The President's signature on the Affordable Care Act

This is turning into one of those days when I just want to scream at the talkers on television who are so absolutely sure they know what everyone thinks if they belong to the same faith or they know how people will vote or they know anything. The issue is a Health and Human Services requirement as part of the Affordable Care Act that even church owned businesses such as hospitals, schools, or relief agencies must provide insurance coverage for birth control. The Catholic Church says this is a violation of their freedom of religion.

All the people who are engaging in these heated, passionate arguments about this issue are screaming about the apples and ignoring the oranges. This isn’t about religion. It’s about affordable health insurance and affordable health care.

Way back in the dark ages of my childhood, Chinese restaurants had “family meals.” The menu had three columns of choices, appetizers and entrées. A certain number of people got to choose a certain number of items from column A, column B and column C, and paid a single price for the whole family-style meal which was delivered on serving dishes and passed around, just like at home. That’s what health insurance is like in America. A company or person can buy health insurance with options from column A, column B and column C. It is a stupid, cost-increasing way to buy health insurance.

The fewer people are in an insurance pool, the higher the premium cost. The mix-and-match-option method of buying health insurance guarantees smaller pools. They claim that no one should pay for things they wouldn’t use, like someone who doesn’t believe in abortions buying a policy that covers them. But that’s salesmanship, not honesty. The big secret the insurance companies will not tell you is that the more people choose optioned health insurance, the more profit they can make. Insurance premiums are dependent upon the odds of someone using the insurance figured against the number of people who have bought that package.

So, someone want to show me where enrollees in the Federal policies with Blue Cross-Blue Shield have their premiums put into a specific account only for those people who have chosen the same option that they have? Are only the premiums for Self-Low-Option in the account with other Self-Low-Option members? Or are all the premiums paid under all four federal option packages put in a single account which Blue Cross then uses to “invest” in the stock market to create additional income? Please, show me the proof that my Self-and-Family-High-Option premiums are only keeping company with like minded persons’ money.

The fewer the options and the higher the co-pays and deductibles, the lower the premiums. This option is the one most guaranteed to drive people into bankruptcy because of unpredictable occurrences.

The Catholic Church is being complicit with the insurance companies whose only concern is their profit margin and with the right wing which wants complete relief from regulation for those insurance companies so they can go back to denying health insurance for pre-existing conditions or cut off coverage when someone contracts an expensive disease.

One of the reasons every other country in the world gets health care at half or less of what it costs us is the insurance companies’ profit margins. With nationalized health, there are no options for coverage. Everything that the legislature and a nation’s health agencies decide upon is covered. We are stuck with private health insurance and these mix-and-match policies is because the insurance companies put out massive amounts of money to buy Republican votes to preserve their abuse of our health.

The Catholic Church does not want this battle. Seriously, the church’s leaders don’t understand how far out on a limb they have just put themselves. They should have started the debate over the additional cost of health insurance premiums when just one drug or one medical appliance is added to the policy. Instead, they are beating their breasts about religious discrimination and freedom of religion and that is taking the debate away from the ridiculous way health insurance premiums are priced to a face-down with the 98% of American Catholics who practice birth control.

Hispanic Republicans who are insisting that Hispanics will vote with their bishops and this policy is a danger to President Obama’s re-election are totally out-of-touch with young Hispanics. The abuelas may be sitting in church every morning in their black widows’ clothes fingering their rosaries, but their granddaughters are out buying the latest album by JLo or checking the magazines for what Sofia Vergara wore last week. Take a look at the evolution of Italian immigrants in America. It’s just three generations from those little old ladies with their black dresses and sensible shoes and lace doilies on their heads to Snookie. That’s the secret of America – the seductive power of personal freedom.

The White House and the Democrats need to turn the focus of this battle to the right issue – the high cost of health insurance with options. It is way past time they properly explained this to voters.

Related articles

• Love hurts: 5 insurance heartaches when good lovin’s gone bad (insurance.com)
• US Catholic Bishops Don’t Know Their Congregants (lezgetreal.com)
• The Church, The State, and Contraception (makeafriar.com)
• How To Find Affordable Health Insurance (answers.com)
• Consumer Reports: Mini-Meds and Other Junk Insurance Plans Still in Business as Consumers Wait for Health Reform to Kick In (yubanet.com)
• Many Catholic Universities, Hospitals Already Cover Contraception In Their Health Insurance Plans (thinkprogress.org)

U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear stockpiles, 1945 to 2005

Every four years, the United States government, in the person of our sitting president, reassesses our nuclear policy and strategy. It’s that time again.

Among the choices to be made are the scope of our nuclear arsenal, how our nuclear weapons are deployed and who they are aimed towards, and if the United States would ever again be justified in using a nuke in a first strike.

There are a range of variables that will determine the President’s decisions. It is not as simple as it was during the Cold War when we built up an arsenal to match or exceed that of the Soviet Union, and aimed all our nukes in that general direction. Intelligence experts and military analysts will present the President with their best view of the stability and friendliness of the nations that hold nukes. They will assess the potential for further proliferation of nukes and the use of nuclear power for energy.

An assessment of our enemies and the kind of war we would fight with them is also part of the process. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan proved what the Army College said ten years ago, that a war in the Middle East would be a regression in the advancement of warfare.

President Obama would like to reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons, and see the rest of the world reduce or eliminate their stockpiles. When announcing the administration’s long-range plans for our military last month, the President said, “It is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory as well as their role in U. S. national security strategy.” The implication was that the push to reduce our budget will help him do what he wants about nuclear weapons.

It is not a position that the Republican side of Congress will approve. Ever since the public wondered why America didn’t drop a nuclear bunker buster on Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound, there has been a portion of the right wing that advocates nuking Muslim countries just because they are Muslim. There is a belief in some parts of our society that having nukes keeps us safe and using them would make us safer. They are the same people who do not comprehend the consequences of any nuclear weapon being discharged anywhere.

How the President handles this – if he chooses to create a disarmament strategy, if he fights for it – will effect how voters view him in the election. The number of Americans who think nuclear weapons are a good thing is a minority. The number willing to use them to wipe out whole populations is small. Most of us would prefer to, if not put the genie back in the bottle, at least get rid of the excess bottles. What the White House needs to realize is that we like the President better when he is fighting for what we and he believe in.

Related articles

• Nukes, We Need Upgrades … (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Near-majority approves of military force against Iran to stop nuclear-weapon development (hotair.com)
• Santorum: Iran would nuke Missouri (thehill.com)
• Obama’s Golden Opportunity on Nukes (alternet.org)
• Pentagon’s Ex-Mideast Chief: We Might Need Nukes to Deter Iran (wired.com)
• Senator Puts U.S. Nuclear Arsenal in Doubt (usnews.com)

2009 Installation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan

Keith Soko, Associate Professor of Religious Ethics and Moral Theology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, has a simple message for the Catholic bishops and arch-bishops who are upset about the Obama administration’s new ruling on birth control coverage in employer-based health insurance: get over yourselves.

The statement issued by the Bishops called contraception against “the mandate of Jesus Christ.” They pulled that one out of their fancy hats. Christ said very little about sexuality and nothing whatsoever about preventing pregnancy. Only the leaders of the church have ever addressed the issues, and did so from some very warped personal positions. They were also the ones who said that clergy should be celibate. They just assumed that since no one bothered to mention any wives that the Apostles might have had, that there weren’t any.

Would the bishops be as eager to follow the teachings of the Apostles if they were called upon to kill any rich person who didn’t donate all their wealth to the poor, the way St. Peter did in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter Five?

When I was born, any Catholic who practiced birth control was excommunicated. After the introduction of the pill in 1960, Catholic women quietly revolted and eventually parish priests developed a pattern of looking the other way. Opposition to the use of artificial contraception among American Catholics is under 10% and use is around 75%. The archbishops and bishops who are protesting this ruling are speaking for themselves and not for their congregants.

The bishops might have been more effective if they had objected to the cost of contraception coverage in their parish health insurance premiums. Between the settlements made in child molestation cases and falling parish populations, the Church is strapped for cash. Churches and schools have been closed and property is being sold off, especially in those dioceses that have been hit with multiple settlements in the molestation cases. On the other hand, with the reduction of the number of young women willing to enter the religious life, most parochial schools have faculties that have more lay teachers than nuns.

Even the committee formed during the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65 to study birth control voted 75 to 15 to allow married Catholics to use contraceptives. Pope Paul VI rejected their recommendation. The Church refuses to understand that there is a direct correlation between the dwindling number of congregants and their policies. They have lost the battles across Europe to legalize abortion and divorce in what were once considered “Catholic countries” like France, Italy and Ireland.

The health insurance rules do not apply to clergy or those directly employed within a church, synagogue, temple or mosque. They only apply to schools, medical facilities and charities owned and run by a church, where the employees are likely to be lay persons and not necessary members of the owner’s faith.

All the bishops are doing with this hysterical response to a requirement to provide full health insurance coverage to their lay employees is increasing the gap between the church’s hierarchy and its parishioners.

Related articles

• Catholics, Contraception & The Heretical 98% (jonathanturley.org)
• Bishops don’t speak for most Catholics on contraception (cnn.com)
• Archbishop Dolan Continues To Obsess Over NY’s Same-Sex Marriage (lezgetreal.com)
• Catholic Church Launches Anti-Gay, Anti-Marriage Website (lezgetreal.com)
• Mass. Catholic Bishops Urge Parishoners To Fight Govt. Birth Control Rule (boston.cbslocal.com)
• Pelosi Vows to Stand With Obama Against Catholic Church | cnsnews.com (gloucestercitynews.net)
• No Debate, No Focus On The Poor, Catholic Church Obsessions Not Helping (lezgetreal.com)
• Catholics Defend The President (dgsma.wordpress.com)
• Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s Hypocrisy On Human Dignity (lezgetreal.com)
• Contraception. Again. (deaconjohnspace.wordpress.com)

Sen. John McCain

Senator John McCain wants to save the Defense Department budget $109 billion. No, he doesn’t want to save the taxpayers $109 billion, he wants to cut $127 billion elsewhere in the government so the Defense Department doesn’t have to cut $109 billion. He has been joined in this proposal by five other Republican senators including fellow Arizonan Jon Kyl.

The bill would freeze federal pay for an additional 30 months and allow only two people to be hired for every three who is “leaving”. That phraseology saves the party being accused of adding to the unemployment rolls. Overall, the 2/3 hiring proposal would cut the federal workforce by 5%.

At the base of this proposal, or more accurately driving the masses to approve of this attack on federal workers, is the allegation that President Obama has made massive additions to the federal workforce and will be adding 20,000 more workers just for the IRS to process health care provisions. That last one is a complete lie.

Paul Joseph Goebbels, the principle propagandist of the Nazi regime, had a few things to say about how to control the message and the masses, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth,” “The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it,” and “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” Karl Rove calls it “creating a new reality.”

A few facts in refutation of the “new reality”……

In pure numbers, the highest levels of federal employment took place in 1990 for just executive branch employees (3,067,000) and 1968 for all branches and the military (6,639,000). The lowest levels were in 1962 for executive branch (2,498,000) and 2007 for total (4,127,000). But the government is a service industry, and the best way to judge the size of the government is as a percentage of the population. We think of classrooms that way, as student-teacher ratios. That is the way we should think of those people who process our Social Security and Medicare, take care of our national forests, investigate crime, guard our borders, who do all those things too numerous to articulate, as a population-employee ratio. Since it is the executive branch that provides the services, those are the figures to concentrate on.

Our federal workforce, though numerically larger by 42,000 employees than in 2010, actually shrunk last year as a ratio. It went from 0.00899% of the population to 0.00897% of the population. That is, incidentally, the lowest ratio in the past 51 years. In 1960 and 1970, the percentage of executive branch federal employees was 0.014% of the population. Under Reagan and Bush 41, it was 0.012%. The percentage has consistently shrunken since Bill Clinton took office. The total federal workforce, including the military was at its largest in 1970 at 2.5% of the population. The Iraq and Afghan wars saw our military shrink by 0.001% of the population.

Ever been in a retail store and there are only 2 cash registers open and lines of ten, twelve customers? Well, that is what the government would be like if we were to cut it further. I spent thirty years as the wife of a Federal employee. Over those years, I saw the government make advances in productivity and efficiency. It doesn’t seem like that to those outside of it, but they did, mostly through computerization and consolidation of responsibilities. I also saw the mess the Bush administration created with the Department of Homeland Security. What was supposed to be a consolidation of services instead became an over-complicated braided rug of jurisdictions and supervision. There is a great deal that the government could do to improve efficiency, but that will not happen if the Republicans are allowed to just slash employees. That’s putting the cart before the horse. For example, it would benefit both the federal government and the states if certain inspections were co-ordinated, like food processing.

But making the government more efficient is not what the Republicans want. The eventual goal is the privatization of as much of the government as possible. We saw the preliminaries of this policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, where private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater took over work that used to be done by Federal employees. Instead of hiring Iraqis to rebuild their schools and their water systems, we hired private American contractors who charged us $5,150 a month for a truck driver, and then charged us twice that for the security personnel to protect those truck drivers because Iraqi unemployment was over 30%. Privatization is not intended to save us money, but to give money to corporations.

Lastly, the ultimate “new reality” lie is that Federal salaries are bloated and Feds get free health care and huge pensions. Federal salaries are 28% lower than the same jobs in the private sector, where comparisons are possible. There are certain jobs like forest rangers that have no comparable private jobs. The pension system started being eaten away at during the Reagan administration and the Federal employee share of health care premiums have grown since Clinton. Now, federal employees are discouraged from retiring before age 66 because they will be forced into Social Security at 62 at the lower benefit level. One can find people all over the country who believe that Anthony Weiner is receiving 75% of his Congressional salary right now and will receive it until he dies and that he gets free health care for life. Both are complete lies.

The lies that Republicans tell about Federal employment are so well entrenched in the minds of their supporters that it is easy for them to sell the idea that Federal employees are over-paid, contribute nothing to their health insurance or pensions, and don’t work nearly as hard as a private sector employee.

McCain’s bill should not be allowed to pass the Senate, but if it does, the President should veto it.

Related articles

• Federal Salary Cuts To Pay For Payroll Tax Extension? (lezgetreal.com)
• The Republican Lies About Federal Pay And Benefits (lezgetreal.com)
• Republicans propose alternative plan to budget cuts (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• McCain Plan to Avoid Spending Cuts Is a Plan to Increase Spending (pogoblog.typepad.com)
• U.S. House votes to freeze federal pay through 2013 (newsok.com)

Sen. Scott Brown

Two years ago, while campaigning in the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy as Massachusetts Senator, Scott Brown vowed to be the 41^st vote to stop the health care law. Once in the Senate, he forced deletions of critical portions of the Dodd-Frank Act weakening our oversight of the financial services industry. He was elected with the support of the Tea Party and he was goose stepping in line with their policies.

That was then. This is now. Now Brown is facing the normal cyclical election for his seat and his probable opponent will be the irrepressible, passionate, articulate, down-to-earth, almost irresistible Elizabeth Warren, the woman charged with creating the mechanisms of the financial reform bill and whose appointment to head the new consumer protection bureau was blocked by Brown and his fellow Republicans. Warren is determined to restore the so-called Kennedy Senate seat to the Democratic Party. From December 1960 to November 1962, the seat was held by the appointed Benjamin Atwood Smith II. That two year interval was just a bump in the 54 years that the seat was held by a Kennedy brother.

Now, Brown is facing three problems to get re-elected. The first is the fact that he is part of a Congress that has a 13% approval rating, the lowest in the history of polling. Second is a general sense of buyers’ remorse across America over the Tea Party. It is one thing to espouse an ideology. It is quite another to watch that ideology virtually shut down Congress. Though Brown may be a reasonable man, there were too many crazies who were running as Tea Party candidates in 2010. Lastly, Massachusetts is starting to feel picked-upon. Even Mitt Romney has disavowed RomneyCare. It may not be the perfect health care plan, but 84% of Massachusetts residents are satisfied with it. That is an impressive majority, and one that makes the Republican promise to repeal ObamaCare and the constant harping on Romney for signing their health care system into law very difficult for Brown.

Brown is trying to separate himself from his own party. He is presenting himself to Mass voters as deeply committed to bi-partisanship. The President has called for a bill banning insider trading by members of Congress. Brown has sponsored such a bill, and after the State of the Union Address, urged the President to talk to Majority Leader Harry Reid about bringing the bill to the floor. The exchange was caught on camera and the video is being used in Brown’s campaign. He voted against his party for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and has supported the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the post denied to Elizabeth Warren. Brown said “If we’re going to make progress as a nation, both parties in Washington need to work together to end the procedural gridlock and hyper-partisanship.” Dangerous words for a Republican. His party may want to hold his seat to maintain their ability to filibuster everything that comes from the President, but taking such a bi-partisan line could cost Brown support from the right wing media.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren would be a formidable opponent even in a state less devoutly Democratic than Massachusetts. She has a quick mind, a dry wit and an ability to talk with anyone without talking down to anyone that makes one wish there were more college professors like her. I certainly never had a college professor who could have made Jon Stewart double over laughing. No one can fake the passion Warren brings to her beliefs and her policies. Though there are other Democrats on the March 6 primary ballot, Warren is considered the winner already, and she has the war chest to prove it. She raised most of her $6 million campaign fund in just three months. Brown has $12.8 million in his coffers, but it is a gap Warren should be able to close easily.

Though Massachusetts is considered a Democratic state, the majority of Massachusetts voters are registered independents, something that Brown hopes will work to his favor if he stresses his “independent streak” But in the end, Brown is not running on his record, which is more Republican than independent, but is running against his own party.

Related articles

• In Mass. Senate race, GOP’s Brown embracing Obama (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Scott Brown Embraces Obama (huffingtonpost.com)
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• Washington Is Rigged – by Elizabeth Warren (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• In Op-Ed, Elizabeth Warren Hits Scott Brown and Mitt Romney For Opposing The Buffet Rule (thinkprogress.org)
• Elizabeth Warren shows how elections are won (americablog.com)
• Elizabeth Warren Is No Longer Just A Candidate, She’s A Cause And She’ll Be Almost Impossible To Beat (businessinsider.com)

Mitt Romney

“FoxSpeak” is that peculiar manner in which conservatives managed to twist a liberal’s statements 180° to mean something that was not said, just so the statement can be vilified. Though Repubican presidential nominee candidate Mitt Romney may suffer from too many incidents of letting his mouth get in the way of his political brain, yesterday he proved that he has mastered the art of “FoxSpeak.”

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta laid out for the press on a trip to Brussels the very thing so many have been calling for for the past ten years – an exit strategy for Afghanistan. While campaigning, President Obama had promised us not just an exit strategy, but an exit from Iraq and Afghanistan. When he took up occupancy of the Oval Office, the facts prevented him keeping that promised immediately. We are now out of Iraq, and Panetta told Congress that the administration “hopes” it will be able to withdraw our combat troops from Afghanistan during 2013, and leave a small contingent to continue training the Afghans. The whole exit strategy depends on two things – the situation on the ground and the decisions of the Afghan government, which is very clearly determined to create its own internal peace and get the American troops out quickly.

The key word in Panetta’s presentation was “hope”

Romney used a visit to a Las Vegas factory to criticize Secretary Panetta. He told the factory workers, “The president’s mistakes, some of them are calculated on a philosophy that’s hard to understand, and sometimes, you scratch your head and say, ‘How can he be so misguided and so naive?’ Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy. The secretary of defense said that on a day certain, the middle of 2013, we’re goint to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan. He announced that. He announced that. So, the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with a tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops? It makes absolutely no sense. His naivete is putting in jeopardy the mission of the United States of America and our commitments to freedom. He is wrong. We need new leadership in Washington.” Romney has said that any decision he makes in Afghanistan would be based on the advice of the generals on the ground.

It was perfect “FoxSpeak” – create words that were never said so the administration can be called weak, incapable of defending our country, incompetent, naive. In the thrall of some foreign philosophy. “FoxSpeak” requires their audience to ignore facts like the deaths of Osama bin Laden and most of the top ranks of al Qaida. It requires ignoring the successful end of the war in Iraq. It ignores the way in which the United States is standing toe-to-toe with Iran waiting for them to blink. Like every other criticism of the administration, Romney’s rebuke is dependent upon having listeners who are programmed to believe the worst of any Democrat, Progressive or liberal.

Secreatary Panetta did not say anything new on that flight to Brussels. The 2013-14 timeline has been discussed for a couple of years already. Romney’s remarks can be interpreted as both his own ability to deny the true words of those in the administration and as an indication that the right wing media has managed for two years to never disclose to their viewers and listeners that this timeline existed.

Related articles

• Romney: Panetta’s Withdrawal Announcement ‘Misguided’ (abcnews.go.com)
• Pentagon pushes to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible (rt.com)
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• Plan for early end to US combat role catches Afghan officials by surprise (csmonitor.com)
• Mitt Romney hauls out the weak-on-defense canard over Afghanistan withdrawal plans (dailykos.com)

Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma who is well respected on both sides of the aisle, has placed a filibuster hold on a bill authorizing an annual earmark of $20 million for the New York City September 11 Memorial & Museum at the site of the World Trade Center. That’s $20 million a year to operate the museum and memorial, not just to build it. That earmark comes at the same time that funding for other museums all over the country, including our national museum, the Smithsonian, have suffered budget cuts.

Coburn’s spokesman, John Hart, explained the Senator’s rationale, “Our debt is our greatest national security threat, and Dr. Coburn makes no apologies for forcing Congress to make choices and avoid unnecessary borrowing. If providing federal funding for this effort is a critical national priority, the sponsors should pay for this effort by reducing spending on lower-priority programs. It is also important to question why we need a $20 million earmark for a 9/11 memorial when private and patriotic Americans across the country are generously supporting this noble cause.”

The sponsors for the bill include Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer of New York. Schumer told Politico that “This is sacred ground not just to New Yorkers but to all Americans, and it deserves the same treatment as other memorials. Sen. Coburn heard our arguments on the Zadroga bill and eventually supported it. We hope he will do the same this time.” Big difference here. The Zadroga bill was for the medical care of those who worked on the Ground Zero site. Schumer is obviously forgetting that funding has been so severely cut for the Capital Mall that the Reflecting Pool is a cesspool of goose droppings and a private fundraiser was needed to start repairs. The Mall is a national monument as well. And how about the need for a private donor to fix the Washington Monument? Congress only approved half the necessary funds.

I understand the emotional element of the 9/11 memorials, just as I understand the Pearl Harbor memorial. But I also understand a couple of other things about Ground Zero….

First of all, it is not Federal land. The property, as near as I can figure out, belongs to the New York Port Authority. The buildings belong to the developers and from the beginning, back in 1966, the city of New York, the Port Authority and the developers had deals concerning property tax payments being replaced with fees collected from the building tenants. The new World Trade Center complex will consist of five high-rise office buildings and a transportation hub close in size to Grand Central Terminal (meaning a heck of a lot bigger than anything most of us have ever seen) in addition to the museum and memorial. Nothing in all of that says “Federal government” anymore than Central Park is under Federal jurisdiction. People from all over the world and all over the United States enjoy Central Park and New York City’s many museums. None of them are, to my knowledge, subsidized by the Federal government.

Then there’s the thing very few of us speak of out loud…how fed up so many Americans are with being blackmailed with 9/11. If you don’t support invading Iraq, you’ve forgotten 9/11. If you question the legality of activities of the Bush administration, you’ve forgotten 9/11. If you vote for a Democrat, you’ve forgotten 9/11. If you are in any way tolerant of Muslims, you’ve forgotten 9/11. If you think it’s a stupid idea to drop a nuke on every Muslim in the world, you’ve forgotten 9/11. If you believe that a Muslim group should be allowed to build a community center in lower Manhattan, you’ve forgotten 9/11.  There came a point, about 5 years ago, where the constant refrain of “if you….you’ve forgotten 9/11″became sickening. My husband was a Federal employee. I would rather hear people say, “If you use violent imagery in discussing politics or call Democrats ‘communists’, you’ve forgotten Oklahoma City.”

Coburn is right. The September 11 memorial and museum are for all Americans, but unless they are on Federal land under Federal superivsion, they are not a Federal responsibility. Twenty million doesn’t sound like much, but if you take ten little $20 million projects off the books, you have saved $200 million. Take out 100 of them, and you save $2 billion. To put that in perspective, this week the House has voted to eliminate the $330 million in support for Planned Parenthood. Now, which is more important, the funding for 15 purely regional projects like a museum for Lawrence Welk, or the health of millions of women?

Related articles

• Coburn blocks 9/11 museum funding (politico.com)
• World Trade Center Design Flaw Could Cost Millions (huffingtonpost.com)
• Voices of September 11th Urges Senators to Support Zadroga Bill (prweb.com)

Home ownership and sub-prime origination, 1987 through 2007

Have you ever heard someone say that the stock market is going through “an adjustment”? They are describing a situation in which stock prices have been inflated beyond the real value of companies and stock prices fall to more accurately reflect what a company is worth.

As hard as this is to accept, the housing market collapse may eventually prove to be the same kind of adjustment.

Americans tend to equate new home construction with a good economy to the point where construction is one of the prime indicators of our economic health. But what if new home construction exceeds the need for new homes? What if the new homes being constructed are priced too high for the average family? What if new home construction is adding to our economic problems, not indicating a healthy economy?

Comparisons of incomes and prices across time are normally adjusted into their equivalent in today’s dollars. That’s not monkeying around with the beans. In purely numerical terms, the median income in 1967 was $6,156 per year, but today, the same income would be equal to $40,770 in purchasing ability.

So, back to that 1967 number….the median income is the absolute center of the income spectrum in a population. In 1967, the U. S. median income was $40,770. The median house price was $25,000. In 2007, when the housing bubble was collapsing, the median income was $52,820 but the median house price was $250,000. In forty years, the median house price went from 61% of median income to 473% of median income. Economists have long used a simple measurement to determine if one can afford a house. The price should not exceed 150% to 200% of income. By 2007, using that standard, one would have needed an income of $125,000 to $166,667, 2.4 times to 3 times the median income.

