Emblem of the Papacy

Elsewhere on this site you can read the case of the nine-year-old rape victim whose mother and doctors made the decision to abort her twin fetuses. This isn’t about her. It is about Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho who excommunicated the doctors, the girl, and her mother, but not the stepfather who raped her.

This is about the Archbishop’s explanation of why he excommunicated them….”They took the life of an innocent. Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored.”

The mother was not an adult, you fool. She was an innocent child, who should have been learning long division and playing with dolls.

The Archbishop needs a refresher course in Catholic theology.

Skipping over the ways someone can be baptized, let’s get to the meat of it. According to the website Te Deum Laudamus!, an aborted fetus is not considered to have been intended to be baptized, so it is not assumed to be “baptized by intent,” as a stillborn or miscarried child is. Aborted fetuses are not in Purgatory. They are in the ether. They are nowhere. The Church has no place for them in the afterlife. So, no prayers are offered by the Church for their transition from Purgatory to Heaven. Prayers are offered for God’s mercy on the fetus’ soul. The remains of an aborted fetus are not accorded a Catholic funeral mass. It has only been since 1983 that an unbaptized child may be buried in a Catholic cemetery. They used to throw them over the walls.

People are baptized in the Catholic Church to remove the stain of Original Sin. Until baptized, an infant is in a state of sin. Like to explain, Archbishop how these twin fetuses are more innocent than that tortured, abused, raped nine-year-old child who was going to die if she carried that pregnancy to term. And where did you get your medical degree? You must have one if you could explain with such certainty that she could have carried the pregnancy and been delivered by caesarean section. When did you examine her? The authorities found out about the pregnancy because she was in a medical crisis, not because she was seeking routine pre-natal care.

This is why we fought for the right to legally get an abortion. We didn’t do it for emergency birth control. We did it because women and girls DIED carrying bad pregnancies to term, and their babies usually died with them. We did it because women died getting illegal abortions, or were so maimed they could never have another child. We did it to save the lives of those already walking God’s earth.

We fought for legal abortion to save the lives of those Archbishop Sobrinho has said were not innocent enough to save, those the Vatican considered too unclean to save.

We took the risk that women would choose an abortion because they were careless, or because they didn’t think through the consequences of unprotected sex, or because they were suddenly abandoned by the father of the child, or because they were too uneducated to prevent a pregnancy. We knew that we could be enabling abortion as birth control. It was a necessary risk to achieve the goal of saving women’s lives.

But as we fought for the right to a legal abortion, we also fought to better sex education and access to birth control. The pill was already available, making it easier, we thought, to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Years ago, I met a woman who worked for the Georgia public health department. She said her worst enemy was the jackass legislators who wrote opt-out clauses into sex education laws. It never failed that the kids who had been excused from sex ed ended up in her clinic with unwanted, unexpected pregnancies because some uneducated parent had taught them a girl could only get pregnant during her period.

In America, we are facing laws that will criminalize abortion or make it so difficult to get that a pregnancy passes the acceptable threshold before the woman has passed through all the hoops. We have a law in Arizona that says a woman is pregnant before having sex, and amendments and laws have been proposed to declare a fertilized egg a person. Twenty percent of Americans would deny abortion to raped girls and women, or to save the life of the mother. The majority of Americans want to restrict the circumstances under which a woman or girl can receive an abortion. And just to compound their reckless disregard for lives of women and girls, state legislatures and Congress have voted to de-fund the most important providers of education and family planning and birth control in America. In the minds of these fanatics, the only people worthy of drawing breath are those who are virgins until marriage and who belong to their religions. Everyone else should just curl up and die.

Because one Pope thought he knew better than 1580 years of Popes before him, because he thought he knew better than all the scholars in Rome, the Catholic Church condemned this nine-year-old Brazilian girl to death, but her loving mother and caring doctors intervened. Now, they have condemned her to hell.

God, please protect us from your faithful.

Related articles

• Brazil Court OKs Abortions for Brainless Fetuses (abcnews.go.com)
• Hayley Rose Horzepa: The Importance of Choice (huffingtonpost.com)

Thomas Lagenbach mug shot, and the target of his scam (AP Chris Ratcliffe)

Thomas Langenbach, vice-president of SAP Labs Integration and Certification Center in Palo Alto, California, very successfully stole expensive Lego sets and resold them on the Internet. His website, “TomsBrickyard” had earned an “excellent” rating from his buyers.

It was all very simple. He copied bar codes from lesser expensive Lego sets and printed them on press-apply labels. Then he would walk into a retail store and plant his less expensive bar code over the actual one. He “bought” the $249 Millennium Falcon set for just $49.

Many of the people commenting on this story on the news site were shocked that the cashiers hadn’t noticed how cheap the orders were. They were saying some very nasty things about cashiers, and those who work at Target in particular. Therefore, this is more about cashiers than about a thief.

In civilized places like Brazil, cashiers have stools to sit on.

Cashiers have to meet a goal of a certain number of items scanned per minute. A sustained failure to reach that goal will result in being written up. Get written up enough times, and you get fired. On rare occasion, there will be a cashier who is exempted from those goals. We have one at a local supermarket. She is 86 years old and if not related to half the city, she certainly knows half the city, and their parents and grandparents. People will ignore other available cashiers to line up for her. Her scan numbers are ignored because keeping her is good public relations. But scan speed is job retention for everyone else. Really nasty companies will slowly raise the scan speed goal in hopes of pushing out older cashiers who have attained a higher per-hour wage rate. Cashiers rarely look at the print-outs on their registers. They listen for the pings. They are too busy trying to keep products from catching on the lip of the scan bed or on the fencing for the out-ramp and slitting open a bag of cat litter. They are trying to avoid carpal tunnel and turkey elbow (caused by pulling and scanning fifty or sixty 25-pound frozen turkeys.) The only time they look is when they need to enter a code number for something like produce, and at the end of the transaction.

Cashiers also do not know the cost of every one of the 10,000 to 30,000 items in a store. And you can bet your last UPC that they cannot afford $250 for a toy. That’s more than a week’s wages.

Cashiers rarely make a living wage. If they are lucky, they make more than minimum. Very rarely are they allowed to work fulltime. That way their employers can duck providing access to health insurance. They may get offered a buy-in to a 401K, but are more likely to get strong-armed into a payroll deduction for the United Way. They get strong-armed into a lot of stuff that makes the company look like it really truly cares about the community, while sitting under a poster in the break room telling them how paternal their company is and please remember to alert a manager if you are ever approached by a union rep.

They have to deal with a whole lot of stupid stuff from customers, and they are never in the right if the customer decides to be offended. They are blamed if the computer malfunctions or the credit card scanner doesn’t work or there is something, anything, that goes wrong.

And if the cashier appears to be in his or her early twenties, the odds are you are looking at a college graduate who find a job in his or her field.

Try to think about all this the next time you are checking out. It’s really marvelous to see how much a cashier appreciates the words, “It’s all right, I have time.”

But, back to the Lego thief….

He was finally spotted on video surveillance and arrested on May 8. Langenbach is free on $10,000 bail, about a third of how much he made in his Lego scam. When the police searched his expensive home in its gated community, they found stacks of Lego sets and sheets of bar codes, all neatly arranged, all very business-like. Langenbach is facing felony burglary charges.

Langenbach is not the first Lego-bar-code felon. In 2005, a man in Reno, Nevada, had pulled the same scam on nearly $200,000 worth of Lego sets..

Related articles

• Thomas Langenbach, SAP Labs Executive, Accused Of Stealing LEGOs By Using Fake Bar Codes(mbcalyn.com)

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• Silicon Valley Executive in LEGO Bar Code Scam(theepochtimes.com)

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• Professional Nerd Uses Scam to Buy More LEGOs (betabeat.com)

President and Vice-President touring Namaste Solar Electric in Denver with CEO Blake Jones

In spite of the debacle of Solyndra, the President is continuing to press for the development of green energy, which hits at one of the greater divides among Americans. There are those who believe that we can and should keep extracting fossil fuels and using them the way we have for almost a century, and those who believe we need to develop new sources of energy for the future.

We have a couple of major problems with energy in this country. One is infrastructure, the other is inevitability. First the infrastructure.

Every year, tens of thousands, if not millions of Americans suffer power loss because of ice storms, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, you name it. There are two causes, besides the weather. The first is our power lines being above-ground and the second is the age of our energy grid.

The United States did some very stupid things during the 1950′s economic boom years. We allowed our rail system to start shrinking, to be replaced with cars and trucks, and we kept putting electricity and telephone lines above ground as we built hundreds of thousands of new towns, suburban developments that rippled out around our cities. Some later developments buried the electric lines, but it was too little too late. Most of our country has above-ground utilities.

Today, the utility companies, states and cities say it’s too expensive to put them underground. That’s a very short view of the situation. Yes, it would be an expensive proposition. It’s much easier to put these things underground during initial construction, but we are also facing collapsing, aging water and sewer systems across America, so doing the two in tandem makes economic sense. It also makes sense to look at how much it costs us each year when power lines are downed by weather events. My city is facing a thirty-year project of replacing our entire water and sewer system. So far, except for a few downtown streets, no one has suggested going underground with our utilities at the same time. My state had massive power line damage with Tropical Storm Irene. No one suggested using this opportunity, while we are rebuilding roads, to bury the lines. It’s not just electricity we lose when power lines go down. Most of us have heating systems that depend on electricity, so we also lose our heat or air conditioning, which is far more dangerous to our survival than losing the ability to watch TV for a few days.

Our current power grid is not efficient. We literally leak power across the transmission lines. It is not capable of carrying the loads we will need in the near future, as more of our lives are wired and powered. Those of us who haven’t gone completely cellular for our telephones are just as likely to have wireless phones which don’t work in a power outage. My family went completely cellular because the city we lived in had such old power and telephone lines that we were constantly losing one or both. I don’t mind losing power, but being cut off from being able to contact emergency services because a squirrel hit a bare patch on the wires scares me.

The term “power grid” refers to the nation-wide system that moves electricity from generation facilities to homes and businesses, often across state lines. The power for my home crosses an international border. Vermont buys most of its power from HydroQuébec. Which segues nicely into the inevitability aspect of our energy future.

Fossil fuels built this nation. They have powered our electric generation plants, run our cars, heated our homes and commercial buildings and they are running out. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. There is only so much oil, coal and natural gas under the surface of the earth, and we are now extracting it from the sources that were considered too marginal to bother with just a decade ago. Gas prices will never go down below $3.00 a gallon again. They can’t, not when we are extracting oil from the deep ocean and from oilsands formations, places where oil does not just gush up easily or inexpensively. And to get that 100 years of natural gas that those gas company ads keep talking about, we are forcing chemicals into shale formation, fracking the shale, to extract the gas.

When people talk about green energy generation, they think big, really big. They talk about acres of solar panels in the deserts of the Southwest and huge wind turbines dotting farmland in the Midwest. We even have that mentality where wind is concerned in Vermont, with plans for ridgeline installations setting off big battles between people who want alternative energy and those who want to preserve our views. But big isn’t necessary.

Drive through Vermont, not the interstate but the state highways, and you will see wind towers in farm yards. Not many of them, but they are around. Windmills used to be a routine part of farms. These are just an updated version, not a tall or as visually offensive as commercial installations. The problem with wind turbines on farms is the cost. The turbines are very expensive and it takes years for them to create enough savings in electricity to pay for themselves. Which leads us to a much better solution, compliments of a brilliant state legislature and some pretty smart entrepreneurs.

We have just applied for solar panels which will be leased from a company here in Vermont. The lease payments will be lower than our current electric bills, there will be no up-front costs and the installation is free. The application included this neat little feature where I had to verify that they had the right address from the satellite picture of my house. The company will use the satellite picture to determine how best to install panels on my house. I included the information that the picture doesn’t show well. Our house is built into a hillside. The front, at street level, faces north. At the back is a two-car garage at basement level. It has a triple-pitched roof that faces east, west and south. The only tree near the garage is on the south side, but is leafless in winter when the sun’s rays come from the south. It’s the perfect roof for solar panels.

Now, for the brilliant legislature part: In Vermont, a homeowner can elect to hook their solar panels up to their electric meter and the electric company must buy the power generated by the panels. The meter runs backwards when the sun shines, the company issues credit against the customers electric bills. For about six months, the credits are building up to be used the other six months when the sky is more overcast. A typical customer either ends up with smaller electric bills or gets a check from the electric company. The savings over the cost of a year, even with the cost of the lease, can be significant.

Small scale, personal, no initial cost, low operating cost, crafted in co-operation with the power company and not in competition with it, and one more part of the green-ness of the Green Mountain State. We only seem fanatically environmental in Vermont. We have learned over the years that easing into new ideas works better than hitting people over the head with them. Eventually, the ideas catch on, usually with a lot of grumbling and grousing along the way, but like civil unions and same sex marriage, once the ideas are in place and people see that they don’t harm anyone, they gain better acceptance.

There is a house in the next block that has a bank of older solar panels covering most of the front of the house. Our installation will show that solar installations don’t need to be unsightly or intrusive and that other houses on our block which share our directionality could also benefit.

Related articles

• The Guardian reports on the Feed-in Tariff(evoenergy.co.uk)

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• El Nido Resorts as a case study for how going green means saving gold and doing good(elnidoenvironment.wordpress.com)

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• “Not In My Backyard”: The Green Energy Paradox (doubledippolitics.com)
• Solar prevents rising energy costs (evoenergy.co.uk)
• Solar power to generate majority of electricity by 2060 (evoenergy.co.uk)
• Union Cab installs solar panels to help power fleet (channel3000.com)

Mitt and Ann Romney campaigning

Aware that he is having problems connecting with women, even with his wife explaining how much work goes into raising five sons, Mitt Romney is trying to bridge his gap with “personal” stories of women he has met and spoken with at small, private gatherings away from the press. He has quite a collection.

The press is not permitted to meet these women or to have names or addresses to verify their existence. And in some instances, those omissions raise questions about how these women’s stories relate to the policies Romney advocates. At a fundraiser last week, Romney explained to potential donors that “In some towns that I go to, I ask to get a group of women business owners, and I meet with them. I have them describe their experiences.” So, here are some of the stories he presents to rallies and fundraisers…

Romney describes the woman whose unemployed husband signed up for an upholstery class. When she queried her husband about his choice of retraining, he explained that there was a shortage of upholsterers in their area. She realized he was right, and opened an upholstery business where she employs her husband and 40 others. Romney thinks that was “pretty impressive.”

The first question I want answered is when did this happen? Forty employees is not something one starts off with, it’s something that is built up to. And then, where? I used to live in a small city in Georgia, population 17,000. There was an upholsterer in town, total personnel four people. Most of the furniture refinishing businesses I’ve known over the years are very small operations and upholsterers are even smaller. We have become a society that replaces furniture instead of refinishing it or reupholstering it, unless it’s an irreplaceable piece, an antique or something with great personal value. So, where and when, please?

Next up is a woman married to a caricature artist. As Romney explained, “It’s hard to make a great living out of just being a caricature artist. He does caricatures at county fairs and so forth.” So, the woman decided that she had to become the primary breadwinner. Having been born in Mexico and being fluently bi-lingual, she got a job translating construction manuals from English to Spanish. It’s “just remarkable!”

Really? How about visiting a Federal Court in the near future? You will find freelance translators in a variety of languages who are contracted for suspect interrogations and court proceedings. Pick up a newspaper or check jobs websites in any state with a large Hispanic population. You will find ads for bi-lingual employees. I’m not putting down this particular woman, but her story isn’t really all that remarkable. It is somewhat remarkable that she chose to support an artistic husband. It’s a pity Romney didn’t ask her about birth control which makes it possible for her to pursue her career instead of being perpetually pregnant and stuck at home collecting welfare or forcing her husband to go flip hamburgers and abandon his art.

One of Romney’s favorites, because it is twisted to his party’s narrative, is the lady who owns a trucking company. She used to buy new trucks every year and employs both men and women to drive them. But, now, she is waiting to buy new equipment, she is “uncertain how many new regulations or taxes the Democrats might force upon her in the coming months and prefers to wait to purchase big ticket items until a Republican is in the White House. She runs the place with a very strong hand, a very successful hand.”

