam knew something was afoot when his dog Dukie, who was always by his side, gave a low growl deep in his throat. This was Dukie's way of telling Sam that someone was coming down the road towards the house. The next thing they knew federal agents were at the front door with a warrant for Jim's arrest. The warrant stated that Jim and his private police force had violated the inner city black's civil rights when they arrested them for shoplifting. The rest is history, the trial was held in the Federal Court House in San Francisco before Federal Judge Susan Puling. Trials by one's peers, in none homicide cases, had been abandoned several years before because of the cost involved in running traditional jury trials. The federal prosecutor produced court records showing that over the past 5 years Jim's private police force had made 562 arrests for shoplifting related offences. Prosecutor Gonzales went on to demonstrate that the vast majority of those arrested, 96% to be exact, were residents from the minority communities of Oakland, Richmond and Bay Point. Prosecutor Gonzales argued that the large number of people of color being arrested was evidence per se that the defendant and his colleagues were relying on racial profiling to make their illegal arrests. Jim's high priced lawyer, Samuel Kline, tried to object, contending that there was no evidence, what so ever, that any innocent person, irrespective of race, had ever been arrested by Jim or any member of his team of security guards. Without a second thought, Judge Puling ruled that Kline was out of order and fined him $500 for, what she said, was his trivial attempt to disrupt the proceedings. The trial was short, if not so sweet, lasting less than an hour. Judge Puling ultimately ruled that, irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the shoplifters Jim and his staff had arrested, they had been illegally detained because he had used racial profiling to select them from a crowd of other prospective shoplifters. Defense lawyer Kline made one last feeble attempt to defend his client by pointing out that the level of shoplifting by the white residents who lived in Walnut Creek and its surrounding suburbs was too low to be statistically significant. Thus, Kline argued, with respect to the crime of shoplifting, the whole concept of racial profiling was meaningless. After all, how could his client be expected to arrest locals who lived in these communities if they weren't inclined to break this particular aspect of the law? By this time Judge Puling had had enough, she found Kline in contempt of court and sentenced him to 5 days in the county jail. As they handcuffed lawyer Kline and led him to the bus that would take him to the Martinez Jail, the good Judge fined Jim $100,000 and sentenced him to 600 hours of community service. With that, she slammed down her gavel bringing the proceeding to an end and called for the next case on her calendar. The verdict in the case, which was ultimately upheld by the Ninth District Circus Court of Appeals in San Francisco as well as the United States Supreme Court, changed the law forever. Before the Puling ruling, it was unlawful to use racial profiling to apprehend suspected law breakers. After the Puling ruling it became illegal to arrest individuals of a minority group for a crime if the overall percentage arrested for the offence exceeded their rank in the population as a whole. This was interpreted to mean that, in California, where minorities make up 50% of the population, it was evidence per se of racial profiling if more than 50% of those arrested for a specific crime were from the minority community. The states of Washington and Oregon adapted similar anti-discriminatory racial profiling legislation shortly thereafter as did most of the Northeastern states. Once again California had lead the way, taking judicial lunacy to an entirely new level, and a large segment of the clueless nation, had followed. Six months later Judge Puling disappeared after she left her home on Russian Hill one foggy Monday morning to drive to the San Francisco Federal Courthouse. No trace of her or her shinny new black Mercedes SUV was ever found, it was like she and her vehicle had disappeared from the face of the earth. Jim swore that he had no idea what had happened to the judge, but couldn't vouch for the innocence of several of his former employees who had been extremely pissed off when Jim was forced closed his security guard business and they lost their jobs. Sam later came to the conclusion that it was, more likely than not, Judge Puling had become the first casualty of the Second American Revolution. Well, she might have been the first, but she certainly was not be the last. Uncle Jim paid the 100 grand fine but never served an hour of community service. Once the feds got their hands on his money, they seemed to lose interest in him. Within a week he had closed the doors of his thriving private security business and discharged his entire work force of 22 employees. Nordstrom's also stopped doing business in Walnut Creek two months later, after several more robberies convinced management that they could not continue to operate a successful high end retail outlet in the Walnut Creek area. The department store's closure added an additional 225 people to the unemployment lines in Contra Costa county. Tiffanies followed suit shortly thereafter as did Davidson and Licht, a high-end jewelry store that had been a fixture in Walnut Creek since 1916. If you wanted to buy a Christmas present for your wife or girlfriend in Walnut Creek that year it wasn't going to be anything very fancy, more than likely it was going to be of the dime store variety. Go to my web site to learn more about Escape From Chaos at www.boobsbymerrill.com