Naturally, house prices vary widely across the country, but so do incomes. One place where this whole thing is very easy to see is Atlanta. Back in 2007, you could drive around the suburbs of Atlanta and see dozens of housing developments and the cheapest house price was $175,000. More normal was $300,000. But drive into the city and you found a huge swath of the city with dilapidated houses, certifiable slums, too many owned by absentee landlords. The amount of housing between those two points was not equal to the number of people who were at the median income level. Older neighborhoods with relatively affordable houses were occupied by older people who had bought those houses twenty, thirty years previously or by tenants. Some older neighborhoods were being “gentrified” by young professionals. The affordable housing market for the family with a median income was practically non-existent, and for a family with one median income, absolutely non-existent. There was a horrific case about a decade ago involving a young family who had downgraded their housing so the wife could go to school. The husband became the victim of a random shooting in a convenience store parking lot in front of his two young children. They could not afford for the wife to go to school and stay in the more safe neighborhood they had lived in. The shooter was a ten-year-old gangsta-wannabe.

Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, house prices have fallen. It’s a particularly bad situation for those who bought those inflated homes during the 2000s. Too many now have mortgages higher than their houses are worth. It is conventional wisdom to blame the bursting housing bubble on everything starting with a law passed during the Clinton administration that forbid banks making mortgage decisions based on the zip code of the house instead of the financial stability of the purchaser. The practice was called “red lining.” Red lining contributed to deteriorating neighborhoods as those people who might have held off urban blight were kept from buying in neighborhoods on the brink. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are blamed. But the worst abuse is blaming people who “bought houses they couldn’t afford.” No one ever thinks to blame the housing bubble on people who thought they were entitled to have their houses double in value in five years, or the never-ending construction of grossly over-priced houses. No one wants to see that when people cannot find houses they can afford, they are forced to buy houses they cannot afford or live the rest of their lives in rentals that are inadequately maintained and allowed to crumble. And they also don’t want to see the impact of a President who pushed for an “ownership” culture, as George W. Bush did.

We can talk openly about the stock market “adjusting” and how the “tech bubble” bursting weeded out the dead weight in the industry, but we are reluctant to discuss the housing market “adjusting” or the “housing bubble” bursting as a means of correcting something that went very wrong. We lost sight of the fact that people need decent, affordable housing.

Mitt Romney has suggested that we should deal with the foreclosure crisis by allowing developers to buy up those houses, renovate them and rent them out. No. We do not need more absentee landlords. We need a way to stabilize the housing market so that people can afford homes again they way they did in the 1950s and 1960s. We have to decide if we are going to lower the river or raise the bridge. We can lower home prices until they are in line with incomes or we can raise incomes so that people can afford them. There are no easy solutions to this, but we cannot determine solutions if we refuse to acknowledge the totality of the causes.

Related articles

• Where home prices are headed in 2012 (freedommortgage.com)
• David Coates: Republican Truth and Real Truth: GSEs and the Housing Bubble (huffingtonpost.com)
• Positive market conditions fail to spur rapid home buying demand (freedommortgage.com)

Public support for unions (red) union membership (blue)

In the late 1960s, a high school student in Pittsburgh could earn $11 an hour sweeping floors after school in the steel mills. At the same time, a legal secretary was considered well-paid if she made the equivalent of $2.25 an hour. The Auto Workers Union negotiated contracts that led to salaries for assembly line workers that hit the $100,000 a year mark, while quality was falling precipitously. The teachers’ union in New York City, in fact all of the New York City public sector unions, had contracts that were even more exorbitant. A maternity leave for a teacher ran to five years. Tenure was so unassailable that a teacher could be on the payroll, at over $100,000 a year and not teach a single class. There are still eight of those non-teachers in New York City drawing paychecks right now. When our economy was booming, the unions cut contracts that were outright outrageous, but sustainable because the companies were making enough money.

Funny thing about those unions. When the Chrysler Corporation was on the rocks in the 1979, it was not the wage scales in UAW contracts that CEO Lee Iacocca talked about the most. It was the cost of health insurance. Some unions had negotiated health insurance policies that are still mindboggling. Iacocca did not cite wages, but health insurance as Japan’s edge in the market. (He wasn’t entirely correct. It was Toyota’s practice of doing the market research first and building the car second that made the difference.) He didn’t mention pension systems, but they too were high-end.

As American industries were shipped overseas, it became a tenet of the right wing ideology that the unions were at fault. It absolutely could not be the fault of owners or shareholders. It had to be the unions, and in a simplistic way it was, through the health insurance policies and pension costs. But Iacocca was petitioning for nationalized health care, not an end to unions in 1979. He understood that what the UAW had negotiated was equivalent to the kind of health care that was available in Japan, France and Germany in their nationalized systems, at a much lower cost than the private insurance Chrysler was forced to buy.

Shifting blame away from business owners for the outsourcing of American industry has become second nature in the Republican Party. The best example is the textile industry. Many years ago, the suburbs of Boston all the way to Concord, New Hampshire, were filled with textile mills and clothing factories. Then, they all moved to the Carolinas to take advantage of the “right to work” laws there. The presence of a “right to work” law practically guarantees the absence of unions, unions wages and union safety requirements for workers. The Carolinas worked fairly well for a couple of decades, in spite of the attempts to “Norma Rae” the mills down there. But even the child labor restrictions, minimum wage requirements and OSHA regulations of Federal law were unacceptable to the mill owners. They packed up and moved to Central America, where a worker made as much in a week as a Carolinian made in an hour. It had nothing whatsoever to do with unions. There were no unions in the Carolinas. It was a management decision made to increase the profit margin and shareholder dividends. Just don’t try to tell that to a Republican. Even Carolinians find someone else to blame, usually Bill Clinton and NAFTA, though neither had anything to do with this. Bush41 negotiated NAFTA and Central America is not part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the late 1940s and 1950′s private sector union membership was over 40% of the American workforce, the top tax rate was 90% and not only was our economy thriving, but we paid down the 125% of GDP national debt left from the Great Depression and World War II. The middle class exploded. City neighborhoods and small towns could not accommodate all the veterans who had spent the war dreaming of wives, babies and single-family homes, so the planned suburb was born and tens of thousands of homes were built. It was “The American Dream” and it was fed by those very unions that the Republican Party hates so much.

But the big factories closed and with them, the unions shrank until less than 12% of Americans belong to unions and those are mostly in the public sector, sports and entertainment.

It is against this background of “unions are bad” that Indiana passed a “right to work” law last week. It will be signed by Governor Mitch Daniels this week. Most civilians think of “right to work” laws as guaranteeing that a company or individual can hire non-union workers and not be boycotted by the unions that govern the industry involved. That’s just the surface part of “right to work” laws.

There are two different types of unions – labor unions that deal with employees of things like auto manufacturers, textile mills and mines, and trade unions that deal with people who work in a specific field like plumbers and electricians. In many ways, it is the impact that “right to work” laws have on trade unions that is the larger problem.

Trade unions provide a framework within which a person earns the right to call himself or herself a professional. They have steps, normally apprentice, journeyman and master, that define how far a person has come in the training process and what he or she is competently capable of doing. A trade union is a guarantee to the consumer that the person being hired can do what he/she is being hired to do. In short, in a state that has trade unions, there is less need for Angie’s List.

The standards for trade unions exceed state licensing standards in most cases. “Right to work” states can, and most do, have very lax standards for licensing of trade professionals. That means any jerk with a toolbelt can call himself a plumber, like that person who came to be known as “Joe the Plumber” in 2008. He was not a plumber, not even an apprentice plumber. But in several “right to work” states, he could call himself a plumber, take out an ad in the phone book, run a website and walk into someone’s home not knowing an intake valve from a u-joint. We ran into this in Georgia when we needed a “plumber” to verify that our incoming water line had ruptured, causing the $1,000 water bill, and had been replaced, to void the $1,000 water bill. We were literally told that anyone could sign the forms. We did not need a certified Master Plumber to oversee or do the work. There was no such thing as a certified Master Plumber in the whole county.

A “right to work” law is attractive for some because it means a homeowner or landlord can hire someone on the cheap and not have to pay the fees that the trade union has set for jobs. The cost cutting is welcomed, but the consequences are never taken into consideration. My hundred-year-old house has been wired and re-wired four times that we’re sure of. The first three did not involve trade union-trained electricians. That is part of why it cost so much for the fourth. No one could figure out where the freaking wires ran. Worse, some of them ran wrapped around copper plumbing lines and behind joists and rafters. A secondary circuit box had been jumped off the first instead of being installed separately. We have wires on top of wires strung all through the walls and ceilings. That this house didn’t burn down in the past fifty years is a testament to dumb luck, not to properly-done renovation work.

The least obvious impact of “right to work” laws is worker safety. People are unaware of the fact that unions were born on the graves of workers. OSHA is relatively new. It was unions who created the first safety standards for workplaces such as mills and mines. If you remember Norma Rae, you will remember that one of the primary issues was face masks for the mill employees to prevent them breathing in the fibers that are released into the air by the machinery. Those fibers cause “white lung” a disease no less deadly than a miner’s “black lung” because the fibers coat the inside of the lungs and prevent oxygen from being absorbed. Unions forced face masks in the northern mills long before OSHA was formed. Unions fought for the regulations that protect workers, and maybe that’s why the Republicans hate them so much.

The Walton family jokes that liberals blame Walmart for everything, well, in this case, they deserve it. Walmart began in the Southern “right to work” states and used the lack of unions and lax regulations to create a system of employment that has become the standard for retail and hospitality. States have thresholds for an employer to provide access to health insurance, typically between 32 and 36 hours per week for the employee. For this reason, there is no such thing as full time in retail. Without a union to fight for health insurance access, the retail and hospitality industries don’t offer it, except to salaried management. And that part-time employment thing is a real trap. It is rare for retail and hospitality employees to have very stable schedules. It would be so easy if one knew, okay, I work 9 to 1, Thursday to Monday, so I can schedule a doctor’s appointment for after 2 or on Wednesday. Doesn’t happen. Employees have to make appointments and then ask for the time off. Many retailers will absolutely not allow any requests for time off during “holiday periods,” like from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Years. And then there’s what happens if one is lucky enough to be with a company long enough to make, say, 50¢ an hour above starting pay. That person can expect to lose half their weekly hours while the company hires someone to work those lost hours at 50¢ an hour less than they pay the established employee.

There’s also the “discipline” forms. If one makes a mistake, one is expected to confess to it in writing. If one doesn’t sign the form, one is fired. There is a grace period in most companies where, if one is super good, the form will be expunged. But, if one racks up three or four or whatever number of them, one is fired and one’s signature on those forms bars one from collecting unemployment insurance. That’s being “fired with cause,” and it kicks in a waiting period for unemployment benefits. That benefits the company because it reduces their liability with unemployment insurance. Got all that? A worker keeps his/her job by confessing to doing something wrong, and forfeits unemployment benefits in the process. There is no appeal and no recourse without a union. The employee is always wrong, even in cases of customer complaint. There is no objective means of settling these things, just the subjective opinion of management that the employee is expendable.

“Right to work” laws result in lower wages for workers, fewer if any benefits, no guarantee of the competence of contractors, unchallenged abuses by employers, a reduction of safety standards for workers. The only people who gain anything from “right to work” laws are corporations that are freed to intimidate their employees to prevent unionization.

In the end, it is not about giving people the right to work. It is about giving those poor helpless corporations protection from the big, nasty, ugly unions that “destroyed” America. It is about “taking America back” to the 1890s and the sweat shops, child labor, workplace diseases and injuries, mine collapses and factory fires. When the Tea Party (or the people who created the Tea Party while convincing idiots that it was a grassroots movement) coined the phrase “take back our country,” they chose not to answer two questions: “Take it back from whom?” and “Take it back to when?” The answer is take it back from middle class and take it back to 1890.

Republicans are engaged in a double-whammy to create The Corporate States of America — bust unions and deregulate.  They might want to remember something.  When we had neither unions nor regulations to protect workers, that when we had class warfare in its purest sense, the workers’ riots and the Harlan County War in Kentucky. 

Related articles

• Indiana right-to-work law to get final push this week – Reuters (reuters.com)
• After 70 years, right-to-work issue remains a hot potato – USA TODAY (usatoday.com)
• Indiana joins GOP union-bashing with right-to-work law | Michael Paarlberg (guardian.co.uk)
• What Is a ‘Right to Work’ Law? (blogs.wsj.com)
• Anti-Union “Right-To-Work” Laws Really A Tax On Unions (seeingtheforest.com)
• Indiana passes right-to-work law and is now open for business – and jobs (winteryknight.wordpress.com)

Speaker John Boehner by Donkey Hotey

Having failed to force President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline route by attaching a sixty-day limit for action to one law, Speaker of the House John Boehner has laid out which up-coming bills the pipeline will be attached to, this time with a straight “approve it or else.”

That leads to a very big question….

Since TransCanada has already said it doesn’t really care about the route and will re-submit the application, just who is Boehner doing this for? It’s not for jobs for Americans. According to TransCanada’s website, they already have thousands of miles of pipeline across Canada and the United States and have only 4,200 people on payroll. Not exactly the 20,000 Boehner keeps saying would be employed by the pipeline. In fact, TransCanada has a series of natural gas pipelines that approximate the route for the Keystone XL pipeline and could be tandemed with an oil pipeline with little or no disruption to the environment. The Northern Border Pipeline begins in Alberta and runs to Iowa and the oil pipeline could be connected to the ANR Pipeline route with a span across Illinois. The ANR runs all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. From Louisiana, it’s a really short hop to the refineries in Texas.

So, back to the question…who is so desperate to run the Keystone XL pipeline on the proposed route, which would run through virgin lands in six states? It’s not TransCanada, so who? Tandeming with the existing pipelines would be a longer route, and cost TransCanada more, but they are eager to co-operate with our government on finding the route that will present the least potential for environmental disruption and protest. They are having enough problems with environmental issues over the oil sands development in Canada without adding Americans to the mix. Their only other option for the oil sands is to run pipelines to British Columbia and ship the unrefined oil to China, but the First Nations are blocking that proposal and will probably win the court battle over it. They could, of course, tandem with the GTN pipeline into Oregon and Washington, cut over to the Pacific and then ship to China. Good luck getting that one approved. If TransCanada tried to pipeline through the United States to ship to China, even the right wing media couldn’t spin that one enough to stop opposition. (Very interesting website, www.transcanada.com)

We already know that Boehner’s campaign fund was enriched by $1.1 million from fossil fuel interests and the 234 members of Congress who voted for the pipeline have received $42 million in contributions from fossil fuel companies. Is that the answer? Got any better ones? They are not doing this for TransCanada or for tens of thousands of American jobs. There is only one explanation – they are planning to hold our government hostage for people like the Koch brothers. In fact, the protest groups are demanding to know if the Kochs have

Boehner said Sunday morning that they will attach an immediate approval amendment to the energy and highway bill that will be considered next month. “If [Keystone] is not enacted before we take up the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, it will be part of it.” Boehner told ABC’s This Week. Part of the bill already includes elements that will not pass the Democratic Senate, including opening the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

There is also a chance Boehner would attach the Keystone approval to a bill to extend the payroll tax cut that benefits most Americans.

This entire proposal, adding the approval of the pipeline {in defiance of the stated plans of the company that would build it) to bills that are necessary for America’s recovery is not just partisanship at its worst, it’s out-and-out blackmail. There are only two reasons for holding a person or thing hostage for blackmail – to force someone to do something or to collect a great deal of money. In the case of the Republican blackmail of the American people over Keystone XL, it’s both. They are trying to force us to do something so that someone can collect a whole lot of money, and it certainly isn’t the American people.

Here’s my best guess –

The oil sands fields are in Canada, so the United States gets no revenues from leasing the land or royalties form the oil extraction. This operation has no monetary benefit to the United States, except at the end of the pipeline. The oil sands require a specific type of refining operation because of their impurities. Our existing oil refineries in Texas are already incapable of keeping up with American output. To refine the oil sands, we would probably have to approve a new refinery in Texas. That’s where the money is. The United States taxpayer would be expected to heavily subsidize the building of a new refinery in Texas and the people of Texas would be expected to waive any kinds of benefit from it to “attract the jobs.” Republican governors loving giving away the tax benefits for a few jobs. Whoever would be involved in the building or expanding of a refinery is probably the money person we should be looking at for the source of all that money that the Republicans are getting to support this project. Like I said, my best guess.

Related articles

• Surprise! Boehner Owns Stock In Keystone-Related Companies (lezgetreal.com)
• Keystone a Key Ingredient Missing from Obama’s Economic Recovery Recipe (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Republicans keep up Keystone XL efforts (ctv.ca)
• BREAKING: TransCanada’s Dirty Keystone XL Jobs Claims Draw Complaint To SEC (thinkprogress.org)
• Demise of Keystone XL Means More Bakken Shale Gas Flaring (desmogblog.com)
• Keystone XL Pipeline: Extra Large Pipe Dream Or Extra Large Infrastructure Project? (constructionsocialmedia.wordpress.com)

Cynthia Nixon at the May 25, 2010 Designing Women Awards (by Peter Kramer for AP)

For years now, gay rights activists have been making the case that gay is not a “lifestyle choice,” but a biological condition. They consider it essential to the movement for the biology to be accepted as the root cause of homosexuality. The thinking is simple – if being gay is not a choice, then discriminating against people who are gay is unconstitutional.

The movement is basically so dug in to the idea that “lifestyle choice” threatens gay rights that they are attacking actress Cynthia Nixon for saying that for her, at least, it was a choice.

Nixon, best known for the role of Miranda in Sex and the City, spent fifteen years in a committed relationship with a man, bearing him two children during that time. For the past eight years, she has been in a relationship with a woman, to whom she is engaged.

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, Nixon said, “I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matter that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.”

Wayne Besen, of Truth Wins Out, is one of Nixon’s critics, saying “Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words, and it is going to be used when some kid comes out and their parents force them into some ex-gay camp while she’s off drinking cocktails at fancy parties. When people say it’s a choice, they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse because if it’s a choice, people will try to influence and guide young people to what they perceive as the right choice.”

Wow – in one statement Besen just dismissed one-fourth of the movement.

Nixon is bi-sexual by biology even if she refuses to define herself as bi-sexual, and at different times in her life has made two distinct choices about her commitment to a partner. That does not change the biology of purely gay or lesbian people or the complexities of transgenderism. It just sets the record straight about bi-sexuality. There is a choice involved for bi-sexual persons when it comes to commitments.

The “movement” is called LGBT, as in “Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender.” One of those four is not like the others. One of those four has more options and more choices to make. That does not change the fact that the one different group needs just as much in the way of rights protections as the other three. They should not be forced to take cover in a straight relationship to prevent being discriminated against. And Nixon’s statements are not going to change anything for a teenager who is stuck with parents who would demand “cure the gay” therapy. As long as there are so-called professionals like Marcus Bachmann willing to “cure the gay” there will be parents who force their kids into it.

The problem is not in converting the parents. Trust me, this country is full of people who cannot see facts for their own bigotry. The problem is in allowing these “cure the gay” therapists to do business. Until laws are written that define what therapy is and who can practice it, and punish those who practice without proper training or certification, this situation will continue. The laws can be written to encompass alternative medicine and still protect kids from the intentional malpractice of “cure the gay” therapists.

Welcome to the problem every rights movement in history has had. A movement is perceived as being weakened if it is not totally unified in a way that makes conformity more important than individual rights.

One of the things that has haunted the Scott family of Atlanta is the possibility that W. A. Scott was not murdered by white supremacists, but by African American extremists who could not accept a moderate view in the pre-World War II civil rights movement. The feminist movement was fatally damaged by a leadership that said women could not choose to be homemakers and full-time mothers, forcing those who wanted that choice to seek refuge among the anti-feminists. It took guts to stand up to the extremists in the feminist movement and say “If this is about choice, why can’t you respect mine?” It took courage to be full-time homemakers and teach our children they had the right to make their own decisions.

Then, there is the issue of “allies” – an important part of any civil rights movement. The civil rights movement for African Americans needed white allies. Without them, nothing would have happened. A minority cannot change laws all by itself. When extremists in the African American community started lashing out at the allies, the movement suffered set-backs that are really coming to fruition this year in restrictions in voting rights, rights that were more reformed by white allies than they were impacted by black activists. There is a part of the LGBT community that lashes out at those who have not been subjected to discrimination within their own families. That’s a really great way to lose allies.

Cynthia Nixon is a bi-sexual who has made her choice. She has chosen the lesbian side of her sexuality and made her commitment within that decision. She is hardly alone in that. The movement has decided to define women like Meredith Baxter according to the movement’s preferences. She must have been a deeply repressed lesbian who finally threw off her shackles and found herself. But what if Meredith Baxter is in fact a bi-sexual? What if she wasn’t faking it when she was attracted to men? Her description of her relationship with ex-husband David Birney was about his controlling and emotionally abusive treatment of her, not about sexual compatibility. What if Baxter has made a choice about committed relationships more than a choice about coming out of the closet? Is the movement denying Baxter the right to define herself the way they want to force their definition on Nixon?

One last thought, from a straight woman..Nixon is far more threatening to homophobic men than a biological lesbian is. Nixon is saying it’s not about the equipment, it’s about the quality of the relationship. Ever seen those t-shirts that say “the more I know about men, the more I love my dog”? Nixon’s message is a multi-layered one. She is saying, with her own personal history, that two women can forge a sexually satisfying relationship and an emotionally satisfying relationship without being totally immune to a biological attraction to men. And since most women are already aware of the fact that it is much easier to get one’s emotional needs met by other women, her message is a real threat to men’s belief that women cannot get sexual satisfaction without a penis being involved.  (If you are comedy deprived and have never seen the British series Coupling, I recommend Series 2, Episode 2, “My Dinner In Hell.”  The background joke is that Patrick is a tripod.)

The best way to destroy a movement is by insisting that everyone within it conform to a single set of criteria. If the movement cannot accept diversity within itself, it dooms itself.

Related articles

• Cynthia Nixon Won’t Call Herself Bisexual Because ‘Nobody Likes The Bisexuals’ (towleroad.com)
• Cynthia Nixon’s ‘choice’ remarks to New York Times land her in hot water with some gay activists (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Cynthia Nixon’s remarks on gay ‘choice’ worry activists (ctv.ca)
• Actress’ gay-by-choice claim riles activists (cbsnews.com)
• Actress’ claim to be gay by choice riles activists (pbpulse.com)
• Actress’ gay-by-choice claim riles activists (kayceeweezy.wordpress.com)

Newt Gingrich at Iowa fair (Creative Commons)

The sunspot storm has occasionally been messing up my cable, so I thought it was a reception problem. This morning, however, I saw back-to-back clips of Newt Gingrich from two consecutive days and it is not sunspots. Newt’s hair has gone from snow white to mildly salt-and-pepper with a slightly darker base tone overnight.

Who does he think he’s fooling? Does he think that a truck load of Only For Men will make us forget he’s old enough for Medicare? We all know the sales pitch – leave only enough gray to show you have experience, but get rid of enough to show you can still function at whatever. Did he think this campaign is a first-impression job interview? We all know how old he is. He uses his age to show that his womanizing, wife-cheating days are over.

One more observation from this morning – how does a man look like he’s lost twenty pounds overnight? Spanx? Seriously, I’ve knew a man who wore girdles. He was an over-the-hill actor.

If he really wanted to prove he has the stamina for the job, he should have joined Nutrisystem a couple of years ago. Everyone who lived in Georgia in the past thirty years knows the story of newspaper columnist Lewis Grizzard. Incredibly talented man. Brilliant and beloved observer of the human condition. After his last heart surgery, he was greeted at home by neighbors bearing plates of fried chicken. Okay, he had a congenital heart defect, but a whole lot of us blamed the fried chicken brigade for his death at the age of 48. Have you caught the Paula Deen diabetes story? Also a Georgian. Georgian’s cholesterol levels scare me. Being President is freaking hard work. We haven’t had a fat president since William Taft left office in 1909. Bill Clinton came too damned close to it, and look how his health has been since leaving office. Gingrich is three years older and in far worse physical condition than Clinton was in office.

At some point in this campaign, Gingrich’s age and physical condition will become an issue. His choice of a running mate will be as important as McCain’s. And Only For Men and Spanx won’t help.

Related articles

• Newt Gingrich: I’m Not Like Bill Clinton (lesliebrodie.wordpress.com)
• Take that Romney! Nancy Reagan 1995: Ronnie turned the torch over to Newt Gingrich (usamericanfreedom.com)
• Newt Gingrich Admits He Can’t Refute Second Wife’s Allegations (inquisitr.com)
• Newt Gingrich Wanted Open Marriage, So Much For The Sanctity Thereof (lezgetreal.com)
• Watch: Newt Gingrich Attacks Romney on ‘Mud’ Ads (abcnews.go.com)
• Prison Planet.com ” NEVER MIND: Gingrich Campaign Just Admitted To Lying In The Last CNN Debate (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Watching the GOP implode (miscellany101.wordpress.com)

The State of the Union Address, 2012

I’m going to get the sappy part out of the way first. When a President arrives for the State of the Union Address, he shakes hands with everyone who can reach him. When he reaches the front of the chamber, where the extra chairs have been placed to accommodate the Senators, Supreme Court and Cabinet, he can choose to go down the front row shaking more hands. Last night, President Obama shook hands with the members of the Supreme Court and near the end of the front row, reached Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The President didn’t shake her hand. He gathered her up into a huge bear hug and rocked her, nestling her head against his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time they have seen each other this year. Captain Mark Kelley’s retirement ceremony was held in the White House. But this was more than just “I’m so glad to see you.” This was also good-bye because Gabby had already announced her retirement. It was one of the most spontaneous, honest, warm, loving human things I have ever seen a President do with an adult, and I’ve lived through 12 presidents. It was beautiful.