New regulations, huh? She must be a Fox News viewer or has right wing radio on at work all day. President Obama has pushed to streamline business regulations, not increase them. She’s a small business owner. Her taxes have been reduced by this administration. The administration wants to make taxes more fair, not just heap new taxes on people, and there are new tax incentives for her business, like the credit for hiring unemployed veterans, many of whom have great experience at driving trucks. Interest rates are at nearly historic lows, so this is a perfect time for making large purchases. They will cost less over time. I’ve known truckers. The trucking industry suffers when gas prices are high. Long haulers are expected to take larger loads in less time. In a recession, with businesses closed and factories stilled, there is less cargo being shipped. There are a lot of reasons for this woman’s business to be suffering, but the threat of new regulations and phantom tax increases are not among them.

Now, this one defies explanation for why Romney includes it. He says he met a woman in Cleveland who just graduated from college, but is going back for a second degree because she can’t get a job in her field and can’t afford to make payments on her student loans, which are currently sitting at $40,000. If she goes back to school, she can put off making payments on her loans. Romney explains “She can’t find a job, so she’s doing three part-time jobs. She doesn’t know how they’re going to make it. She’s having a hard time.”

Oh, let me at it. She can’t find a full-time job because of four lovely people at the top of the Forbes 400 whose company showed American businesses that if they limited their employees to part-time, they would not have to provide benefits. It’s called “the WalMart model” inside the retail and hospitality industries, and it has spread to health care now. Kids who were working in supermarkets during college are still working there because they can’t find full-time jobs. Three that I knew had their degrees in education, where we are losing jobs instead of recovering them as states and town tighten their belts. And let’s not forget, Mitt Romney told students to get a loan from their parents to go to school or start businesses, and the Republicans are insisting on cutting programs to pay for lower interest rates for that woman’s student loans. Just how the hell is anything the Republicans are offering going to help this woman, or the millions of students and graduates out there who are holding a total of nearly one trillion dollars in debt?

Finally, Romney talks about a woman he met in Appleton, Wisconsin. She sells perfume in a department store. She and her husband had planned on being retired at this point, but the real estate they bought, two duplexes, have decreased in value. He says he has met other older women who are finding retirement eluding them.

I really don’t understand the duplex lady. How did the decrease in her property values decrease her income from three rental properties? Did her mortgage payments rise? If she lives in Wisconsin, I know that her property taxes have not risen in the past year, but did state property taxes impact their profit from the rentals? If the expenses of the properties rose, why didn’t they raise the rent? Any other landlord would have. This story makes less sense than any of the others.

When I look at my own situation, facing eleven months when my husband will be on Medicare and we don’t know how we will be able to afford medical insurance for me; when I get ready for work or watch my husband go off to work instead of enjoying a comfortable retirement, that’s when I remember something that happened in 1992. H. Ross Perot was running for President and had to release his tax returns. In 1991, Perot threw a million dollar wedding for his daughter Margo, but he paid less actual money in Federal income taxes than my family did – a family of four at a median income. Today, both Perot and his son are in the Forbes 400 billionaires list and my husband and I are working part-time to supplement his Social Security and pension. I don’t resent Mr. Perot’s wealth. I resent the taxes he didn’t pay and the entirely legal way he avoided paying fair taxes. And I resent the idea that I’m supposed to suffer cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare to pay for men like Henry Ross Perot to get even bigger tax breaks and better ways to avoid taxes.

Mitt Romney suffers from something greater than being out-of-touch with ordinary Americans. He’s intellectually lazy. He has this set of beliefs and he fits what he hears into them, even if he has to chop bits off the round peg to put it in the square hole. He only half-listens to what people are saying to him and has no point of reference to evaluate what is being said. I’m not sure which is worse, Mitt’s problems connecting with reality, or the fact that the Republican Party and their well-paid media shills have done such a spectacular job of turning their followers’ brains to mush.

Related articles

• After backing Romney in 2008, Ross Perot declines to endorse anyone for 2012(trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com)

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• Mitt Cites Perot (thepage.time.com)
• ‘A woman who. …’: Romney’s stories court females (goerie.com)

From Creative Commons

I just found a fabulous website. It is run by a lady who only identifies herself as Middle Molly. She resides in Chicago, and she has posted less personal information about herself than I have, and I refuse to post a profile. Molly has the most concise, precise analysis about unemployment in America that I have ever seen. You can find her at mollysmiddleamerica.blogspot.com.

Quick summary, so visit Molly for the detailed analysis –

When Barack Obama took office, we had already lost 4,462,000 jobs, a million more than the Bush administration had admitted to.

In the next few months, we lost 4,317,000 additional jobs, all before a single Obama policy could take effect.

During the recession, we lost a total of 8,779,000 jobs.

We have gained 4,248,000 private sector jobs since February, 2010.

However, we have lost 503,000 public sector jobs – school teachers, road maintenance, police and fire fighters, library workers – almost all at the state and local level.

The net job gain for the Obama administration is 3,745,000.

We still need 5,034,000 jobs just to break even with what we have lost. That number does not take into consideration the new jobs needed for people who have graduated high school and college or immigrated to this country legally since 2006 when the recession began.

So, the question facing Americans is really very simple – do we want to return to the policies that cost us 8,779,000 jobs or continue with the guy who has helped to restore 3,745,000 of them?

Visit Molly monthly to track the jobs numbers and get that most elusive of things in this election year – real, honest, unbiased facts.

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JPMorgan Chase Tower

Let’s get the bad jokes out of the way first. The JPMorgan Chase employee who did the trades that cost his bank at least $2 billion was nicknamed “Voldemort.” And we thought George W. Bush was the only “He who must not be named,” running around….

Steven Pearlstein, writing in The Washington Post on May 19, has an interesting take on the whole JPM-C mess. He considers it a blessing for a simple reason. It might help Americans understand all the hows and whys of what has happened in the economy in the past decade or so.

The worst part of the whole economic collapse is how none of it made sense to ordinary people. In our minds, Wall Street was a place where people traded shares in real companies that made real products or provided real services. In our minds, banks were where we deposited money and drew interest on it, and where we arranged loans and lines of credit and paid interest on those things. Trying to understand derivatives and credit default swaps, well, none of that made sense, particularly the part about the derivatives market containing more money that actually exists in the whole world.

The global economy went into freefall because Wall Street and banks stopped dealing in realities and starting believing the old adage that one must spend money to make money. Only, they twisted it into using money to make money.

In 1955, dramatist Thornton Wilder wrote, “Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” That was the distillation of the “spend money to make money” philosophy. A good company would take profits and reinvest them in the company, buying new equipment, expanding markets, retraining workers. A superb company, like the Swiss Army Knife Company, would also take profits from really good years and put them into the bank, to use in short years to prevent lay-offs. A person would invest in a new company simply by hiring them for a job, thereby encouraging a young thing to grow.

Back in the 1950s, the managers of several New York City department stores “invested” in a man with a weird idea. Instead of them each having a couple of guys on payroll who would be pulled out of the shipping department a few times a week to go to a customer’s home and assemble a new bicycle, the stores could contract this man’s company to do the assemblies. The guys on payroll at the stores did not lose their jobs, but were simply shifted to new responsibilities. It was a win-win. The stores got people who could not only assemble the new bicycles, but repair older ones, and do the same with lawnmowers, yard furniture, baby furniture, and eventually health equipment companies and hospitals contracting for wheelchairs. The man with the plan was my father. He operated under the principle of providing the highest quality service for the money. It was all very simple, and very understandable for any person, even junior high school drop-outs like my father.

Mortgages bought homes. The person who wanted to buy a home had to meet certain credit-worthiness requirements (or have the backing of the GI Bill). Mortgages were written at set rates of interest for set periods of time. The homeowner paid interest on the mortgage. It was all clean and simple.

Voldemort at JPMorgan Chase was played for a sucker by hedge fund managers. That’s the simple explanation of how he lost the bank $2 billion plus dollars. Voldie made these deals while experts were saying there was an unacceptable risk. But the upside is that he proved that all the proposed regulations, including the Volker rule, are worthless in the face of soulless greed.

Small fact…when Fobes magazine started compiling their Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, there were almost no money managers or hedge fund managers on it. In 2011, 104 of them had broken into the list, where the poorest person was worth a cool billion. (I haven’t finished analyzing the 2012 list yet, but so far, only one person in 60 lost asset value in the past year. Everyone else increased their wealth.)

The JPMorgan Chase loss disproves the idea that business suffers from stifling over-regulation. Real businesses, like meat packing plants and furniture manufacturers and assisted living facilities do need an honest reassessment of regulations. The regulations often are too old to reflect changes in the industry or don’t really cover new industries properly. Those are the regulations we should be concerned with. Are all environmental regulations “job killers”? The state of Vermont has some of the toughest environmental regulations in America, and the largest iron foundry in the country was built after those regulations were created.

But when Republicans talk about over-regulation, they are not talking about the corner deli and the health department. They are talking about massive international corporations that use loopholes in our tax code to avoid paying taxes in any country. They are talking about the financial services industry which employee armies of attorneys to find ways to get around regulations and lobbyists who push congress to water down regulations and create new loopholes. They are talking about protecting oil companies, not the men who work the rigs. The are talking about protecting the Forbes 400, less than a quarter of whom believe in the principle of noblesse oblige – with great fortune comes great responsibility.

So the loopholes were in place and the lobbyists did their job, and JPMorgan Chase lost at least $2 billion and we can point at them and say “They will do it again, and again, and again.”

The “explanation” for the whole derivatives market is that it lowers the cost of borrowing for corporations and households. The excusers of derivatives say that the derivatives and credit default swaps “hedge” the risks, making investors more willing to buy bonds and banks more willing to extend credit. Ain’t seen none of that, have we? Banks are hoarding money, refusing to give loans and refusing to fully participate in refinancing home mortgages. And trillions of dollars are being held in these “money making money” situations and not being used to “encourage young things to grow.” The money is not financing new businesses or helping companies upgrade or retrain. It is not being used to finance research and development. It is not being used to pay decent wages and provide decent benefit packages to employees. It’s just riding the merry-go-round of money making money making money while the world falls further and further behind the extremely wealthy people playing these games.

There is also a human cost, beyond the obvious. The financial services industry is a waste of human beings. Yeah, they make big bucks figuring out how to screw everyone else in the world, but these are supposedly some of the brightest minds on the planet. At least that’s the explanation given for why they should be paid such exorbitant salaries and bonuses. Why aren’t they using those brains to better use?

Steven Pearlstein summed it up this way: ” For this pundit, the lesson to be drawn from JPMorgan’s trading blunder is not that banks have become too big to manage or even too big to hedge. It is that banking and finance have become too detached from the real economy they were meant to serve.” Amen.

Related articles

• JPMorgan Chase loss only going to get worse(money.cnn.com)

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• Citing JPMorgan Loss, Regulator Pushes New Oversight(dealbook.nytimes.com)

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• Now up to 7 Billion Dollars – JPMorgan Chase loss only going to get worse (sgtreport.com)
• Marvin Meadors: Why Is Romney So Casual About the JPMorgan Chase $3 Billion Loss? (huffingtonpost.com)
• CNN States JPM’s Derivatives Losses Now Likely $7 Billion (silverdoctors.com)
• Massachusetts Democrats seeking information on Scott Brown and JPMorgan Chase (dailykos.com)

President Barack Obama meeting with healthcare stakeholders in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is to his right. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the early days of John Boehner’s twenty-one year career in Congress, the House leadership had to take him aside and explain that one does not walk around the chamber handing out lobbyists’ checks to colleagues before a vote. That is a fair picture of how most Americans view lobbyists – the guys with the checks who pay for a vote that favors their client’s interests. And that is what most of us were thinking of when candidate Barack Obama promised to end the culture of lobbyists in Washington.

But, the lobbyist who hands out checks or who arranges a special deal on the lease for a high-end apartment (another perk Boehner enjoyed for years) is not what all lobbyists do. Therein lies the basis for accusations that the Obama administration has broken its promise to limit lobbying.

Lobbying firms are people who arrange meetings between their clients and members of the government. Where lobbyists cross the line is in arranging for their clients to provide perks for a government official. Where government officials cross the line is writing laws that benefit the special interests represented by the lobbyists.

The Washington Post has published a story that starts off criticizing the White House and waits until page two to explain who the lobbyists are who have had access to the administration. Ooooh – looky here, he broke a campaign promise – there are still lobbyists visiting the executive branch!!!!

Let’s start on paragraph six of the WP story….President Obama barred persons who had recently worked as lobbyists from joining his administration. He also forbid federal employees accepting free admission to conferences or semi-social events run by lobbying groups. It certainly didn’t end lobbying, but is created a low wall between the lobbyists and the administration.

But it is who the lobbyists are and what they are lobbying for that really matters. Start off with, most of them are liberals or have had ties to the Democratic party. Lobbying firms routinely hire people on both sides of the aisle to allow them to access any administration or legislator. So, who has had access to the administration?

Marshal Matz was an unpaid advisor to the campaign and as a lobbyist has arranged meetings with administration officials for the general counsel for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the CEO of General Mills, advocates for farmers in Africa, the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, Beef Products, Inc.

Bill Samuel is a lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, the master union of all unions. He has met with William Daley, the former chief of staff and Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council. Samuels has explained that his firm is working as an interface between the administration and Congress on laws to assist job creation.

Nancy Zirkin is a lobbyist for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Laura Murphy represents the ACLU.

Tim Hannegan was another advisor to the Obama campaign, and represents several businesses, including Comcast, Taser International, Kelly Services, the temp agency, and for-profit colleges. Hannegan arranged meetings between the CEO of Kelly and aides in the jobs council to discuss the tax credit for businesses hiring unemployed veterans. The Hire Heroes Act was signed into law six weeks later. However, Samuels was not able to persuade the administration to back reduced regulations for the for-profit colleges. (The Washington Post owns Kaplan University. Just throwing that in for the sake of disclosure.)

Some lobbyists arrange meetings to tell members of the administration that an organization or industry wants something. Some lobbyists connect the administration to people with intimate information about an industry or issues. Others are asked to arrange the meetings so taht the administration can explain a policy or law to an interested industry, organization or business. One such meeting was arranged for Andrew Menter, CEO of Vivature Health, a medical billing firm for college health programs. He wanted to understand the Affordable Care Act and had his lobbyist, Tom Downey, arrange the meeting.

Downey is a unique case. He is married to Carol Browner, Obama’s energy czar until last year. While Browner was working for the administration, Downey’s firm dropped any client involved in any way with the energy industry, to avoid charges of conflict of interest on both sides. Downey also arranged meetings for the head of the Credit Union National Association. The group wanted to lift the cap on the percentage of assets that can be used to make loans. This is not the administration to ask for relaxation of banking regulations.

This is the first administration to release the visitor logs for the White House and all executive offices. The releases are delayed three months, and were initiated in response to a lawsuit. No other administration has been sued over visitors, and maybe the way these logs have been misused is the reason. The right wing found the name William Ayers on a visitor log for the White House. They immediately claimed that it was the infamous Weather Underground domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, former professor at the University of Chicago. Not so, according to the White House and the Chicago Bill Ayers. But, facts never get in the way of a good right wing narrative, and so the loyal followers of right wing media believe that President Obama has entertained his “good friend” the domestic terrorist in the White House.

Roughly 2,600 people are given badges to enter the White House, Blair House which is the vice-president’s residence and the new and old Executive Office Buildings. There are over 2 million visitors on the log database for the past 3½ years, 1.3 million unique names. No information is given about the identity of the visitors or their professions. Since there is no list for any previous administration, these logs cannot be compared with who had contact with previous presidents, cabinet members or special czars.

With the exception of the hiring vets tax credit, the Washington Post offered no information about any instances of a direct line between the White House or the administration and the people lobbyists advocate for. The overall tone of the opening of this article and the headline made it appear there was something wrong going on here, but what the article presented was a picture of people with a special interest meeting with people who could advocate for them with the leaders of the administration if they chose to.

Nothing will end the lobbying industry. They are too valuable to their clients. What is important about lobbying is the manner in which they approach the administration. Are they arriving with blank checks for campaign chests? Are they handing out favors in exchange for meetings? Nothing in the article suggests that.

Most of the links below show how the right wing is using the information about lobbyists and the executive branch.

