Yesterday I launched a project to provide free Kindles for U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan.  I chose Kandahar because of the letter K, but also because it’s the general region where Army Sgt. Andre B. Corbin will serve when he deploys later this month.  He will be toting a new 6-inch Global Wireless Kindle and accessories, all donated by M-Edge Accessories in a sponsorship for which I gained quick and enthusiastic support from Patrick Mish, CEO of M-Edge.  You can listen to the interviews I did with Sgt. Corbin and Patrick Mish in Episode 84 of The Kindle Chronicles.

It was during those interviews that the idea of Kindles for Kandahar arrived, and I’ll be working with Andre and Patrick to develop the project. Andre this morning left the following message on my Reading Edge Facebook page:

“As the Kindles become available, I will provide to you a name and address of one of the Kandahar soldiers who will find great pleasure in receiving a Kindle. I will donate the money required to cover the postage.”

I appreciate that donation, Andre!  I realized yesterday, when the first contribution arrived, that PayPal is charging a small transaction fee, so I will donate that money back to K4K, so that we can assure donors that every dollar contributed will go toward a Kindle for the troops.  I haven’t had a chance to talk with Patrick Mish yet about M-Edge’s involvement in this next phase, but I’m hoping he will consider contributing a protective cover and an E-luminator 2 light for each of the Kindles we ship to Kandahar.

Andre has another idea we’ll pursue, which is to figure out a way to donate Amazon gift certificates for purchasing content on the K4K units.  I loved his signoff on the Facebook entry today:

“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the first contributors to Kindles for Kandahar. To do so, simply click here or on the logo above or the PayPal button.  If you have your own PayPal account, you will be able to use it for the contribution.  If not, there will be credit card buttons available. I don’t have nonprofit status set up for this yet, so for the moment your contribution will not be tax-deductible.

This project is a terrific use case for eReader technology.  I realized that when Andre described how small the bag is that he will carry for his personal effects when he deploys.  Instead of taking one or two print books, he will be able to bring more than a thousand titles on his 10-ounce Kindle.  His reading list for the year he will be stationed at a remote base in Tarin Kowt includes recreational fare, as well as elucidating tomes such as In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (Kindle, hardcover) by David Loyn and Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Kindle, paperback) by Steve Coll.

Another book I’d recommend is Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Kindle, hardcover) by Seth Godin.  It’s about making yourself indispensable by overcoming lizard-brain resistance to your true mission.  I happened to have read it in preparation for an interview with Seth just before talking with Andre, and it helped me overcome reasons to procrastinate the launch of Kindles for Kandahar.  Andre and his fellow soldiers are taking the art of being indispensable to the 11th power.

That complacency changed yesterday when my wife and I attended an Organizing for America forum in Dorchester, Mass.  In a Service Employees International Union hall we joined approximately 200 volunteers recycled from the Obama grassroots campaign organization.  You could tell it was the Obama team at work, because we were invited to fill out contact information on arrival, and it was difficult to leave without turning in a form with more contact information and details of the tasks we were willing to undertake.  From 10 a.m. till 1 p.m. on a muggy July Saturday, we willingly descended into the weeds of this vast topic, hearing from a procession of speakers actually involved in the proposed health care legislation. Two stood out for me.

John E. McDonough is senior advisor to Sen. Ted Kennedy on national health reform.  Because of Senator Kennedy’s key role on the issue, even as he has to sit out the current debate because of brain cancer, it’s clear that McDonough is close to the action in Congress.  He struck me as a calm, pragmatic, engaging fellow.  He said that everyone could agree in general terms that something has to be done about escalating health care costs in this country, but now that there are actual bills filed in Congress, “we’re using real bullets.”  Too much conflict and arguing?  “That’s what we do down there,” he said. “It’s called democracy.”

I take comfort knowing that people like John McD0nough are crafting health care reform, as opposed to Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck.  If you put those four and all their pundit kin in a room with the task of creating anything that would benefit the nation–well, good luck with that.  But if you put McDonough and his counterpart staffers from conservative members of Congress together, along with the members themselves, and you provide a strong push from a new president to get something done on this issue that has been kicked down the road for generations, well, maybe something really might change in the way health care is provided in America.