Now, down to the speech……

The pundits were right. The State of the Union Address was the first salvo of the Presidential election, even if the Republicans haven’t figured out who is going to be their nominee. We know who will be the Democratic nominee and he gave his first campaign speech last night.

A State of the Union Address is supposed to be, by Constitutional definition, a report to Congress of the, well, the state of our union. It has evolved into a wish list for Presidents. It is the opportunity for the President to say what he wants out of Congress. President Obama’s first two State of the Union Addresses were sort of like Oliver Twist time – “please, sir, may I have some more?” – with him asking Congress to send him bills that would support his agenda. Didn’t work. Even when the Democratic House in 2009 and 2010 gave him what he wanted, most of it died in the Senate because of the Republican filibuster. He had to give up critical parts of his health care law and financial services reform laws just to get the things passed. This time, there was no asking please.

I like watching the opposition’s reactions. At one point, I was sure I saw steam coming out of Eric Cantor’s ears. I thought as the speech went on he was going to chew up and swallow his lips. There probably isn’t enough Maalox in Washington for the dyspepsia that John Boehner was experiencing. This speech was game, set and match to the President.

Unlike last year, it is not the specifics that matter. What matters is that the President laid out things that would benefit the 99% and not one single thing he asked for will happen. Not one. We will not see a program that allows the Defense Department to purchase green energy instead of fossil fuel based energy. We will not see a Senate rule change that restores the majority rule that our founders believed in. We will not see infrastructure work or the ability of homeowners to refinance at “historically low” interest rates. We will not see laws that do buttkiss about eliminating the unfairness of the tax code or restructures regulations to make them more efficient and less obtuse. We will not see the money to support joint projects between businesses and community colleges to train people for the jobs of this century. We will not see support for college financing or more work-study jobs. It ain’t gonna happen.

The entire Republican election strategy for 2012 consists of making sure that as little as possible gets done in Washington so they can call Obama a failed president. They already call him the worst president in history and get away with it because their base is so grossly undereducated they’ve never heard of any of the presidents between Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Well, they probably have heard of Teddy Roosevelt just because Dubya admired his “big stick” foreign policy without understanding what a progressive he was and how he fought government corruption all his public life. We can expect that the Republicans in Congress will do everything they can to screw this nation so they can blame the President.

It is incomprehensible to everyone how the Republicans cannot understand what it means when a Congress has a 9% approval rate. Sorry, they are up to a whopping 12% this week. These are the lowest approval ratings in the history of approval ratings. No matter how low the President’s rating is, it has never gotten near that.

And the overnight polls are even more bad news for them. They show 91% of Americans approved of what the President proposed last night. Only 9% disapproved.

We are supposedly a nation addicted to instant gratification. The Republicans are playing on that. They are pushing the idea that because the recovery is taking time it isn’t working. They are playing on the “right now” instead of the future. I don’t believe that we are incapable of focusing on the long term.

The President’s speech was not about the “right now” it was about the long term, about moving into the 21^st century, not taking our country back to the 19^th. It is a more focused message than “Yes we can” and “Hope and Change” were. It is a message that says there is a future, but not if we don’t change with the times and adjust our thinking. It shifts the responsibility for creating that change from the government to us in many ways. We must be willing to see past the now to the future.

I am 63 years old. I don’t have a lot of future left to me, but I want to see us firmly in the 21^st century before I go. I want to see stem cells being used to replace damaged and eroded tissue so that people can live without pain or disability. I want to see us playing on a level global marketplace, not scrabbling to the bottom of the barrel. I want to see us finally realize that we have had the ways and means to educate all our children well. I want so much for the future. There is only one way to achieve that.

The Democrats had better have been listening last night and they had better grow cajones and backbones this spring. This must be a party-wide effort. We must regain control, total control, with no wussing out over eliminating the filibuster rule so that we can pass things with a simple majority. We must have a clear, unassailable majority in both the House and the Senate to drag this nation kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. In 2010, the party was a study in cowardice. They didn’t have the guts to listen to us and act accordingly. No, 76% of us did not disapprove of the health care bill. Half of that 76% were pissed off there was no public option. That changes the meaning of the poll, doesn’t it? They were listening to Fox News instead of listening to us.

There is more than enough evidence out there that this is our time – the Occupy movement, the strike-back against the right wing propaganda. We need more. We need the courage to demand that those who have chosen to represent us in court cases over abortion and gay marriage stop farting around and go for the First Amendment jugular. We need every Democrat who steps in front of a mike to be fully prepared for anything that might be thrown at him. We need all of them to get an infusion of Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner, because at least those two men fought back. They lost, but they fought back. We all need to be United Wisconsin and realize that unions are not the enemy. Unions fought to get us safe working environments and decent pay and end sweatshops and death traps. Unions created our middle class. It is not a question of what is right for America. We all know what is right for America. It is purely and simply a question of us having the courage to fight for what we need.

President Barack Obama

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has spent the time and effort to go through White House internal memos to gain insights into the legislative losses of the Obama administration.

Progessives complain that the President hasn’t done enough. The right complains he has bypassed the Constitution and done too much. Both claims are wrong. Until recently, President Obama has avoided doing the Bush thing – using executive orders to bypass Congress and signing statements to void laws. If he had done so, the Progressives would have nothing to complain about. Bush earned himself the professional political scientist s’designation as our third “constitutional dictator” after Lincoln and FDR, without the excuse of a Civil War and a Great Depression.

President Obama was elected on a list of promises, just as every president is. Bill Clinton was a rarity. With the support of a Democratic House and Senate, he fulfilled 73% of his campaign promises. The percentage of fulfilled promises was figured by the very conservative Florida Times Union before the 1996 election with a complete list of Clinton’s campaign promises and what legislative action had resulted. The list included the reform of the welfare system that Newt Gingrich is taking claim for. Sorry, Newt. If Clinton had gotten Hillary’s act together and put the health care reform package on the table in mid-1996, we would have had no need for Obamacare. It was the legislative action needed for the missing 27% of campaign promises. Most presidents don’t come close to a 73% fulfillment record. They learn very quickly that they have virtually no power. They can recommend, request and lobby, but they cannot write or pass laws. That’s the way the Constitution was written – the legislative branch writes the law, the executive branch implements and enforces the law, the judiciary branch interprets and rules on the law.

The right wing also claims that the President had a majority in both the House and Senate in the first two years of his term, and he forced legislation down our reluctant throats. Also wrong.

Almost 300 laws and appointments were stopped dead by the minority of the Senate through the filibuster. All any senator has to do is say “I object” and a bill is not debated or voted upon until 60 senators agree to release it from the penalty box. Through the filibuster, the Republican Party thwarted not just the will of the President, but the will of the people who elected him.

So, what were the President’s big losses? Lizza listed them, along with the reasons they were abandoned.

In 2008, Obama promised a “bold space program.” The hysteria over the deficit stopped those plans. A memo from the West Wing explained, “Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign.”

Obama proposed a smart energy grid, something this nation desperately needs. Just ask the millions who end up with rolling brown outs in the summer or black-outs after storms. The full 21^st century visionary power grid involves solar farms in the deserts of the southwest, wind turbines in wheat fields of the midwest and a grid that controls and directs power efficiently and effectively, and preferably most of it buried underground. His advisers told him it would cost too much not provide enough short-term stimulus. They key words are “short term.” We are a nation addicted to instant gratification. We can no longer see the long-term benefits of anything.

The White House budget called for decreasing defense spending to preserve domestic programs. There was no way to get that past the Republicans. It is vital to the survival of any fascist regime that there be a powerful and eminent threat to our security. That requires a strong defense. The fact is that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and the Republicans will do anything to defend the incomes of defense contractors. The rest of us can starve to death in the cold dark.

Obama wanted a 5% increase on income taxes for those making a quarter of a million dollars a year, while retaining the Bush tax cuts on the lower income brackets. That would have brought in an additional $11 billion in revenue by 2015. There were higher taxes during the Vietnam War to pay for the war, instead of the tax cuts that Bush pushed through. The top tax rate was 90% during the Eisenhower administration to pay down a national debt equal to 125% of our GDP, much worse than our current national debt. The Bush tax cuts had not produced jobs or increased investments in America, just greater wealth for the already wealthy. The idea had to be sacrificed for unemployment benefits to sustain those who lost their jobs of Bush-onomics.

The White House wanted to scale back the budget for the State Department in its first budget. Secretary Clinton opposed any cuts. The dispute was seen as a weapon that the right wing could use, so the President lobbied for a bigger State Department budget. It turned out to be very necessary as the Middle East went wonkos.

There were aspects of both the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank that were stopped by the Republicans, thereby setting them up to fail. In the ACA, there was supposed to be a pilot program that would help determine the most effective treatments for patients. It was killed. In Dodd-Frank, there have been filibusters to prevent implementing portions of the bill, including the appointments necessary to get the required agencies up and running. It was determined in the White House that fighting for some of these things was pointless.

Early on, the President was forced to abandon his plans to get major stimulus spending and use Keynesian economics principles to help the economy recover. He was up against a chorus of right wingers screaming about over-spending, deficits, the national debt and socialism. The over-spending, the deficits and the national debt were never their concern during the Iraq and Afghan wars that cost nearly one trillion unfunded dollars or an unfunded Medicare drug program that included no provisions for bargaining for drug prices.

It’s a litany not of broken promises as the Republicans claim, but of dreams dashed on the rocks of partisanship. We elected the dream, the audacity of hope and promise of change. We ran headlong into an entrenched oligarchy with enough money and enough media control to persuade too many of our fellow citizens that the sky is purple and they have to reclaim this nation from some nebulous nefarious force, using code words for taking it back from minorities, immigrants, non-fundamentalists, gays, welfare queens and entitlement recipients, even when they themselves were recipients of those “entitlements.” We are losing our country to those who wish to take it back to the late 19^th century instead of forward into the 21^st. We can fight them for our future or let them drag us back into the past. It is time to take back our country.

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Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum’s excuse for yesterday’s cowardice is that the woman he was speaking with was old and leaning on a cane. I have no doubt that if she was old, wearing black, leaning on a cane and started weaving evil spells at him, he’d have no problem tackling her.

This allegedly feeble woman, said that President Obama is “an avowed Muslim” and has “no legal right to be President.” Translation: he was born in Kenya. She is a believer in a twist on birtherism – a Muslim-sperm birther. After all, according to televangelist Franklin Graham (who isn’t half the man his father Billy is), a person is a Muslim if the sperm that fertilized his or her mother’s egg came from a Muslim. There is no free will in Graham’s world view. Muslims are Muslims by virtue of Daddy’s sperm and Jews are Jews by virtue of their mothers’ wombs. In that world view, there is no point in conversion crusades, is there?

Back to Santorum – the feeble old lady asked why nothing is being done to evict this illegal Muslim from the White House and Santorum’s response was that he’s trying – by running for the Presidency.

Bad news for Santorum. As I’ve stated before, MSNBC has a wide range of conservatives and Republicans who appear on their shows. The consensus among them today was that Santorum had proven that he is unfit to govern a diversified nation.

Something is seriously wrong in the Republican Party when Newt Gingrich is the sane one in the room. He at least defends the President’s birth and religion.

You know the math of the haves and have-nots, right? There’s the 1% and there are the 99%. There is another math involved in the Republican Party. There’s the 1% who finance the campaign and whose interests the Party defends at all costs. They overlap with the 1% who are the politicians who benefit from them and the media who shill for them. Then, there’s the 98% who blindly follow them, never fact-checking, never questioning even the most outlandish claims, never putting a single brain cell in gear. Are the 2% proud of their base or are they just happy that there are so many people in this country that they can control with the same ease that the Nazis controlled the population of Germany?

Republican spokespersons like to deny that the past four years have been about racism and religious prejudice. They don’t want to admit that they have played this card to the extent that they have turned this nation inside out with hate and fear. They will not see how they are doing exactly what was done during the Great Depression in Germany – find a scapegoat and blame them for the economy, any scapegoat to divert blame from the real causes of the Depression. So the Nazis blamed the Jews and immigrants and communists and homosexuals, and the Republicans tossed in Hispanics and blacks. Fascism draws its power from a combination of the two elements of human thought that inspire the most blind devotion – nationalism and religion. These are the elements leaders use to recruit cannon fodder for wars.

This is why the right wing media has gone out of its way to confound their listeners and viewers about the differences between fascism and communism. This is why Glenn Beck kept saying that Nazis were socialists when in fact the only thing socialist about them was their lie in including the word Socialist in their party name. This is why Rick Santorum’s grandfather is probably spinning in his grave faster than a nuclear centrifuge.

Benito Mussolini, who invented fascism, said it best: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” It is time to pull off the velvet gloves and do a whole lot of honest name-calling backed with irrefutable facts.

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Newt Gingrich, by Gage Skidmore

Contrary to conservative propaganda, MSNBC has more Republican analysts than Fox News has Democratic guests. And no one yells over them. But since the South Carolina primary, I’ve been wishing someone would yell over them once in a while. I am really getting tired of Michael Steele being the only Republican who admits how angry the Republicans are.

The analysts like to pretend the party is rational and thoughtful. They are either in deep denial or totally out of touch with what they have created. Rank-and-file right-wingers are bordering on insane. And one can pick out just a handful of men who are responsible for this climate of hate.

It began with newspaper columnists George Will and Cal Thomas back during the Reagan years, using the catch-phrases of the Cold War to describe the Democratic Party – “leftist” “fellow traveler” “pinko.” The drumbeat was picked up by Rush Limbaugh. It was Limbaugh who first crossed the line into hate speech. On the night Clinton was elected, Limbaugh still had his television show, and he announced there would be a new dog in the White House to take the place of the Bush’s dogs. Then, he showed a picture of Chelsea Clinton. To this day, right wingers call this accomplished, educated, gracious young woman a dog. They applied the communist-themed terms to President Clinton and a Democratic majority in Congress that helped Clinton fulfill 73% of his campaign promises, to great effect.

Into this stepped Newt Gingrich, who wrote the blueprint of language for Republicans to use in their discussion of Democrats. He issued it through his political action committee after he was elected speaker.

In a New York Times interview published on December 14, 1994, Gingrich said his goal was “reshaping the entire nation through the news media.” That was after he had labeled the Clintons “counter-culture,” equating them with the hippies of the late 1960s.

The pamphlet that Gingrich wrote and which has become the Bible of Republican politicians was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Got that “Control” part? In the cover letter than accompanied the first distribution of the pamphlet to Republican candidates, Gingrich wrote “The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.”

Here is what Newt wrote,

“But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.
This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used….
Contrasting Words
Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis… urgent(cy)… destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… liberal… they/them… unionized bureaucracy… “compassion” is not enough… betray… consequences… limit(s)… shallow… traitors… sensationalists…
endanger… coercion… hypocrisy… radical… threaten… devour… waste… corruption… incompetent… permissive attitudes… destructive… impose… self-serving… greed… ideological… insecure… anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs… pessimistic… excuses… intolerant…
stagnation… welfare… corrupt… selfish… insensitive… status quo… mandate(s)… taxes… spend(ing)… shame… disgrace… punish (poor…)… bizarre… cynicism… cheat… steal… abuse of power… machine… bosses… obsolete… criminal rights… red tape… patronageOptimistic Positive Governing Words
Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!
share… change… opportunity… legacy… challenge… control… truth… moral… courage… reform… prosperity… crusade… movement… children… family… debate… compete… active(ly)… we/us/our… candid(ly)… humane… pristine… provide…
liberty… commitment… principle(d)… unique… duty… precious… premise… care(ing)… tough… listen… learn… help… lead… vision… success… empower(ment)… citizen… activist… mobilize… conflict… light… dream… freedom…
peace… rights… pioneer… proud/pride… building… preserve… pro-(issue): flag, children, environment… reform… workfare… eliminate good-time in prison… strength… choice/choose… fair… protect… confident… incentive… hard work… initiative… common sense… passionate”

Where has twenty years of using the media to control the masses led us? To people who have disavowed the Bush insistence that not all Muslims are terrorists, to a rise in vocalized anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, to an explosion of dangerous right wing, anti-government militias, to open calls to assassinate our President and other leading members of the Democratic Party, to people who are calling for people to lock and load to hunt liberals, absolute refusal to admit to anything this President has done. This is the legacy of Newt Gingrich.

Of course, in the new lexicon of Gingrich, “change” is not a word being used positively, but to make fun of President Obama, and “passionate” is the word Gingrich used to describe his devotion to the nation that put Callista in Marianne’s bed.

As a side note to this – I am madly in love with Jimmy Williams, Senior Strategist of United Republic. He is a frequent member of the panel on MSNBC’s Now With Alex Wagner, at noon, and today he did the unthinkable. He challenged Karen Floyd, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, to back up her statement that the Obama administration’s regulations stifle business. Floyd was struck dumb. She could not come up with a single regulation that stifled business, nor could she respond to the FACT that President Obama has ordered a total review of Federal regulations to streamline them, update and make them more business friendly.

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Sir Terry Pratchett - his most used book jacket photo

In 1786, the great Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, an’ foolish notion.” Someone did give us that gift, 60 years before Burns wrote “To A Louse” – Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Unless one has studied Gulliver’s Travels in school, it is just a fantasy tale of a voyage to strange lands. But in reality, it was a scathing indictment of contemporary British society, wrapped in a story that could, but did not necessarily, make people see the world they were living in.

Swift set the model for modern political exposé and satire. Before him it was a pretty straightforward field, exemplified by the Celtic bard and the court jester – make fun of the rich and powerful in a sufficiently public way that one didn’t get thrown in the dungeon. The subtlety of using non-humans to portray the foibles and failures of humanity has worked very well. Swift was the intellectual grandfather of Jules Verne, Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Anne McCaffrey and the entire range of science fiction and fantasy writers of the past three centuries.

But few of those inheritors fo Swift’s legacy have been as brilliant at it as British author Terry Pratchett. It is normal, three or four days after one finishes a Pratchett book, to do a mental head smack and finally see what he was talking about. Pratchett is read on multiple levels. For straight fantasy fans, he writes very funny books about witches, trolls, wizards, demons, goblins and such. For the politically astute American, he writes very funny satires about Hollywood and newspapers and postal services. For those who understand British politics, it has an even deeper level.

Before becoming the world’s most widely read fantasy author, Pratchett worked in journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. With one book, The Colour of Magic, in 1983, Pratchett set the stage for a brilliant career not just as a fantasy writer, but as the best analyst and observer of the human comedy, drama and tragedy in modern times.

The 47 Disc World books are set on a flat planet that sits on the backs on four elephants who ride through space on the back of a turtle, Great A’Tuin. The planet has its own sun, which revolves around it. The primary continent, which sits at the center of the planet is home to most of the books. Some parts of the landscape resemble the British Isles, and all of the species who inhabit it are drawn from the collective lore and myths of Northern Europe.

The Librarian (Pratchette supports orangutan preservation)

It is possible to divide the books up by their principal focus. There are the wizard books, which center around the Unseen University, but which took the reader to the ends of the planet with the bumbling, traveling wizzard Rincewind. J. K. Rawlings was inspired by the University Library when she created the living wizarding books of the Hogswart’s library. She just left our the Librarian – a wizard who had been transformed into an orangutan. It’s a very useful body for a librarian, so he chose not to be changed back to human form.

Wrapped around and occasionally interacting with the wizards are the witches. This group includes the young adult series which features the young witch Tiffany Aching and her friends, the Wee Free Men, the Feegles. Some of Pratchett’s best twists on simile and metaphor are in these books. I’ve always been particularly fond of “The storm walked around the hills on legs of lightning, shouting and grumbling.” [Equal Rites, 1987]. It is the aspect of Pratchett’s work most frequently underdiscussed. He is an incomparable wordsmith, his use of English rich and textured.

The witches’ books are the best explanation of the craft I have ever encountered. From the first moment when Esme Weatherwax used the term “headology” to what she does, to the examination of the relationship between land and craft, story and life, the books were a constant “Why the hell don’t others see this?” for me. I was reading them in the coastal south, a very bad land for the craft, a land that is so full of death and decay that it encourages the black arts. Here it was, someone articulating why I responded physically to the journey inland and uphill, to mountains of granite and marble. We draw our strength from the land upon which we stand. It’s that simple and that complex. The land determines the limitations and extensions of ability, not some demon called up from the otherworld, not some hyped-up ceremony or amulet. It is all about the land and our relationships to it and what is natural in it and around it – the water, the rocks, the trees, the air. Pratchett understands this as no “celebrity “witch ever has. The occult sections of bookstores and libraries make me physically ill, the books vibe to the wrong resonances.

Death is a character in many of these books, featured as the main storyline in several, beginning with 1991′s Reaper Man. He is on a quest to understand mankind and why these beings cling so tenaciously to life, and trying to humanize himself in the process. Rawling’s third nod to Pratchett is in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in the Department of Mysteries with it rooms of jars containing brains and prophecies. It is a variation on Death’s chamber of hourglasses.

It is the books which spread outward from the twin cities of Ankh-Morpork that are the education in almost every aspect of the human mind – politics, money, bureaucracy, war, folklore, diplomacy, the law, journalism, entertainment, gender-identity. They started as a couple of books about the Ankh-Morpork city guard, and evolved into the finest example of satire and sociology in modern times.

The Ankh-Morpork books contain the only Pratchett character that one can isolate as having been inspired by a living person. When we first meet Lady Sybil Ramkin, the description of her matches almost word for word a description of sci-fi author Anne McCaffrey by Isaac Asimov. I don’t like illustrations of Lady Sybil because she is portrayed as more saftig opera diva than Nordic goddess. The illustrator never met Ms. McCaffrey or got the connection even with all those dragons hanging around Sybil’s garden.

The lead characters of the Anhk-Morpork books are Watch Commander Samuel Vimes and the city’s “tyrant” Lord Havelock Vetinari. Vimes was a poor street kid who chose law over crime, and became seduced by law. Vetinari is the ultimate politician. Though the pair of them may be in the background of some of these books, they are the windows through which we can see ourselves, often with astounding clarity.

Would you like to understand the Walmarting of the world? Try Samuel Vimes’ “Shoe Leather Theory of Economics.” It goes something like this: The very rich can afford very good boots which last for decades. The poor can only afford poor boots that only last a year. Over time, the poor spend more on shoe leather than the rich do. The late economics writer Sylvia Porter said the same thing in her Money Book, in the chapter “The High Cost of Being Poor.” Fewer people have read Porter than read Pratchett, so Samuel Vimes has reached more of us than Porter ever did. From Vimes’ explanation of shoe leather, it is a simple jump to how cheap goods make people think they are doing well. After all, they can afford a cheap microwave and cheap knock-off designer clothes, so they are more amenable to lower wages. The low prices of Walmart and other discount outlets have downgraded our entire economy while creating the illusion of a better lifestyle.  It’s a better lifestyle until you have purchased your third microwave in three years.

The list of what one can learn from Pratchett is almost unending. After all, there are 47 books to draw from. So, I’ll limit this to just a few major concepts:

In 1992′s Small Gods, Pratchett explains that gods exist only as long as people believe in them, and religion is not the equivalent of belief or faith. It is a powerful book that explores the dangers of churches and the purity of faith.

From 2000′s The Truth, the following: “Pulling together is the goal of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It is the only way to make progress. That and, of course, moving with the times.” That comes at the end of a long exchange between William de Worde, publisher of the Ankh-Morpork Times and Lord Vetinari about determining what the public should know and what is in the public interest.

2003′s Montrous Regiment is an LGBT delight, a gender-bending exercise in soldiering, parenting and relationships that, if you read no other Pratchett, should be at the top of every gay’s, lesbian’s and transgendered person’s reading list. Yes, at the time it was an indictment of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but now, it is needed as a way to make people step back and laugh about the whole thing. That’s what satire is all about, making us see the absurd and ridiculous and causing people to back down from militancy.

Finally, the best explanation I have ever seen of why I really hate WikiLeaks, from the most recent Disc World novel, Snuff: “And now the world is a better place, commander. You have no understanding, Vimes, no understanding of the deals, stratagems and unseen expedients by which some of us make shift to see that it remains that way. Do not seek perfection. None exists. All we can do is strive….And, slightly better than before, the world will continue to turn.” There is a massive difference between a government that tries to cover up war crimes and a government engaged in diplomacy. The two do not and should not involve the same level of public exposure. A simpleton like Julian Assange does not understand that. He is more driven by his hatred of America than any pure devotion to exposing dangerous secrets. Diplomacy is a fine art that eventually benefits all involved, even if it doesn’t appear to in the eyes of outsiders or the terminally dense. Those “deals, strategems and unseen expedients” prevent wars, create alliances, bring about positive changes. In Snuff, they bring about the liberation and equality of a species previously classified as vermin, and a halt to smuggling and drug operations that harmed tens of thousands. In the here and now, they are needed to assure a transition in the Arab Spring nations that does not erode previously held rights. We don’t really need to know how this is done. What matters is that it is done.  Diplomacy should be added to the list of things one really shouldn’t see being made — along with sausages and babies.

On one occasion, life imitated the books. In 1997′s Jingo, a war is started because an island suddenly pops out of the sea and countries fight over who the island belongs to. There is a small volcanic rise in the Mediterranean that is creating an island, and several nations have already laid claim to it. It probably will not end as Jingo did, with the island sinking back into the sea, but it will certainly be fun watching it.

Terry Pratchett announced in 2007 that he is suffering from early onset Alzheimers. He is 63 years old. Since that announcement, he has produced Unseen Academicals, I Shall Wear Midnight and Snuff. He has reported that while he can no longer compose on his word processor, he can dictate his books. Believe me, I know how important every mind is and the horrors of losing one’s mind to Alzheimers.  But sometimes it helps to have a very high-profile victim.  If there is anything that should be lighting fires under Alzheimers researchers around the world, it should be the possible loss of this brilliant mind. He still has books to write, including Raising Taxes and Scouting for Trolls, two he has mentioned in the past. We need his voice – to educate us, to make us see the lunacy of our political systems, to help us make sense of the world and how it is changing and what we need to protect us during the transitions.