America's First Black President

The people of Oz had lived for thousands of years in a land of milk and honey. It always had been their practice to work hard and save their money, putting it away for a rainy day. During the past 50 to 60 years, however, the industrious nature of the citizens of Oz slowly had changed, possibly due to something some evil demon had put in their drinking water. Or, Maybe, someone had cast a spell over them. No one knew for sure what had brought about the change. It was similar to a hive of honey bees that had been infected by a deadly virus that turned worker bees into drones, whose only purpose was to mate with the queen and consume the hives increasingly meager recourses. A hive like this, of course, was doomed to failure. But the Ozian's couldn't see what was happening to them, and like lemmings blindly running to their deaths over the side of a cliff, continued in their self destructive ways, hoping to beat France and Greece in the race to national irrelevance. And so it came to be, the people of Oz became increasingly fat and lazy as they sat back and watched their once prosperous nation deteriorate before their very eyes. But this tendency to slothfulness was not what ultimately did them in. No, it was their tendency to elect unworthy leaders that led to their ultimate demise. It began when they sent the socialist Woodrow Wilson to the White House and the folly continued when they elected Presidents Roosevelt, Johnson and the peanut farmer Carter. The leadership of these ultra liberal politicians, supported by the leftist dimwits and dingbats in the House and Senate, left the land of Oz swimming in a sea of red ink before you could say Jack Robison. But then, when things could hardly have gotten any worse, they made the biggest mistake of all, they elected their first black president. The sheeple of Oz ignored the fact that Senator Obama had been raised by a radical liberal mother and a Muslin communist father. Just as they overlooked his ties to the leaders of the cop killing Weather Underground's William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. It made even less difference to them, that president to be Obama, had sat in the pews of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years, while soaking up every word of the black leaders anti-Oz rhetoric. No, all that seemed to matter to the naive citizens of Oz was that the man they hoped to elect president was black. The fact that he was somewhat of a comical figure with his large misshapen and mismatched ears seemed only to endear him to the masses, the majority of whom would not rest until they had made him president. So, Obama became president of Oz and immediately began to change it into a country of his own liking. He took over General Electric and General Motors, demanded that the latter make electric golf carts disguised to look like actual cars, except that they didn't have real motors and wouldn't go very far on a charge of electricity. When it was determined that no one would buy the electric go-carts, their dear black leader insisted that GM give the fake cars away. The banks were the next to go. The former community organizer from Chicago's eastside, now the President of Oz, forced the banks to make home loans to anyone who wished to purchase a home, irrespective of whether or not they had a job or the means to pay for the dwelling. This led to the collapse of the housing market and sent the country into the worst recession since Oz's great depression 150 years before. The President's wife Mooch-chelle, who had thighs the size of medium sized redwood trees and liked barbecued ribs better than anything in the world, spent most of her time flying all over the world on Air force two at taxpayers' expense. She was accompanied by an entourage of camp followers, the likes of which had not been seen since the reign of England's King Henry the Eighth. When not on vacation the first lady grew vegetables in the White House garden and led the campaign to reform the school lunch programs in the land of Oz. This crusade was a miserable failure since most of the children, including their child President, preferred pizza and hotdogs too turnip greens and raw carrots. As time went on, the first black President's appearance began to take a turn for the worse. His face, the main feature of which had always been his lopsided elephant like ears, began, because of his incessant lying, to resemble that of the cartoon character Pinocchio. His big ears were no longer such a big deal, as his nose continued to lengthen with each passing day. This, of course, was an emperor's clothes situation and no one in his staff of advisors, or any member of the press, dared to mention the first black President's ever-enlarging Pinocchio like nose. Things came to a head, when the President's snoozle became so long that it interfered with his ability to read a teleprompter. His inability to use the teleprompter was a disaster because Oz's first black president didn't have the ability to form meaningful words, much less sentences, if left to his own devices. So ended, the reign of Oz's first black president. He left office in disgrace and returned to Chicago where he became the city's second black mayor. The first one, of course, was in prison with most of the state's previous liberal goveners. Proving once again, that you didn't have to know how to form words or meaningful sentences to be the mayor of a large city in the land of Oz.