Related articles

• Obama Discovers Lobbyists Are Hard to Get Rid Of(usnews.com)

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• White House Visitors Logs Shows Obama is a Lying Lobbyist Whore(gds44.wordpress.com)

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• Even after Obama’s promise, lobbyists still run the White House(rt.com)

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• Lobbyists “a steady stream” at White House despite Obama pledge (hotair.com)

cover

This quote is from the book “Magic’s Pawn” by Mercedes Lackey. It is the first in her “The Last Herald Mage” trilogy in her extensive Valdemar series. I read it last night, and this morning was thinking about how authors in the science fiction and fantasy genres have been creating worlds and societies where hermaphrodites, homosexuals and just about anythings else you can imagine are accepted parts of those worlds. They approach the inclusion of those characters in a matter of fact way, not making it a sensational issue, even in this book. The main character is a teenager, who has discovered that he is gay in a society where some factions, usually for religious reasons, do not accept it — including his father. Skipping all the plot lines that lead to it, his lover dies, and he blames himself — wondering if Tylendal died because of their love, wondering if it was his fault for loving him.

The speaker is an Adept Healer, speaking to him after he has tried to suicide, and damned near collapsed the Herald’s college with his uncontrolled new Mage powers:

This is the thing I wish to tell you; in all the world, there are more creatures than just man that make lifetime matings. Among them, some of the noblest -– wolves, swans, geese, the great raptors -– all creatures man could do worse than emulate, in many, many ways. And with all of them, all, there are those pairings, from time to time, within the same gender. Not often, but not unheard of either…

This I think I have learned: where there is love, the form does not matter, and the gods are pleased. This I have observed: what occurs in nature, comes by the hand of nature, and if the gods did not approve, it would not be there. I give you these things as food for your heart and mind.

Humboldt penguins

Even penguins. A couple of years ago two male Humboldt penguins paired up in a zoo. Zookeepers separated them into different enclosures, hoping to get them interested in a lady penguin. It didn’t work. They pined for each other, refusing to eat, moping around. Finally the zookeepers relented, placing them back in the same enclosure. Reunited, the pair thrived and ultimately adopted an egg abandoned by its birth parents. They hatched it and have raised the baby as their own, acting exactly like a male-female pair would have.

The gods are pleased.

Water tower in Wolfforth, Texas

So here’s the scenario in Wolfforth, Texas, a small bedroom community of 3,700 near Lubbock: in last week’s election for a vacant city council seat each candidate received 118 votes. Texas election law has three options for dealing with a tie: a runoff election (estimated to cost around $10,000), one candidate conceding to the other, or some form of casting lots (old terminology for, oh, drawing the short straw or losing at rock-paper-scissors).

Candidates Bruce MacNair and Bryan Studer didn’t want to bankrupt the town, and neither wanted to concede, so they chose the third option. The tie was decided Friday with a single toss of a silver dollar. It landed heads up, giving the seat to McNair.

Wolfforth city manager Darrell Newsom said the candidates’ decision reflected their characters. “The term ‘gentlemen’ comes to mind,” Newsom said. “It’s the gentlemanly thing to do, and they’re acting in a gentlemanly fashion.”

MacNair and Studer shook hands after the toss.

The city attorney drew up a three-page contract outlining rules of the coin toss based on state election procedures for municipalities. Newsom said the Texas municipal league had requested a copy of the contract in case another municipality ever faced a similar situation.

I go along with “gentlemanly”. “Civilized” also comes to mind. I want to know why people can act in such civilized and humane manners on the small scale, in their communities, but seem to lose their humanity and civility when they make it to the big stage. What is it about politics that makes such monsters?

Kudos to Mr. MacNair and Mr. Studer.

Related articles

• Local council seat decided with coin toss (todayonline.com)

The California Statehouse, Sacramento

The Constitution of the State of California, in Section 1, contains the following, “The legislative power of this State is vested in the California Legislature which consists of the Senate and Assembly, but the people reserve to themselves the powers of initiative and referendum.”

Nice, innocuous sentence, right? The people retained for themselves the power to suggest new laws and to hold referendums on important issues. Nothing harmful there. Except in the state of California. That little sentence has created the chaos and failure that is the state of California.

In 1978, Proposition 13 limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value of the property and limited reassessments to inflation or 2% whichever was lower. That was the beginning of the end for responsible governance and budgetary sensibility in California. The motive for the law was to protect the elderly from losing their homes because a rapidly inflating housing market would tax them out of houses they had lived in for decades. It was a valid concern, but one that could have been better handled with any number of alternative laws, starting with the homestead exemptions that some states have used, or grandfathering of persons who had owned their homes over a specific period of time. Instead, it crippled the ability of California to garner sufficient tax revenue for the government.

Prop 13 was just the first of California’s idiotic referendums. Over the next twenty to thirty years, it reached the point where California’s assembly couldn’t adjourn for lunch without someone demanding a referendum. Jerry Brown, California’s current governor and a Democrat, was governor at the time of Prop 13. He left office in 1983. From 1983 to 1999, there were two Republican governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. They were followed by Democrat Gray Davis until 2003, and then Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger until last year. California’s economic problems are not partisan. Neither party is more responsible than the other. The state’s problem is its citizens.

Left to a referendum system, a state’s citizens will naturally vote for things that benefit them without giving much thought to what the consequences might be in the long term. From an extraordinary education system to sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants to a far-reaching welfare system, Californians just kept piling on the things the state had to pay for, all the time limiting what they were going to pay with.

The state knew some exceptional economic booms, the movie and television industry and the tech industry brought great fortunes to the state. But they contracted over time. Laws passed during the booms became unsustainable, but the state didn’t referendum reforms that adequately contracted state obligations to match revenues.

In 2006, just as everywhere else in America, the perfect storm of economic catastrophes hit California. Unlike everywhere else, California could not respond. It couldn’t even screw up the way other states did in 2009 when they received the stimulus money and used to keep their budgets going instead using it to stimulate their economies. As it had been for too many years, California was paralyzed by a budget and management system run by citizen referendum.

There are only about a dozen nations in the world that have a larger GDP than California, which is why California’s budget deficit is bigger than the deficits of most nations, and there is only one way out…they need to amend their constitution to limit the use of referendums. Then, they need to let their elected officials do what needs to be done.

Related articles

• If You Live In California Things Just Got A Whole Lot Worse(ConservativeActionAlerts.com)

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• The Golden State Gone Broke – Huffington Post (blog) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Steven Greenhut on Jerry Brown’s Broken Budget (reason.com)
• Brown’s Plan for California: 4-Day Workweek (newser.com)

Maneki Neko

In cruising around Google yesterday, looking for information on the ecosystem of Tokyo Bay, I stumbled across listings for cat cafés. That perked my ears up, so I searched for cat cafés and found this essay [published in 2010] on the Vice magazine site. It explains this phenomenon so well that I knew the best thing to do would be to give it to you whole…

I Like to Have Tea With Cats in Japan Because I’m Shy

By Tomokazu Kosuga, Translated by Lena Oishi

Sleeping - Leave Me Alone

Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks.

Thirty-eight-year-old Norimasa Hanada, the owner of Neko no mise (Shop of Cats), Tokyo’s first-ever cat café, explains the problem: “Most Japanese rental apartments prohibit pets. The only ones that allow them are condominium apartments for families. This means that young, single-dwelling workers in their 20s and 30s can’t even think about getting any pets, despite the fact that they’re stressed out and are seeking comfort and companionship of some kind.”

I'm your excuse to play

It makes sense, then, that most cat-café fans are relatively young. More than 30 customers shuffled into and out of Neko no mise during the four hours I recently spent there, and apart from one lady in her 50s, all the other patrons were in their 20s or 30s (most of them female, with only three guys spotted the entire time). Another contributing factor to the cat-café trend is that Japanese people are chronically shy, to the extent that many can’t even hold a decent conversation about the weather with a stranger. The wordless, tactile communication of kitty cats is a great source of comfort for these high-strung, antisocial urbanites.

At Neko no mise, a few sofas, chairs, and tables were scattered throughout the café, which emanated a relaxing, feminine atmosphere complete with soft music. One wall was lined with a bookshelf full of hundreds of manga books. Apparently there are 14 resident cats at Neko no mise, and because it’s winter in Tokyo right now, most were huddled under the kotatsu (a traditional Japanese low table with an electric heater on the underside). Since the cats are obviously the kings of the café (and they know it), they seemed more arrogant than I’m used to. Some of them were skittish and jumped around every time a new person came in or walked out. I got the impression that unless you’re willing to stay for the long haul, befriending a café cat is trickier than desired, especially for an establishment that makes money off the illusion that patrons will be guaranteed some pussy lovin’.

Looks like my house

There are a few different types of cat-café customers. Newcomers will be so swept up in the distinct atmosphere that they will just sit there stunned. It looked as if most of them had never had a pet cat or even touched one before and it seemed like they were struggling to come to terms with the unpredictable behavior of real cats while their fantasies of docile, purring balls of love were being shot to hell. In an hour’s stay, most could only manage to touch a passing cat just once. Many customers seemed like the shy, meek, silent type who were in need of a hug or two. Since these sorts don’t have the courage to go up to a cat and play with it themselves, they would read a book and sip coffee while they patiently hoped for a cat to come closer. It broke my heart.

Those who came in groups were generally cheerful and talked a lot, using the café as a place to catch up with friends. The cat factor was a bonus for them, and they grabbed the cat toys lying around and played with the cats quite successfully. The couples that I saw were either in new relationships or were still in the friendship stage, and were using the cats to bridge the awkward distance between them.

He must have food...

While I sipped my coffee in a room full of cats and cat groupies, I could slowly feel the soothing effects of the kitty café wash over me. Before I knew it, I was smiling for no reason and was so at ease that my eyes started to droop in a sort of happy stupor. Others must have been feeling the same numbing effects because occasionally the room full of people would fall silent as they stared at the cats’ every move.

Most customers stayed for at least one hour, but apparently some fanatics can last more than six hours. Norimasa told me that “while the average stay is an hour and a half, some regulars take a sick day from work and stay all day. They say that they’re about to buckle under the stress of their workload and need some time out. Some regulars come four or five times a week, while those who have become so mentally drained from work that they have taken an extended leave from their jobs come every day, seeking comfort and healing.”

Yes... scratch right there...

Cat cafés generally charge a time-based fee. Neko no mise charges $1.50 every ten minutes ($9 an hour), and $21.50 for a special three-hour plan. Might sound like they’re overcharging, but maintaining a clean, dreamy cat environment ain’t cheap. The only way for cat cafés to survive is for them to maintain a high turnover rate and keep away the cheapskates who will otherwise undoubtedly stay for hours on end, nursing a single cup of coffee. Sadly, this also means that the regulars who stay for six hours end up paying more than $42 just to stroke some fur.

There’s a Japanese legend that says that cats become popular every time there’s a recession in this country, and it’s true that there’s been a huge boom in cat and cat-related-merchandise sales these past few years. Something about those pointy ears and tiny paws has a calming effect on the human mind. Or perhaps it’s the traditional Japanese culture of forcing people to behave like herds of sheep and act appropriately by carefully judging the vibe of every situation (what the Japanese literally call “reading the air”) that makes the independent, freedom-loving cat the perfect target of obsession. I know I’m making this all sound pretty sad, but like most cute things, it’s best not to think about it too much. Just stare into the hypnotizing eyes of the pretty kitties and let your troubles fall away. Purr.

Back to Pat Carbonell, Intrepid LezGetReal Blogger:

Now that I think about it, I’ve seen this here in Rutland… not the cat café thing, but people who can’t have a pet seeking them out. Our local Humane Society shelter has two “cat rooms”, where adult cats ready for adoption hang out. In January I was there with my niece, looking for a cat for her, when I ran into a couple of women I used to work with. They were there to visit the cats. The shelter looks on these folks as helping to socialize stray, abandoned and possibly abused cats. The women look at their visits as mental health breaks – go to the shelter, hang out with the cats, come out smiling.

Maybe we should set up cat rooms for the House and Senate, and make every congressperson spend a couple of hours a week in them. No aides, no smartphones, no work papers. Leave the world behind and pet a cat for an hour. Get a grip, take a deep breath, relax.

A few of mine

Maybe that’s why I have five. I go to sleep at night surrounded by purrs.

Related articles

• Kitty Cuddling Java Shops – The ‘Cat Cafe Neko no Mise’ Offers Hot Drinks and Adorable Felines (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)
• First Cat Cafe Opens in Vienna, Austria (shoppingblog.com)
• New curbs on cat cafés in Tokyo – but Vienna extends a welcome (majiroxnews.com)

Age 19

It’s true. I model nude. I’m also not a sex symbol, or a twig, or unfed, or in magazines, or on a runway. I model nude for art classes in the area of my hometown. Why do I do this? Well, for many reasons. I started modeling for art classes at the age of 19 y/o to pay for my college books. My mother had done it when she was in college and introduced me to the teacher she had modeled for. At 19 I was going to model for the art classes she taught at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT. This modeling gig led to fifteen years (so far) of a modeling career (and to my meeting my partner!).

I’m not the type of person one thinks of when they hear the term “model”. I’m not stick thin, or glamorous, or sexy. I’m an over-stuffed hourglass with wide hips, large breasts, and long curly hair. (Height: 5’7″, Weight 285 lbs. Breasts 44DD) Does that sound like a model to you? Well in the Art Community - I’m more beautiful and graceful than any Size Zero in a magazine. The reason for this is because I have curves.

Age 22

Artists like drawing curves because its easier than drawing lines. When you walk into an art class to model nude you must remember that the people drawing you are not looking at you like you are a sex symbol. To them….you are a bowl of fruit. Simple as that.- No sex appeal. No personality. You are an inanimate object for them to draw.

This evening I returned to nude modeling after a year hiatus to have a child and mend a broken ankle. I model at an art gallery here in Rutland, VT. It is a small group of artists that come to the Life Drawing classes, which aren’t really classes, but more of a free drawing period with a model provided. I get paid $20/hr to sit on a platform nude in different poses that I chose in front of a group of strangers. The only person that talks to me is the person that hired me and gives me my check at the end of the gig, usually a teacher/gallery manager. (This isn’t rude, its a sign of respect to the model. After years of modeling I now speak to some of the artists that have been drawing me for years and have learned that they can actually speak to me like a person and I won’t be offended.)

I arrived 10 minutes before the gig starts because 1.) I like to be early/on time for a gig. 2.) I like to look at the art displayed (because its free!) before I have to sit still for 2-4 hours, depending. I talked to the assistant that ran the gig as I came in. I walked around the gallery, which has 2 floors and 5 rooms dedicated to displaying art. This month’s show was a collection of art done by children around the area ages K-12. As I finished my walk around I went to the bathroom and got out of my clothes.

Painting of me by Anonymous

I usually bring a bag with me because it carries my large bath towel that I wrap around myself during breaks and to walk around, and it also holds the clothing I’m wearing when I arrive (along with my cell phone, wallet, glasses, etc.). I get into my towel, grab my bag and shoes and head to the second floor. The room we use for the class is at the front of the building with the windows covered from prying eyes. It is also one of the rooms they show art in, so every time I model I get to see the latest show. The problem with this is you never know what you will be stuck staring at while people draw you and you can’t move. This evening I got the pleasure of looking at a large amount of artworks by small children. The most imposing piece was a 7 foot tall orange cyclops wearing a blue bathing suit missing one toe on his right toe. I got to look at it for 3 hours. You couldn’t miss it.

So I start the gig and I’m told by The Time Keeper (the before-mentioned gallery assistant) that I will be doing 5 minute poses and she will tell me when I have one minute left in the pose. Its a simple system that works. This evening we began with 3 artists, but ended with 5 (sometimes artists show up late or leave early). I’ve noticed that when I model for a college class that there are many students, but very few if its in a gallery class. I’ve learned to be prepared for either size, but I prefer the smaller classes.

A painting of me found in an art gallery

Posing is harder than it looks. When you see a model in a photograph that person had to stay still for as long as it took for the photographer to set up the shot and push a button. For an art model they have to sit still for 1 minute to 1 hour at a time, depending on the pose. The class I model for does a series of poses for different times. I start with simple 5 minute poses and end my gig doing a 25 minute pose. The only problem you have to look out for is body parts falling asleep. It takes a model YEARS to figure out their body enough to know what poses they can and cannot do and for how long and what will hurt or fall asleep. So you model and you learn.