Queen Elizabeth II appointed Pratchett Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 “for services to literature. He was knighted in 2009. Samuel Vimes’ response to marrying a Lady and becoming a Duke is part of his charm. Vimes hates the titles and isn’t too happy with people who think they are somebody because of their lineage. I have always suspected that knighting Pratchett could be one of those rare glimpses of Queen Elizabeth’s sense of humor. She actually does have one.

Sir Terence David John Pratchett wrote the best explanation of himself in 1988′s Wyrd Sisters (the second nod to Pratchett in Harry Potter was the use of this title for the band at the Christmas Ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire):

“Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.”

Covers of the first 38 primary Disc World novels

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• Snuff: By Terry Pratchett (faceplantreview.wordpress.com)
• Snuff: A Discworld Novel : Book 39 by Terry Pratchett (booktopia.com.au)
• Trailblazing Sci-Fi Legend Anne McCaffery Passes Away At 85 (lezgetreal.com)
• Pratchett’s Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice (boingboing.net)

Newt Gingrich, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”  First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Current-TV, The Washington Post, The New York Times, thousands of independent blog sites and newspapers around the country – these are the “liberally biased” “blamestream press” who are not to be trusted, who allegedly lie about everything…according to the right wing media and politicians. These so-called “liberal” media sources are exercising the right in our country to have a free press, free from censorship by government, free from control by one political party or another. They are as essential to our liberty as free elections and universal suffrage.

So, you want to know Newt Gingrich’s take on a free press? Here is it, in response to John King opening last night’s debate with a question about the interview ABC News conducted with Gingrich’s second betrayed and abused wife, Marianne….

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” After condemning Marianne’s statements as “trash” and “false,” Gingrich continued, “Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable asanything I can imagine. I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

“Decent people” Who the hell does this man think he is? Gingrich carried on a affair with Marianne while his first wife was fighting cancer. He carried on with Callista for six years, phoning Marianne in Georgia, telling her every night “I love you,” while Callista was lying next to him in Marianne’s bed. He asked for an “open marriage” after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis for crissake! He can’t deal with “in sickness and in health.” He is asking for us to forgive him now, because he claims that at 68 and a grandfather he’s learned to keep his dick in his pants?!? And he has to arrogance to say the media keeps “decent people” out of politics?

Get this straight you whoring son of a bitch – we don’t need a First Skank in the White House who will be snubbed, or worse, by every decent First Lady and royal wife in the world. You can dress that woman up in all the designer clothes and Tiffany baubles your money can buy but it doesn’t change what Callista is – a homewrecker, an adulteress, a social-climbing predator who thought she could ride your fat ass into the White House – and you said that outright to your sick wife “Callista can take me into the Presidency.”

Don’t like that characterization? Well, we don’t like Republican trolls on the comment streams saying that all the females in the Obama family should be gang raped, right down to Sasha and Malia, that Michelle Obama looks like “a ho licking cum off her thick lips,” or the right wing media and politicians getting after our First Lady for the size of her butt. You think the “elite media” have protected the President? Bullshit. No one has protected him from the piles of crap that have come out of the right wing for the past four years. We are fed up with the right wing media saying that President Obama is “the worst president in history” like Hoover, Grant and Taft never existed.  Get over yourself, and stop thinking that just because Democrats have behaved decently for the past 20 years, since we chose not to go to court to challenge Ronald Reagan’s competency, means that we won’t go after Callista with the same venom and viciousness that your people have used on Mrs. Obama and his daughters.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system. Back to the real issue….the press.

The only “free press” that the right embraces is the right wing media, so deep into the Republican Party that one Republican senator once commentated that they thought Fox News worked for them and they have learned that they work for Fox. Ordinary conservatives and Republicans have been seduced into believing that Fox is “fair and balanced” and the rest of the media is lying and biased. Read them on-line in any comment stream for a while. They will insist that this story or that story isn’t be carried by the “MSM” (mainstream media) because they are being told by Fox and talk radio that these stories aren’t being carried, when they really are. It’s just that the mainstream media is telling the whole story, not just the right wing side of it. Or the stories that the MSM don’t tell are outright lies, like the Philadelphia New Black Panthers story that Sean Hannity has been touting for three years.

—- Facts: a group of six men calling themselves the New Black Panthers roamed around a neighborhood festival calling for the murder of “cracker babies.” The Philly police investigated and decided that since all that was involved was obnoxious speech, there was no point in pursuing it. A couple of them then, trailing a “reporter,” planted themselves in front of what they said was a polling place, which had nothing on it to indicate it was a polling place, and said they were there to intimidate voters. They most resembled the hamsters in the Soul commercial. Seriously. They were that scary. The BUSH administration investigated and decided there was no voter intimidation. Hannity claims that Eric Holder ended the investigation because the New Black Panther were intimidating Republican voters. The whole story is bullshit, but it was filmed for the National Geographic Channel, which is now owned by NewsCorp, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News. Got all that? The mainstream media didn’t report it because it is bullshit.

Okay, that’s how the right wing media is operating – and all those idiot Fox viewers in the audience at the Thursday debate applauded Gingrich’s attack on the “elite media” because they are brainwashed. They are limited in their access to other news sources because Murdoch has bought so damned many local television stations he’s in every market, sometimes with no local competition. Cable systems in some communities don’t carry CNN or MSNBC to compete with Fox. I was in one last year in Virginia. Our free press guarantee has allowed these right wing propagandists to saturate the media markets and cut off access to the rest of the media.

Rupert Murdoch didn’t become an American citizen because he loved this country, but to get around the laws that forbid foreigners owning too much media. That’s why his son James is a British citizen. In England, NewsCorp literally bragged that they won the last election, getting the Liberals tossed out and the Conservatives in. That’s what they do at NewsCorp. They manipulate elections to benefit their politicians and their super-rich class and drive their agenda. Canada demanded that Fox had to be severed from their American operations before they would be allowed there.

Most historic fascist regimes were more honest about their attitude toward the press. They shut it down. The Republicans have the gift of Fox News and talk radio, so they don’t have to shut down the other voices in America. They just shout over them and make gullible people distrust the facts. I’m not using the term fascist facetiously. Fascism is not communism, as the right wing would want you to believe. They don’t want the word “fascism” attached to themselves, so they have muddied what it means. Though the definitions in Europe are more political, the simplest definition works here: In Communism, the state owns the means of production. In Fascism, the means of production own the government. Benito Mussolini, who invented Fascism, said it himself: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” That is what the Republican party stand for these days – corporate power.

I just listened to a South Carolina Republican tell Martin Bashir on MSNBC that the mainstream media didn’t ask the hard questions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Bashir corrected him, and he kept insisting that the mainstream media didn’t ask hard questions because they didn’t ask Obama the same questions they asked Gingrich. Bashir, unfortunately, didn’t shoot back at him that President Obama wasn’t asked the same questions because he is not a serial adulterer. That is the power of the right wing media – black is white, white is black, lies are the truth and the truth is suspect. The rewrite history, even recent history, while decrying “revisionist history” that is in fact the insertion of facts into the myth. They paint themselves as victims of a vicious liberal media, while their entire party participates in the lies and manipulations of who and what the Democrats are. Then they convince their idiot chorus that the mainstream press is too easy on the President, when in fact the mainstream press judges the President quite fairly, and lets us all know when the President does something wrong.

I will let Martin Bashir have the last word here, because he has called out Gingrich on his authorship of the very thing he attacked John King for – “destructive, vicious, negative” rhetoric.

Related articles

• Gingrich Lashes Out Over Ex-Wife’s Interview, Open Marriage Claims (lezgetreal.com)
• Newt Gingrich Wanted Open Marriage, So Much For The Sanctity Thereof (lezgetreal.com)
• “Situation Ethics” (duanegraham.wordpress.com)
• Newt Gingrich’s Second Wife: Newt Wanted an Open Marriage With Me and His Mistress Callista (shoppingblog.com)
• How Was Newt Gingrich Not Castrated When Asking Wife For “Open Marriage”? (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• South Carolina Republican debate: Newt Gingrich goes nuclear on media (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Gingrich Blasts Media for Focusing on Open Marriage Story (fox4kc.com)
• Rush Limbaugh: Newt Gingrich asking his wife for permission to cheat is “a mark of character.” (skydancingblog.com)
• Marianne Gingrich: Newt Wanted Open Marriage [video link] (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• Gingrich wanted open marriage: ex-wife (news.ninemsn.com.au)

Steven Colbert at the Oct. 31, 2010, Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Guess what? South Carolina is an open primary. That means that anyone can vote in either primary. The voters of South Carolina are not limited to voting in the primary of their registered party.

Georgia does that too. So, in 2004, I switched parties and voted for McCain over Dubya in the Republican primary.

Just asking here, but what would happen if enough Democrats were to switch sides and vote for Herman Cain, who is fronting for Steven Colbert, in the Republican primary tomorrow?

Just asking. I mean, it would be unethical of me to suggest that Democrats could really screw up the Republican primary, wouldn’t it? So it is just to registered Republicans that I am saying Protest Campaign Financing! Protest Bought and Sold Politics! Vote for Herman Cain/Steven Colbert!

Related articles

• Stephen Colbert Asks South Carolina to “Rock Me Like a Herman Cain”! (colbertnewshub.com)
• Now I’m Confused (news.icanhascheezburger.com)
• Raising Cain in South Carolina (538refugees.wordpress.com)
• A Vote For Cain Is A Vote For Colbert (eoghann.com)
• Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC: Vote for ‘Herman Cain’ (newsfeed.time.com)
• New Colbert SuperPAC Ad Encourages SC To Vote For ‘Herman Cain’ (Stephen Colbert) (mediaite.com)
• Colbert cannot appear as write-in candidate in South Carolina (thehill.com)

The simple tax forms most of us use.

The taxes paid by Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have been in the news in the past two days. Romney finally fessed up about his taxes, and Gingrich, just to look really good by comparison, volunteered his tax rate. So, where does all of lead?

Gingrich said that he paid a 31% tax rate in 2010. Thing is, there is no 31% tax rate. For taxable incomes between $137,300 and $209,250 the rate is 28% and for $209,251 to $373,650, it is 33%. So, how did Gingrich come up with 31%? It is, in all probability, an aggregate rate between earned income and investment income. He has promised to release his tax returns, so we will be able to see how this 31% was arrived at.

Romney admitted he paid around 15%, but that is because his “income” is all from investments and subject only to the capital gains rate. We’ll just ignore all those millions socked away in the Cayman Islands upon which he pays no taxes. I once knew a couple who inherited money in Scotland. To avoid paying American taxes, they arranged to have airline tickets bought in Scotland with their Scottish money and upon arrival in Scotland, they were free to travel all over Europe on those funds. They never got around to booking a world cruise out of Southhampton, but they could have done that easily. There are ways to keep ones money offshore and still benefit from it.

Gingrich is playing “I’m more in touch with the common man than Romney” with his tax information, but that’s not what is to be gained from seeing their tax returns.

Way back in 1992, when H. Ross Perot (who sits at #92 on the 2011 Forbes 400 with a mere $3.4 billion in assets) was running for President, he disclosed his 1991 income taxes. Now, in 1992, he spent $12.3 million of his own money on his campaign, but in 1991, he paid less in cold cash in income taxes that year than my family of four with an income just below median did. Hand to heaven – we paid more in income taxes. Now, this was just three years after Leona Helmsley, the real estate and hotel millionairess, had been convicted of income tax evasion for putting a few too many things on the business that were actually intended for personal use. She should have had Perot’s accountants.

That is what these income and tax disclosures do – they give us ordinary Americans a chance to really understand how our tax system works.

Take Romney. His income is from dividends paid on his investments. He doesn’t draw a paycheck from anything. His income might also be derived from buying and selling stocks. The dividend tax rate is just 15%, and the tax on any profit from the sales of stock is capital gains tax, also at 15%. Now, these tax rates were intended to encourage investment. The idea was that if we didn’t overly tax the sale of stocks or real estate, we would encourage the purchase of these things, and therefore encourage investment. It is also argued that if we hold down the tax on dividends, more people will invest in stock and draw dividends. But this capital gains rate is also used by hedge fund managers who can personally make billions investing other people’s money, so there is a need to re-examine the intent of the capital gains and dividend tax rates and see if they really encourage investment or if they are used as means of avoiding paying taxes. The capital gains rate helps house flippers. Are they really serving society by buying up foreclosed houses, doing cheap cosmetic repairs and getting large profits? That is part of what needs to be examined. How to prevent abuse of the concept while protecting ordinary homeowners.

Then, there’s the way a business owner does his income and/or his taxes. Now, according to the Republicans, most small business owners don’t separate their personal income and their businesses. That’s worse than dumb. That’s just plain stupid. A business owner can “draw” his personal paycheck from the business, and if he or she is smarter than Helmsley, there are a whole raft of things that can be paid for by the business and the personal income can be reduced to a very small amount, which is what H. Ross Perot did. And the expenses of the business are tax deductible, so if one is really astute about it, the business can pick up most of the cost of a daughter’s wedding (invite business associates, not friends) and then the wedding can be written off as business entertainment. My version of this is obviously very simplified, but you get the idea. Being able to see the tax returns of a candidate helps us understand the way the tax code is slanted toward the rich and toward the people who can afford really good accountants.

Who paid a larger tax rate among the candidates is not nearly as important as what the tax returns can teach us about how ridiculously imbalanced and complicated our tax code is. For most of the 99%, these returns are the closest we can get to seeing the impact of a tax code that’s almost as big as an unabridged dictionary, and understanding just how deceptive those statistics about who pays what and how actually are.

James Madison, 4th President, author of the Bill of Rights, by Gilbert Stuart

My paternal grandmother was born in Chile and raised in England. Her parents had died when she was a child and she was raised by her uncle, who was an ambassador. He retired to the Dominican Republic, where she met a French-American engineer and married him. Shortly after the birth of their son, Aubrey did a bunk, emptying her bank account before taking off for parts unknown.

The Dominican Republic was a Catholic country, and canon law dictated secular law. There was no divorce in the Dominican Republic. There was no legal way for her to pursue her husband for the return of the money that had been held in trust for her since her parents’ deaths. It was legally his. Matilda had no legal rights because under Church law, women were chattel, the property of their husbands, and had no rights of their own.

She ended up dependent on the charity of her relatives. Eventually, she met my grandfather and became his mistress and for the birth of their third child, my father, he brought her to New York. For two years after my dad was born, Matilda came up with excuses to not return to the Dominican Republic. Finally, when grandfather was back in the Caribbean on business, she moved and left no forwarding address. Matilda reinvented herself as a war widow, made herself respectable, got a job and raised her four sons. She also rented out the spare room in her apartment, which is how I got an aunt out of the deal.

Matilda’s experiences taught me one important thing about America – the writers of the Bill of Rights knew which end was the cart and which was the horse when they wrote the First Amendment. It states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” They put the horse in front of the cart. One cannot have freedom OF religion unless one first has freedom FROM a state supported or imposed religion. It’s that simple.

So why is it that all the lawsuits about same-sex marriage and abortion avoid that simple piece of Constitutional principle? Why is it that no one challenges the Rick Santorums and Michele Bachmanns and all the religious candidates on this principle? Why do we avoid telling all of them to bugger off?

It really is simple. The only “evidence” they provide for anti-abortion legislation is Biblical discussions of when the soul enters the body. The only “evidence” they offer for anti-same-sex marriage amendments and laws is Biblical passages about homosexuality. They have not and cannot offer any scientific proof that homosexuality harms society or that aborting an unwanted first-trimester fetus is more harmful to society than allowing that child to be born, abused, raised in abject poverty and vulnerable to criminal behavior. The only justification they have is their religion.

The only explanation I can come up with is a literal reading of the Amendment. As long as no law is passed by Congress that says “We are a Presbyterian nation,” or “We are a Catholic nation,” then, in the most literal sense, we have not violated the First Amendment. But these laws – anti-abortion and anti-gay laws – are back door means of imposing a Judeo-Christian Biblical limitation on our secular society. They deny those of us who do not adhere to the Bible, with its contradictory and competing translations, the right to practice our own religions, or not practice any religion at all. It is time we rejected the idea that people came here for religious freedom and embraced the truth – they came here to escape countries that had a state religion which they did not belong to, and not belonging to that state religion made them victims of discrimination and denied them full citizenship.

U. S. Incarceration rates, 1920 - 2006

During the Monday night Republican candidate debate (was it number 8 or number 23?) the issue of voting rights for convicted felons came up. They are running out of things to ask the candidates. Next time, look for a question about boxers versus briefs now that Bachmann is out.

Anyway, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney were being asked about their opposing positions on this. Santorum favors allowing ex-convicts to reclaim their right to vote, while Romney, after a rather long lead-in, said he opposes it.

So, I have a question. Why shouldn’t someone have his/her voting privileges restored once he/she has paid his/her “debt to society” and completed his/her sentence? Sorry about how awkward that sentence is. I’m old-school feminist and like gender neutral statements.

During a Vermont legislative debate over regulations for day care homes, I raised the fact with our legislators that there were laws on our state’s books that are no longer crimes…like providing an abortion. Laws change. Sometimes, what was once a felony becomes decriminalized. Sometimes, what was once a misdemeanor becomes a felony because some idiot decides that using an illegal drug should carry the same long sentence that selling it does. What happens when a law changes? Is everyone who was convicted of a crime that is no longer a crime get an automatic clean slate? Is their record expunged? And what about those who were slapped on the wrist for what is now a ten-year sentence? Should they be rounded up and incarcerated?

Do you remember the TV series Northern Exposure? There was an episode about John Corbett’s character Chris not being able to vote because of a felony conviction. It was a quiet, beautiful argument for ending the practice of barring ex-convicts from the polls.

I’m not even sure we should be denying the right to vote while in prison. Why do we do that? Is it part of the idea that we should be taking all rights away from someone who has committed any crime? We’ve already got them in prison. We’ve taken away their freedom to move about, their freedom to choose their roommates and their meals, their freedom to choose when they will get up and when they will sleep. Why do we also remove their right to vote? Is the purpose to dehumanize them by in effect taking away their citizenship? And isn’t dehumanizing a prisoner counter-productive to rehabilitation?

I think the issue of restoring voting rights goes to the heart of what we consider a member of society. When we deny a person the right to vote, we tell that person that he or she isn’t worthy of being part of our society. And if they are not worthy of our society, why should he or she care about our society? It’s sort of that simple to me. We tell our children that they are adults and have responsibilities as adults when they are old enough to vote. If we want a person to care enough to be a useful member of society, the first place we can tell them that is by restoring the right to vote, or maybe by not taking it away from them in the first place. Over 5 million American adults are denied the right to vote because of a past conviction, while over 7 million people are still in the system – in prison, on probation or on parole. That’s an awful lot of disenfranchised voters.

Related articles

• Felon disenfranchisement gets brief spotlight in latest GOP debate (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Santorum and Romney Square Off On Felon Disenfranchisement (unprison.com)
• On MLK Day, Santorum Criticizes Romney For Undermining Voting Rights (thinkprogress.org)
• Rick Santorum Blasts Mitt Romney Over Voting Rights (huffingtonpost.com)
• Duluth Jails Detroit: Man Sentences To 15-Months For Voting As Convicted Felon (jonathanturley.org)

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg of the United Kingdom

The modern state of Israel has had one thing going for it for over 60 years – sympathy. Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, give them the Holy Land! Israelis are targets of terrorism, protect them! Victimhood has worked well for Israel. It has allowed Israel to refuse IAEA inspections and build up the best military in the region. It has allowed Israel to pretty much do anything it wants without condemnation from the Western nations that created it out of their own guilt.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas understood that, and decided that sympathy can work against Israel. He has no control over the Gaza and Hamas, but he has managed for the most part to convince the people of the West Bank to avoid terrorist acts and become what the Israelis have always been – the victims. He hasn’t always been successful. The settler murders last spring and an incident where rocks hurled at a settler’s car resulted in him crashing it and killing himself and his son worked against Abbas’ grand strategy. But the Israelis have been very accommodating to him. They have provided the Palestinians with firebombed mosques, unprovoked attacks on Palestinians, destruction of Palestinian farms and homes that have outweighed, in the minds of Israel’s supporters, any acts committed by limited numbers of Palestinians.

This past weekend, Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg condemned the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as acts of “deliberate vandalism” intended to thwart efforts to create a Palestinian state on land that was ceded to the Palestinian people by Jordan. The Israelis are insisting that their people in their settlements must be part of Israel, but the way they have placed the settlements would create a Palestinian state that just looks like so much Swiss cheese – totally unviable as a nation, too broken up for control and lacking some of the best arable land and usable water.

President Obama angered many by saying that the negotiations for a Palestinian state must start with the pre-1967 borders and involve “land swaps” to make the Palestinian state contiguous. That view is held by most Western nations. The Palestinian state cannot contain pockets of Israelis, especially now that the Israelis are the ones committing the acts of terrorism.

Even Hamas in the Gaza seems to be learning this whole sympathy thing. They lobbed one dud shell into the empty desert and Israel responded by shelling a village soccer field and killing a child. The Israelis responded to every act by Hamas with “overwhelming force,” until it began to look like the Israelis were using a bazooka to kill a fly.

Abbas is on a world tour of sorts, building support for the Palestinians’ position in new talks. Negotiations began January 3 to set the parameters for restarting talks about a two-state solution. The settlements are the reason Abbas suspended talks 15 months ago. All parties to the talks have agreed in principle to the idea of a two-state solution. What is at issue is the amount of land the Palestinians will get. The Palestinians control 17% of the land, the Israelis are occupying under nominal Palestinian administration 24% and the Israelis control 59%. The total area is 2,177.6 square miles, smaller than the state of Delaware. There are 1.6 million Palestinians and 300,000 Israelis in the West Bank. That’s about 100,000 fewer people than the state of New Mexico. But to be more accurate, try picturing squeezing the population of Idaho into Indianapolis, which has a population of 820,000.

Israel insists that the two-state talks must proceed without preconditions like stopping the building the new settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements must stop because each new settlement changes the map of the final solution. Clegg supports the idea that the settlements are halting the talks, telling reporters “Once you place physical facts on the ground which make it impossible to deliver what everyone has for years agreed is the ultimate destination, then you do immense damage. It’s an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise upon which negotiations have taken place for years and that is why we have expressed our concerns as a government in increasingly forceful terms.”

Britain supported a United Nations condemnation of the settlements, but the United States vetoed it, saying that international condemnations were counter-productive.

Abbas, who is also scheduled to visit Berlin and Moscow, was pleased with Clegg’s remarks, telling the press conference that “This is exactly what we had wanted to hear officially from the government of the United Kingdom.”

Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in a parliamentary briefing, said that “They [the Palestinians] are preparing a groundwork of excuses to shift responsibility for the talk’s’ failure to Israel.” They don’t have to. The Israelis have done a wonderful job of doing that themselves. All Abbas has to do is keep a lid on Palestinian response to Israeli acts and keep pointing out the basic unfairness of the situation in the West Bank. So far, it’s a strategy that is working very well.

Related articles

• Israel Hints At How Borders Would Be Drawn (lezgetreal.com)
• Israeli PM: Palestinians Not Interested in Talks (abcnews.go.com)
• UK’s Clegg Says Israeli Settlements ‘Vandalism’ (abcnews.go.com)
• Israeli, Palestinian negotiators meet for third time (jta.org)
• Netanyahu: I’m ready to get into my car and go to Ramallah for talks – Haaretz (haaretz.com)
• Israel criticises Clegg comments (bbc.co.uk)

Way back when nearly every country in the world was a monarchy and the world functioned primarily on barter, the only thing that resembled a central bank was the royal treasury. But as money replaced the exchange of goods, it became apparent that some device was needed to print legal tender and control its flow across a nation, and then across international borders. Thus, the concept of the Central Bank was born. The famous Bank of England really is THE Bank of England. All nations needed a single central bank. The United States, specifically Alexander Hamilton, modeled ours on the Bank of England, an entity that was not part of the government but was part of the government. The “not part of the government” aspect was designed to prevent political control of the monetary system.

Central banks control a nation’s currency value, its money supply and its interest rates. It is also the means by which a nation conducts business with other nations. That is why sanctions against Iran and Syria are now concentrating on their central banks. Cripple the central banks and you cripple a nation. The central banks use their powers to try to control inflation and deflation in the nation’s economy. If the central bank makes a mistake, it can be devastating to the economy. If it is subjected to laws that over-regulate or under-regulate commercial banks, the effects can be just as bad.

That is what happened during the Reagan and Bush43 administrations. The Federal Reserve lost its power to control the behavior of savings and loan banks under Reagan and commercial banks under Bush. Both sets of institutions used the loosening of regulations to enter into high-risk behavior that collapsed the savings and loan industry and would have collapsed our commercial banks if the TARP program had not been instituted. It was 1928-9 redux.

It is not just Ron Paul who wants to “End the Fed” – it is also part of the 99% manifesto. They are both dead wrong.

In addition to ending the Fed, Paul wants us to return to “the gold standard.” That is a monetary system under which all money issued by a government is backed by a deposit of gold equal to the amount of money in the nation, in our case, Fort Knox. The biggest reason for abandoning the gold standard is the fact that gold’s value is determined by men. In and of itself, gold is just a soft, yellow, incorruptible metal with limited uses. It was man who made it valuable. At one time, silver was as valuable, if not more so depending on the location, than gold. You need look no further than Nevada to understand what happened to the value of silver – the Comstock Lode, enough silver to devalue silver. That is the risk of a gold standard. Okay, there probably aren’t any Yukon Gold Rushes in our future. Our nation is pretty well mapped out for mineral resources. But the rest of the world isn’t.