I believe it was McDonough who explained what will be necessary for Congress to pass meaningful health care reform.  “Do the members feel they have to do it?”  That’s the question which he said must be answered affirmatively – thus the need for grassroots work.  Another speaker stated that the insurance industry is spending $1.4 million a day to make sure no reform passes.  Without political pressure on behalf of reform, you’d have to say the odds favor the status quo, as usual.  And that status quo is costing us dearly – $2.5 trillion a year or 17 percent of Gross Domestic Product, more than any of our international competitors.

We were told that the next few weeks, before Congress leaves for its August recess, will be critical in determining the success of reform.  On the screens appeared a list of the members of the Senate Finance Committee and we were each urged to ask 10 friends in the members’ states to email support for reform.

The other speaker who impressed me was Rahul Rajkumar, a senior advisor to Doctors for America, a grassroots organization of more than 13,000 physicians in all 50 states seeking to engage doctors in healthcare reform. He calmly addressed the key question: how are we going to pay for this?  I recorded his talk, and you can listen to it here.  He pointed out that the issue of cost really has three components – how will families pay for medical costs, how will the nation pay for medical costs, and what will the impact be on the federal budget?  The third aspect is “what’s sucking up all the oxygen in Washington,” Rajkumar said, but the first two are crucial in understanding the entire issue.

I was surprised to learn from Rajkumar’s pie charts that 25 percent of us already receive health insurance from the federal government, through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration.  The pie chart won’t change much in the proposals before Congress, he said, except that most of the uninsured would obtain insurance, and those with private plans would have other options.  He also noted that more than half of all bankruptcies in the United States are due to medical costs which people are unable to pay. Of those health-care related bankruptcies, 68 percent involved people who had health insurance that was clearly inadequate.

As a new student in Health Care Reform 101 I won’t presume to write a definitive thesis on the topic this morning.  But my interest was piqued, and I’m ready to do some work on behalf of sensible reform that can bend the escalating curve of medical costs away from the unsustainable track they are on now, as well as provide coverage for the millions of Americans who have none.

The speakers at the forum recommended these sources of continuing information about the health care reform initiative: Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic, and Talking Points Memo, as well as general coverage in The New York Times.  For balance, you might want to add the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, as was pointed out to me by Mike Neumann, a Twitter follower who offered pithy rebuttals to my Tweets from the forum.

On my own after the forum, I came across this excellent overview of the issue in The New York Review of Books.

Let the learning begin!

Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief and, for the past 13 years, author of the paper’s “Lexington” column, suitably chose July 4th for a farewell column titled “Two Cheers for America.” It’s a great read, one of my first pleasures in having a new subscription to The Economist on my Kindle.

Wooldridge echoes Alex de Tocqueville’s seminal portrait of the United States in 1831, noting that the Frenchman’s initial enthusiasm for the U.S. darkened after 1840, according to a new collection of his writing, Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings.  Wooldridge writes,

It is presumptuous to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America. But during the 13 years that the author of this column has spent in the United States, he too has found his initial exuberance clouded by darker thoughts. When he arrived in 1996, America was lord of all it surveyed, the world’s only remaining superpower, convinced of its supreme benevolence, and the engine of a productivity miracle that left Europeans in awe. Social pathologies such as violent crime were being brought under control; almost half of households owned shares. The place had an air of what Mark Twain once called “the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces”.

Today, this serene confidence has long gone. Americans are more pessimistic than the Indians or Chinese, worried that their children will not enjoy the opportunities that they have taken for granted. Xenophobia is on the rise, as is nostalgia for a time of stable families and solid values. California, the state that has always reached the future first, is preparing to pay its bills with IOUs.

The departing columnist continues with what I found to be an even-handed account of this nation’s recent troubles, but what I like about The Economist is a certain detachment and distance which makes even its forcefully stated opinions seem like reasonable accounts, not ideological rants.  It’s not shy in criticizing Obama.  “Whether Mr. Obama can deliver on his promises is open to doubt:” Wooldridge writes, “his inspiring rhetoric is marred by a willingness to compromise with his party’s free-spending establishment in Congress.”   As opposed to emotional/ideological attacks on Obama from the right and the left, The Economist‘s brand of analysis fits my stubbornly moderate view of the world.