This evening while only my right hand fell asleep in one pose, I was thanked 3 times for the pose I had done and thanked profusely at the end of the gig for being a good model. This is the highlight of my modeling gigs; getting praise. I’ve been told by complete strangers that I’m beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, voluptuous, curvacious, and the best female model they’ve ever seen. This is my ego boost. This happens after the gig is finished and the artists are packing their supplies up. I walk around and see what they’ve drawn. It is the best feeling for me to see how others perceive me artistically. Being an artist myself I know that everyone sees the world differently, but its only in art when you can actually see how someone else sees the world. To be a part of that is wonderful for me. I like seeing how others see me because it makes me feel better about my own image. I’m reminded that I’m not as ugly and disgusting as I feel sometimes. I’m actually rather …beautiful.

Sketch by Richard Weiss 2012

Over the years I’ve suggested to friends that they also get into nude modeling. None have taken me up on the offer. I don’t know why. It is good money for little work, you are helping artists develop their skills, and you are contributing to the world of Art. Who knows, someday you might be the next Mona Lisa.  Tonight I found out that one of the artists drawing me tonight has been drawing me for 15 years now, just sold a painting of me, and has a gallery at home that has a few framed prints of me. *BLUSH* Stuff like this just makes you feel special knowing that you are so beautiful that you are art.

Related articles

• Sensuality vs. Sexuality in the Modeling World (jasonandthegoldenpose.wordpress.com)
• 14. Life drawing class (foundobjectbeachart.wordpress.com)
• Summer Art Classes (lauradaub.com)

President Obama presented the Congressional Medal of Honor today to the widow and brother of a Vietnam War infantryman who sacrificed his life to save the men of his platoon. It is the greatest sacrifice a human being makes, to give up one’s life for another. But watching the ceremony I was struck by something about the right wing hatred of President Obama — in hating him so vehemently, in denying his legitimacy as our President, in labeling him most of things Americans hate from his race to his political position –- the right wing has diminished the honors being bestowed on Americans during his term of office. They are saying to our first responders, our soldiers and sailors, our artistic achievers, our outstanding students and teachers, our innovators, the families of our fallen, that their accomplishments and losses are not special because they are being honored by a man the right wing refuses to acknowledge is our President.

Leslie Sabo, a naturalized citizen born in Hungary, died in Cambodia in 1970. He was 22 years old and a newlywed.  His Medal of Honor is long overdue. Not enough of these medals were bestowed on Vietnam War soldiers, sailors and airmen. Our nation was so traumatized by the war, and our Presidents since then so eager to distance themselves from it, that we have failed to recognized the heroism and sacrifices of those men and women.

When a sports team member refuses to attend an honor ceremony at the White House because he denies the legitimacy of the President, he insults and demeans his teammates. When the right wing attacks the President’s speeches and meetings with our heroes and fallen, they insult and diminish those being honored. And these people call themselves patriots and tell themselves they are better than those who respect the office of the Presidency and the man who occupies that office. They say our President and all liberals hate our soldiers, but it is the right wing who dishonors them.

Liberals hated George W. Bush. There’s no denying that fact. But we were appalled that he refused to meet the fallen as they returned from his personal war in Iraq. We criticized him for the way he wanted to ignore the sacrifice. We wanted him to face the price of his actions, and we wanted him to honor those who fell. Catholics of all political bends were furious when Pope John Paul II refused to receive the firefighter’s helmet of a gay priest who died shielding an injured man on 9-11. It didn’t matter if Father Mike was gay. What mattered was that he removed that helmet to properly administer to a dying man. It is possible to hate the man while respecting the office and understanding the importance of the honors that office pays to our heroes, our achievers and our fallen.

Today, President Obama told a group of Vietnam veterans gathered for the Medal of Honor ceremony, “You did your job, you served with honor, you made us proud.” My friends, my school mates, my relatives, my generation have waited too long for those words to be spoken by a President of the United States of America on behalf of the American people. Leslie Sabo was one of the forgotten, a file in a box in an archive warehouse. His widow Rosemary and his family deserved this respect and this honor, this acknowledgment of their loss and their sacrifice forty years ago. His parents should not have gone to their graves not knowing how bravely their son died. Rosemary should have had that one little thing to cherish as a memory of a husband taken from her so young, so newly married before they had an opportunity to have children and build a life together. Leslie Sabo was one of 58,220 American men and women who died in the Vietnam War, 11% of the Americans who served. They all deserved the respect of a grateful nation, even those who came home and protested it.

The right wing haters should be ashamed of themselves for the way their hatred dishonors others Americans, but they won’t be. They have been so indoctrinated in that hate they can’t see the harm they do, how unpatriotically they are behaving, how inhumane they have become.

Related articles

• President Obama Awards Posthumous Medal of Honor to Specialist Leslie H. Sabo, Jr (whitehouse.gov)

Marriage Certificate, 1875

Originally published May 11, 2012

The right wing avers that allowing gays to marry will destroy traditional marriage in America. They never say how, but they are sure it will happen. Too late. Traditional marriage is already in trouble, and gays had nothing to do with it. Neither did Kim Kardashian. She simply provided fathers with a really good argument against $25,000 custom wedding dresses and million dollar receptions.

Fifty years ago, 72% of Americans were married. Today, the number is just under 50%. The United States isn’t the only place experiencing this phenomenon. When my husband’s family in Canada held their last reunion a few years ago, the organizers got tired of trying to sort out spouses and non-spouses and just put “partner” on the name tags. Britain, France, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong are all reporting deep drops in the number of couples getting married.

In spite of the right wing nonsense, marriage has always been an economic arrangement. The rich and titled used marriage to join property, assure inheritances, merge businesses, cement international treaties. The poor didn’t bother to get married which is why the concept of common-law marriages arose. If two people stuck together long enough, they were considered married for legal purposes. Marriage was very much an upper-class thing until the emergence of a mercantile class. It was the middle class that set the standard of what the right calls traditional marriage. The economic factor was subtler than joining two estates or receiving a massive dowry that paid off the debtors. Money, property or value was not an open part of marriage negotiations in the middle class. Women wanted a husband who could support them because they were barred from earning their own incomes. Men often wanted a wife who might be able to advance their careers, which accounts for over half the signers of our Constitution marrying the daughter, sister or widow of an employer. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington became members of the landed gentry because of their marriages.

People in the middle class were also those most attached to a moral standard and a religious standard. So, within those moral and religious strictures, the only place for sex (which women weren’t supposed to enjoy anyway) was marriage, and sex was only supposed to be for procreation. A child born out of wedlock, and the mother, were spurned by society, relegated to the fringes of society, condemned to poverty and deprivation, or in their pregnant state, the girls were whisked off out of sight, the babies were disposed of into orphanages and the girls returned to their families to be handed over to the first man who expressed willingness to marry “sullied goods.” Discovering on his wedding night that his bride was not a virgin, was legal justification for divorce in many cultures.

Two factors blew up the traditional marriage model. The pill removed the fear of pregnancy if a woman had sex before marriage. And women started making strides in the workplace. They became able to support themselves.

There was a debate that occurred in Georgia a few years ago among black college students and college graduates. The women were questioned (more like challenged by black men) as to why they were either dating white men or having babies out-of-wedlock and dumping the fathers. They said that there were not enough black males going to college and able to match the women’s intellectual or financial achievements. As women became able to control their reproductive choices and their financial situations, men became optional.

The definition of why people got married changed. The modern prime motivation was supposed to be “love.” The only problem with that was the discovery that being “in love” is a chemical and biological state related to sexual passion and not a logical, rational emotion based on common values, goals and interests. There comes a point where the passion becomes secondary to the need for a best friend and partner. There is a moment when the ability to talk to each other overrides everything else. That revelation brought about a spike in divorce rates.

Is same sex marriage responsible for the decline in straight marriage? No way. Traditional marriage is still popular among those who live traditional lives bound on all sides by gender roles and religious morality. The problem is not that the existence of gay marriage diminishes the value of straight marriage, but that it shows young people there are alternative ways of thinking about gender roles and the structure of marriage.

Conservatives and followers of certain religious ideologies want to keep their kids locked up in a world where the only things they see or hear are “acceptable” ways of thinking or being. Tony Perkins of the American Family Research Council has stated that his children will never be gay because he and his wife raise them properly. But to keep them in that state, he must deny them access to thoughts outside of his narrow views. For that reason, Perkins wants gays back in the closet and religion to control our civil laws. For that reason, anti-abortionists also oppose birth control and fact-based sex education, and favor public shaming of those who become pregnant out of marriage. It’s a control issue, not a morality issue. They are losing, which is making them double down on their attempts to push the world back into the fantasy framework of the 1950s when no one saw or acknowledged those things that did not fit the “traditional” model, even though those non-traditional things existed all around us.

Where is marriage in America today? The following states have same-sex marriage: Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. It is pending in California, Maryland, New Jersey and Washington.

Common law marriages still exist in Alabama, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah. In New Hampshire they are legally effective for settling an estate, and in Georgia, Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania a couple who were considered “common lawed” before a certain date must obtain a legal divorce to terminate the marriage.

Civil unions exist in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. There are legally recognized domestic partnerships in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Maine and Wisconsin (the last three have very restricted rights attached).

Laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman exist in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming. The first three bar same-sex marriage while allowing civil unions.

And those states whose populations have been persuaded to amend their state constitutions because same-sex marriage will bring about Armageddon are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Nevada and Oregon have domestic partnerships.

California’s amendment is in the courts, and the result of that law suit will determine the future of all these amendments. As much as conservatives love to lament “activist judges” Georgia’s amendment is a shining example of conservative activist judges. The state constitution clearly requires an amendment have only one clause. The same-sex marriage ban has two. The amendment was argued to the Georgia Supreme Court on that single issue – it’s consitutionality under their constitution. The judges upheld the amendment, denying their own constitution.

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"Marriage Equality: It's A Right" from Flickr

Originally published May 10, 2012

One of the things one learns doing French Canadian genealogy is that in 17^th century France, while two Catholic cardinals served as Chief Minister to the King, religious weddings were not recognized as legal contracts. It was necessary for the colonists to sign a marriage contract in the presence of a Royal Notary for the marriage to be legal. A religious ceremony could be performed after the civil contract was certified. Napoleon spread the idea throughout Europe and today, most European countries (notably not those of the British Isles) do not recognize a religious ceremony as the legal marriage.

Having been an English colony, America adopted the British method, which was tied in to the fact that the King of England was the head of the Church of England. A marriage license could be certified by a clergyman.

A lot goes into creating a nation, so it is understandable that the simple matter of separating a civil contract of marriage, which carried with it certain legal obligations and rights, from a ceremony that binds two people within the precepts of their religion just didn’t occur to our Founding Fathers. They knew it was important to protect us from religion dictating civil law. They knew that those who came to America for religious freedom did so to escape countries where one church controlled civil law and membership in another church restricted a person’s life choices. But on this one small issue, they were blind.

It is long past time that the power to certify a civil contract which carries with it civil rights and responsibilities and can only be dissolved in a civil court be removed from any clergy of any faith. No clergyman can declare a marriage legally null and void. If they are barred from dissolving the contract, how can they been empowered to create it?

Conservatives talk about “traditional marriage” without understanding that the traditions of their faith are not the precedents of law around the world. In Muslim countries there are no civil marriages, all marriages are religious. We do not acknowledge Muslim religious marriages without a civil license in America. In all but two of our ancestral European countries, only civil marriages have legal validity and it has been that way more or less for over 200 years.

We need a Constitutional Amendment that expands and defines the First Amendment guarantee of freedom from state religion and freedom of worship. It should state that no civil legal contract can be fulfill with a religious ceremony. It should state that no law or amendment can be passed if it is based solely on religious principles and not on the need to provide legal protections to the people. It should state that definitions that impact our laws should not be based on religion but on science, as in the definition of when life is viable and independent and not when the soul is implanted.

Like the Second Amendment, which was written in language that made sense in the 18^th century, the First Amendment did not go far enough in expressing what it was intended to protect and define. We must rely on the Federalist Papers and the writings of those who wrote the Constitution to understand what was intended, and far too many people don’t bother to read them or understand them. The Second Amendment was intended to provide a fledgling nation with a militia to supplement a very small standing Army, not to give ordinary citizens the right to own weapons the founding fathers could not even imagine. The First Amendment was intended to protect us from a religion writing our civil laws and controlling the lives of those who don’t belong to that religion. That aspect got lost in the first two hundred years of our nation, and it is time to reassert it.

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President Obama

Originally published May 8, 2012

Officially, President Obama’s views on same-sex marriage are still “evolving.” Nothing’s changed, there’s nothing to see here, move along people…..

I really don’t get the idea that statements of personal opinion by Vice-President Biden and Secretary of Education Duncan represent some kind of division in the administration. I don’t understand why commentators are going nuts over this and analyzing it to death.

There is a major difference between pandering to a fringe for votes and knowing how a single issue can be manipulated to drive voters to the polls. Anyone suggesting that President Obama is refusing to take a public stand on same-sex marriage to pander to Southern voters is wrong.

In 2000 and 2004, we saw the Republican Party use same-sex marriage to get people to the polls. They included same-sex marriage amendments on state ballots so that they could increase turnout among people who would vote against Democrats. In 2008, with the economy in freefall, they could not use a single religion-based issue to drive voter turnout. They have spent the past four years building up their smoke-and-mirror issues and throwing dirt at the President to see what will stick and what might get out the hate vote. He doesn’t need to hand them gay rights on top of all the rest of the stuff they have nurtured.

Listen to them, to conservatives and Republicans, and you hear allegations that he supports illegal immigration because illegals turned out in droves to vote for him; that he wants to turn the United States into a communist dictatorship; that he “wipes his ass with the Constitution”; that he supports killing babies; that he is anti-religion; that he has not done anything in four years; that he spends millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars on his lavish lifestyle; that he should be hung as a traitor; that he hates America; that he hates business; that he is bosom buddies with radicals he barely knows and sat at the feet of Saul Alinsky as a student, though Alinsky died when Obama was in short pants. They have dug up nonsense from thirty, forty years ago to smear anyone who gets within two-hundred yards of Obama and paint them as Maoists who control the President. You hear racism at every turn, with people calling the President of the United States of America a monkey, a gangbanger, a coon and describe our First Lady as resembling a “crack ho wiping cum from her lips.”

No candidate in his right mind is going to hand the opposition another way to get gullible people to the polls for a single, hate-driven issue. It’s bad enough a third of Republicans think he’s a Kenyan-born Muslim.

It does not matter what President Obama says in public about same-sex marriage or gay rights. He may, honestly, as a Christian, have reservations about same-sex marriage. What matters at this time are his actions. He signed the law ending DADT. He ended government defense of DOMA. He has made his position crystal clear….he opposes restriction of civil rights for any reason.

Isn’t that what really matters?

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"We Are Hispanics"

Originally published May 7, 2012

There is a disturbing report out of Alabama about the unintended consequences of a “papers please” law. Hispanic children are afraid to go to school. On May 2, over 1,300 Hispanic-heritage students were absent from schools across Alabama. The normal absentee rate for all Alabama students is 900 to 1,000 daily. There has also been a substantial increase in drop-outs among the Hispanic population.

Part of the Alabama “papers please” law called for the schools to collect immigration information about all enrolling students. It does not block undocumented students from attending schools, but can create a database for future arrests of illegal immigrants. The law was blocked from implementation by a Federal Court of Appeals last October.

The state has been sued by the Federal government over the “papers please” law, and an Alabama State Senator, Scott Beason, told The Montgomery Advertiser, “The Department of Justice has already made it clear they’re on the side of illegal immigration. Anything they say or do to try to bully the State of Alabama or other states across the country does not surprise me.” And, therein lies the battle line. Conservatives and Republicans say the Obama administration favors illegal immigrants over native Americans, even claiming that the President was elected because the Democrats made it possible for illegals to vote. And they absolutely refuse to believe the facts about the number of illegals who have been prevented or deported and the decline in the number of illegals in the country because they are choosing to go home. The administration says that the Constitution is clear that only the Federal government has authority over immigration and we cannot have 50 different laws and 50 different policies.

In Alabama, Hispanic students are not necessarily dropping out or truant because they are illegal or their parents are illegal. They are missing school because they are being harassed, bullied and isolated from their classmates for special “assemblies” about the law.