Nigeria and Afghanistan come to mind immediately. Estimates are both nations are sitting on trillions of dollars of unmined mineral wealth, though not necessarily gold. If they ever got their political systems stabilized, they could be very rich nations. Then, there’s all that virtually unexplored territory in Africa, Russia, China, most of Central Asia. What would happen to our currency if China found that it was sitting on hundreds of trillions of dollar of gold in its western provinces? Our currency would be worthless. It’s that simple. A metal, any mineral, is only as valuable as its availability. Diamonds have retained their value because there is a limited source and that source is controlled by a monopoly. The discovery of diamonds in Canada caused major panic in the diamond industry. If Canada’s First Nations had chosen to flood the market for quick profit, the value of diamonds would have bottomed out. It is their decision to control of flow of diamonds from Canada that sustains diamonds’ market value. That’s why we stopped using silver as a currency-backer. Too much silver devalued our money. If there too is too much gold in the world, it will become worth as little as silver. In fact, the current value of gold is being driven by factors other than actual availability. It is being driven by a perception that it is more safe than money, a perception being created by those who will profit from building that perception – people like Ron Paul, whose personal wealth is allegedly in gold, and Glenn Beck who is paid very nicely in real money to build up the idea that the end of world is coming and we all need to have gold to barter with. Worse, the perception is causing people to turn in their gold or purchase items which are not really gold. The market is being driven by fraud.

One of the accusations leveled against the Federal Reserve is that it invents money out of thin air. Our currency is back by the value of our economy, our Gross Domestic Product. That’s the “good faith and credit” part of our currency. As long as we have the greatest GDP in the world, we have the most stable currency. The accusation of inventing money comes from a bookkeeping method by which the Fed “transfers” money to the Federal treasury, which is nearly immediately “transferred” back. It is non-existent money. It’s bookkeeping. There is no need for there to be actual funds transferred because the whole thing is just a bookkeeping trick to span a certain period of time. Any accountant will tell you that such phantom money transfers are common in business accounting. These phantom money transfers do not impact our economy or hurt our nation, unlike the financial transactions that caused our recession. The buying and selling of debts, the creation of derivatives, all that hocus-pocus that the big banks and hedge fund managers engaged in – that all had a value on paper greater than all the money on the planet, and it was backed in large part with our mortgages and our homes.

The Federal Reserve Bank is not the problem. The problem is a Congress that manipulates banking regulation even when the Fed tells them it’s a rotten idea. The problem is a set of laws and regulations that have loopholes that allowed the derivatives and all that junk to happen. If the Fed were allowed to do its job without near-sighted or bought-and-paid-for interference from Congress, we would be in a much better position.

The sad part of the inclusion of an “end the Fed” clause in the 99%ers’ manifesto is that it is indicative of a lack of understanding of who would benefit by ending the Federal Reserve Bank – the people who caused the recession, the big banks and financial manipulators. Sometimes, regulation and control benefit the people, but only if those regulations are designed to do so. We do not need to end the Fed. We need to strengthen it so that a group of congresspersons who have been lobbied richly cannot strip away those laws and regulations that protect our economy, our homes and our money.

And by the way, those accusations that no one audits the Federal Reserve? Well, they are pure bullshit. Not only is the Fed internally audited on an ongoing basis, but since 1978, it has been externally audited by the Government Accountability Offie and since 1999 by an independent auditing firm. And the three audits had better match up perfectly, or the Fed will be taken apart bit by bit by the Justice Department. Funny how those little facts are never mentioned in the hue and cry by those who want the Fed dismantled.

Those who want to end the Fed want to turn our monetary system over to the private banks and politicians that Alexander Hamilton warned us against. The one time we did not have a central bank, from1811 to 1816, it almost destroyed our nation. The world is much more complex today than it was 200 years ago. We could not withstand a five year period without an independent central bank. The key word is “independent,” like an independent judiciary and free press. Our founders understood that there were certain things that were not independent in Britain, things whose independence would assure the liberty they had fought for. We have already had too much of our judiciary compromised by politics and our press has always been biased in both directions, requiring care by the people to sort through the biases. Protecting the independence of the Federal Reserve is essential to our freedom. Ending it would enslave us.

Related articles

• Central bank independence at risk from financial crisis, warns UBS (telegraph.co.uk)
• Ron Paul And The Banks (baselinescenario.com)
• Fed Began Opening Up Aiming to Make Policy More Effective (businessweek.com)

Rick Santorum, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

Rick Santorum’s political rallies tend to turn into lectures. He is very big on explaining in depth the historic or research basis for his positions. It is already well documented that he chooses his research studies to match his prejudices, as in his choice of the infamous “Marriage in Scandinavia” study to prove the impact of same-sex marriage on straight marriage. The study used data from before same-sex marriage was instituted in a country that isn’t part of Scandinavia.

But if you really want to see how off-base Santorum can get, try this statement about the French Revolution: “There were no God-given rights because there was no God. What happened? Tyranny and the guillotine.” No God in France? Okay, would someone please remind this man that he’s a Catholic.

First of all, one of the things that the French Revolution was revolting against was the same thing that the British had revolted against in 1649 – the idea that the divine rights of Kings were greater than the rights of free men. God was very much a part of the dynamics of the French Revolution. For centuries, the French monarchs’ prime ministers had been Catholic bishops and cardinals like the famous Richelieu. The monarchy and the church were wrapped up so tightly that they were braided into a single entity. The church literally told the poor that they would get their rewards in heaven, so they must endure the deprivations of earthly life. It still does in third world countries.

What happened in France after the Revolution was the lack of something to replace the bureaucratic structure of the deposed government. People settled scores, they killed for power, they destroyed anything that was in any way associated with a hated government. It was anarchy wrapped in an attempted dictatorship. God had nothing to do with it, one way or the other.

The greatest lie in America is that we had a “revolution.” We freed ourselves from imperial rule, an necessity caused by the Empire’s refusal to allow us representation in the parliament of the nation we considered ourselves part of. As free Englishmen, we resented being treated like Irishmen. The full phrase is “No taxation without representation.” We were originally negotiating for representation, not liberation from England. As for the “revolution” part…we damn near recreated the government system of England. We actually offered a crown to George Washington. Even as president, we surrounded him with an aura of monarchy. We chose our Senators from among the closest thing we had to an aristocracy – the landed gentry. What we did, in writing the Constitution, was an EVOLUTION, not a REVOLUTION. We evolved the British government into its next logical step.

And we completely rejected the idea that God decides the affairs of man. Our founders were not Christians, as the word is used today. They were Anglicans and Puritans and Presbyterians and Calvinists and a dozen other sects and divisions within Christianity. And they had political agendas. For over 200 years, Europe had been at war, a war between Catholicism and Protestantism and skirmishes between the sects of Protestantism. The King James Bible is called “King James” and not “St. James” because it was written under the direction of King James I of England in an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the warring factions of Protestantism in his kingdom. Our founders knew all this. The taxes they were protesting were levied to pay for the colonies’ portion of a war, we call it the French and Indian War, that was started in Europe over whether a Protestant or a Catholic would inherit the throne of a country.

What Rick Santorum wants is a Catholic country, the kind of country my grandmother fled, where the church determines secular law. It is one-half of a Christian version of Sharia or Talmudic law. It is in many ways more restrictive than evangelical Protestantism in that it bans divorce and birth control. And he has the gall to wrap his argument in false history.

And then, there’s the rest of the Santorum story….

One of his favorite rhetorical questions at rallies is “How many 62-year-olds do you know who can’t work? Do you know how many people take benefits early?” He then answers his own question with “Seventy percent.”

That position makes one wish his coal-mining grandfather were still alive. His position is very upper-class. People who do manual labor, and that includes working in retail and the medical field, wear themselves out physically at much earlier ages than those who sit at a desk all day and can afford gym memberships and healthy diets. Maybe Mr. Santorum should ask a few coal miners how many 60-year-olds there are in the mines.

Santorum’s position also ignores company policies that gently but legally push people out if they get too much seniority or they could be replaced by two entry-level workers for less money. When 62-year-olds have had their hours cut to 10 a week, they do the only thing they can do – apply for early Social Security. When they can’t find jobs, they apply for early Social Security. Santorum will run this lie as long as no one challenges him. He conveniently ignores the fact that taking Social Security at 62 means life-time benefits at half what they would get if they waited until 66 and someone has to be pretty desperate to accept that.

Santorum delivers his lectures with a demeanor that exudes knowledge without arrogance. That is why people are not challenging his statements. He appears to be a heavy thinker. Anyone can do that if they dazzle a less-educated audience with a glut of quotes and citations. Ann Coulter’s made a career out of it.

But what Santorum’s supporters pulled in Texas at the conference to try to unify the Christian right behind one candidate (and stop dividing the vote) is damaging Santorum’s image. The first vote resulted in none of the candidates getting a clear majority. All but two of the candidates were eliminated, and only Santorum and Gingrich were voted on in the second round, which resulted in Santorum getting 70 votes and Gingrich getting 49. The Gingrich supporters did not know there would be a third round of voting, and many left the event. The third round gave Santorum enough of a majority to “earn” the endorsement.

Nice try, guys. All it accomplished was getting the vote denounced as “rigged” and demands for a new conference.

The Christian right needs to acknowledge something that they want very much to ignore. Though there are issues that the very religious may agree on, like same-sex marriage and abortion, there are many things they do not agree on and very deep levels of distrust among the various Christian faiths. It’s one of the funniest things about right-wing Catholic commentators Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Years ago, Malkin did a newspaper column praising Christian radio, only proving she never listens to it after dark. There are several shows on so-called Christian radio that are vehemently anti-Catholic. O’Reilly and Hannity wrap themselves up in the Christian right positions, also ignorant of how much anti-Catholic sentiment there is among the very people they are catering to. Everyone is trying to step lightly around Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. Just ask anyone in southeastern Georgia about Mormon electibility. There is a state senate district down there that elected an incumbent who had been caught on a sheriff’s dashcam drunk as a skunk, doing his “do you know who I am” routine between racist rants at the African-American deputy. His opponent was a Mormon and this senator used that Mormon faith in his re-election campaign.

Trying to unite the entire conservative social agenda part of the American electorate behind one candidate is a useless exercise. If you put this issue to the actual values voters – “which candidate’s religion do you trust?” – you would come up with Rick Perry leading the pack. He’s the one who represents the religious beliefs of the greatest number of social conservatives. Ron Paul has separated himself from most of the religious debate, Santorum and Gingrich are Catholics and Romney’s a Mormon. But this election isn’t about social conservative issues or the ability of the right to use a backdoor to impose a state religion. It’s about the economy, stupid. All the social issues are just diversions intended as they always are in the Republican party to gather votes to support the economic policies that will most benefit those who are least religious among us – the super-rich and corporations.

Related articles

• SC Religious Leaders- Santorum Supporters Stuffed Ballots, Rigged Vote (lezgetreal.com)
• Maggie Gallagher Endorses Rick Santorum (towleroad.com)
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• Dirty Tricks in Santorum Vote (thedailybeast.com)
• Rick Santorum wants to be God’s chosen one in South Carolina – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
• Social cons feuding over Republican pick (aleksandreia.com)
• Is Rick Santorum A Catholic Or An Evangelical? Yes. (huffingtonpost.com)

President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, July 2, 1964, with Martin Luther King, Jr., as witness

The headline on the Christian Science Monitor story is “Martin Luther King, Jr.: How would American life be different without him?”

Answer: not much.

Humans have an innate desire to personify everything. We need to latch on to one person and believe that person was responsible for the totality of an historical event. Hence, we place the entirety of Nazi Germany into the person of Adolf Hitler, even though he was more mouthpiece than planner. We transform a common criminal named Robin the Hood into a champion of the poor and oppressed under a foreign usurper. We need that one person to be hero, and fight any attempts to spread the word “hero” to cover the unnamed soldier in the field. When we get too inclusive with the word, we seem to diminish the impact of heroism.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a talented orator and organizer. He was shot and died. He became the face of the civil rights movement. And in that elevation of him to the personification of the movement, we demoted thousands of people who put their lives on the line, who died for the movement, who did the day-to-day work of the movement to the periphery.

Do you remember the three civil rights workers who were brutally murdered in Mississippi in June of 1964? They were James Chaney, 21, African-American, of Meridian, Miss., Andrew Goodman, 20, white, Jewish, of New York, and Michael Schwerner, 24, also white and Jewish, of New York. Young men, just at the start of their lives, killed fighting for the rights of all men and women to be equals in this “land of the free and home of the brave.” And every once in a great while we are reminded that they lived and died.

Ever heard of the Scotts of Atlanta? No, I’m not talking about Coretta Scott King. She was from Alabama. I’m talking about the founders of the oldest African-American newspaper in Atlanta, and the core of a large multi-state African-American news empire. The paper was founded in 1928 by William Alexander Scott II. Six years later, he was shot and killed outside his home by “an unknown assailant.” That was the price of speaking out against Jim Crow laws, whites only primaries, and the far left rhetoric of many in the early civil rights movement. The Scotts were moderate Republicans, which makes perfect sense if you understand that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats, were the racists at that time and the Northern Republicans were the advocates of equal rights. The parties changed positions after Lyndon Baines Johnson “betrayed” his party with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

W. A. Scott was replaced at the helm of the paper by his brother Cornelius Adolphus. Today, the paper is a once-weekly print publication and an on-line newspaper run by M. Alexis Scott, W.A.’s granddaughter. It is still a family business, with members of the Scott family in the principle editorial positions.

W.A. wrote the paper’s manifesto, “The responsibility of a Negro newspaper is to dispense to the public good wholesome information to enlighten our people…and to serve as a guide and organ of expression for the community.”

During the 1940s, the paper fought for school integration and voter registration. At its height, it had a daily circulation of 28,000 in 1945, purchased by almost 10% of the city’s total population. The paper drew a lot of its subscribers from the two premiere black colleges in Atlanta, Spellman and Morehouse. But it also angered many in the civil rights movement by calling for the use of the courts and the ballot box instead of demonstrations and sit-ins to effect change. In the end, C. A.’s choice was proven to be the more powerful one. Brown v. Board of Education did more for the movement than all the sit-ins at lunch counters. The sorry fact of the matter is, demonstrations eventually stop getting attention in the media and issues fade away with the short attention-spans of Americans. But Supreme Court rulings are almost eternal.

Never heard of the Scotts, have you? But they were on the front lines a year before Martin Luther King, Jr., was born.

There are so many men and women who fought for equal rights, not just the handful that have been elevated to “hero” status. It does not take away from the accomplishments of a Rosa Parks to discuss others who also refused to give up their seats. All of them left us with a legacy we can actually see in New York City’s Bushwick bus dispute and the fight in Israel against those who want to relegate women to the back of the bus.

My argument with Martin Luther King, Jr., is not what he did or didn’t do. It’s how elevating him to a god-like status has hurt the African-American community. He was a human being and just as flawed as any other human being and so much time and effort has been expended protecting his godhood from his humanity that the man gets lost in the myth.

Tell young people that they should emulate a god and they will back off the aspiration. It asks them to aim too high. They know instinctively that they can never lead a whole movement, so why should they try? This problem exists in every minority movement, not just the African-American community. Why should a young Native-American try to be Russell Means or a young Hispanic try to be Caesar Chavez? It’s too high a goal. It doesn’t relate to their daily lives. It’s like the focus on sports stars and entertainers as role models. Too many kids say they want to be a sports star or rap singer, and they are failures before they out of middle school because they lack the natural talent. But, to be the next William Alexander Scott II? Now, that’s attainable. Not the shot dead in the street part, but the entrepreneurial part. Be the next Melissa Harris-Perry – now that’s attainable. Black activists are crying because there is no current television show with black leads, but they fail to see the power of the black characters in ensembles – the surgeon, the police squad leader, the soldier, the scientist and teacher. These are ordinary people who have succeeded in attainable careers. S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lt. Anita Van Buren is a more important role model than some spy couple in designer clothes.

Sadly, the right wing has figured this out. That is why they, not us, refer to Barack Obama as “your Messiah” and “your Savior” and call him a “community organizer.” They want to elevate him above aspiration level while denying the simple things he did that make him a great role model – the college degrees, the university professorship, the strong marriage and fatherhood. One of the givens in white culture in America is the idea that anyone can grow up to be President. It is vital to the protection of their party that the idea of growing up to be President doesn’t spread outside the white upper class. Hence, they make it seem that Barack Obama is a god and no one can aspire to be a god, can they?

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should not just be about one man. It should be about all the men and women who made the civil rights movement happen, the good, the less than good, the obscure and the famous. It should be about honoring several generations of men and women, not just one. It should be about bringing the successes of the movement home to those who have not had the opportunity to share in it. Black History Month doesn’t cut it. It’s too many heroes and not enough ordinary success stories. It should be focused not just on the Tuskegee Airmen, but on the black army units who built the airfields that our pilots landed on across the Pacific, the men who worked under enemy fire without the ability to fight back. It should be focused on people like the Scotts, four generations of Atlanta business leaders and the real human problems that have been part of their lives – the seduction of one young man into the gangsta culture, the tragic death of another from a rare cancer and how he had done something very unusual among young fathers of any race – his life was very well insured before he became ill and that insurance provided for his widow and two young children, the educations they received and the careers they built outside of the paper. It should focus on the very high level of college enrollment among black women.

Heroes are wonderful things, until they make it harder for ordinary young people to see what they can accomplish. We need a little less Martin Luther King, Jr., and a lot more Coach Craig Robinson. Don’t know him? He’s the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University, an ordinary black man in an ordinary job, but just as important as any god-hero because what Coach Robinson is is actually attainable by anyone who tries.

Related articles

• Martin Luther King Jr. Notes & Papers Debut Online (hiphopwired.com)
• Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr.! (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. archives: Reagan makes Martin Luther King Day official (thegrio.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day: A quiz on the struggle for a national holiday (csmonitor.com)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Died Intestate (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. and Tax (taxprof.typepad.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. archives: The last days of Dr. King (thegrio.com)

Rush Limbaugh (Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons)

Never thought those words would come out of my computer, but Limbaugh is busy making the case for Barack Obama.

Along with Ron Paul, Rudy Guiliani and Jim DeMint, Rush has attacked Republican candidates for bringing up the issue of Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital. Rush called the attacks “indefensible,” and that at least was a multi-syllable word. But what these guys are proving is what the Democrats are saying – the biggest issue in America is jobs and the Republicans aren’t interested in creating them.

It is important that Mitt Romney’s “jobs” history consists of destroying them. It is important for people to understand that Bain Capital killed the KayBeeToys chain for no reason whatsoever except to steal money from it to pay to Bain’s partners. It is important that people understand this concept of buying a company just to loot its assets and shut it down. This is at the core of America’s joblessness — the manner in which unregulated, unrepentant “capitalists” killed companies and jobs for personal wealth accumulation.

So, what does it mean to ordinary Americans when the conservative elite and libertarian godfather think it’s a bad idea for people to know this stuff? It means that under their leadership, companies like Bain would continue to buy up companies just to shut them down. It means that they have no interest in creating jobs or investing in our economic future. It means that they are all guilty of what Mitt is accused of – heartless, mindless, soulless wealth building for the 1% and spiraling poverty for the rest of us.

Related articles

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Sasha, Michelle, President Barack and Malia Obama, Dec. 2011

Did you know that the First Family have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money on extravagant vacations and Hollywood A-list parties? No? Well, maybe that’s because they haven’t. Just don’t try to tell that to any faithful viewer of Fox News or listener to right wing talk radio. Facts are never allowed to prevent them riling up a healthy level of conservative outrage.

Here’s the short facts – the President is paid $400,000 a year. It used to be $200,000 until the first year of the Bush administration. The President also has a $50,000 expense account. The government pays for government-related travel, even if it is done by the First Lady. The government pays for government-related parties in the White House. It does not pay for vacations or private parties. It does not pay for trips that are undertaken on behalf of the President’s political party.

According to the outrage-stirrers, the Obamas take constant vacations. The ignored facts? In the first 31 months of his administration, the President took 61 days of vacation, Dubya took 180 and Reagan took 112. They criticized the First Lady for taking her daughters to Africa at the taxpayers’ expense, even though the First Lady made several official visits. Not a single objection was raised to the Bush women doing the same thing, without the official visits, just a couple of photo ops. No one has actually kept track of presidential golf games, though I would bet Eisenhower holds the record for that, but at least President Obama doesn’t tell people to “watch this drive” after making statements to the press about our war efforts.

The newest outrage on the right is over a 2009 Halloween party. Only took them two years to get worked up over it.

For Halloween, Easter and the 4^th of July, the Obamas host parties for military families. After the first 4^th, the press didn’t make much fuss over them. There are apparently, rules concerning the press presence at these parties. They are requested not to photograph any of the military children so that they can be identified. This is done for their protection and privacy. For this particular party, director Tim Burton brought a few friends – Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska from the unreleased Alice in Wonderland, and Deep Roy from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also helped with the decorations, all of them taken from Burton’s movies. Now, that “unreleased” part is important to remember here. There were 2,000 members of military families at the lawn party. They were getting up close and personal with the casts of Alice in Wonderland, and would be going back to their homes, their schools and their friends talking about the costumes and the experience. It was a brilliant piece of publicity.

The press were informed of the party and invited to attend. There was nothing secret about this party.

After the military families’ party, there was a private party in the White House, for friends and staff members. The Burton group attended that as well. Mrs. Obama was wearing a leopard costume. Malia, who was 11 at the time, was dressed as the Morton Salt girl and carried a large container of salt all night. Nice sense of humor the girl’s got, making fun of her mother’s healthy eating initiative. Sasha, 9 then, was outfitted as the Queen of Hearts, in a costume based on the one worn by Helena Bonham Carter in the movie. Odds are, Burton arranged for the costume, since the movie had not been released and the costumes were not yet available commercially. Burton, Depp, Roy and Wasikowska were guests, along with about a dozen others Burton brought with him.

While the military family party would be covered under the White House’s entertaining budget, the private party was not. It was paid for entirely by the Obamas. And the press did know about the private party. Photos from it have been available for two years now.

The right wing is saying that the Obamas kept the party secret because it would be too embarrassing to be seen throwing an “extravagant Hollywood party” while the rest of the country is in deep financial doo-doo. That’s a load of candy corn. The party was not a secret, and no one is expecting the President to live like a welfare recipient.

There are very solid lines between what the taxpayer pays for with regards to the Presidency and what the President and his family pay for. The job comes with a $400,000 salary plus room and board. The “room” part means they do not have the single largest expense the rest of us have. They also don’t have car payments.

The taxpayer does not pay for the girls’ private school. That is a private expense, though it is one that the Secret Service prefers. Amy Carter attended public school and it was a nightmare for the Secret Service. The Bush twins, at college in Texas, were an even bigger headache. Chelsea Clinton attended Sidwell Friends. The school is accustomed to handling the security needs of high-profile families, in addition to being an exceptional academic facility.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s our President or the British royal family…the public never seems willing to find out the specifics of expenses and the divisions of private and public costs. Out of the mouths of those who wish to hurt come the big and little lies about those expenses. Prince Charles doesn’t receive a public salary and Michelle Obama does not have 100 people on her private staff. The jerks who put that one together included all the civil servants who are in the employ of the White House – the building itself, not the family who occupies it.

Getting bent out about the 2009 Halloween party is difficult territory for the right wing. To condemn the President, they must condemn a glittering, star-studded, once-in-a-lifetime party for the children of our military personnel, one of nine such parties in the past three years, parties held with a minimum of press hoopla and a maximum of attention to the pleasure derived by the military families who attend. And the conservatives are so programmed to hate everything this First Family does they can’t appreciate what these parties mean to the families of our men and women in uniform. Haven’t met one yet who could spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E.

The wild Hollywood Halloween party crew: Johnny, MIchelle, Malia, Barack, Sasha, Tim and Mia

Have fun perusing the extreme reactions to this party…..

Related articles

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• The Different Branches of Wingnuttia – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision (tbogg.firedoglake.com)
• President Obama Hosted Alice In Wonderland Party With Johnny Depp At White House: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• Pamela Geller, WND Column: Obama in Wonderland (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• Kept that under their hats (theage.com.au)
• White House Alice in Wonderland party under fire (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Obama in Wonderland: White House threw secret #’Alice in Wonderland’ bash during recession, Michelle’s Million Dollar Rags (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• White House film party under fire (bbc.co.uk)
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Rick Santorum, by Donkey Hotey

We have had this conversation before about Rick Santorum, back when he was in the U. S. Senate. He uses studies that relate to straight parents to defend his position on gay parenting. His newest one cites “one anti-poverty expert” who, according to Santorum, “…found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children’s lives.” The first time Santorum came to my attention, he was speaking on the Senate floor, weeping copiously, displaying charts created based on a couple of “studies.” The first was the infamous “Marriage in Scandinavia” That study alleged that the legalization of same sex marriage had adversely impacted straight marriage in “Scandinavia.” The study used statistics from the 1970s through the 1990s which did show a decline in marriage rates in Scandinavia. Problem is, The Netherlands isn’t in Scandinavia. Scandinavia consists of Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. None of those countries had same sex marriage. They didn’t even have civil unions. The Netherlands had progressed, over a ten year period, through registered domestic partnerships and civil unions to same sex marriage. Their Bureau of Statistics said that there hadn’t been enough same sex marriages to draw any statistical conclusions about their impact.

The second study Santorum used was about the effects of divorce and single parenthood in straight couples. Not a single same sex couple was profiled. That study did say that a child benefitted from having both a mother and a father. But it didn’t say anything about having two mothers or two fathers.

The studies that Santorum ignored were the ones that showed that same-sex parents waited to have children, were more financially stable (have to be, becoming a same-sex parent is expensive), were better educated, more emotional mature and really, really, really wanted that kid. They also showed that two parents, of any configuration, was better than one. Santorum is still ignoring those studies. They don’t fit with his narrative. They deny the necessity of men.

That is what this comes down to with Rick Santorum. The work that is being done now that could lead to the conversion of a human egg into the equivalent of a sperm is Santorum’s worst nightmare. If women could have babies without any contribution, natural or otherwise, from a man, what is the point of having men at all?