The Dingbat Twins

THE DINGBAT TWINS The luxurious 230 seat passenger plane was sitting first in line to take off at the runway reserved for government dignitaries and other members of the elite class at the Dulles International Airport in Washington DC. The planes 12 person crew included a master chef, a wine steward, two serving people dressed in tuxedos, as well as speaker Pelosi's personal masseuse, Philip. Mary, the speakers $250 an hour hair stylist had fell ill at the last moment and couldn't make the trip. The airplanes co-pilot knocked politely on the door to the passenger compartment and was ushered to the plush black leather seats where Speaker Pelosi and Senator Boxer were sitting. Each had a large glass of $438 a bottle aged single malt scotch whiskey in their hands, Pelosi's was already half empty and she appeared to be a bit tipsy. "Permission to take off Speaker Pelosi," the Air force colonel said. He kept his eyes on the floor as he spoke, as a show of deference to his prestigious passengers. Everyone knew that the two liberal politicians hated the military and the speaker's response was not entirely unexpected. "Well, of course you can take off, you moron, what have you been waiting for?" she snapped. "Do I have to tell you everything? Now get back in the cockpit and get this thing off the ground! I've a good mind to have you court-martialed, and I will if you don't smarten up." The colonel bowed slightly and turned to walk away. "And you tell the captain that I expect a smooth ride this time. I won't tolerate any more of that turbulence you subjected us to last time! My nieces and nephews were sick for a week after what you put us through." "Don't you just hate those military types Babs? Lord knows I do, with their stupid uniforms and better than thou attitudes." "Yes, and I can hardly stand it, Nancy, when they come to testify before the senate, with their condescending attitudes and all. One of those fools even had the nerve to call me ma'am at one of the hearing last year. Who do they think they are treating elected public officials like us in such a disrespectful manner? Just who do they think pays their salaries anyway. Well, his career in the military is over, I saw to that! "Good for you Babs' low-lives like that need to be kept in their place, that's for sure." I don't know how this country could survive without your steadfast leadership in the Senate." "Oh Nancy, aren't you just so kind, but you're the brilliant one! Just think, convincing those morons that they should vote for Obama's Health Care Bill before they had even read it. Now that was a stroke of pure genius. You will go down as the greatest speaker ever for pulling off that one, no doubt about that, none at all." "Oh, it was nothing really Babs, anyone could have done it." "Anyway, its nearly time for dinner. I hope you like Maine lobster, that's what we are having. I just know you are going to love the champagne, its Perrier-Jouet 1945. It costs $5,000 a bottle," she giggled, "but, of course you have to buy a case to get it at that price." "Pretty expensive," Nancy, "must be nice to have a rich husband." "Heavens to Betsy, Babs, if it wasn't for the business I sent his way, we wouldn't have a pot to piss in, I can assure you of that! Anyway, I would never spend that kind of money on anything, let alone a bottle of overpriced French wine. I hate the damned French almost as much as I despise the military. No, the sheeple that contribute their hard earned dollars to my campaign fund paid for the wine as well as the lobster. Hell, they pay for damn near everything. That's if I can't find a way to wheezel it out of the government." "Well, traveling with you certainly is a treat, Nancy, I just hate flying commercial these days. I fly first class, of course, and buy up all the first cabin seats so I don't have to mingle with the other passengers, Lord knows what you might catch from those peasants. But it's still such a hassle, getting to the airport and going through security and all." "God, I know what you mean, Babs. As you know, I had to give up most of my perks, including the plane, when we lost control of the house in 2010. I thought having to go commercial again would be the end of me, I really did!" "That must have been awful, Nancy, the least that meany Boehner could have done was let you keep the plane! Just think of it, and after all you have given to this country, where would we be now without your insightful leadership all these years. I tell you, there just no justice in this world anymore, none at all!" "Well, I begged him to let me keep the plane, I even shed a few tears. But he, being the SOB he is, wouldn't hear of it, said it didn't look right to have someone in a leadership position flying around in a 230 seat private jet at taxpayers expense, especially with so many out of work and surviving on food stamps. There was just no reasoning with the guy. Oh, he did offer me let me use a smaller plane, but I refused his offensive jester, recognizing it for the slight that it was. The very idea of having to downsizing to a 20 seat aircraft, the nerve of the guy." "I admire your courage and steadfast resolve, Nancy, I think you have been very brave about the whole thing. It must have been very hard on you and your family too." "Yes it was, looking back on it now, I'm kind of surprised that I was able to make it through those dark days as minority leader. I still have nightmares about the weekly flights on those awful commercial airplanes. Having to wait in those endless lines at the airports and being screened as if I were a common farm hand. I tell you it was downright humiliating, that's what it was. Fortunately, I wasn't subjected to as many personal searches or pat downs as I was in my younger days, but it still was a terrible experience being herded around like a bunch of cattle." "Yes, public figures like us pay a heavy price for the indispensible service we provide our country, but that's our lot in life and we just have to make the best of it Nancy." At that point the head waiter approached the two dingbats and announced that their lobsters were about to be served in the planes lavish main cabin. They staggered to the dining room chattering away like magpies who had gorged themselves on to many fermented Christmas berries and were oblivious of the world around them.