And by the end of Wooldridge’s farewell, he widens the perspective beyond any one administration, to find the following solid reason for optimism regarding the American experiment:

That is the country’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism, a taste that arrived with the first settlers and is becoming an ever greater resource, as the global economy is shaken by wave upon wave of disruptive technologies. America still has a genius for incubating entrepreneurs and giving those entrepreneurs the wherewithal to turn bright ideas into global behemoths. America’s biggest company, Wal-Mart, was founded only in 1962; its sexiest, Google, was conceived in a Californian dorm room at about the time that your columnist arrived on these shores. Even as de Tocqueville despaired about the future of his half-adopted country in the 1840s and 1850s, the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller were about to unleash the greatest productivity miracle the world has seen. That is the America that still promises much.

Well said, old chap!  And I for one would not consider it presumptuous if you turned this sane farewell into an introduction for your own contribution to the genre that de Tocqueville initiated nearly 80 years ago.

When I hear the name “Medellin” I think of drug lords and death.  I had no idea that a reform coalition headed by a charismatic mathematician, Sergio Fajardo, won the mayor’s race in Medellin in 2004 with the intention of solving the city’s two huge and interrelated problems of violence and inequality.

I was pleased to hear Fajardo in his orienting of the Cornell audience explain that Medellin is “a mile high, a little less than Denver, 50 meters below Denver.”  This made me think he might be a natural participant in Denver’s exciting Biennial of the Americas scheduled for next year.  His mixture of creativity and pragmatism reminds me of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and if they have not already met I feel confident they would find themselves very at home in each other’s company.

“Since I am a mathematician, I like to address issues the way a mathematician would do,” Fajardo told his audience at Cornell, “to say, ‘What problems are we going to solve here?”  The first problem his team chose to address was inequality.  “Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, and within that most unequal region in the world, Colombia is one of the most unequal countries, and Medellin is part of Colombia, so we have a very unequal society,” he said.

The second problem this mathematician attacked is violence, which came into Medellin in full force at the beginning of the 1980s with the rise of narco-traffic. “That was a bomb that was thrown at our society, and that bomb has shaken the foundations of our city and the foundations of Colombia,” Fajardo stated, in his calm and resonant cadence.  To watch him on the video and hear his voice, you’d think this is a poet or a scientist at quiet work far from the hurly burly of urban and national politics.  His centered presence and equanimity remind me of another unlikely leader who has similarly promised to change not only policies, but the way politics are conducted in the U.S.

The story Fajardo told in the hour-long talk unfolded like a novel, or the account of a team of scientists hunting the cure for a killer virus.  They decided they could not address violence and inequality at the same time, because the roots of those two trees were too strong.  So they tackled violence first, beefing up the police force, and then they built library parks in the poorest neighborhoods of the city.  Fajardo did not sugarcoat the pain involved and the mistakes made.  But at each crisis or challenge, he simply looked at the next action that would make an improvement, and he never stopped.

As I listened to the podcast while working out on the cross-trainer, I tried to imagine how passionate conservatives like my parents would hear the story.  I liked to think it would not be easy to dismiss this man as simply one more Latin American Leftist bent on diminishing personal freedoms under the guise of equality.  He never mentioned taxes in his talk, and when someone asked how he had paid for all the good projects in the poor neighborhoods, he said that yes, they had raised land taxes.  This apparently was accepted by the wealthy who I’m sure paid the lion’s share of the increases, perhaps because of these two promises the new mayor’s team made:

Every single peso that you give us, we will translate into something like this: “Here are your taxes .” We had that statement in all the places we went to. So we managed to tell people that they were giving us the money and what they gave us we translated into something very good for everyone.  … And then, something very simple — we didn’t steal a single peso.

By the time of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, this mathematician turned mayor might be the President of Colombia. This would be a great time for us to issue him an invitation to be a keynote speaker!

Robert Fisk of The Independent has emerged as a hero journalist, a reporter’s reporter, following crowds of protesters after his visa has run out, moving between opposing camps in the streets.  He’s also a terrific writer.   I’ll be looking for his work throughout the rest of this crisis, and afterward.

I saw an item attributed to Fisk which confirmed a nagging question I’ve had: What if Ahmadinejad actually won the election?  Fisk’s suggestion was that it’s possible that this was the case but that the greedy and arrogant authorities cooked the ballot boxes to make it look as if he had won in a landslide.  Clumsy overkill, such as the claim that Ahmadinejad won Mir Hussein Mousavi’s home town, has led most observers to assume the election was stolen.  It probably was. But we don’t know.  Maybe it was just close, like, say the U.S. election in 2000.  Here is what Fisk has to say:

My suspicion is that [Ahmadinejad] might have actually won the election but more like 52 or 53 per cent. It’s possible that Mousavi got closer to 38 per cent.