Several years ago in Georgia, in areas about Atlanta, a man was approaching people he believed were Hispanic and suggesting that he was a Federal agent while he demanded to see their papers. What does an Hispanic look like? How did this man profile them? In his view, Mexicans look a lot like Native Americans, so those are the people he targeted, anyone who looked like a descendant of the Pueblo and the Inuit. He was not unique in his belief that anyone who looked Mexican had to be illegal. The small city I lived in in Georgia had two shrimp processing plants. Out of pure frustration with an inability to hire and retain workers, the two plants brought in Mexicans. One recruited 500 families in Brownsville, Texas. They other arranged for rotations of nine-month workers visas. One-third of their 500 Mexicans rotated home every three months. Yet, in a town as small as ours, where the news of these hiring decisions had made every imaginable news media, there were still people who believed that all those Mexicans were illegals. They also said that they weren’t paying taxes at their jobs and were getting all kinds of government benefits and their base pay was higher. The Mexicans’ base pay was not higher, they simply earned more because they worked overtime and never missed a day of work. I spent an hour listening to one of the locally-born employees of one of the plants ranting about the Mexicans in a laundromat, just before she called in “sick” to work because her clothes hadn’t dried yet.

Seventeen percent of our population is of Hispanic descent, 53 million of us. There are only 11 million illegals, and it is unclear if they responded to the census in 2010. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they did respond to the census. That means only one-fifth of all Hispanics are illegals. That means that 42 million Hispanics are legal immigrants or descendants of immigrants or descendants of those who were living on the land when it became part of the United States.

Hispanics have babies. They are the fastest growing ethnic group in America. That means they have children in school. A lot of children. The anti-immigrant atmosphere that the right wing is fueling is putting those children at risk of bullying. They are also being denied educations and without educations can become a permanent underclass. Immigrants have always valued the American education system. Too many of them came from places where only those with money got educations. Immigrants understand that education is the way their children will be able to access the American dream. And after so many generations of being second-class citizens, Hispanic-Americans were finally seeing advances, election to public office, higher positions in companies, ownership of businesses. Now, their children are having a harder time than they had and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

Between forty and fifty million Hispanics, Latinos and descendants are being marginalized by immigration hysteria. They are the latest victims of a pattern that has been played out in this “land of immigrants” since the beginning. Each new immigrant group was treated as a threat to “real Americans.” Immigrants were blamed for every recession and depression in our history, and there have been dozens of them. And the real bitch? All of them are descended from people who were here before those Europeans who think this is their country.

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Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, 1940 -- fascist enemies of socialism and communism

Tens of thousands of protesters filled Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square on Saturday. Spain is in an economic crisis so severe, it makes the United States look like boom times. Saturday was the beginning of protest gatherings in 80 cities and towns across Spain. They are part of an international movement the Spanish are calling 15-M to commemorate the May 15 anniversary of the first protest marches last year. We call it Occupy Wall Street. The British called it rioting.

The things that led us to this point are complex and go back over thirty years. They built up slowly, without us really seeing most of them. Our economic base moved from makings things to making money, and those who make money found new ways to do it. In 2006, there was more money in the derivatives market than actually existed in the world.

The income gap in first world countries like Western Europe, Japan and the United States reached levels we had associated with oil kingdoms and corrupt third world countries. The rich didn’t just become richer, they were hoarding the world’s assets. Billionaires became so common, we no longer thought of millionaires as being rich.

And then, as such things always do, the whole mess crashed. Not just for us, but for most of the world. The conservatives, whose policies of deregulation and support for the very rich created the climate for the crash, blamed the “socialist policies” of previous administrations. They used the weapons of fear and hatred – of minorities, of immigrants, of those who need and receive the support of society – to bolster their own power and protect their money. Everywhere, they preached the dangers of socialism, and mixed that word with the horrifying words communism, Marxism, Maoism, fascism, words that conjure images of totalitarian governments and labor camps. It was a masterful piece of propaganda, since fascism was defined by its creator, Benito Mussolini, as corporatism. Just a little smoke and mirrors there. In making people fear socialism, they have lost sight of a very important economic reality. Socialism is necessary to the survival of capitalism.

During the Great Depression, communism grew in America and Western Europe. It was a reaction to the poverty and deprivations of the times. Communism offered economic equality as opposed to the income gap that characterized the 1920s. Into this situation stepped a handful of men, led by a man who had known wealth and privilege all his life, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead of adhering to the ideology of his peers, instead of defending and protecting the wealthy, he established programs that were pure socialism. The federal government started a retirement pension system for all people. It hired hundreds of thousands of people for infrastructure projects. It subsidized other projects. It underwrote visual, literary and dramatic arts. It put people to work. And those people had money to spend and that nurtured manufacturing and retail and housing and the economy regrouped and rebuilt.

There was a little hiccup in the recovery, World War II, which both fueled the economy and diverted it. When 16 million veterans returned after the war, a new federal “socialism” took over, the GI Bill, which paid for education and supported low interest loans for homes and businesses. And the economy exploded.

In England, in 1948, they created the National Health Service, the first step to a “cradle to grave” social safety net. The rest of Western Europe followed. Sweden created the most extensive socialism, but all of Europe embraced programs to support the poor. So did the United States, though not quite as effectively. Even though business leaders have warned as far back as the 1970s, we have resisted a full-on national health service, only creating Medicare and Medicaid instead of universal single-payer health.

Most of Europe has, in varying degrees, swung between communism and fascism ever since the end of World War II. It was most pronounced in Spain, but the lesser form of it was manifest in England’s swings between Tories and Labour.

For the past six years, as the West went deeper and deeper into economic crisis, conservatives have blamed socialist programs for the economic collapse. They claimed that the social programs were responsible for the national debts of these nations, and those national debts were crimping off the credit that nations need and “burdening our children and grandchildren.” The last thing they will admit is that in pursuit of those billions, they stripped these nations of good paying jobs that would have sustained the social safety net and created tax revenue. They deny that the tax breaks and tax shelters used by the very rich reduced national revenues, exacerbating the problem.

Now, France has elected a socialist government. Greece is edging that way. Socialists are gaining strength across Europe in response to the way conservative governments have failed to end the economic crisis. In America, however, we elected an administration that wanted to find a middle path between socialism and preserving capitalism. It has been labeled Marxist. The right wing has used Americans’ basic fear of Soviet communism to cripple the administration’s attempts to bring us back from the brink. They are arguing that we must restore the policies that brought us to this state, and too many Americans are believing them.

The most stable societies and economies in Europe have been the ones that didn’t swing between the extremes, where the social safety net was solid and secure as in Sweden. These are the countries that didn’t pursue great individual wealth at the expense of majority of its citizens.

Here’s the cold, hard reality…..without a social safety net, when people are starving and living in squatters’ camps and traveling the country looking for any job that will feed their children, that is when communism takes hold. When people have no homes and no jobs and no money, when they are denied the very basics of survival as a small group sucks the nation dry to buy multimillion dollar mansions and multiple cars and private jets, that is when communism looks attractive. When the gap between the haves and have-nots becomes a chasm, that is when communism happens. It doesn’t matter if that upper class is landed, titled nobility or products of capitalism, the consequences are the same – revolution and destruction of the institutions that created the inequalities.

Neither pure communism nor pure capitalism is sustainable. Venezuela is crumbling under Chavez’s leadership and his attempts to move the country into communism. North Korea is a decaying wasteland where membership in the army is greater than civilian employment. Russia is still trying to sort it out, with the incoming government ministers fighting over the role of state ownership of the means of production. Pure communism only works in small societies, in tribal settings or in isolated situations like the kibbutzes of Israel and the communal needs of colonies in the wilderness like Plymouth and our Pilgrims.

Socialism is not the enemy of capitalism. It is what keeps capitalism alive. Right now, we are watching China and Cuba reverse the process, moving from failing pure communism to mixed capitalism and communism towards capitalism and socialism. They are doing from one direction what we in the Western so-called first world should be doing from the other. Human beings need to believe that they can achieve a better life for themselves and their children. Communism is stagnant, it offers no possibility of achievement. Uncontrolled capitalism that benefits only a few is equally stagnant for the many.

There is only one way to save the first world nations – restoring the balance between the socialism that prevents destructive revolution and the capitalism that exploits the working classes, leveling the playing field of opportunity, not leveling the living standards of all.

Properly done, socialism saves a whole lot of capitalism.

Durham, N. C. bus station, 1940 -- the world we changed when we stopped denying it existed

One of the reasons I enjoyed Caleb Carr’s Alienist books was the underlying theme of societal denial. One character explains that the banner for the New York Times, first used in 1896, “All the news that’s fit to print,” was intended to set his paper apart from the more sensational rags, meant to imply “All the news that’s fit for an Upper West Side patriarch to read to his little women over breakfast.”

The New York Times and other premiere newspapers established a division between newspapers. They were called broadsheets, those full sized papers, and the papers known as tabloids were half their size and intended to be read by working men on the trolleys and omnibusses. The tabloids reported news that happened in the working man’s world, while the broadsheets reported more genteel news.

I grew up in the 1950s. It was a time of societal denial worse than the 1890s when Carr’s books are set. America was trying to create a fantasy that matched the dreams dreamt by our soldiers in the trenches of World War II – a perfect world of single-family homes with clipped yards, little wife in the kitchen and four children round the dinner table. There’s a song in Little Shop of Horrors that matches the vision Americans had for that time, “Somewhere That’s Green.” It is exactly what society was pretending America was or should have been.

But America wasn’t that perfect place. Just as the late 1800s had Jakob Riis and Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger, the 1950s had Edward R. Murrow and other journalists who peeled back the curtain and showed America as it really was. One of Murrow’s most courageous programs was called “Harvest of Shame” and showed America the lives of migrant workers. People didn’t want to know. They wanted the fantasy.

The truth was all around us, in the deaths of civil rights workers in the South, in the hanging of black men, in the deprivations of those who lived in Appalachia, in the deaths of women who sought out illegal abortions or who were denied abortions that would have saved their lives, in the way returning black veterans who had married European or Asian women could not find places to live, in the slums and ghettos, in the Jim Crow laws, in the seething animosities between ethnic neighborhoods in our major cities, in the way our Jewish neighbors adopted Hanukkah bushes as protective camouflage and put white and blue Christmas lights on their houses, in the story of Christine Jorgensen’s sex-change surgery and the sadness of women like Linda Porter in their celebrity “white marriages” to gay men.

My parents did not believe in the fairy tale, so the truth was not kept from us. We watched Murrow the way other children watched Howdy Doody, and discussed what we read with our parents. We learned real history as well as Disney’s version of Davy Crockett.

Conservatives say that this country has been going to hell since the mid-1960s because of liberals and radicals tearing down the barriers to bad behavior. That’s a lie. Everything they say started with my “hippie” generation was always part of America. All we did, all my generation insisted on, was an end to the pretenses, a exposure of the reality, an acknowledgment of facts and truth. Some of my generation, like Bill O’Reilly, were so infused with the fairy tale we are still denying the facts of our lives in the 1950s and 60s. Some of us, were so isolated from the reality we can’t accept the idea that it ever existed.

My father was a Republican, my mother a Northern Democrat, a whole different species from Southern Democrats. My father’s Republican Party was the party of Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller, of Dwight David Eisenhower. He left the party in 1960 because he could not accept what Richard Nixon was. My mother lived to see her party become what the minority of Democrats were during the 1950s – liberals.

If I had to choose the best way to define the difference between today’s liberals and conservatives, it would be that the conservatives are not true conservatives who seek to retain the status quo, but reactionaries trying to return us to a world that never really existed, while liberals and progressives want us all to acknowledge the facts and the truth of who we are and who we have always been. Liberals and progressive stand against societal denial.

Many people know that the late Robert F. Kennedy said, “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” But he said something much more profound, more applicable to the ideology of liberalism:

      “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

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Marissa Alexander reacts to her sentence

Last week Marissa Alexander, a mother of three, was sentenced to 20 years for three counts of aggravated assault with a weapon with no intent to kill. The charges against her, for which she was convicted by a jury in March of this year, arose out of a confrontation between Alexander and her husband at the time, Rico Gray, in August of 2010, nine days after giving birth to her six-week-premature daughter.

Gray has a history of domestic violence. He was arrested in both 2006 and 2009 on domestic battery charges (against another woman and then Alexander). Alexander had a court-issued protection order in place against him. He also had such an order against her, which rather begs the question of why he was in her house that day in August 2010.

Alexander alleged that Gray found text messages on her cell phone from her first husband, Lincoln Alexander. Gray became enraged, choked her and threatened to kill her, “If I can’t have you, nobody will.”

After breaking away from him, Alexander ran into the garage and found her escape thwarted by a jammed garage door. She needed her cellphone and another exit to escape, so she grabbed her handgun out of her glove compartment and returned to the house.

Gray moved to stop her. Feeling in fear for her life, Alexander fired a warning shot into the ceiling near Gray and his two children who were with him. No one was shot or injured.

Mr. Gray admitted in his deposition that he threatened his wife’s safety on the day she fired the gun into the ceiling. He also admitted that Ms. Alexander never aimed her gun at him (or his two children who were also present). According to Mr. Gray, after she told him to leave her house and he refused, she discharged the gun into the ceiling and no one was hurt. He later called the police and told them what had happened. Ms. Alexander was arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated assault (one count related to her husband, and two more for her stepsons).

Last year the trial judge rejected a motion by Alexander’s attorneys to dismiss the case as a “Stand Your Ground” situation. The judge rejected her justifiable use of deadly force plea because she had returned to the house, placing herself back into the threatening situation. She said Alexander could have fled the scene (through the bedroom window?). Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law says that a person does not have a duty to retreat; that is why it is called “Stand Your Ground”.

State Attorney Angela Corey (Getty Images via @daylife)

State Attorney Angela Corey’s office, which prosecuted the case, confirmed that she was offered a 3-year prison sentence plea deal, but Alexander chose to take her case to trial. If the name’s familiar, that would be because Corey is the prosecuting attorney in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. In that case, George Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, after Zimmerman left his vehicle against the advice of the police dispatcher he was speaking with and confronted Martin, who he suspected of being a thief casing homes in the neighborhood. Zimmerman is also planning to present a “Stand Your Ground” defense, which Corey has said will not fly in that case, either.

In sentencing her last week to the state-required minimum of 20 years in prison, the judge reiterated that she could have fled the scene, retreating from the threat, instead of firing that warning shot and placing two children in jeopardy.

OPINION

It seems that the judiciary in Florida is not consistently applying their “Stand Your Ground” law. There have been numerous cases thrown out based on that law, but there are other judges, like the one in Alexander’s case, who are using the older, more common interpretation of self-defense. In that interpretation, the person in fear for their life should flee if possible; that the person doing the threatening should have physically initiated the confrontation (thrown the first punch, etc.) and that there was truly no other option available to the defendant but to fire their weapon or take a swipe with a knife.

Unfortunately for Alexander, she had escaped as far as the garage. She did not have to return to the house; she could have stayed in the garage with her gun and waited for Gray to either leave or come after her. If he had her backed into a corner and was continuing to threaten her, then she would have had a better chance of claiming justifiable use of deadly force.

Of course, I have yet to meet any battered woman who is thinking rationally when that final confrontation happens, when they are truly in fear for their life. In Alexander’s mind, she needed those keys to get her far enough away from that man to feel safe. Gray claims she came back with the gun to shoot him in anger, not out of fear. Apparently no one pointed out that anger is a frequent result of fear.

better days

Related articles

• Florida woman sentenced to 20 years in controversial warning shot case – CNN (edition.cnn.com)
• Marissa Alexander sentenced to 20 years in prison (thegrio.com)
• Analyzing the Marissa Alexander Sentence (theroot.com)

Elderly Woman at a Soup Kitchen

The “Senior Hunger Report Card” released by Meals On Wheels found that one in seven seniors in America – 8.3 million people – were faced with the threat of hunger in 2010, a 78% rise since 2001. The study found that while the threat of hunger for the U.S. population as a whole had decreased since the end of the recession in 2009, it rose for people age 60 and older, mainly among those earning less than twice the poverty level in 2010.

“There is no question that we are failing our seniors, some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens,” said Enid A. Borden, CEO of the Meals On Wheels Research Foundation, in a statement. “The numbers spell out our failure with clarity, and at the same time they call us to action. No one in this, the richest nation on Earth should face the threat of hunger, no one. And seniors, who have little power to change their circumstances, deserve our special attention.”

Says It All

At greatest risk were seniors living in the South and Southwest, minorities, people who were divorced or separated, the disabled, and seniors age 60 to 69. In terms of geography, the threat of hunger for seniors increased in 44 states since 2007, the report found.

Hunger translates into economic challenges for the U.S. economy, noted the authors of the report: “… food insecurity is associated with a host of poor health outcomes for seniors such as reduced nutrient intakes and limitations in activities of daily living. This implies that the recent increase in senior hunger will likely lead to additional nutritional and health challenges for our nation.”