There is a new research brief, Childbearing Outside of Marriage: Estimates and Trends in the United States, that shows that more women are having babies outside of marriage. It’s just the kind of study Rick Santorum loves. The right wing is pushing the study to show that single motherhood is a public concern because “it is linked to negative outcomes for women and their children across a range of measures, as well as with a reliance on public assistance.” Agreed, if all you look at is a teenager who got pregnant by accident and whose baby-daddy took a hike. But that conclusion ignores the increase in single motherhood among educated, financially stable women, older women, who have given up on trying to find a man and chosen to have a family instead. Add in the single women who adopt, like Diane Keaton and Sandra Bullock, and you have a whole other picture. It is also worth looking at the way “staying together for the sake of the children” no longer works as a reason to stay in a bad marriage, unless there is some deficiency in the wife – lack of education, lack of resources, psychological factors. Women are coming to the conclusion that becoming a mother isn’t worth the investment in time, effort or commitment with a less-than-acceptable man.

Rick Santorum will continue to rail against gays and lesbians and same-sex parenting for two reasons. First, he’s deeply homophobic. He admits it, sort of. He acknowledges that the whole idea of gay makes him ill. That covers the gay men bashing. He hates lesbians because they prove that it is not necessary to have a dick to be an important person or raise great kids. Lesbians diminish Santorum’s level of importance in the world. They, and straight women who chose to be single parents, are making the statement that straight men need to prove themselves capable of something more valuable in society than spreading their seed. Jane is saying Tarzan should get an education and a decent job and stop sitting on the couch, drinking beer, watching “the game” and scratching himself.

On Friday, Santorum told an audience that “Marriage is not a right. It’s a privilege that is given to society by society for a reason. We want to encourage what is best for children.” Wrong. Marriage is a legal contract for the protection of property or to secure inheritance rights to a position. For centuries, women were told that marriage protected them. Not hardly. It denied them every imaginable freedom.

Somewhere in all the uproar over Rick Santorum’s positions on gay marriage and gay rights, his equating of homosexuality with beastiality and pedophilia, his insistence that gay marriage is a gateway to polygamy and marrying your dog, something important has gotten overlooked. Rick Santorum hates women. He doesn’t trust women to raise children, run a home, earn a living, lead productive lives without a MAN. In his view, women are only complete when they have a man and children are only valid if they have a male parent. He actually believes that having a rapist, drug dealer, murderer or psychopath for a father is better than being raised by a woman alone.

He’s politically savvy enough to understand that he can’t just come out and say that if he could he would strip women of their rights, but that’s what is lying just under the surface of his positions on family and children. He is 100% with St. Paul, who said that a man was the head of the household just as Christ was the head of the Church. Maybe that’s what he really meant when he said he was the “Jesus candidate” – he’s the person who thinks men are the earthly equivalent of Christ and are to be obeyed and followed in all things.

On a more earthly note…..

Now that Santorum is center stage, literally and figuratively, people are finally looking at his finances. He portrays himself as blue-collar, with an Italian immigrant coal-mining grandfather. Well, the grandfather part is true. Santorum’s raking in about $1.3 million a year as a member of the board of a health care company, a consultant for a Pennsylvania energy company and his work for a Washington lobbying firm. Not bad for a guy who, while in the Senate only made $165,000 in salary and $32,000 in book royalties. He is hardly the Washington outsider he says he is. He’s taken the path of least ethics since being defeated for re-election – he’s a paid lobbyist for those very interests that most hurt us – for-profit health care and over-priced energy.

Related articles

• Rick Santorum Argues with Students About Same-Sex Marriage and Polygamy: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• Rick Santorum booed for suggesting gay marriage ‘harms’ children (topix.net)
• The Desperate Spin Of Rick Santorum (lezgetreal.com)
• ABC News video | New Hampshire college students boo Rick Santorum for anti-gay marriage stand (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Santorum Tells Kids With Gay Parents: You’d Be Better Off With Parents In Prison (thinkprogress.org)
• Bill O’Reilly Questions Rick Santorum About His ‘Extreme’ Plans to Invalidate Same-Sex Marriage Licenses: VIDEO (towleroad.com)

Baroness Thatcher with P. M. Cameron, 2010

If U. K. Prime Minister David Cameron had his way, Meryl Streep’s new movie would be shelved for years. He doesn’t like the wrapping narrative, where former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is shown suffering from Alzheimer and recalling her years as PM with her late husband. Cameron’s take on the movie is “It is a film more about aging and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister, and my sort of sense was a great piece of acting, a really staggering piece of acting, but a film I wish they could have made another day.” He would have preferred that it be made after Thatcher, who is 86, was dead and buried.

My problem with The Iron Lady is that Thatcher is reasonably sane during those dementia scenes. Okay, so she’s talking to her dead husband, but she’s not cussing, not hitting people, not spitting her food at people, not walking around shoplifting, not fighting every attempt to help her, not grinning nastily while her aide changes her shitty diaper, not lying on her bed screaming for a long-dead grandmother. Like most portrayals of Alzheimers, her case is shown as being fairly benign.

My mother’s wasn’t. A nurse who took care of my mother thought that it might be able to predict how Alzheimers would effect people if we knew what their childhoods were like, since eventually, they will regress that far. One victim that we knew must have had the happiest childhood in history, judging from how happily she spent her time dressing her dolls, coloring, drawing, cutting out snowflakes, cuddling her stuffies. She didn’t have a bad day from the moment she entered that phase until her death. I’d have given anything for that. My mother spent the last six months of her life trapped in the worst days of her childhood, days of confusion, fear, pain and panic.

Alzheimers is a very difficult disease to explain because it impacts each patient differently. Possibly the only trait most Alzheimers patients share comes near the end of their lives, when the seem to sleep almost constantly. At that point, I think they are either trying to cope with not understanding anything around them or they have retreated into infancy. But too many people only know that Alzheimers robs people of memories, makes them forget the events of yesterday while remembering the events of ten years ago. But, when they begin to understand that they are not suffering from “senior moments” but actually losing memories, they panic, they lash out in anger, they are in pain. Alzheimers is more terrifying that cancer for seniors. Alzheimers means losing who they are.

I had a patient last year who had a massive stroke. She lost most of her memory because of it. One morning, she was crying because she couldn’t remember when her husband died. But, eventually, she did remember and she told me about it. She was surrounded by her possessions, in her own apartment, and those visual reminders helped her to bypass the damage in her brain and remember things. That doesn’t happen in Alzheimers. There is no recovery of memories. And it goes far beyond simply forgetting. Many Alzheimers patients literally go back in time. In their minds, they are living at some point in their past. An incident with my mother made we realize that we may be misinterpreting the wandering of Alzheimers patients. I’m not sure they wander off because of confusion. I think it’s possible they wander off because they are trying to get to wherever it is they think they are still living, some home they had in the past. My mother was determined to get to her old house across town. She didn’t live in this other place. She had to get home to make dinner for my father. Dad had been dead for over 25 years.

If The Iron Lady is accurate about Alzheimers, it shows Maggie Thatcher walking into a room and telling “Dennis” about her day, just as she did when she was Prime Minister. She would not be relating things in her past, but reliving those days as though he were still there to listen to her complain about her job.

The Reagan family went into major denial over Ronnie’s Alzheimers. They still are to an extent. Ron Reagan’s admission that maybe his father had it in office is partial denial. President Reagan needed a seating chart to conduct Cabinet meetings, according to those who were there. We don’t need denial. We don’t need movies that deny the worst things that Alzheimers can do. Our population is aging – ask me, I’m a true post-war baby boomer. As bad as the numbers are now for Alzheimers, mostly because our population is living longer, it is about to get much worse. We need to show that dirty old men are not a joke, but many times they are Alzheimers victims who think they are 30-year-old studs again. They don’t perceive themselves as fat old men covered with liver spots. They see themselves the way they were.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher

In David Cameron’s mind, the movie might be an embarrassment to Maggie Thatcher. I deeply doubt that. I doubt she’s aware of it, and even if she sees it, she probably won’t associate it with herself. I also think that if she were capable, just for one day, to step out of her condition and comment on the film, I think she would approve. I think every Alzheimers patient would approve if films could educate the general public about what these people are going through and lift the myths, expose the horrors, make friends and relatives understand. The Iron Lady does not take away from who Margaret Thatcher was and what she accomplished. It will not make her detractors love her or make her fans hate her. It might make some people more sympathetic toward her, but that’s as far as the impact would go. She will always be the first female Prime Minister, the person with her name on an era of British history, the person credited with or blamed for the greatest peace-time shift in British culture and economics ever. It is not wrong for her in her last years to also be someone who helps educate the public about Alzheimers. Not many of us get to make a contribution to society when we can’t remember how to put on our knickers.

Related articles

• David Cameron: The Iron Lady should have been delayed (telegraph.co.uk)
• UK PM David Cameron criticizes ‘The Iron Lady’ (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• David Cameron blasts Margaret Thatcher film The Iron Lady (dailymail.co.uk)
• Iron Lady film made too soon, says David Cameron (independent.co.uk)
• British PM criticizes timing of The Iron Lady (cbc.ca)

Rick Santorum

 An interesting graphic has emerged from the Gallup organization. It tracks the last seven relevant Republican presidential primaries and where the candidates stood in the polls before and after Iowa and then after New Hampshire. It was the post-New Hampshire polls’ results that predicted the eventual candidate, not Iowas.

Take 2008, for example. It was Giuliani in the lead before Iowa, Huckabee after and then McCain after New Hampshire. In 1980, it was Reagan before Iowa, G.H.W. Bush after and then Reagan after New Hampshire. The polls can show gains or losses for the leading candidate across the three time periods or they show complete changes in the front runner. The important thing is, the post-New Hampshire polls are the most accurate predictor of the eventual winner.

Sooner or later, people are going to stop concentrating on the farthest right social stances Santorum takes and finally analyze his jobs program. According to him, strong families create jobs. Sorry, that’s backwards. Good jobs build strong families. Marriages fall off during recessions and depressions. The greatest cause of divorce is money problems. Unemployment stresses marriages and committed relationships.

One last note about Iowa. The evangelical political machine wants you to know that if you take Santorum’s 25% of the votes and add the 25% that didn’t vote for Romney or Paul, you get a solid 50% of Iowans who support a Christian values agenda.

Related articles

• New Hampshire Polls: Will We See An Iowa Bump? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Evangelicals Discuss ‘Encouraging’ Gingrich And Perry To Get Behind Santorum (huffingtonpost.com)
• Santorum’s hopes of winning may be squashed in the middle (guardian.co.uk)
• Romney Leads in South Carolina Poll; Santorum Second (ibtimes.com)
• Romney retains strong lead in New Hampshire as Santorum gains in polls (guardian.co.uk)
• Santorum’s Electability Factor (thedailybeast.com)

Compared to the state of Vermont, the EPA are slackers. Our Act 250 makes businesses quake and our citizens shake their heads in disbelief. But, as one Act 250 inspector put it, “If they bothered to read the regulations before they built, they wouldn’t have to do it over.” We kind of like the regulations when they prevent some home builder putting in a septic leech field uphill from our water wells.

The Republicans have two goals in their attacks on the EPA. First is making it possible for business to destroy our living space and the second is to destroy the independence of executive branch agencies. For people who are always talking about the Constitution, they really hate the part about it creating three branches of government. They want single-party rule, like China or Syria or Egypt before the revolution.

The EPA regulations do sometimes get in the way of business, mostly to everyone’s benefit, but occasionally with something dumb. In the Republican view of America, states should decide if they want to be socialist muckpiles or free enterprise paradises. So why should be defend a national EPA? I’ll share a few EPA stories with you to illustrate why the EPA is needed.

Way back before the EPA had much clout, the state of Vermont suddenly had an air quality problem. Whole hillsides of trees were being killed by acid rain. Thing is, Vermont doesn’t have any industries that create acid rain. We don’t burn fossil fuels for electricity and we’re not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse. The acid rain was coming in from the West – from a paper mill in New York state and auto plants in Michigan and coal-burning electricity-generating plants in Pennsylvania. Canada was having the same problem with acid rain. Both Vermont and Québec have forest-based industries – timber, maple products and tourism. Acid rain is also not a great thing to have falling on farm fields producing human food and the crops used to feed milk cows. So, Vermont and Canada sued in Federal court to protect our air. We won, and air quality regulations were enforced on everyone upwind of us. Only a national agency can act when one state’s pollution damages another state’s industries.

When my husband took a job in a Federal Court in coastal Georgia, we went up to get him settled in an apartment. The children and I would join him when school ended. We asked one of his new co-workers “What’s that smell?” and she replied “Our bread and butter.” It was a turpentine plant just beyond downtown. During our tour of the court, we had seen an 8-foot long window sill shelf filled with court filings. We later found out, those were the filings from the EPA and Georgia EPA battle with that one turpentine plant.

The town has three SuperFund sites – places so polluted that the only thing that can be done with the land is scrape it off and remove it. People decide where to go fishing based on what the air smells like. It if’s papermill air, fish in one place. If it’s turpentine air, fish in another spot. Within 18 months, the windshield of our car was etched in a pattern identical to the wipers. Among the EPA’s finding was the fact that 20-year-guaranteed house roofs downwind of the plant (and everywhere was really downwind) had to be replaced in less than 10 years. The asthma and lung cancer rates are off the graph. I once went rushing up to the high school with a can of Pepsi, and met the principal outside the building. He took one look at the Pepsi can and directed me to the nurse’s office. Pepsi is a poor man’s emergency inhaler for asthmatics. All four of us left that town with asthma, something there is no medical history for in our families.

When Ben Affleck was engaged to the first Jennifer — Lopez – he bought an island off the state of Georgia, just a dozen miles up the road from the town we lived in. The running gag down there is that JLo visited the island, loved the plantation-style house and the isolation. Then, the wind shifted and she caught a snootful of the mainland where there is a chemical plant. Somewhere between gagging and wiping the tears from her eyes, she ran like hell. I have never read a story about Affleck and Jennifer Garner taking their beautiful little girls to his island. I don’t even know if he still owns it. For anyone who wants to breathe, it is uninhabitable. You drive past that town on I-95 and you want a barf bag, quick. The stench is horrific, a combination of swamp gas and chemicals.

The attitude towards pollution in the South is exemplified by that remark about “bread and butter.” A gentleman I met through the Kerry campaign, sixth generation Georgian, explained how the public schools were controlled for decades by a consortium of business, political and church leaders. Between those forces the people of the South were trained to believe that whatever business wanted was the best thing for everyone and if there were bad consequences, it was God’s will and His way of testing his servants.

The religious aspect of the hatred of the EPA first surfaced during the Reagan administration. Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt, was an evangelical Christian who believed the Biblical statement that man should have dominion over the earth. Besides, as he explained, the Rapture was on its way and the world was going to end within the next twenty years, so why should we do anything to protect it.

It was about this time that environmentalists were hit with the ancient line from a letter by Julius Caesar about the Celts “They worship trees and sacrifice humans to them.” Nice quote, but Caesar was trying to scare the bejeezus out of his Senate to get them to fund his campaign, not really reporting on Celtic religious practices. A better explanation of the ancient pagan attitude is this – only the English name a Prince of Wales. To the Celtic Welsh, one is not prince or king of a land, just the leader of a people. The land is not owed or ruled, just stewarded. Hence, in ancient traditional fashion, we have Albert II, King of the Belgians.

The EPA is not a battleground of pagan sensibilities against end-time Christian beliefs. It is a battleground for the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we live upon and farm. Land should not melt the soles of shoes, as it does in that Georgia town near the paper mill. Air should not make people sick and cripple them for life. Water should be clear and drinkable, not catch fire. One can make the argument that land is within the jurisdiction of a state, except that land and what is placed upon it washes away with rain and travels or what is placed upon it leeches down into the water table. Air and water do not stay within state boundaries. They travel from state to state, impacting the lives of those who are downstream and downwind.

That is why we need the EPA – to protect those of us who care what we breathe and drink and eat from those in other states who don’t. The basic principle of our founding was that the majority could rule only so long as they did not deny rights to or harm the minority.

Related articles

• Forget War On Christmas, GOP Conducting War On EPA (lezgetreal.com)
• The Hypocrisy And Stupidity Of The GOP’s Hatred Of The EPA (mykeystrokes.com)
• EPA Helps Tribes Clean the Air in Indian Country – Finally (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Toxic Chemical Releases Up 16% Over Previous Year (thegoodhuman.com)
• A rare breath of fresh air in US politics. (aljazeera.com)

Jan. 20, 2009, the last good day of the Obama administration

Still obsessing over the NDAA? Have you started blaming President Obama for the bank bailouts that Bush passed? Are you calling him a failure because Gitmo is still open and we still have troops in Afghanistan? Do you think he doesn’t respect the Constitution? Congratulations. You have morphed from a liberal to a Limbaugh ditto-head. Just a little further down the road and you will be accusing him of getting illegal immigrants to vote, of using the New Black Panthers to intimidate voters in Philadelphia, skimming millions out of the Treasury, and orchestrating an elaborate fraud over his birthplace from inside his mother’s womb.

The indefinite detention provisions were inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act for one reason, and it had nothing to do with national security. If the President vetoed the bill, he could be accused of undermining our military (or hating the military, as some rightwingnuts would put it). If he signed it, the liberals and progressives would go nuts over the denial of Constitutional rights. It was pure Karl Rove – provide the rope, eliminate all avenues of escape, and watch the liberals hang themselves.

And you did. Instead of seeing this for what it was – a political campaign attack – you went ballistic over infringement of rights.

This isn’t the first one. Ever since Barack Obama was inaugurated, the Republicans have created box canyons for him. If he compromises to get part of his agenda passed, the liberals attack him for not getting all of it. If he refuses to compromise, the Republicans can accuse him of hurting Americans. And the whole left side of this country has decided to get terminally stupid and play stooge to the Republican plan for one-party rule. You are not listening to the how of how things are being done, only the results. You have become as deaf to the word “filibuster” and as ignorant of its power as the Republicans who view it as their savior from creeping socialism. The late Michael Crighton once observed that the Japanese fix the problem, the Americans fix the blame. You want to blame someone for the past three years? Blame Harry Reid. Twice, he had the power to end the filibuster rule and restore the Constitutional powers of the Senate majority. Twice, he wussed out – holding on to that power in the event the Democrats would ever be the minority again.

This is how elected dictatorships happen — with the full, blind co-operation of the opposition. This is how opposition parties are de-clawed and castrated – with their own knives. This is how, when the corrupt gain complete control of a government, they outlaw opposition parties.

The NDAA debate has been going on for weeks. The President signed the bill into law just three days ago, with a four page signing statement. So far, Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic and CBS News is the only analyst out there who sees this for what it is. So far, Cohen is the only one saying “this is what the President wrote, this is what it means and this is what it undercut.” In his view, this is a battle over the limits and extents of legislative and executive powers. In my view, it’s a campaign maneuver to undercut the President’s support in the next election.

When I and my children were in school, somewhere during the junior high/middle school years, we took a semester of world geography and a semester of civics. I don’t know when that stopped being taught, but the number of people in this country who are clueless about what is and isn’t in the Constitution is frightening. The Constitution laid it out fairly clearly – the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch enforces and implements them, the judicial branch interprets them and determines the guilt of those who break them. Three branches, three areas of authority and responsibility. The President cannot write laws or terminate them. Only Congress can legally do that.

The Constitution says nothing about signing statements that void rightfully passed laws, or about executive orders to bypass Congress, or about filibusters blocking debate and votes. All these things have been created in the last 222 years to bypass the provisions of the Constitution.

You have been so blinded by the propaganda that you could not step back, take a deep breath and believe that a Constitutional Law professor would not agree to gut the Constitution for any reason. You have become so accustomed to the idea of a President who flaunts the law, issues executive orders to bypass the Constitution and signing statements to void laws that you could not believe a President would do the right and proper thing within the limits of our Constitution.

President Obama finally decided to use the power of the signing statement, a power he is not granted by the Constitution, to delay the implementation of an un-Constitutional provision in a law. He broke a promise to us in order to do that. He promised not to be the next Constitutional dictator, an extension of the Bush-Cheney administration, in the only area that he could fulfill that promise.

So, the Republicans are calling this one a win. They forced the President to break a campaign promise and they got all of you to turn against him. Congratulations. You are now Limbaugh ditto-heads.

If you really want to blame President Obama for something, he has made one enormous mistake that he should be called out on. He refused to prosecute the members of the Bush-Cheney administration for their illegal and unconstitutional abuses of power. Barack Obama chose not to put this nation through that trauma. Bad choice. For the preservation of our Constitution and the soul of our nation, he should have.

Related articles

• Progressives Could “Tea Party” The Democrats (lezgetreal.com)
• What The NDAA Is And Isn’t (lezgetreal.com)
• What The NDAA Is And Isn’t – Part 2 (lezgetreal.com)
• The NDAA’s historic assault on American liberty | Jonathan Turley (guardian.co.uk)
• Happy New Year: Obama Signs NDAA, Indefinite Detention Now Law of the Land (worldtruthtoday.wordpress.com)
• Bachmann Blames Occupy Iowa Protesters On President Obama (lezgetreal.com)
• The Republican Power Binge Strikes Again (lezgetreal.com)
• Obama’s NDAA Signing Statement is Just Smoke & Mirrors (mountainrepublic.net)

Tim Carpenter, Progressive Democrats of America

President William Jefferson Clinton fulfilled 73% of his campaign promises in the first two years of his eight-year term. He had a Democratic Congress and Senate. Then, Newt Gingrich and his “Contract On America” won the House. It was downhill all the way for Clinton after that. (Just for the record, not one of the things in the “Contract On America” ever made it into law.)

The last president we had before Clinton who got that much out of Congress was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson had been in the House for so long and knew so many secrets about members and others (including J. Edgar’s secret wardrobe) that he could literally blackmail his way into the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and every other great achievement of his term. He also shamelessly took advantage of our national trauma in the first months after the Kennedy assassination to get a lot of stuff done.

When Barack Obama took office he had a Democratic majority in the House. But in the Senate, there were not enough Democrats to end a filibuster and during the last year of the Bush administration, when the Democrats had the majority in the House, the Republicans in the Senate had discovered the power of the filibuster.  All any of them had to say was “I object” and a bill was sent to legislative limbo, never to be seen again. 

During his campaign, Obama made a lot of promises. He promised to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He promised to close Gitmo. He promised real health care reform and a single-payer plan. He promised new regulations for the financial industry. He promised jobs and economic growth. He promised help for those facing foreclosure. He promised us almost every progressive wet dream we have ever had. And he delivered none of them.

Now, progressives are threatening to punish him for his failures. In Iowa, the group Progressive Democrats of America is organizing people to vote “uncommitted” in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Tim Carpenter, founder of the group, said “I believe we need an inside outside strategy. We’re not asking everybody in this room to vote for Barack Obama. We’re not voting for Barack Obama. We’re organizing uncommitted slates to go the caucuses on Tuesday to challenge Barack Obama because he gave up on his promise to single payer. He took too long to get troops out of Iraq. There’s still troops in Afghanistan. And we need a financial transaction tax.”

There are days when I really despair of ever finding an educated voter in this nation. This is one of them.

There is no single payer plan or public option because if the Democrats had not given that one up there would be no health care law at all. There are no new regulations on the financial industry because if the Democrats hadn’t given up some provisions there would be no law at all and the Republicans are refusing to finance what was passed. What will it take to get it through progressives’ heads that this is not a dictatorship? The President should not enact laws without Congress. This President is not George W. Bush. He will not, absolutely will not, issue executive orders that violate the division of authority in our Constitution. He absolutely will not exceed his Constitutional powers. That’s one of the reasons we elected him in the first place. To put an end to the de facto dictatorship of the Republican party.

The Progressives can get all stupid and pull a Tea Party revolt on the President or they can learn the meaning of the word FILIBUSTER. It means that the Republicans in the Senate killed almost 300 bills and appointments. We have half a dozen unfilled ambassadorships, a crisis in the Federal judiciary because of unfilled judgeships, openings in the middle management of almost every cabinet department because they will not allow hearings for the approval of appointments. The Republicans blocked important bills and dumb little “pickle week” bills. The Republican filibuster is singularly responsible for the past three years producing the least amount of legislation in our nation’s history.

This is not Obama’s fault. And if the Progressives really want to get all the things that Candidate Obama promised us four years ago, they will do the things that will get results, not screw up the process by dividing the vote.

We need to regain the majority in the House. That means keeping every Democratic seat and taking an additional 25. Thirty would be better. Fifty to sixty would be ideal. We need a strong majority in the House. There are currently 193 Democrats, and 218 is the majority threshold. The Republicans have 242. We would be best served with 250.

We need to control the Senate. No more Conservative Democrats fouling up the works by voting with the Republicans. We technically have 51 Democrats, 2 Independents and 47 Republicans in the Senate. The Democrats can count on one Independent (hell would go sub-zero before Bernie Sanders voted with the Reps.) We need 60 strong Democrats in the Senate to end the tyranny of the filibuster. Ben Nelson is already leaving, so there’s one DINO out the door. If we can’t get rid of the rest of them, we have to compensate. There are only 33 Senate seats up for election next year. We need to take as many as possible.

We need strong candidates for the House and Senate and we need a unified Democratic Party prepared to get down and dirty in this campaign. We need to shout the facts from the rooftops and put down the lies whenever they occur. We have the momentum of the Occupy movement and the frustrations of the 99% if we just tap into it instead of getting divided over something that the President had no control over.

Remember how Kennedy told us to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”? Well, this is that moment…that time when you really can do something for your country, yourselves, your children and grandchildren. You can come together as a force for change, for the change we hoped for four years ago. You can fight for the power to put this country on the right path to recovery and growth. It will not happen if the Progressive wing of the Democrats divide the base and pull votes away from the candidate we need.

The Progressives need to get over themselves, stop pouting in a corner over what could not be done in the first four years and give the Democrats the power to save our country.