But I think the Islamic republic’s regime here wanted to humiliate the opponent and so fiddle the figures, even if Ahmadinejad had won.

The problem with that is they’re now going to claim they’re going to need a recount. If the recount is to actually give Mousavi the presidency, someone is going to have to pay the price for such an extraordinary fraud of claiming Ahmadinejad won 30, 40, 50 per cent more than he should have done.

You’ve got to remember as well, on the election night, if the count was correct it meant that they would have had to have counted five million votes in two hours.

Twitter, which in the early hours after the election brought forth a mesmerizing stream of real citizen reports from Iran, soon became its own battlefield.  The security forces apparently set up usernames to spread misinformation, such as repeated warnings yesterday in exactly the same words that the army was coming to clear out the protesters. (The Twitter news today is more hopeful, reporting that the police are wearing green and the Army have mostly returned home.) Twitterers from Iran have reportedly been tracked down based on their Tweets, for arrest.  So we rag-tag distant cyber-allies are trying to be smart, following plausible advice to help the cause of the reformers.  I’ve greenified my Twitter icon, and I changed my location and time zone to Tehran, to maybe make it difficult for the bad guys to isolate real Iranian Twitterers.  This militarization of Twitter is a fascinating development, but it makes the Twitter stream problematic.  You have to figure out on the fly which Tweets have anything to do with reality and which ones are totally fabricated–either by dark security forces or perhaps a 15-year-old in Philly, Twittering from his basement, pretending to be a student under attack in a Tehran dorm.

The deluge of citizen-uploaded photo and video images has forever changed what comes to my mind when I think of Iran.  The iconic photo I’ve put at the top of this post is an example–a man with a briefcase and newspaper who has picked up a rock to throw.  My ill-informed stereotype of women in Iran had been one of cowed, subservient victims in nun-like black veils.  That’s now replaced by images of fierce and colorfully veiled women in the streets of Tehran, challenging security forces.  In the fleeting glimpses I have of faces in the crowds, I see people more similar to me than different.  I always knew that this was true intellectually, of course, but the reality is now embedded in my consciousness through hours of following this drama on my computer screens, looking at real people instead of nattering TV pundits.

As history unfolds today a half a world away, I’ll be going over construction contracts for a project here at our condo association, preparing to interview Will DeLamater for this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast, and getting ready for our trip this weekend to Casper, Wyoming, to visit friends from our 20 years living there, mostly on Casper Mountain.  Tonight we have tickets to see A Bronx Tale at Denver’s handsome Ellie Caulkins Opera House. At any point during this ordinary day here in Denver, I will be able to dial up Tweets and news from Iran on my iPhone or computers.  It’s generally a good idea to live in one place at a time, and one day at a time.  But in times like these, I’m glad to have digital tools at my disposal which enable me to more fully experience how connected this one world truly is.

Since walking  back home from a Colorado Rockies baseball game tonight, I’ve been transfixed by words and images tumbling forth from Tehran in the aftermath of what is beginning to look more and more like a stolen election.  Twitter’s #iranelection trending topic is producing a torrent of reports and links to videos of protesters marching in the streets of Tehran, throwing rocks at riot police, and wearing green.   In each of the videos I’ve seen, everyone in the crowd seems to be holding their own camera high, taking their own photos or videos.  Each time a new video appears as a link in Twitter, you can see the chaos from a different angle, the camera jittery with movement and running away from danger.

Flowing alongside the #iranelection trending topic is #CNNFail , a torrent of criticism of CNN for NOT covering the events in Tehran adequately.  A Twitterer named TeacupTina 10 seconds ago wrote, “There’s riots over #Mousavi and the #Iranelection and their top story is about people not getting cable. Major #CNNfail”

It’s all boggling to someone trying to make sense of these events half-way around the world, here in downtown Denver past midnight.  I look out my window at the peaceful 16th Street Mall and wonder what thousands of protesters/rioters would look and feel like down there.  I would no doubt be one of the observers taking video and posting it on the web, with Tweet-links to sound the alarm.

It seems like a week ago that I was in a great seat at Coors Field, cheering the local baseball team on to its 10th win in a row.  I hope to get some sleep now.  Tomorrow I will wear something green.