James P. Ziliak of the University of Kentucky and Craig Gundersen of the University of Illinois authored the report.

Opinion

Medicare Card

As a disabled American, let me put this in hard numbers for you: I have a monthly income from Social Security Disability Insurance of slightly over $1,100 a month (I held down decent paying jobs when I worked). After subtracting for rent, utilities, phone, car insurance, medical insurance premiums, co-pays for my prescriptions, gas, over-the-counter medications, and payments on old bills… that leaves me about $30 a month to pay medical deductibles and co-pays and the 20% Medicare doesn’t cover, laundry, toilet paper…

However, the powers that be have set the bar so high for Medicaid that according to their calculations I “earn” $150 a month too much to get Medicaid to back up my Medicare. I just got the hospital bill for a 3-day stay in January: $1,200 after Medicare. I’m still waiting for the bill for another stay in February. I can get Medicaid if I show that I have paid over $900 out-of-pocket each six months. Let’s see, $50 a month times six months equals $300. I be screwed.

A man walks down the street collecting cans in Reading, PA. (Getty Images via @daylife)

I honestly don’t know how I’m going to pay that $900 every six months. Use the Fingerhut catalogue for toilet paper, I guess. I was better off on our state’s low income health insurance (VHAP)… but I don’t qualify for that anymore, because I’m now on Medicare. I cannot imagine how people only getting $600 a month are surviving.

I only qualify for $175 a month in food stamps. Between my coronary artery disease and my diabetes, I should be eating a diet heavy in protein and fresh vegetables and fruit. Right. I be screwed again.

I cannot, on my food stamps and income, eat the type of diet I should be. That means that I am technically an uncontrolled diabetic, which has led to issues with my kidneys. My blood work still sucks, which means the CAD is also uncontrolled, so I’ve got two coronary arteries at risk of blocking and killing me.

I eke out the food stamps with visits to the local food shelves. I try to not do that too often, because there are so many people worse off than me.

Women shop for clothes at a thrift store in Reading, PA (Getty Images via @daylife)

I wish I could work. Really. I miss being able to go to Denny’s, for crying out loud. I miss being able to buy clothes in a real store, or even the Salvation Army. I know that when my van finally dies, I won’t be able to replace it (the cars-for-the-poor program in my state is only for working poor families, not disabled singles).

I do not wonder that more and more seniors, disabled and displaced are at risk of hunger. Increases in assistance on one hand are negated by revised income limits on the other. Some programs have been cut to the bone, meaning lower benefits or none at all. The Low Income Heating Assistance Program is a favorite for Congress to cut when they need to look “firm in their resolve” to cut government expenses.

They do not care that all forms of heating fuel, from wood to electric, have gone up in price, some of them drastically in the past ten years. They do not care about the seniors trying to survive with thermostats set to 55^o. They do not see the little children sharing a bed with their parents so they can stay warm while they sleep.

Let me rephrase that; they do not want to see. They know these people are out there. They are passing laws to make it harder for these people to vote. They are trying, all over the country, to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, the disabled. They do not want America’s most vulnerable citizens to vote this year.

They are afraid.

Related articles

• Eating is NOT a privilege: It’s a RIGHT! (cleanyourplate.net)
• Number Of Seniors Facing Threat Of Hunger Spiked 78 Percent Over Last Decade (thinkprogress.org)
• Proposed Medicare Cuts of Concern to Spectrum Generations: Hearing on May 9, 2012 (thevalleyvoice.org)

Jacob French

Jacob French walks with patient Helena Kantarelis at the Sydney Children’s Hostpital on April 4, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. French completed an over 5,000 km trek from Perth to Sydney on foot, wearing a full body stormtrooper costume. He successfully raised over $100,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

"He's mine!!!

Sue Smith pulled these affectionate carrots from her garden in Cwymbran, South Wales, UK. (Photo courtesy of BNPS photo)

I see you!

A grasshopper plays hide and seek with the photographer as he peeps through a hole he has eaten in a big green leaf. (Steven Passlow/Caters News)

Damn that cedar pollen!

A 19-year-old Japanese macaque monkey named Monday scratches her eyes while suffering an allergy to pollen from the cedar tree, at Awajishima Monkey Center on March 26, 2012 in Sumoto, Hyogo, Japan. Some twenty monkeys are suffering the effects of hay fever at this time of the year, with the typical symptoms being the same as with humans. (Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images)

My mommy!

An Indochinese tiger cub plays with an adult tiger as the tigers are presented to the media for the first time at their outdoor cage at Tierpark Friedrichsfelde Zoo in Berlin, April 3, 2012. The cub is one of four cubs were born August 10, 2011. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

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2006 Hunger Strike Commemoration Flag

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —   George Santayana, 1905

World-wide, Jews fight to make sure that no one forgets the Holocaust. In their view, and the view of many others, if we forget the depths humanity can reach in blind bigoted hatred, such events will happen again. But, the Israeli government needs to realize that theirs is not the only story that should be remembered and learned from.

Beginning in 1976, groups of IRA members incarcerated by the British government engaged in a series of strikes, ranging from refusing to bath and covering their cells with their own excrement to refusing to eat. The final one took place in 1981. The prisoners went on a hunger strike. One striker, Bobby Sands, had been convicted of possession of a firearm. During the strike, he was elected to Parliament. Then, he died. Nine other hunger strikers died. The British grip on Northern Ireland was seriously damaged. World opinion of the British right to use extreme measures to deal with the IRA turned. People started to see the IRA as freedom fighters instead of terrorists. It was all in the perception, and it is a perception that has persisted to this date. The IRA of the late 20^th century were terrorists. They attacked civilians, not just military or police targets. They took their fight to the British people instead of keeping it in Northern Ireland. The Thatcher administration refused to deal with them or with the legitimate complaints of the Catholics of Northern Ireland. What had begun in the early 1970s as a protest movement for equal rights turned into a movement to have Northern Ireland “reunited” with the rest of Ireland. In the aftermath of the hunger strikes, the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein, became a powerful legitimate political party. In dying, ten men accomplished more than years of bombs had.

It is a story that the Israelis should pay attention to. The Palestinian men and women that the Israelis are holding in jail without charges, without trials, often without contact with the outside world, are now imitating the IRA.

There are about 3,000 Arab and Palestinians in Israeli jails taking part in a hunger strike that has been going on for almost three weeks. They are demanding trials and better incarceration conditions. The prisoners include women and children.

There are more than 300 Palestinians held in administrative detention, without any suggestion of a trial. All Gazan prisoners are deprived of family visits for four years. Since 1967, over fifty Palestinians have died in prison from refusal of medical care. Prisoners are “treated” with expired medications or medications not recommended for their illnesses. The prison clinics and the military hospital in Ramleh lack basic supplies and equipment and are run by military personnel with no medical training. Female prisoners are treated even more severely, placed in isolation cells and denied any medical care.

The hunger strikers are being punished with daily raids on their cells, confiscation of personal belongings, loss of electricity and other measures classified as torture by the Geneva Conventions.

Standing around and hoping that the Israeli government will respond to the strikers demands is useless. International human rights groups are protesting the situation. They too are being ignored by the Israelis.

The more the world knows about the strikers and the conditions under which these prisoners live, the more international opinion can turn against the Israeli government. The more they punish the prisoners, the stronger opposition to their occupation becomes. The United Kingdom learned the hard way that starving, dying prisoners have more power than bombers.

The Netanyahu administration prefers to ignore the concerns of the United States, mostly because they feel there is enough fanatical pro-Israeli feeling in America to overcome any concerns the Obama administration has about human rights and the Geneva Convention. But there is one fact Americans need to understand….the actions of the Netanyahu administration have a direct impact on our security and safety. The situation in the occupied territories is the primary recruiting tool for terrorist organizations. Most Islamic terrorist groups began with the Palestinian conflict, but even al Qaida, with its regional ambitions, uses the Palestinians as their first line of recruitment. America is blamed for supporting the manner in which the Israelis treat the Palestinians. It is easy for those who support Israel to say that the Muslims want the complete annihilation of the state of Israel, without acknowledging that there are forces in Israel who advocate genocide of Muslims, and a government policy that treats Palestinians as sub-humans. There is enough fault to cover both sides.

Friends tell friends when their behavior is self-destructive. It’s called an intervention. Israel’s friends need to hold an intervention and convince the Netanyahu administration that they are not controlling the situation, but condemning themselves to failure.

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• Ten hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners hospitalized(haaretz.com)

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• Hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners hospitalized(sacbee.com)

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• #PalHunger | Hamas warns Israel over hunger strikes’ probable death(occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com)

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• Protests held for Palestinian prisoners (dailystar.com.lb)
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One of Vermont's non-voting citizens

There is a group called State Integrity Investigation, that analyzes a state’s transparency, accountability and anti-corruption mechanisms and rates the state for corruption. According to them, the worst, most corrupt states in the Union are Georgia, Michigan, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, South Carolina, Virginia and Wyoming. The best states, all earning Bs, are California, Connecticut, Nebraska, New Jersey and Washington. Apparently, a state can be corruption-free and anti-freedom if Nebraska is on this list.

So, after reading the news story about the survey, I went to SII’s website to find out what they thought of my home state, Vermont. It was a shock. They rated Vermont the 25^th most corrupt state in America. Digging deeper, I discovered that we earned this rating because we do not have independent corruption police, any kind of extra-governmental agency charged with finding and rooting out corruption in our state.

No, we have the ballot box. We don’t need an outside agency. We impose term limits the old fashioned way – we kick them out.

We got an F for legislative accountability. Each member of our House of Representatives has only 4,175 constituents (3,300 adults) and lives among them. Each State Senator represents 20,880 Vermonters (16,450 adults). (We got high marks for our legislative districting, by the way.) But SII doesn’t understand what those numbers mean. Our former Senator, Jim Jeffords, would go to breakfast at a small, local restaurant on Saturday morning when he was home. Everyone was welcome to sit with him and talk, and everyone did. I was at dinner one night when one of our state senators walked in. Half the restaurant greeted him by name and a few voiced opinions of upcoming legislation. It’s an occupational hazard in Vermont. If one represents the people, the people expect to be heard.

Our local newspapers and our local television stations extensively cover our legislature. Our older television station, WCAX, does weekly and daily interview shows in addition to their normal coverage. We not only know our own legislators, we pretty much know everyone else’s. Right now, the minority leader is in deep shit with both parties and most of our citizenry for trying a state version of a Republican filibuster. We are not tolerant of disruption of process for partisan posturing. This is not the place to sabotage a bill by adding an unrelated amendment to it.

During the 2010 campaign, one of the gubernatorial candidates was stopped on the Interstate for speeding. The dash-cam video hit the evening news the next day. He paid the fine, and we elected him governor. We even elected the State Auditor candidate who was stopped for drunk driving. He paid his fine and did the rehab. That was what mattered. If either of them had whined about his treatment by the police or did the “do you know who I am” routine during the police stop or claimed to be a victim of political persecution, we would not have elected them.

Size matters, especially in governance. The fewer people a legislator represents, the closer he or she will be to those people. We don’t need an outside agency to uncover corruption in our government. We have something better. Howard Dean once observed that in Vermont, everyone knows everybody’s else’s business, so it is impossible to be corrupt. Officials have tried. We’ve had a few too many incidents of embezzlement in local governments and a few incidents where agencies didn’t do what they were supposed to do in a proper manner. Those who think they can work the system are always found out and dealt with eventually, simply because Governor Dean was right. We all know what everyone else is doing.

Very little in the world is purely black-and-white. The State Integrity Investigation system uses a limited set of criteria to judge a state. They need to look at the entirety of a state before deciding who is corruptible and who isn’t.

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Cinco de Mayo American-style

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Quick, answer this question: what does Cinco de Mayo celebrate?

If you are like the majority of non-Mexican-Americans, you probably don’t know the answer to that question. You have some vague sense that it is a holiday celebrated to honor Mexico’s cultural heritage… but really, it’s just an excuse to break out the salsa and the tequila. Sort of like St. Patrick’s Day for non-Irish-Americans. It’s an excuse to get drunk.

That’s pretty sad, to tell you the truth. Cinco de Mayo, as celebrated in Mexico, is more a regional holiday than a national one. It celebrates the victory of a smaller, ill-equipped Mexican militia over a well-equipped French invasion force at the Battle of Puebla, on May 5, 1862.

So, here’s your history lesson for the day.

Flag of Mexico (1823-1864, 1867-1893)

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, after a long and bloody struggle. That was followed by a period of internal coups and wars, including the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, and the Mexican Civil War of 1858. Needless to say, Mexico had racked up heavy debts to several nations, including Spain, England and France, which it was having trouble repaying due to the economic collapse of the country from all the wars.

France, under Napoleon III, was eager to expand its empire in the south, having lost all footholds in North America in the previous two centuries. The loan repayments gave them a perfect excuse to invade with the goal of installing Napoleon III’s relative, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as ruler of Mexico.

The French invasion occurred during America’s own Civil War, so that although President Lincoln was sympathetic to their plight, he was unable to offer any direct assistance. They landed in the state of Veracruz, and marched toward Mexico City.

Ignacio Zaragoza, Mexican general.

They were stopped near Puebla by a force of some 4,500 poorly armed militia under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin. It was a glorious moment for Mexican patriots, although it was ultimately futile.

Napoleon III, never one to take “no” for an answer, sent 30,000 troops to invade again, even though his own French people were opposed. A year later, Maximilian was installed at Mexico City.

Unfortunately for him, the American Civil War ended, and Lincoln’s successors were able to turn their attention to Mexico, providing political and military help. After only three years on the “throne”, so to speak, Maximilian was executed in 1867.

Thus ends your history lesson.

I don’t drink tequila, and I’m not all that fond of Mexican-American food, but today, I salute the courage of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin and his 4,500. They proved to a war-exhausted, divided country that it could stand against the might of France. That’s not too shabby.

Coat of Arms of Mexico

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Jim Deitz puts the final touches on his polka dot house. (AP Photo/Grand Forks Herald, Eric Hylden)

“Polka dots aren’t just for bikinis,” according to the Grand Forks, North Dakota painter behind the now-famous polka dot house. Jim Deitz, a retired house painter, is in the process of converting a two-story house into an apartment rental complex, by covering the exterior in brightly-colored dots. “Pizza delivery drivers won’t have any trouble finding this place,” Deitz joked to the Associated Press on Wednesday. “You can’t miss it.”

The paint upgrade of his 100-year-old home has become a local attraction, with crowds gathered daily to watch Deitz choose colors for his slightly imperfect circles. He first got the idea for the project after a virtual tour of colorful homes. “I looked at all kinds of crazy paint jobs on the Internet and came up with this polka dot deal,” Deitz said. “She looks good.”

Are these offensive because they are rainbow or round?

But not everyone’s digging the dots. Ryan Brooks, a local city planner, thinks the home is a blight on the neighborhood. “I think my opinion is the same as everybody – I wouldn’t want to be living next to it,” Brooks told the Associated Press. But there’s more to this story… Last year, the city backed out of a plan to buy Deitz’s home for $100,000. Now Brooks sees a connection between the dots and the failed deal. Is it a form of protest? An aggressive flick off to city planners? It’s neither, says Deitz. He’s just hoping the dots will brighten up the neighborhood, and perhaps, up his property value. (He says he’d charge the city $50,000 more if they wanted to reconsider a purchase with the new paint job. Any takers?)

Despite his pro-dot stance, the new landlord must have anticipated some dissent. Before going ahead with his plans, Deitz checked with City Hall to make sure he wasn’t breaking any law by decorating his home in circles. Turns out House-Dotting is totally legal in area, if not neighborly. “I’m glad you don’t live next to me,” fellow painter and Grand Forks resident Gary Kokron told Deitz when he saw the house. Technically, the new landlord doesn’t actually live there. The place he calls home is a decidedly dot-free house nearby.

How offensive is this?

This isn’t the first time a fresh coat of neon paint has stirred controversy. Back in February, an Orange County couple turned their home into a bright green billboard in order to pay their mortgage, much to the dismay of neighboring families. In Edenton, North Carolina, one home’s purple shutters had locals screaming to City Hall. And in Thorntown, Indiana, homeowners raged against one resident’s outrageous lawn decorations, which include a giant Styrofoam alligator and a graffiti-covered motorboat. But is it Art? —Unfortunately, not to disgruntled neighbors.