Related articles

• Progressives mount a Challenge to Obama In Iowa (theleagueofaggressiveprogressives.wordpress.com)
• David Coates: Time to Choose, America! (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Schoen/Caddell Calls For Hillary 2012 Are Getting Progressively Dumber (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why Obama’s Second Term Will Be the Best (538refugees.wordpress.com)
• Republicans Block Obama Appellate Court Nominee (abcnews.go.com)
• Speaking of Predictions, Speculation and Resolutions . . . (skydancingblog.com)
• Obama: The Consummate Politician And Very Charming Man (lezgetreal.com)
• Progressive Democrats to Challenge President Barack “Wall Street Drone” Obama in Democratic Caucas in Iowa (johnhively.wordpress.com)

From Donkey Hotey. Top: Bachmann, Cain (suspended), Gingrich, Huntsman; bottom: Paul, Perry, Romney, Santorum.

The weather will be fairly mild by Iowa standards tomorrow. High in the mid-30s, low in the mid-20s. Most of the state will have clear skies. So turnout for the caucuses should be fairly good.

A good turnout in the Iowa Republican caucuses would be around 150,000 Republicans. The state has a population of just over 3 million. Almost 24% of the population is under 18. That leaves approximately 2,450,000 adults in the state. A whole 6% of Iowa’s adult population will participate in the Republican caucuses.

The media is going bananas over 150,000 Republicans putting hand written paper ballots into boxes in little meetings held in everything from living rooms to church halls to hotel conference rooms.

We go through this every four years. Iowa fights for the right to be the first “primary” in the country. But it’s not a primary election with every eligible adult able to cast a vote. It’s a small, select group of people who have to be physically present tomorrow afternoon or evening to be part of this farce. It is irrelevant.

On Wednesday, we’ll tell you the results. Then, we can get around to reporting the real story – the primaries in states that have real primaries.

Did you know that in England, politicians cannot campaign until the Prime Minister adjourns Parliament for an election? Then, they have six weeks. If the PM announces that he is adjourning Parliament at the end of a four-week recess, then they get ten weeks. That’s it. The votes are tallied before midnight in most districts. If there is a clear winner, one party takes a majority of the seats in Parliament, the old PM says good-bye to the Queen at 11 a.m the day after the election and the new one pays his respects at noon. Now, I don’t really want a parliamentary system. I prefer the balance of power our Constitution gives us between the three branches, but that whole ten weeks max with an instant change of administrations sounds really attractive right now.

In other words, I have no intentions of getting hysterical over who is doing what in Iowa for the next 48 hours. The Republicans have seven months of this ahead of them – polls up, polls down, stupid stuff being said, stupid stuff being defended, every fart and wart in everyone’s background being exposed. Seven long months. We can all go stir-crazy trying to make sense of it or we can sit back as good Democrats and Progressives and watch the show. I opt for not going stir-crazy.

Related articles

• Iowa Caucuses Are As Distorted As A Funhouse Mirror (mykeystrokes.com)
• The overhyped, unrepresentative Iowa caucuses – CBS News (cbsnews.com)
• Iowa: Ready, Get Set, It’s Over! (thewesternexperience.com)
• VIDEO: Rep. Steve King weighs in on Iowa caucuses (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)

Our nation was founded in radicalism and enlightenment, not conservatism and superstition masking as religion. It was the intention of our founding fathers that we always move forward, not backwards. It was the intention of our founders that we open our land and our hearts to all who long for freedom. But we cannot simply welcome those who do not have freedom in their own lands, this country isn’t that big. And we cannot impose democracy upon others. All we can do is lead by example and encourage those willing to fight and die for the liberties we take for granted. It is not our manifest destiny to rule the world. We can however, as Bill Clinton said, be first among equals, but only if we help others become our equals.

We cannot do that if we ourselves are not equal in rights and opportunity. We have been evolving for 235 years, slowly enlarging the definition of who is equal and what their rights are. Most of that equality has been achieved in just the past 91 years. We thought we had made a major move in that direction in 1868, but laws were passed that abridged the rights granted in the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. So we had to fight for those rights twice.

We have been moving backwards in the past few years. It is acceptable again to be openly racist, anti-immigrant and attack others because of their religion. Our constitution was written, amended and interpreted to support the radical idea that the majority rules only as long as they do not abridge the rights of minorities. That is what we have been losing…the belief that we must protect the rights of minorities instead of imposing the will of the majority.

The battle cry of the right wing has been “take our country back.” The irony is, they did take our country back – back to the fear and bigotry of the Great Depression, when people lashed out at anyone who was different and blamed them for the hardships. But in the 1930s we didn’t have a mass media that fed those fears and that bigotry, while persuading the gullible that only one source of information is valid. We are fighting for the soul of this nation, but not its Christian soul as the right wing implies. We are fighting to restore the ideals and principles upon which it was conceived – that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.

I will leave you this year with two quotes.

The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

First from our beloved Terry Pratchett. In The Truth, he wrote “Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It is the only way to make progress. That and, of course, moving with the times.” Remember those words every time someone talks about a permanent Republican majority or ending gridlock through conformity.

And from Hendrik van Loon: “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.”

May the coming year be better for you, and thank you for joining us, staying with us and keeping us going.

Gov. Rick Perry

Rick Perry was at a campaign event at the Mason County Country Club in Iowa when a member of the audience complained to him about packaging. “I don’t know how the rest of the conservatives in the room feel, but personally, I’m fed up with seeing the directions on every single product on every single shelf of every single store written in four languages.” Perry responded “That is a statement, that’s not a question, and I can agree with it.”

Actually, it’s only three…English, Spanish and French, though I have bought some products that had instructions in Japanese as well as English.

Perry’s home state of Texas is home to millions of Spanish speakers, but that’s actually beside the point. Neither the Gov nor the complainer understands why we have these multi-lingual labels. It’s so our products can be sold in Mexico and Canada. Seriously, how many French-only speakers do you think we have in America? The labels are part of the NAFTA treaty. If we want to sell our products to our trading partners, we must have labels in their languages. It also is the reason our cars have information in metrics. Great to have if you are driving in Canada. And it’s the reason so many directions have pictograms. No language barriers. Now, the companies could print separate packaging for export, or they can save big moolah and print in two or three languages and use pictograms and put in the metrics.

I’d love to see Perry explain this position to his corporate donors.

But, while we’re on the subject of English packaging….

There is a difference between “English as our official language” and “English Only,” just not in the minds and rhetoric of the right wing. In an “official English” law, all official documents would be in English, which they pretty much are already. It is already law that any immigrant seeking naturalization must read and write English. Some communities have alternative documents in other languages for the convenience of immigrants, but it would be an easy matter to provide the other version as a translation means, but only the English document would have legal status. . That is how “English as our official language”would work – it’s a purely legal matter.

But the “English Only” movement, which hides behind “English as our official language” is nothing but raging bigotry enhanced by paranoia. Two years after the Supreme Court ruled that no public school could forbid immigrants or anyone else for that matter speaking among themselves in any language, I was subbing at a school in Florida which was surrounded by strawberry farms. The principal had an English-only policy because the previous year someone had told a teacher what two Hispanic kids were saying to each other and it was not flattering to the principal. You hear that a lot down South – people absolutely convinced that anytime two Hispanics say something to each other in Spanish, they are saying something nasty about the non-Spanish speakers. Some educators insist that the best way for immigrant children to learn English is the “total immersion” method where they don’t hear anything in their native tongue all day. That’s not my experience. In any school which services migrant farm families, you will find kids who speak no English and kids who are completely bi-lingual. There are usually aides who work with the non-English kids, but they are not in the classroom translating all day, the way deaf kids have signers at their sides. Inside the classroom, those bi-lingual kids are vital for the survival of the non-English kids. Pair them and by the end of the first year, those non-English kids are fairly fluent in English. They need to be. It is easier for them to learn English than it is for their parents, and they become the means by which their parents survive. English is a very hard language to learn. It is part Latin-based (from the French) and part German-based with an underlayment of Celtic. The grammar rules are a nightmare for people who have never dealt with contractions and convoluted adverbs and adjectives that aren’t where they should be. Things are simpler in either of our base languages than they are in English. The Romance languages and German have opposing sentence structures. American English has drawn in words and phrases from all over the world. It’s one of the largest languages man speaks and it is highly nuanced. Then, just when they think they’ve got it, immigrants run into the regional dialect and usage differences, including what is well-mannered in one place is insulting in another. I had to explain once to a twenty-something Mexican that while white Southern men get away with calling every woman “darlin” it was not something he should do.

Which brings us to a Chinese restaurant in Georgia, where we knew the wait staff spoke both English and Mandarin. The town we lived in had two shrimp processing plants which had brought in a total of 1,000 Mexican workers – half were men on nine-month work visas, the other half were permanent-resident families. Now, my understanding is that most Mexicans speak two languages in Mexico – their regional dialect or native American language and official Spanish. As immigrants, it is common for the children to learn English first. My daughter and I were in a booth, behind me was a Southern couple and across from them was a Mexican family in an end-of-aisle booth. . The Mexican family, mother, father and three children, were speaking Spanish among themselves. The guy behind us, who had a tendency to mess up his verb tenses, started lecturing the Mexican family. First of all, he assumed that the parents spoke English and the children didn’t. He was telling the parents they should only speak English to their children so the children could learn English. He was bragging about how everywhere he had ever traveled, he didn’t need to speak the native language, he could always find someone who understood him if he spoke slowly and loudly enough. Now, my daughter is something of a language genius. She can speak, read and write Latin, Spanish, French, and German, reads any variation on those – which covers all of Western Europe – and has studied Japanese and Russian. I can read and within limits understand Spanish and French. We were listening to this jerk, feeling very sorry for the family who just wanted to enjoy their meal, when suddenly one of our Chinese waiters leaned over the back of the booth and said to the family, in flawless Spanish, “Don’t mind him, he’s loco.” My daughter and I were choking we were laughing so hard. In that little corner of that restaurant were nine people who spoke or understood a total of eight languages, and one idiot with a superiority complex about being an American who mangled basic English grammar.

And I finally understood why some people are so adamant that we establish “English Only” rules in this country….they are having their superiority challenged. If they can just get immigrants to stop speaking more than one language, they can get their position at the top of the ladder back. Multilingual children make them feel stupid.

It has only been sixty years since the combination of television and suburbs started to break down our ethnic isolations. Ever since the Pilgrims chose to settle anywhere but Jamestown, our immigrants had chosen to gather together in neighborhoods, towns, even whole states, where a single ethnic group lived, conducted business, held church services in their old language. They taught English as a second language in their public schools. Just thirty-five years ago, there were still communities which held town meetings in a language other than English. There are still “ghettoes by choice” in America, like the Hasidic Jewish communities in New York. It’s been an evolution for most of the country. But there are places that either kept that ethnic purity, though switching over to English, or where there was no history of immigration. These are the places where people say something really stupid like “everyone learned English right off the boat.” No, they didn’t. The residents of Germantown, Pennsylvania, didn’t use English as their first language until the First World War, around 150 years after the town was founded.

A great deal of this “English Only” movement comes out of the fact that Hispanics – Mexicans and Latin Americans – are not staying in the Southwest, but spreading across the country. More than anything else, right now, this movement is aimed at one immigrant group and one language. There have been other late-twentieth-century immigrant groups, refugees like the Vietnamese mostly, who have faced the same language prejudice.

“English Only” is not “English as an official language.” “English Only” would make it illegal for a Spanish grocery store to have a sign in Spanish. It would make it illegal for a Chinese restaurant to print the menu in English and Chinese. If our founders thought we needed an official language, they would have chosen one. Instead, they chose to acknowledge that we would be a nation of immigrants who would, over generations, create a totally new identity, a coming together of peoples who, in their native lands, were historic enemies. They were far more optimistic of our ability to work past our prejudices than history has shown us to be.

Related articles

• Millennium Development Goals, Education for All and the Issue of Dominant language (neltachoutari.wordpress.com)
• Perry supports English as official language in US (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• California Educators Look To Better English Learning (huffingtonpost.com)
• Multilingualism in/and Nepalese Education (neltachoutari.wordpress.com)

President Clinton's State of the Union Address, Jan. 1997

In 1996, when President Clinton got Congress to pass changes in the welfare laws that allowed states more flexibility in how the program was administered, there were 266,490,000 people in America and 12,600,000 were on welfare. That was 4.7% of our population. Today, there are 311,000,000 people in America and 4,600,000 on welfare, 1.47% of our population. But, according to the Republicans, we are living in a welfare state and our socialist President wants to expand that condition.

Among the major changes made to welfare during the Clinton years was an increased emphasis on job training, the availability of child care (which the Reagan administration had reduced), work-fare programs in which mothers whose children were over 12 months old had to work part-time at non-paying jobs to get their welfare checks, and a change in philosophy that said welfare should be a hand up, not a hand-out. The changes worked remarkably well in some states, like Wisconsin under Governor Tommy Thompson, and very badly in others, like Mississippi, where a lack of public transportation and jobs made the whole work-fare and job training portion almost pointless.

Look at those numbers again – 4.7%, a total of 12.6 million on welfare in 1996 against 1.47%, 4.6 million in 2011. That’s an 8 million person and 31% reduction in welfare recipients in the past 15 years, because of changes made by a Democratic President who was working with a Republican Congress. Newt Gingrich likes to take credit for the changes in the welfare system, while going all amnesiac about the numbers.

There are 700,000 more welfare recipients now than a year ago. That is because of the recession, because no matter what the Republicans keep saying about “job creators,” there aren’t enough jobs being created. The increase in welfare recipients is more related to the number of people who have run out of unemployment benefits than in any sudden surge in unwed motherhood. And though anchor babies do qualify for benefits, their parents don’t. Just try applying for welfare if you can’t prove you are a citizen. Just try. For that matter, anyone who has ever applied for any kind of assistance will tell you the hoops that have to be jumped through are worse than the most elaborate dog show in the circus. But the right wing insists that there are millions upon millions of illegal immigrants receiving welfare, and they are getting welfare so that President Obama can get their illegal votes.

The Republican Party and the right wing media juggernaut of Fox News and talk radio are driving the narrative. The entertainers who pretend to be journalists on these sources never come out and say anything that’s an outright lie, that would get them sued. They just “imply” these things, and let the rumors fly. The single worst thing about the Democrats for the past three years has not been their inability to get anything done, but their inability to articulate an argument. A Democrat will agree to appear on Fox, and then get broadsided with a statistic he or she can’t answer, even when that statistic is something taken totally out-of-context or completely mis-used. How many collective brain cells does it take to say “Welfare is down 31% in the past 15 years”? How many to say “half-a-million illegals were stopped at the border” or “half-a-million were arrested and deported”?

Welfare programs are in danger across the country because states are suffering from budget crises. The budget crises are being caused more by reductions in revenues than by overspending, and the reduction in revenues is a direct consequence of the recession. No jobs means no income taxes being paid and no money to buy things means no sales taxes being collected. It’s about a simple as that.

But in a Republican-driven narrative, it’s all about the welfare recipients and illegal immigrants and not about the lack of decent paying jobs and lost state revenues. What the right wing will tell you over and over again is that welfare and unemployment insurance make people lazy so they don’t try to get jobs. It should not be this hard to say “there are no jobs.”

We are facing ten months of wall-to-wall 24/7 politics. Our news cycles will be dominated first by the Republican primary/caucus circus and then by the actual campaigns. But at the rate the Democrats are going, they will blow this, and condemn us to at least four more years of trickle-down sewage and widening gaps in income, four more years of the spiral of deepening poverty for the bottom 50% of us. They can stop this, but only if they learn to do their homework, be completely prepared and be aggressive. The wisest thing Democratic Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz could do right now is pick up a phone and call the office of the British Prime Minister. Ask anyone on the staff just one question – how do they prep the PM for Prime Minister’s Question Time? The PM walks into the House of Commons every Wednesday and for half-an-hour answers questions from the members. He has no idea what he will be asked, but he always has the answer. Find out how they do that, then teach it to the every Democratic candidate and spokesperson.

Mitt Romney said recently that this is a battle for the soul of America. He’s right about that. He’s wrong about what most of us believe that soul should reflect.

Related articles

• The Statistics Disprove The Tea Party (lezgetreal.com)
• GOP Legislating Against Myths They Created (lezgetreal.com)
• Unemployed Being Demonized By Right Wing (lezgetreal.com)
• imabonehead: Nation’s largest welfare state makes deep cuts – Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com)
• Welfare: The Great Ambition Killer (thelastcivilright.org)
• Welfare Reform and Chronic High Unemployment (pubcit.typepad.com)
• The Failure of Welfare Reform Is ‘Exhibit A’ That Right’s Punish-the-Poor Philosophy Doesn’t Work (alternet.org)
• Welfare reform 15 years later: Clinton’s worst move revisited (thegrio.com)

Target "nurse-in" Michelle Hickman on left. (photo, Penny Montgomery-Schlanser)

At the “nurse-in” that she inspired, Michelle Hickman, told ABCNews that “I never knew that sitting in a Target and doing what’s normal – which is feeding my baby – would result in all of this one day, but I’m glad it did.” One dumb question. Where did she find a place to sit in the women’s department of a Target store?

Now, in the standard Target store, there are benches in the shoe department, booths or chairs in the food service area and chairs in the furniture department, though not necessarily at floor level. But Hickman wasn’t in any of those departments when she had her little problem with the employees of a Texas Target last month. She has said that she was in the women’s department. There is only one place to sit in the women’s department – ON THE FLOOR. That would have made her a hazard to the other patrons who might not have seen her before they tripped over her and her baby.

So, Hickman was “surrounded” by eight Target employees who suggested that she move into the fitting rooms, and was offended that some of the employees “rolled their eyes” and gave her dirty looks. And Hickman assumed they were giving her those dirty looks because she was nursing in public, which happens to be legal in Texas. What is not legal in Texas is creating a hazard to other patrons. Maybe I’m making an assumption here about where she was, by her own admission, “sitting.” And maybe, everyone who went out this week to hold a “nurse-in” at Target stores is also making assumptions, assuming that Target’s employees were violating Mrs. Hickman’s right to bare her breast in public.  (The obvious conflict between laws concerning public nudity and breastfeeding are for another time.)

We have had this conversation before. Yes, women have a right to breastfeed their babies when and where they need to. They do not have a “right” to offend or upset people for whom a naked breast is offensive – the elderly, the religious, mothers with their own children. They do not have a right to excite lascivious teenage boys (or men for that matter) causing them to engage in conversations that will be offensive to many. In most places there are areas where it is possible to breastfeed without imposing on other people’s rights. Malls and restaurants have restrooms, department stores have fitting rooms. If women learn how to discretely nurse, raising a loose-fitting top from the bottom, they can nurse in a restaurant booth without offending anyone. But nursing mothers certainly do not have a right to position themselves somewhere that they create a traffic hazard for other patrons.

A nurse-in occurred at Whole Foods last year. This year’s target is Target, which has a policy supporting breastfeeding, but a policy that makes it clear that the fitting rooms are the preferred place for this activity. It’s not an unreasonable request.

What is unreasonable is for women in this country to insist that a modern, diverse nation be legislated into the social conditions of a lost jungle tribe. You want women who stop in the middle of whatever they are doing, squat down and put their babies to their already naked, sagging breasts, get ahold of some old National Geographics and see how civilized that looks. Hickman has called for a Federal law protecting women’s rights to breastfeed. It is a completely unnecessary piece of legislation, whose attempted passage would turn very, very nasty, and in pursuing such a law, Hickman could easily trigger very conservative states to pass laws banning public breastfeeding.

What is needed is not a new law, just a little common sense and a lot of common courtesy and respect for the sensitivities of others.

Related articles

• Breastfeeding Moms Take Their Protest to Stores (blogs.findlaw.com)
• Breastfeeding Moms Stage ‘Nurse-In’ To Protest Target Store Policy (huffingtonpost.com)
• Nursing Mothers Have Feed-Ins At Target (alan.com)
• Targets nationwide see mothers’ nurse-in protest ()
• TODAY: Breastfeed at Target … (parentingintheloop.wordpress.com)

Anonymous members

Last week, Anonymous hacked into the subscription records of the company Stratfor, which advises companies and governments on security. The hacking was a nasty joke, a way of saying “see, even your vaunted security companies can’t keep us out.” In the process, Anonymous grabbed the credit card information of the subscribers.

On Thursday, they published the credit card information of Australian Member of Parliament Malcolm Turnbull, billionaire David Smorgon, journalist Sam Lipski, as well as the companeis BHP Biliton and Woodside Petroleum. Stratfor had notified those effected immediately, one can assume that Mr. Turnbull’s statement that the information was “old” means that defensive measures were taken as soon as the subscribers were notified.

Stratfor stated that the hacked list was their subscribers, not their private client list, which includes the United States Department of Defense, Apple and Microsoft.

And what was the point? Seriously. First Anonymous used the credit card information to steal money from the subscribers accounts and “donate” it to charity. Now, they are publishing the information, leaving any subscriber who didn’t get the message open to having their credit cards maxed out by just anyone. Was the point to prove they could hack into this company? So what? For the most part, Anonymous has only been successful at hacking into or through the public websites of agencies and companies. They have not, to anyone’s knowledge, pulled off anything as sophisticated or damaging as the worm that infested the Iranian nuclear power plant. Their attacks have been nuisances, or embarrassments, not much more. LulzSec’s hacking of the Arizona State Police was horrible, dumping on the net the home addresses, phone numbers and e-mail accounts of state policemen and women, putting their families at risk.

This isn’t whistleblowing to expose secrets that the world should know. This isn’t heroic. This is accomplishing nothing of value to the world. They are hurting those of us who want to see an end to the power of the oligarchs around the world because we are being lumped in with these destructive, irresponsible, thieving jerks. Thank you so very, very much Anonymous. You have just proven that the right wingnuts are right and all we want is to literally take money from the rich and “distribute” it. With allies like you, who needs Rush Limbaugh?

Related articles

• Another Pointless Anonymous Action (lezgetreal.com)
• Turnbull’s card details exposed by hackers (theage.com.au)
• Turnbull’s card details exposed by hackers (news.smh.com.au)
• Turnbull’s credit card details leaked by Robin Hood hackers (smh.com.au)
• Stratfor Offers ID Protection for Victims of Anonymous Hack (pcworld.com)
• Stratfor attackers prep to publish emails (go.theregister.com)
• Hackers Readying Publication of 2.7 Million Emails from Stratfor (linearfix.wordpress.com)
• Stratfor puts off website launch for a week after Anonymous attack (venturebeat.com)
• UPDATE: Anonymous Hacks SpecialForces.com, Posts Passwords and Credit Card Data (pcworld.com)

The late Kim Jung-Il

The videos that have made it out of North Korea are puzzling. State television is showing people lining the streets, wailing, weeping, beating their breasts, falling down because they are so overcome with grief. I’ve seen a lot of public figure funerals in my life, both as they happened as in historical film footage. This was the most over-the-top display of public grief I can remember. Even Evita Peron’s funeral wasn’t this riddled with hysteria, and she was considered a saint by her people, not the cause of starvation and destitution. So, the disclaimers from reporters that there is no way to tell how much of this display was real and how much was staged for television is very understandable. This man was not a young man or woman cut down in his or her prime by a bullet, a car crash or a virulent disease. This was, by North Korean standards, an old man, a man who had been ill for years. After all, life expectancy in North Korean is a full three years shorter than South Korea, even shorter if one is a member of the 25% of the nation that never has enough to eat because Kim Jung Il put all the nation’s money into its military.

Kim Jung Il lay in state for ten days. His funeral’s been going on for two so far. And it’s not over. There will be three-minute silences and the co-ordinated sounding of train and ship horns.

Possibly the weirdest moment was compliments of Seo Ju-rim, a female soldier. Through her sobs, she told state television, “Seeing this white snow fall has made me think of the general’s efforts and this brings tears to my eyes.” Seems that among his multitudinous accomplishments, Kim Jung-Il could control the weather. Not sure if she believes he ordered the snowfall from the other side or if the snow instead of the decent weather that he could have ordered was what made Seo Ju-rim so weepy.

Whenever they get around to finishing off this very expensive spectacle, the curtain will fall on North Korea again and the rest of the world can just speculate on what is really going on.

Kim Jung-Un is Kim Jung-Il’s third son, mother unknown, age not specified. He was chosen as the successor because his older brothers preferred life outside the country pretending that their impoverished nation is Brunei or Dubai. The real power lies with Kim Jung-Il’s brother, Kim Yong-nam. Officially, Kim Jong-Un is being called the “supreme leader of the party, state and army,” but that does not mean he’s actually leading the country. He has only been in line for the throne for less than a year, not enough time for him to acquire any real experience. But the nation functions on the personality cult of the Kim family, not on logic or elections. Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-sung “liberated” the country from South Korea and established the nation.

No foreign delegations or foreign leaders attended the funeral, and neither did Kim Jung-Un’s brothers. Flags at United Nations offices around the world were at half-mast, which is standard protocol for the death of any country’s leader.

Related articles

• North Korea’s Farewell To Kim Jong-il (news.sky.com)
• Kim Jong-il memorial begins (cbc.ca)
• NKorea calls Kim Jong Un ‘supreme leader’ – CBS News (cbsnews.com)
• Kim Jong Il Funeral Reportedly Begins In North Korea (huffingtonpost.com)

Pfc. Manning escorted into court at Fort Meade (Mark Wilson, Getty Images)

Andrew Longstreth of Reuters has written an interesting view of the defense strategy in Bradley Manning’s expected court martial. Though it appears that the Army’s case is strong, a single sentence in the prosecution’s summation may be the weak part of their case that could force a plea bargain.

Captain Ashden Fein, the lead prosecutor, said that Manning “gave the enemies of the United States unfettered access to these documents.” But did he? Define “enemies.” To prove the most serious charge against Manning, the prosecution must show that he intended the documents to reach our “enemies.”

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, says that the information was not intended to reach al Qaida or any other enemy. He is very optimistic about their chances, saying “The sky is not falling, the sky has not fallen and the sky will not fall.” If the information was not intended for the use of an enemy, and would have been of no significant use to an enemy, then Coombs may believe that the government will not be able to prove the charges.

It’s a fascinating premise, and Longstreth makes the case with ample expert opinion, but he misses a vital point – Julian Assange’s attitude toward the United States.