In most towns in America, you’ll find a debate brewing over those oddball homes considered eyesores by some and creative expressions by others. I know that in my hometown, on the darker edge of town, there is a bright pink house with white shutters glowing amongst the greyness and blah of the neighborhood it lives in. While some find it to be an eyesore, I find it whimsical because I know that someone very unique lives there and loves the house enough to give it something nice to wear to light it’s way in the darkness, a fresh coat of pink.

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Nugent is still upset over the fact that Fort Knox revoked his invitation to perform before the troops there. He also stated “So then, when I hear that political correctness has somehow metastasized into the decision makers of the military, I was really let down that political correctness has any role at all in the military.”

Nugent, who apparently went ballistic over being called anything other than a Moderate, had the invitation revoked after saying “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. … We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Any questions?”

Political correctness is one thing, but the military does tend to take exception to things like making violent sounding threats towards the President of the United States. One has to wonder why, especially since it seems like Nugent isn’t going to be dead or in jail any time soon.

Well, apparently Nugent loves to be thought of as a Moderate despite the fact that his rhetoric and politics appears to be more long the lines of a dangerous reactionary.

CBS noted that:

Mitt Romney sought and got Nugent’s endorsement – and Nugent says he heard from the Romney campaign after his NRA speech and that they “expressed support.”

“I got the sensation and not from Mitt himself, or Mrs. Romney, ‘Stay on course, Ted.’ Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing,” Nugent said.

Responding to some of Nugent’s latest comments, the Romney campaign has publicly said that “divisive language is offensive and inappropriate, no matter what side of the political aisle it comes from. Mitt Romney believes everyone needs to be civil.”

When Glor observed that, “April was one of the more interesting months I think you’ve ever had,” Nugent said, “Jeff, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s always been like this.”

“It has not always been like this,” Glor countered.

“It’s always been like this,” Nugent said in a raised voice.

“You have gotten more boisterous,” Glor said.

“No way!” Nugent replied. “You go back and look at these interviews, it has always been like this.”

“Politically speaking, you are more of an activist now than you were in 1970,’ Glor said.

“The political activism is being accelerated because the conditions demand accelerated activism, yes,” Nugent conceded.

Most of the conditions appear to be in the collective delusion of the Right who seem to love using fear of losing rights as a means to gain power even when those who seem to do the most restricting of people’s rights are those on the Right.

Ah, but Nugent then showed off just how delusional he is when he got upset over being confronted by the fact that Nugent isn’t the kind of person that Romney would need in order to win the general election. Nugent told CBS that “Call me when you meet someone who does that more than I do. Because that’s really moderate. In fact, you know what that is? That’s extreme. … I’m an extremely loving, passionate man, and people who investigate me honestly, without the baggage of political correctness, ascertain the conclusion that I’m a damned nice guy. … And if you can find a screening process more powerful than that, I’ll [expletive]. Or [expletive]. How’s that sound?”

CBS reported that “We have no idea where that unexpected outburst came from. The second part of it directed to a female CBS News producer who was off-camera. Nugent’s wife told him after the interview ended that Nugent owed an apology to the producer. And Nugent did. He also called Glor Thursday and said that, after the interview, he was rushed to the emergency room and had a kidney stone removed. So, that’s what Nugent said may have contributed to his high level of energy.”

Actually,  Nugent’s brain is pretty much fried into a paranoid soup of incoherency.

Woody Guthrie, father of modern American protest music

At the May 1^st rally assembly at City Hall in Montpelier, Vermont, there was a trio who performed social equality protest songs from the 1800s. It was a reminder of how long this fight for equal opportunity and equal rights has been going on. But there was also a man who sang a Woody Guthrie-type song of his own composition and later, at the State House, there was a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Both hit me in an unexpected way. I found myself having flashbacks to the protest rallies of my youth and the picture that came to mind was not the rallies themselves, not the ones I attended during college, but the front page of the news papers on the morning of May 5, 1970, John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mary Ann Vecchio over the body of Jeffrey Miller, photo by John Filo

This Friday, May 4, is the 42^nd anniversary of the shooting of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Students were protesting the invasion of Cambodia that had been announced by President Nixon on April 30. The National Guard was called in. There is still no clear explanation for what an audio tape of that day suggests, that there were four pistol shots. All that is known is that a minute later the Guardsmen, scared young men who were totally unprepared for what they were doing, opened fire. Four students, Jeffrey Miller, 20 (who is the victim in the Filo photo), Allison Krause, 19, William Schroeder, 19, and Sandra Scheuer, 20, died on the scene or at the hospital. Nine other students were wounded, one permanently paralyzed. The following day, four million college students went on strike and colleges and universities all over the country were closed. Then, the whole movement seemed to peter out.

Kent State scared the crap out of us. It still scares the crap out of me, more today than it did then.

I would love to say that I felt 100% safe yesterday, but that would be a lie. Even my beloved Vermont has a history of politically driven violence. The day after the bombing of the U. S. Marine barracks in Beirut, October 24, 1983, Billy Harvey walked into a country store in Pittsfield, Vermont, and shot Tania Zelensky in the face. In his mind, he had mashed up Reagan’s rhetoric about the Soviet “evil empire” with the Palestinian-Islamist terrorists who had never hit an American target before. Tania was the American-born daughter of Russian immigrants. She was 31 years old.

There are 200 more anti-government militias in this country today than on the day Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah office building in Oklahoma City.

Maybe it was the timing of the “Put People First” rally that was effecting me – between the anniversaries of Oklahoma City and Kent State. It was just too many reminders of what is out there…..

The security personnel at our rally were there to assist more than anything else, evidenced by the way they cared for a gentleman who needed an ambulance to transport him to the hospital (more about him in Pat’s article about the rally.) But in Oakland, California, the police attacked the rally attendees, just as they attacked the Occupy rallies last fall. Oakland was not alone in the attacks on Occupiers. There was so much pepper spray used last fall, it’s a wonder there wasn’t a supply crisis.

None of this is making much sense, is it? Fear doesn’t make sense, especially fear that creeps up from nowhere the way it did yesterday.

As paranoid as Richard Nixon was, as much as the Republicans built a culture of fear and hatred around Bill Clinton, it was mild compared to the hatred and fear created around President Obama. And the 99%ers, all the disparate groups that joined together yesterday to raise their voices in protest over all the disparate inequalities and losses of rights and opportunities and power, they are associated with President Obama because they are protesting the very same things that President Obama promised to reverse and correct. The right wing is characterizing union members as “thugs” even when the unions they are talking about represent their kids’ kindergarten teachers. The right wing is calling pro-choice advocates “baby killers” and claiming that we all want to kill our babies in the womb. Those who want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation are calling those of us who really believe in freedom of religion “anti-God” and say we are “waging war on religion.” Those who want to curry votes from the NRA insist that Democrats will come into homes and seize our guns. The Republican Party has encouraged every fringe groups and conspiracy theorist out there. Their media shills talk about The New World Order and the conspiracy of Jewish bankers and build up lies about organizations like the Bilderberg Group to counter real concerns about conservative “think tanks” writing laws and buying elections. Go on any comment stream on the web and read how all liberals are allegedly sucking at the welfare teat, living off the hard work of others, have never held jobs or paid taxes. Liberals and progressives, Democrats and Independents have been dehumanized as Libtards and Libturds, baby-killers and thugs, lazy and non-productive….and dehumanization of the enemy is essential to making soldiers capable of taking human life.

That is what scares me. We are talking about policies and laws, they are dehumanizing anyone who stands in the way of the Republican dream of a one-party nation. The right wing is excusing the brutal treatment of protesters as justifiable to protect America from socialists and communists. Will they still be excusing the actions taken by fanatics to protect America when the bombs go off or the bullets are fired?

They talk about taking back their country, but this is our country, too, and we should not be afraid to exercise our Constitutional right to free assembly and free speech. The sad part is, the Constitution is not bullet-proof or bomb-proof and we’ve already learned that lesson.

To all the rally attendees, to the Occupiers, to the marchers, to the protesters everywhere in this country…you have my deepest respect for a courage you may not even know you possess.

I guess I should explain first what a Vermont Town Meeting is. On the first Tuesday in March, Vermonters in the smaller towns assemble to vote on the town’s budget, elect town officials, and conduct the town’s business. It is democracy in its purest form. You will find similar town meetings in New Hampshire, but in fewer towns. It is real governance, not the campaign stops that are called Town Meetings these days. Now that we have that out of the way….

On Town Meeting Day, H. Brooke Paige approached the citizens of his hometown of Washington, Vermont, with the petition he needed to get on the ballot. He needed just 50 signatures. He got 101 of the 135 voters in attendance. They felt the same way Paige does, that no one should be elected unopposed, that there should at least be a debate on the issues. So, Republicans, Democrats and Independents all signed Paige’s petition. That’s Vermonters for you. We love Bernie to death, admire his passion for his constituents, but we acknowledge that he’s a bit over-the-top on some issues. From time to time, we would like to remind him that there is something to be gained in moderation and compromise, and that he doesn’t always have to yell to be heard.

Moderation and compromise. That ought to be Vermont’s motto. We tend to elect mixed governments on purpose, though in recent years, with the rise of the Tea Party in the rest of the country, we have swung very Democratic in Vermont. But Vermont remains the only state with no balanced budget amendment, and a budget that usually comes much closer to balanced than those states that have them. Though we have had a few Tea Partiers come out of the woodwork, and have a handful of representatives with ties to ALEC, our Republicans tend to be moderates, old-fashioned Republicans whose ideas precede even those of Reagan.

Brooke Paige is that kind of Republican, more Javits, Rockefeller and Eisenhower than Bush. He readily acknowledges the power of the big pharmaceutical companies have overpowered the needs of Americans and the problems of the cost of our healthcare delivery. He advocates a form of “networking” with low-cost and free clinics acting as satellites to hospitals to divert the uninsured from emergency rooms. Frankly, our experiences with such an idea in my hometown have led us to believe that this idea, while basically good, needs some major tweaking. There is too much reliance on physician surrogates and not enough involvement by physicians in critical care decisions. But the basics of the idea are good. We just need more doctors in this country willing to participate in such a program.  See – both sides can agree on an idea, even if for different reasons. 

Humana HMO used to run such a program in Brandon, Florida. It was extremely good. It attracted newly graduated doctors who wanted time to pay down their student loans before trying to establish private practices and older doctors who wanted out from the burdens of running such practices.

Paige made a good case for reforming the insurance system, but not the health insurance system. His point was the cost of malpractice insurance was driving up the cost of health care. Good point. Doctors pay enormous premiums for malpractice insurance, among the highest are those paid by obstetricians. Even nurses are getting hit with having to carry a million dollars in malpractice insurance. The insurance industry claims these policies are needed because of exorbitant awards made in malpractice cases. Hospitals and doctors claim that they have to order extraordinary tests to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits. Having been a legal secretary in the dark ages, I can tell you that there would be fewer malpractice cases if the medical profession did a better job of policing their own. No doctor should be allowed to continue practicing after having settled a half-dozen cases out-of-court. There should not be a system in place that protects bad doctors because the state medical board is not informed of pending lawsuits.  See — we agree on this one as well, only disagreeing when right wingers insist that there has to be tort reform without protections for patients. 

I would love to include a picture of Mr. Paige in this story, but I can’t find one. Even the state GOP hasn’t posted one. That’s sad, really. Mr. Paige told me that he expects he will not get enough donations to run any television ads, but maybe enough to run a couple of ads in the weekly free newspapers, you know, the local “Shopper.” So far, his biggest contributor has been his mother, who gave him $100. Mr. Paige is under 6 feet tall, a bit overweight (more Gingrich than Christie) and much better dressed than Bernie, who somehow manages to always look like he slept in his suits. He was a small business owner who commuted between a chosen home in Vermont and his businesses in Philadelphia. His campaign headquarters is his home and the address is P.O. Box 41, Washington, Vermont 05675.

I’ll still be voting for Bernie, but it was nice to meet a Republican who understands the self-destructiveness of his own party, who thinks John McCain should have asked Kay Bailey Hutchison to be his running mate instead of Sarah Palin if he wanted a female running mate, who believes in bi-partisan co-operation and compromise. I expect this to be Pat Leahy’s final term, so maybe Mr. Paige might consider running for Congress in 2016. Our Congressman Peter Welch will undoubtedly be running for Pat’s seat, leaving the house seat open. Vermonters tend to think of being in the House as on-th-job training for the Senate. Electing Mr. Paige would restore Vermont’s three-party balance in Washington.

The Federal government could use more than a few moderate Republicans and the last thing this country needs is for New England’s moderate Republicans to just give up, the way Olympia Snowe has. If they believe in their party and the idea that bi–partisan co-operation has produced some of the best ideas in our history, then they should be fighting for the soul of their party, not going toes-up.

On the other hand, speaking as a Democratic-leaning Independent, the more the Republicans keep moving to the right, the more they turn off moderate Americans, so maybe those moderate Republicans should just join the moderate, center-left party that still appreciates their positions – the Democrats. As several old-time politicians have said since 2000, “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.”

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Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iran has long reminded me of a book my children had when they were little. A tiny dragon crawls out from under a child’s bed. He keeps growing bigger and bigger the longer people ignore his existence. The moment someone says, look at the dragon, he shrinks back to the size of a house cat. The statements being made preliminary to the next round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program show that the real issue is more a matter of respect and equal treatment than nuclear ambition.

Iran lashed out at the fact that France, one of the participants in the talks, is a major exporter of nuclear technology. But if Iran exports any nuclear technology, it gets slammed with more sanctions. Iran has repeatedly made the case that Israel is allowed to refuse nuclear inspection and being a participant in the nuclear non-proliferation treaties, but if Iran wants to build a nuclear power plant everyone goes nuts. In the early days of his first term, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust did not take place in the Middle East, but Middle East paid for it with the taking of Palestinian land to compensate Europe’s Jews for their suffering. He was labeled a “Holocaust denier” for that statement, so he became a full-fledged Holocaust denier. If one stands back from the hysterical responses to Iran and looks at the chronology, there is a very clear case to be made for cause and effect with Iran. The more it is dissed, the more extreme it becomes.

The specific charge made against France was that it was helping Israel develop “inhumane nuclear weapons.” Whether or not that is true, what is true is that Israel has been suspected of having a nuclear weapon since 1948, a suspicion that was increased with some “secret” testing carried out in 1979. Israel is one of only four countries not participating in the non-proliferation treaty, the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel’s official position is referred to as “nuclear ambiguity.” It has said since 1965 that it would not be the first country to “introduce” a nuclear weapon in the Middle East, leaving it open as to whether it has the capacity to use a nuclear weapon in retaliation.

There were sanctions on India and Pakistan until 2001. After 9-11, their “co-operation” with the war on terrorism was the lifting of sanctions. They rattle their missiles at each other more than at other countries.

The Iranians believe that the world should impose the same rules on everyone, not just impose sanctions on Iran for doing what Israel, India and Pakistan get away with. The next round of talks about their nuclear program and the sanctions is due to begin on May 23 in Baghdad. These statements from an advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei give us an idea of the major point the Iranians will be making at those talks. It’s all about respect.

With so many former intelligence and military leaders in Israel saying that the policies and demands of the Netanyahu government are as stupidly extreme as those of the Iranian government, this might finally be a good time to tell Israel, India and Pakistan to allow international inspections and sign the non-proliferation treaty.

There is a much more pressing reason for persuading Iran to pull back on nuclear development than protecting Israel. Iran’s fault line map looks like a spider’s web. It is one of the most geologically unstable places in the region. Earthquakes and nuclear facilities don’t mix, and if nothing else, inspections could reassure the region that Iran has exceeded standards for earthquake safety in its nuclear power plant. They have a right to nuclear power, a right to use nuclear energy to generate revenue instead of electricity. They also have a right to demand that every nation on earth be treated equally on this issue, that no nation receive favored status to keep its nuclear arsenal a secret.

Would saying, “Look, there’s a dragon!” really be that hard?

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• Manthorpe: Israel’s security bosses deride PM Netanyahu on Iran (vancouversun.com)
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• Israeli intel ex-chief: Netanyahu’s policy on Iran misleading, messianic (EndtheLie.com)

Two-Spirited Duo

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Corporate taxes in Nevada are zero. Corporate taxes in California are 8.84%. So, Apple has a office in Nevada. The company may be “based” in California, but it does very little actual business out of California. Apple directs its profits to the Reno office, and others in similarly low-tax states, and a subsidiary called Braeburn Capital invests the money. When those investments earn profits, there are not state taxes to pay.