Assange has made no secret of the fact that he considers the United States the most dangerous nation on earth and would do anything to bring the U. S. to its knees. Should the prosecution collect enough quotes from Assange, enough evidence of Assange’s campaign to destroy America’s credibility in the world, drive wedges between us and our allies, damage our relations with the world – things that his un-redacted release of the State Department documents were intended to do, they could make the case that Assange IS an enemy.

Coombs has many avenues to pursue in defending Manning, starting with Manning’s psyche evaluations before he was shipped overseas. The Army clearly failed to properly deal with a disturbed young man, and Coombs can make a good case that the Defense Departments “Stop Loss” order had a lot to do with the decision to keep Manning in uniform.

The hearings which were held last week were the equivalent of an evidentiary hearing, to determine if the government has a case that can be taken to trial. In all probability, Manning will be court martialed. There are two phases to a court martial – the proving of the charges and the sentencing. If the Army goes ahead with all the charges and proves them, then the Army’s treatment of Manning becomes an important aspect of the sentencing, where special circumstances can be argued for reducing the sentence.

It could be a few weeks before the determination of the hearing judge is known and a court martial date set.

Stem cells (Creative Commons)

Okay, I’m about as pissed off as I get over anything. Pissed off enough that it just took three attempts to type “anything.”

I just watched a report about a stem cell treatment for osteoarthritis – FOR DOGS!

In 1999, my orthopedic surgeon and I discussed the future of stem cell therapy and he joked about having to either retire or change specialties. This surgeon is one of the two men who developed a support system for damaged spines that resembles a bicycle chain, multiple enclosed joints in the metal superstructure instead of the usual stainless steel rods. We talked about using stem cells to restore the lost material in ruptured spinal disks instead of surgeons doing their drill and scrape thing, and what a breakthrough it would be when stem cells could be injected into joints and cure osteoarthritis, one of the most wide spread diseases in America and one that is responsible for billions of dollars in sales of aspirin, Tylenol, Excedrin and the N-said family of drugs, before people go to the hard stuff. It is also, by way of side-effect of medication, responsible for gastric disorders and bleeding ulcers. I was diagnosed at the age of 29, and my doctor told me I had to have had spinal arthritis for at least five years for it to have shown up an a routine chest x-ray.

SO WHY THE HELL CAN THE DOG GET STEM CELLS AND I CAN’T?????

This isn’t even an embryonic stem cell treatment. It uses adult stem cells harvested from the dog. It was a “human interest story” supposed to make us all feel good because the dog, Hoke, is a search and rescue animal who worked on the World Trade Center site. His treatment was donated by the vet and the stem cell company.

There’s a low pressure system over New York State, headed for New England. I can tell. My joints hurt. My left knee hurts all the time, it’s just a matter of degrees. I can’t sit or stand for long periods of time. I have to be able to move and at my own pace. That makes it hard to find a good job, one with enough freedom to handle my pain. And I am a mild case. I’ve seen friends and relatives move from Excedrin to Vicodin and then Oxycontin. It’s a wonderful life – going from pain to drugged dullness and back to pain day after day, year after year.

Arthritics need to be able to move, to keep their joints lubricated, but moving hurts and some days it hurts a lot. Heating pads feel good, but ice pads reduce the swelling. They also do nasty things to core temperature and set one’s teeth to chattering. But some days, all anyone with arthritis wants is to curl up in a good recliner with a heating pad and stay there – all damned day long. Sleeping is hard. Finding a position that doesn’t hurt comes first, then the lack of movement causes other pains to rise to the surface. We spend a lot of time and money trying to find the best mattress, but that doesn’t really help.

It’s not cost effective to treat osteoarthritis with stem cells. We don’t spend enough money each year on our meds, and most of us are using over-the-counters not prescriptions, so our insurance companies aren’t involved. Insurance probably won’t pay for the first few thousand stem cell treatment recipients because it will be classified as “experimental.” And stem cells are just too controversial aren’t they? They could lead to cloning humans and human-animal hybrids, can’t they? They are just too freaking dangerous for us stupid humans to control or use properly.

But it’s okay for the dog, right?

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Old Sturbridge Village Meeting House

Once upon a time….well, actually 51 years ago in October, my family made one of their visits to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. It is a living museum of early America, houses brought to the site and arranged as a real town would have been, shops and a working farm and craft exhibits and an astounding collection of antiques. But, this particular day, there was a cold mist in the air and very few tourists around.

As we crested the hill after the entrance, we heard organ music. We traced it to the Meeting House, but on entering, we saw no one. A voice called down to us, and a few moments later, we were greeted by a tall, white-haired Englishman.

I don’t recall his name. I have never been able to. He explained that he was on sabbatical from his Anglican parish and that he had been born “halfway between Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.” I came to understand, over time, that in that simple statement, he had explained his unusual vision of religion.

We spoke with him for over an hour. None of us were in any hurry. We’d visited the Village so many times and this day, with its lack of tourists, was our opportunity to linger and chat with those who worked there.

On the wall behind the lectern was an antique wall sconce, a candle-holder with reflector. The reflector was about the size of a pie pan, concave and fitted out with dozens of tiny pieces of mirror. The minister lit the candle, turned to us and said…

                 “Just as no one mirror sees all of the light of the candle, no one church sees all of the light of God.”

The Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and Agence France Presse are news agencies. It has always been their function to gather factual news, write stories based on those facts, transmit those stories to newspapers or other media and the recipients would edit the stories for content. Editorializing has never been part of the deal. These agencies have always been respected for their lack of bias.

But the headline given for the story about President Obama’s 60 Minutes interview was biased and misleading, and that dishonors the history and reputation of the Associated Press.

What the President actually said was this: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R. and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.” You see anything in there that says “I’m the Man! I’m #4!” No. First of all, he was talking about his entire administration, not just himself. And what were those accomplishments? Well, let’s start with the health care law that FDR never got to formally present to Congress and Johnson couldn’t get put together. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a down payment on affordable, accessible health care. Then, there was Dodd-Frank, the financial institutions reform law. It restored the oversight of the financial industry that had been lost in the past three decades. The world’s economy is in crisis because of the manner in which financial institutions here and abroad created a system of trades, debts and transactions that contained more money than actually exists in the world. It, too, was not perfect, but a downpayment on a better way to do business.

As for foreign policy, we have gone from having a president who was ranked in an international poll as the most dangerous leader in the world to having one who is respected almost everywhere. All it takes in this world to be respected is to treat other nations with respect.

President Obama was not saying his administration was the fourth best in history, he was saying he would confidently welcome comparisons with any other administration except those three. He didn’t say he would win in those comparisons, just that he wouldn’t shirk from being compared. Honestly, I think he would lose in a comparison with Clinton. I did the math in 1994, thanks to a long analysis piece in the Florida Times Union. Clinton pushed through the legislation that allowed him to fulfill 73% of his campaign promises. Obama didn’t come close. The Senate Republicans filibustered and blocked hundreds of bills sent by the House, including the budgets. It was in the black hole of the filibuster that we lost the closure of Gitmo and an adequate stimulus package.

I regret that CBS chose to edit out that part of the interview. We should be willing to honestly assess the performance of an administration, not shrink from the offer to be assessed. We should be talking about what the President really said and not how it was reported

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• 60 Minutes Broadcast Edits Out Laughable Obama Claim as 4th Best President (papundits.wordpress.com)
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

When the Senate refuses to appoint or vote on the appointment of a nominee for the Executive branch, it is customary for the President to use his executive powers to temporarily appoint someone while the Congress is on recess. This is a power granted to the President by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which states: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” Now, Mitch McConnell wants to strip our President of a Constitutional power without amending the Constitution.

The Senate Republicans have used the filibuster (which is not a Constitutional power, but a rule made by the Senate) to block dozens of President Obama’s appointments, from piddly little middle management posts to Federal judgeships. They are presently blocking the appointment of a director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They don’t like the CFPB, and this is their main method of preventing any protections being created for consumers at the cost of the banks. The Republicans have manipulated things, getting John Boehner to not declare Congress in recess, to prevent recess appointments.

McConnell has made the President an offer he thinks the President can’t refuse – the Senate will vote on his appointments if he abdicates his Constitutional power to make recess appointments. Otherwise, they will just keep filibustering and manipulating and keeping our judiciary in crisis and prevent ambassadors being appointed and bureaucrats taking their places in the flow chart.

There is a point in the scheme of politics and governance where opposition crosses over into treason. Trying to overthrow a portion of our Constitution without following our established laws for amending that hallowed document is well beyond that point. We have had to live with the Constitutional dictatorship of the Bush/Cheney administration, the rants of Republican candidates that they would arrest judges and impose laws without the legislature, and now we are witnessing an attempt to negate a portion of our Constitution by fiat. Just how far do these people have to go before Americans realize they are dealing with a movement to end our republic as we know it?

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• Jonathan Bernstein: How Obama Should Get Tough With Congress on Recess Appointments (delong.typepad.com)
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Newt Gingrich by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

That’s it. I’ve notified my family. If the GOP are stupid enough to nominate Newt Gingrich and the Koch-Murdoch machine is strong enough to get him into the White House, I am taking that 40 pound box of documentation of my husband’s Canadien ancestors and leaving. It’s a real easy route – take the Crown Point Bridge to New York State, I-87 to Montreal, turn left and head for Ottawa. There, I will fight for permanent residency. There is no way in hell I’m staying in a country with Newt Gingrich as president.

New Gingrich, on CBS’s Face The Nation, said he would instruct the Department of Justice to use the U. S. Marshalls Service to arrest any Federal Judge who issued a ruling he didn’t like. Then, he had the cajones to cite Thomas Jefferson as his authority for Executive Branch control of the Judiciary.

An independent judiciary is one of the most sacred aspects of our republic. It sets us apart from most of the world. It gives us an authority to control the Legislature and President when they do things that limit our rights. It stands as the institution that protects the underlying principle of this nation – the majority rules only so long as they do not repress the rights of the minority.

It is our independent judiciary that has carved out that principle, not our legislature or any of our Presidents. They are the ones who have challenged laws that restricted our rights, or oppressed our citizens. It is absolutely necessary that our judiciary exist outside the control of the Executive or Legislative branches for us to continue to be a free people.

We have had a real problem in the past thirty years with Republicans blocking judicial appointments. I’m not talking about Supremes. Those battles are fought in public. I’m talking about Jesse Helms blocking District and Appeals Courts appointments during the Clinton administration and the filibuster squad in our current Senate blocking appointments for the past two years. As it was under Clinton, the Federal judiciary is in deep trouble because of unfilled vacancies, and justice delayed is justice denied. For political purposes, the Republicans are once again denying us justice in our Courts.

Yes, there are some really dumb judges. There are judges whose arrogance is beyond belief. There are judges who, naturally, impose their personal perspectives on their rulings. That’s why the Federal judiciary has three levels. The next guys up are supposed to correct anything the guys below them do wrong. And, yes, the Supreme Court has an unfortunate history of swinging from conservative to liberal and this Court has a damning history of bias and unethical behavior. There have always been mistakes, there have always been judges with bias, and we get past them eventually.

But arresting judges? That’s what dictators do.

In the terminology of political science, a “Constitutional dictator” is a President who bends the law to give him more power than is intended in our Constitution. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt circumvented Congress to prosecute the early stages of the Civil War and launch an all-out, no-holds-barred assault on the Great Depression. Much of what Roosevelt did was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. George W. Bush didn’t have a real crisis to excuse his actions. He told us flat out before he was elected, “The United States is not a dictatorship, it will never be a dictatorship, unless I’m the dictator.” He lived up to it, issuing a record number of Executive Orders to bypass Congress and ignore our laws and international treaties. He used signing statements to void rightfully passed laws. He was our third “Constitutional dictator.” But none of these men, for all their twisting and abusing of the Constitution, dared to threaten to arrest our judges.

One can make the case that the Bush administration committed war crimes, but one would be really stretching it to suggest they committed treason. Arresting judges because you personally don’t like their rulings is treason.

Gingrich justifies himself by saying that judges should not be allowed to issue rulings that violate the “values of the American people,” and he and he alone would be the arbiter of what our values are. There are 311 million people in this country and Gingrich says we are all identical in our values and beliefs. This goes way beyond the Republican lunacy of “The American People Have Spoken!” when they only took the House with 25% of the American electorate. This is a single man claiming a moral authority to dictate our laws and control our nation.

Newt Gingrich does not want to be President of a free republic with a diverse and complex culture. He wants to be Dictator.

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Pfc. Bradley Manning entering court at Fort Meade (photo by Mark Wilson, Getty Images)

Ever since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was made law, gay and lesbian members of the military have chosen to either tough it out or turn themselves in for discharge. According to his attorney, Pfc. Bradley Manning chose a third option – he gave 75,000 military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Well, it’s an interesting defense – not guilty by reason of being gay. Doesn’t do much for gay rights, equating gayness with insanity, but, what the hell.

Manning’s defense team is also claiming that the 75,000 documents were no big deal, that nothing he sent to WikiLeaks was classified above “secret” – the lowest designation for docments. The Obama administration has claimed that the documents compromised collaborators and strained relations with several countries. In most cases, the diplomatic cables contained a lot of local gossip about government officials and the personal reflections of the ambassador. Not all of it was flattering. At least one ambassador has been withdrawn because of complaints about the contents of the cables. Of more significance are the names of Afghan and Iraqi collaborators. Following the release of the military logs, the U. S. military scrambled to evacuate these people and their families. There was nothing we could do for dissidents in countries like Zimbabwe, who had met with members of our diplomatic staff.

The charge that what Manning exposed was not important is almost true. Much of what was put on-line by WikiLeaks about our military in Afghanistan and Iraq was already known or suspected. Much of it was already being investigated or had charges filed over it. Most of it was just “we moved from point A to point B today” routine reports. What Manning’s actions did expose, in the final analysis, is that the American public is more interested in who’s being eliminated on American Idol and the latest bad behavior by some celebrity than it is interested in what’s going on in our wars. If one was shocked by the “disclosures” in the documents, one wasn’t paying attention.

Manning’s defense that his superiors should have known he was too unstable for duty in a combat zone and access to sensitive materials is a valid one, the most valid they have. Examination of Manning’s record shows the pattern of behavior that should have gotten him discharged for mental instability. The defense team is questioning witnesses to Manning’s time in the service and the decision to place him in the intelligence services and in the war zone.

But, back to the “gay” defense…..

For eighteen years, gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors, activists and supporters have busted their chops to convince America that being gay is not un-military. It does not pose a threat to unit cohesion. It does not diminish the power of our military but most especially, excluding gays and lesbians from service does violate the basic rights of Americans. There is a brief scene in Julie and Julia where Paul Childs is being questioned about his loyalty to his country. The scene includes a question about Childs’ sexual orientation. That was life in the paranoid 1950s, the McCarthy-Un-American Activities Committee era. And in a warped way, the gay-bashers were right. Being gay in a world that totally didn’t accept homosexuality was a blackmailable condition. Had gays and lesbians been able to serve their country, or do much of anything else openly, there would have been less abuse, less harassment, less potential for blackmail, less reason for someone to become a spy like the guys from Cambridge, fewer dysfunctional marriages and unhappy lives.

So, Bradley Manning is gay. Big freaking deal. His superiors knew. They suspected he was suffering from gender dysphoria. And his defense team is trying to paint that as an excuse, a cause for his crime. Is Dan Choi even listening to this shit? If the court martial accepts this as a contributing factor to Manning’s actions, as exculpatory, that destroys everything that gay activists have been fighting against – the perception that gays can’t be trusted in uniform.

This defense strategy is an insult to all the gay men and lesbian women who have served with honor and distinction. It is ammunition for those forces who would drive gays and lesbians out of the military and back in the closet. It is hateful. Blaming all of Manning’s problems on his being gay is a cop-out. It’s no better than the Twinkies defense.

Was Manning too emotionally immature to cope with the realities of the military? Yes. But others have suffered from the same problem without being gay. Was he subject to uncontrollable rages? Yes. But others have without being gay. Should his behavior have been cause for slapping him in a military hospital for a proper psyche eval instead of just removing his firing pins and sending him to war? Absolutely. There is a very valid defense for Manning in the way the military failed to properly treat a man who exhibited violent and erratic behavior. It is not necessary to blame that behavior on “the gay.” It should not be necessary to sacrifice the gains that gays and lesbians have made in order to prove that Bradley Manning was a loose cannon and the military failed him.

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Interior detail of Magna Carta Monument, Runnymeade, England (erected 1957 by American Bar Association)

There are two creation stories that are based on the premise of creation out of nothingness – the Biblical creation of the universe and the creation of the United States. I won’t argue with the Bible, but I do argue with the myth of the creation of our country.

Very little aggravates me as much as how little Americans know about British history, or world history for that matter. Oh, we do the whole Egypt, Greece and Rome thing, hit all the high points, but we never really learn the important stuff – like how kings were elected, or how bloody the Protestant Reformation was, or how the British removed two kings before Benjamin Franklin was born. Sure, we know Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, but we somehow miss the fact that before him, Rome was a republic.

Okay, let’s take those elected kings, shall we? Did you know that in 1674, just 102 years before our Declaration of Independence, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth elected their king, John III Sobieski? In the pre-Roman, pre-Christian world, Celtic tribes, and some Germanic ones as well, had a layered system of elections. A clan selected a leader, not necessarily by heredity. A group of clans was a tribe, and the clan leaders elected a tribal leader. The tribal leaders elected a king and the kings elected a high king. Or queens and a high queen, to be perfectly accurate about it. The elected leader was not always the child of the old leader, but was chosen for his or her leadership qualities. Operating totally outside the clans and tribes was an order we call the Druids. They were not magicians or priests, not all of them. They were also healers, bards, historians and judges. This was the foundation of the concept of an independent judiciary, and it goes back a millennium before Christ. We didn’t invest independent judiciaries, we reached back into Irish history for them.

The first British parliament was convened by Simon de Montfort in 1264 without the consent of the Crown. It actually had its roots in the royal council created by William the Conqueror in 1066 and the Magna Carta in 1215, but de Montfort’s parliament was the largest, drawing in representatives from the middle class as well as the nobility. In 1649, King Charles I lost his head to the revolution that had begun in Parliament. In 1688, the revolution was a little less messy. James II was simply exiled and the Parliament chose the next monarch. Though the official form is “Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen…” the reality is “Elizabeth, by the grace of Parliament, Queen…” Every monarch since William III and Mary II has reigned by the grace of the people through the Parliament.

That is what we came from – an almost three thousand year history of elections and the evolution of a modern republic. Forget that whole nonsense about ancient Greece and democracy. That was a fairy tale told to separate us from our reality. All that stuff about the philosophers like John Locke, that was just intellectual justification for what we really were. We were the next logical step in the evolution of the modern state. It was more than just evolving past a king or queen. We evolved past the majority rule of a parliament. In a parliament, whichever party holds the most seats holds the government – legislative, executive and judicial branch. We separated the three. That, not the removal of a king, was our greatest leap forward. But it was a leap from somewhere, not from nowhere.

We didn’t invent democracy or the idea of a republic. We just refined it. And our revolution was not originally for the purpose of declaring our independence from England. It was to win the right to have representation in that Parliament and to be allowed to govern our local affairs the way the Scots did. Independence was an afterthought, when the British Parliament would not allow us to have representation and home rule. And the British didn’t learn from their experience with us, because they did the same stupid thing with Ireland, with the same result.

Because we don’t understand how our own country evolved, we somehow think that republics can be created out of thin air, that people with no history of voting or representation can instantly create republics. We cannot understand what happened in Russia because we cannot understand how a people with no history of liberty could not transition from an absolute monarchy through a totalitarian government to a republic. We cannot understand why China seems to be taking the slowest route possible to democracy, first by creating a capitalist economy, then by teaching elections and voting, starting at the village level. We cannot understand why Afghanistan and Iraq have been such failures. We cannot see that just having elections is not preparation for having political parties and open elections. It’s just going through the motions without the substance.

Because we don’t know the history of Christianity, we cannot understand Islam. If one doesn’t know that the Catholic Church exterminated dissidents, we don’t see the dynamics of Shia versus Sunni. Since we are not taught that the French and Indian War was an extension of the religious wars that had devastated Europe for over 200 years, we cannot understand the true meaning fo the First Amendment. Thousands died at Carcasonne, France, when the early Roman Church decided to rid itself of dissidents. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans died in the wars between Protestants and Catholics, wars over which religion would control which nation. The British monarch who preceded Elizabeth I was called Bloody Mary because of her violent repression of the Protestant faith their father had brought to England. Our founding fathers knew that history. They knew that the only way to freedom of religion was to have freedom from state-mandated religions. Islam is five hundred years behind Christianity. It is grossly unfair of us to expect them to have evolved faster than we did, particularly since the people of Northern Ireland are still fighting each other over religion and equal rights.

The countries of the Middle East have a history we do not understand or appreciate. They have been conquered and occupied since Julius Caesar. They were tribal territories without true borders. They were occupied for centuries by the Arabs and then the Turks. They were promised self-determination and had those promises ignored by Europe after World War I. They were divided into countries with no regard to ethnic, religious, tribal or historical identities, and had kings appointed for them. They became proxies for the Cold War, trading European-placed kings for American- and Soviet-supported dictators. And now, they are trying to evolve into something they have no experience with, no means of creating out of nothingness. They are trying to become real republics.

Compliments of an administration that said we could just pull a couple of republics out of our asses, we expect these countries to achieve overnight what we took centuries to build. It will not happen. It will be years until the Middle East stabilizes. And it is not up to us or Europe or the United Nations to force it to happen. Freedom is only valued if it comes from the people themselves, not if it is handed to them.

There are leaders in the Middle East, good leaders who can guide the region into the future if they are protected. Far too often in history, good men are not strong and strong men are not good. Men like King Abdullah of Jordan need strength, not our military strength, but our economic and moral strength, so he can do more than survive, but lead and teach.

Most of all, we need to keep our distance, no matter what. Our intervention invalidates what the people of the region are trying to do. They may choose to establish theocracies, but that will be transitional, just as theocracies were transitional for Europe. There will be bloodshed. There will be civil wars and possibly wars as they sort this all out. And there may be splintered countries, just as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia shattered when the control of the Soviet Union was removed, just as the Soviet Union broke up into the countries that were unionized by forced. It is not our choice to make. It is theirs.

George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The corollary to that should be “Those who do not know the past cannot understand the present.” Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s the path by which those who would seek to dominate us gain control of our perceptions of truth. Only in understanding how we came to be what we are, can we understand what it will take for the Middle East to evolve. Only in accepting that we still don’t have it one hundred percent right can we admit that others have the right to make mistakes as well. The West – us and Europe – do not need to apologize, but we do need to recognize the facts of our interventions and errors, and let the people of the Middle East find their own solutions to their own problems.

An excellent soldier does not get charged with assaulting other soldiers. An excellent soldier does not have the firing pins removed from his weapons because he is too unstable to be trusted with a working weapon. An excellent soldier does not provide the enemy with information that they can use to incite attacks on other soldiers. An excellent soldier is not deemed unfit for combat because he is too uncontrollable. .

As for Manning “defending our Constitution” – could Choi please provide us with a citation from the Constitution for handing over American military and diplomatic documents to a member of another country’s government? We charge people with espionage if they steal documents to give to our allies. Birgit Jonsdottir, a member of the board of WikiLeaks, was also a member of the Icelandic Parliament. That, Lt. Choi, qualified Manning for charges of espionage. Furthermore, an excellent soldier does not hand over to some irresponsible, glory-seeking prick information that endangers the lives of dissidents inside brutal dictatorships, particularly some paranoid asshole who’s so determined to damage this country that he put these documents out without redaction of the names of people who would be endangered by them. Choi needs to sit down sometime with the real journalists who worked with Julian Assange and find out what really transpired.

Manning did something very wrong. He has confessed to that. His own statements prove that he did not do this to enlighten the world or find justice or fight corruption. He did this because he’s a screwed-up kid who discovered that he could do it, so what the hell, why not? He has bragged about baiting his jailers at Quantico, so that he could whine to whoever would listen about how badly he was being treated. And just in case you all weren’t paying attention, his lawyers are claiming that he doesn’t deserve life in prison because the information he stole was practically worthless and certainly not something no one knew.

He doesn’t deserve life in prison. He does deserve some jail time, if for nothing more than to force him to grow up. I do not know the extent of mental health care he could receive in a military prison, but that is something he definitely needs. He didn’t blow any whistles. That would involve informing an outside authority of any proof he might have had of misdeeds. Everything that came out of the military logs that Manning hacked was already known, BY EVERYONE WHO WAS BOTHERING TO PAY ATTENTION. Manning’s attorney is admitting it in court, for crying out loud.

Manning’s case needs to go beyond his own court martial. I’ve said that from the beginning. His case should be the impetus for investigations into how our secrets are handled, how easily he was able to copy files, how easily he took them from the base, how he got to Iraq in the first place. Manning’s case should be an indictment of the military and its failures on several fronts. Most of the time, I really like Keith Olbermann, but this time, he’s wrong, and Daniel Ellsberg is wrong and while we’re on the subject, Michael Moore is wrong in his defense of Julian Assange. Ellsberg didn’t steal the Pentagon Papers for his own glory or in a state of questionable mental stability. Comparing Manning and Assange to Ellsberg is an insult to what Ellsberg did and it’s coming out of Ellsberg himself. Un-freaking-real.

While all of you are wringing your hands over poor, persecuted Bradley Manning, how about taking a moment to think about the Iraqi and Afghan collaborators whose names were published for al Qaida’s use and their innocent families, or think about Morgan Tsvangirai, and what it meant for his and his family’s safety to have WikiLeaks publish the cables about meetings between him and our ambassador to Zimbabwe. Funny how your concerns and your humanity end at Manning.

One last thing – Mr. Olbermann, stop saying this is the first time Manning has seen the light of day.  He’s been at Fort Leavenworth, in the general population and able to take advantage of everything the prison has for the inmates, like outdoor exercise.

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