The same holds true in Europe. There, download sales are routed through the tiny country of Luxembourg, which has a very low corporate tax rate, instead of larger countries with double-digit corporate tax rates. As Robert Hatta, who was the iTunes retail marketing director in Europe until 2007, explained, “We set up in Luxembourg because of the favorable taxes. Downloads are different from tractors or steel because there’s nothing you can touch, so it doesn’t matter if your computer is in France or England. If you’re buying from Luxembourg, it’s a relationship with Luxembourg.” Luxembourg’s low taxes probably explain its national debt of 3443% of its GDP, the highest in Europe. Before the recession, it had one of the lowest in the world at just 17%.

The Times report showed how Apple had “devised corporate strategies that take advantage of gaps in the tax code.” They interviewed executives in the Reno office, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and other tax-shelter nations and states and its all totally legal. In the first three months of 2012, Apple made a $39.2 billion profit.

Apple issued the following statement to the Times, “Apple has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules. We are incredibly proud of all of Apple’s contributions…[the company] pays an enormous amount of taxes, which help our local, state and federal governments.” In Nevada, they pay property taxes on their offices, either as owners or as part of their rent, and income and payroll taxes on employees, while the office processes untold millions of dollars of investments generating more millions in profit. Nevada used the Federal stimulus money to plug their budget deficit instead of using it to create jobs. They have one of the highest rates of unemployment and home foreclosures in the country.

Some governments are self-destructive in their attachment to creating low-tax incentives for greedy businesses. Others have built their entire economies on their low-tax rates, attracting so many post-office-box companies that the relatively small fees those companies pay support the country. As long as these countries and states exist, others will suffer. They may suffer themselves from their policies, as Luxembourg and Nevada have. And it will all be perfectly legal…though whether or not its ethical is debatable.

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Dominique Strauss Kahn

Former IMF chief and once-upon-a-time Presidential aspirant Dominique Strauss Kahn may have avoided jail, but his political life is over. The French Socialist Party is shunning him at every turn.

Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, who is edging closer to being elected President every day, has publicly stated that Strauss Kahn is not part of the campaign, and he should just stay away from everyone involved in the campaign. Leading party members walked out of a party in Paris when DSK arrived. Now, DSK is whining to the press that the whole mess in New York, where he was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, was a trap laid by his political opponents. Yeah, that maid was set up by a bunch of French politicians. Must be because DSK had dodged repeated similar accusations in France.

There is plenty of evidence that something happened in that hotel room, and the maid was persuaded by friends to go for the money. Gee, just like Paula Jones and President Clinton. (And before anyone crawls down my throat for that one, Jones confessed after she was dumped by the conservatives when they failed to get Clinton removed from office.) But to suggest that the charges were politically motivated or that the maid was working for DSK’s enemies is denial. There are at least two women in France who have accused him of rape, and dozens who have accused him of inappropriate behavior. What the incident in New York did was make French women reject the idea that they have to accept chauvinistic behavior out of French men, accept having their persons violated on any level, accept a culture of being objects instead of persons. It wasn’t DSK’s political enemies who did him in, it was the women of France.

Dominique Strauss Kahn should just fold up the tent and fade away. He’s been lucky so far that none of his activities have been prosecuted. The problem is, the same arrogance that he demonstrated with women won’t allow him to admit his career is over.

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Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits

Being in my 30s and a fan of cartoons, I cherish my Saturday morning cartoons. Unfortunately there is a serious lack of Saturday morning cartoons that are interesting enough to watch. Most of the prime-time channels now have live-action shows for children, but not what I’m used to. There just has to be something about the structure of Saturday morning cartoons that must be obeyed for it to be satisfying. There needs to be an absence of Seriousness. Here are a few of my favorite examples for a perfect Saturday morning filled with cartoons made of the right amount of silliness and entertainment. Enjoy!

So go get some cereal, cozy up with someone warm and enjoy some Saturday silliness from me. ;D

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Six years after its founding, the WHCA held a dinner. Calvin Coolidge was the first President who attended, in 1924. Since then, it has become customary for the President and Vice-President to attend with their wives. The WHCA dinner is held the last Saturday in April at the Washington Hilton Hotel, which was built in 1965 and hosts the National Prayer Breakfast among other large events.

Originally, the dinners featured singers between courses and an hour-long post-dinner show with headliners. But in the past couple of decades, the principle performer has been a comedian, and the show has evolved into a roast of the President, and the President has joined in the fun. This is a showcase for the White House writing staff as much as anything else.

It is fun, a lot of fun as long as something horrific hasn’t just happened like the Oklahoma City bombing. Last year, President Obama introduced his “official birth video,” and showed the birth sequence from “The Lion King,” quipping that Disney had the long form. Donald Trump, who was making waves with birther nonsense, was in the audience. The most famous bit by President George W. Bush was him in a side-by-side video of him finally properly pronouncing the words “nuclear proliferation.” I’m expecting someone, maybe the President himself, to ridicule the outrage heaped on this week by the right wing because Obama is “cool.”

The dinner is attended by journalists, celebrities (Lindsay Lohan will be there) and politicians. News organizations invite celebrities, so Politico is bringing Charlize Theron, Bloomberg (News, not Mayor) has Zooey Deschanel and Fox News is bring Kim Kardashian again, which says a whole lot about Fox (trash attracts trash perhaps?). The incredibly long list of celebrities includes George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks (love her in Slither), Reese Witherspoon, Daniel Day-Lewis (is he still an A-lister?), Martha Stewart (the Hilton staff better be warned), Diane Keaton, Rashida Jones, John Legend, the cast of Modern Family, Stevie Wonder, Pierce Brosnan, Kate Hudson and Mommy Goldie Hawn (step-Daddy Kurt Russell is an avowed libertarian), Claire Danes, Josh Hutcherson, Rachel Zoe, Ivanka Trump (the model daughter, not the ex-wife), Mary J. Blige, Kelly Ripa and Uggie the dog from The Artist.

The dog?

The dinner is tomorrow night. C-SPAN will be broadcasting the entire event live, including what passes for a red carpet at this event, running from 6:30 p.m. Eastern time and running to approximately 11:15. MSNBC’s coverage will start around 9:30. They will be skipping the preliminaries and just covering the roast. You can also expect highlights to show up on the cable news networks on Sunday morning, or log on to MSNBC anytime after 1 a.m. Sunday to watch. Then, on Monday, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who hosted it once, will have their shot at it.

The dinner is also a fundraiser, but not for politicians.  The money raised goes to various charities to aid journalism students. 

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President Warren G. Harding

Crisis Alert: The United States is operating without a budget! OMG! We must have a budget! We can’t function without a budget! This failure of a President hasn’t gotten a budget passed in his entire term! Throw the irresponsible idiot out!  Run, run, the sky is falling!!!!

Well, if you want to throw out presidents who never passed a budget, you have to start with George Washington and go all the way through, oh, Woodrow Wilson. Our 29th President, Warren G. Harding was the first to submit a comprehensive budget. The budget is not a Constitutional imperative, but a law passed in 1921. What is Constitutional is the requirement that the executive branch must present its request for funds to Congress and they vote on those requests.

You know how some Republicans like to compare the budget process to sitting around your own kitchen table figuring out your household budget? Well, think about it. Have you ever in your entire life had a budget that could be adhered to for eighteen months without adjustment? Most people reach a point after a couple of months of trying to be perfect little fiscal managers where they understand that a budget should be targets, not absolutes. And way too many of us know that a single unexpected expense, like replacing one’s eyeglasses ahead of schedule, can cause months of robbing Peter to pay Paul or engaging in the fruitless exercise of trying to catch up one’s bills to date when the late penalties are eating into the budget.

The Federal budget is a best guess of what it’s going to cost to run the country for a year beginning six months after it is submitted. The executive branch needs a crystal ball to figure out what is going to happen 12 to 18 months in the future that the Federal government will have to pay for and what revenues will be available to do it. All those post-1921 presidents who have gotten their budgets passed have had to go back to Congress with hats in hand to beg for more money, which frequently requires also asking them to raise taxes, raise the debt ceiling or shift money from one appropriation to another. Smart presidents ask for tax increases to pay for very expensive things like wars, as Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam. Total dunces don’t bother, like George W. Bush not asking for increases in revenue to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan.  No President can anticipate a series of billion dollar natural disasters in a single year as we had in 2011. 

Budgets don’t matter. Budgets are broad-stroke wish lists more indicative of what an administration hopes to accomplish with policy than an actual accounting mechanism. No complete budget is ever passed. The individual appropriations for the separate executive departments are what is voted upon. The budget doesn’t matter. What matters are the appropriation bills. This is where the Congress and the White House fight out their battles over policy.

All the crisis talk about the budget is just talk. The Ryan budget would have no more reality than the President’s budget does. The only thing that we should be paying attention to is the individual appropriations bills. That is where the real story is and always has been.

And, just a footnote….Harding died in office in 1923 and was replaced by Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge was President until March of 1929, just eight months before the collapse of the stock market that caused the Great Depression. 

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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

Based on the questions asked by the members of the Supreme Court, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was positively orgasmic over the chances her beloved S.B. 1070 “papers please law” has to be upheld by the Court. News flash for Brewer – the questions are not really an indiction of how justices will vote, just how much they feel like making an attorney queasy.

The majority of the Supreme Court are five conservative men. They don’t like the Obama administration and certainly don’t like the two female liberals they have to share the bench with because of President Obama. But, their willingness to get difficult with the administration’s Solicitor General cannot be viewed as a window into how they will vote on a constitutional issue. They are also aware of how sullied their joint reputations are, and how close they are coming to ethics violations and disclosure frauds that could jeopardize their positions.

The questions that had Brewer so happy involved whether or not it is an infringement of Federal jurisdiction for the law to demand that law enforcement officers require proof of immigration status from anyone they stop for a traffic violation. They were not aimed at the parts of the law that go way into Federal jurisdiction.

The government’s case is that we cannot have fifty different immigration laws and standards. While the Feds have improved the ability of local law enforcement to cross-check immigration standards and outstanding warrants and deportation orders with other jurisdictions, the heart of the Feds’ argument is priorities. It is the Obama administration’s policy to first go after those illegal immigrants who commit crimes other than being here without papers, which is only a Federal misdemeanor. They want the drug dealers and rapists, gang members and robbers, killers and child abusers, not the guy suntanning his butt in the strawberry fields. SB 1070 and its cousins profile all Hispanics for harassment, causing the Hispanic communities to treat law enforcement as the enemy, and seriously threatens all of law enforcement’s efforts to win co-operation from those communities in apprehending, incarcerating and deporting real criminals. It is a question of whether or not a state should be able to upend the priorities.

One of the statements from the Justices that warmed the barnacled cockles of Brewer’s heart came from Chief Justice Roberts, who said, “It seems to me the federal government just doesn’t want to know who’s here illegally or not.” That was after telling Solicitor General Donald Verrilli that the Feds were under no obligation to deport illegals being held by local law enforcement after being discovered jaywalking or being profiled because there were too many of them in a car.

Seriously? Almost every state in the union is fighting to cut costs. Do we really need to be spending a whole bunch of money to jail for days or weeks some illegal immigrant who jaywalked just to have the ICE determine that he’s no real threat to America and let him go? That would be a one-way lead-in to Fox News’ newest hysteria over the U.S. being overrun by Mexican criminals.

This case, like all others, comes down to whether or not those five men are going to give greater weight to the letter of the Constitution and over two hundred years of precedents than to the desires of their political party for a new propaganda narrative. The Constitution is clear…immigration and naturalization are the sole jurisdiction of the Federal government.

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Betty Boop

Most people watch cartoons for entertainment. I watch them for study. I grew up watching cartoons that my grandmother and my mom grew up on, thrown in with cartoons of the 80s and 90s. I still watch cartoons today. I watch them with my kid and my partner. My son gets to watch cartoons ranging from Betty Boop to Young Justice. My partner and I watch anything we want to because we are adults and that is how we roll. Recently its been The Secret Saturdays on Boomerang very late at night.

The reason I study them? Easy. I want to be a Doctor of Cartoon Studies. Most people who hear this from me have 1 of 2 reactions; they either think its sad and pathetic or they think its a wonderful idea. The ones that think its wonderful usually get into a conversation about how they learned different lessons growing up because of the cartoons they watched. We don’t think about it much, but cartoons are an educational tool that we all use without thinking about it.

Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius

It is the first introduction we all have of how Physics doesn’t work. How many times has Wile E. Coyote fallen off a cliff, hit the ground far below and is back for the next scene? It is where we learn what a hero truly is. Its where I learned that fast-talking is hard to follow and easy to confuse your listener, Brains always beat Brawn, Cleverness will get you out of almost everything and there is always someone smarter than you. Cartoons teach us all. Why? It is because we learn faster and understand more when we are entertained. Its one of the reasons people have such difficulty learning from boring teachers.I know I did. I could sing any song by Billy Joel, but couldn’t memorize vocabulary words. Why? Because singing is entertaining and vocabulary words are not.

Not all cartoons are educational. You have to find the lessons in order to learn them. In the 1990s Steven Spielberg produced a few cartoon series that focused on fun education. You may recognize a few titles; Animaniacs, Hysteria!, Pinky & the Brain, & Tiny Toons. These shows came when parents cried out that their children were violent because of cartoons that showed cartoon violence. Spielberg disagreed & revolutionized entertaining education for children by creating these shows.

The Brain

Animaniacs came with a “Wheel of Morality” with the end of some of their episodes. Yakko Warner would spin the wheel and a bizarre moral of the show was shared with the audience.  Hysteria tried to teach children History with fun, loud, obnoxious characters such as Father Time and Baby New Year. Each episode covered one or many historical events that children usually learn about in text books. Pinky & the Brain showed kids how to use their brain to get what they weant, while not forgetting that its okay sometimes to be silly-willy. Tiny Toons taught children about what goes into making an animated cartoon, everything that goes into making a cartoon character and the lessons the characters learned (like Plucky Duck & Hampton J. Pig learning not to steal).

So next time you are watching cartoons try to remember that its not only entertaining, it may also be educational.

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Anders Behring Breivik

In Oslo today (4/23/12) Anders Behring Breivik continued his testimony about the events at Utoya Island last July 22^nd. He told the court that he could tell the ideology of his targets by their appearance, and that he had tried to spare one who looked right-wing.

The 22-year-old he chose not to kill, a Labour Party youth wing activist named Adrian Pracon, has told Reuters: “I remember him pointing the gun at me for quite a long time before he took it down, turned and walked away.”

Later Breivik came upon Pracon again as he played dead, and this time shot the son of Polish immigrants through the shoulder.

In another separate apparent bid to show he has a conscience, Breivik pointed out that he spared the life of a 10-year-old boy whom he had had in his rifle sights on the island. “I could not understand what such a little boy was doing at a political indoctrination camp,” said Breivik. The boy’s name has not been released by the authorities but his father, Trond Berntsen, was an off-duty police officer serving as the island’s security guard. He was Breivik’s first victim.

Breivik issued his first seeming apology, to innocent bystanders hurt or killed when his 950-kilogram fertilizer bomb went off in front of a government building in Oslo. More than 200 were injured. “To all of those … I want to say I am deeply sorry for what happened,” he said. “But what happened, happened.”

Most Norwegians have reacted with contained horror to the content of Breivik’s testimony, delivered in a cold, matter-of-fact manner, while there is wide public acceptance of his right as a defendant to give it. He has had almost free rein to issue warnings against immigration and explain how he scoured the Internet for bomb-making recipes while writing his 1,500-page manifesto.

Related articles

• National News: Breivik: I’m victim of racist plot (coventrytelegraph.net)
• Anders Behring Breivik trial: Killer spared one man because he looked ‘right wing’ – Scotsman (scotsman.com)
• Breivik apologizes for killing Oslo bystanders, but not teens at summer camp (csmonitor.com)

Photo credit: AP/Brian Blanco

Just after midnight on Monday, 4/23/12, George Zimmerman left the John E. Polk Correctional Facility (JEPCF) at the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, after posting $150,000 bond and being fitted with a GPS monitoring device. His whereabouts will be monitored by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office and Seminole County Probation.

Bail Bond agency

Just a quick note on bail versus bond: while his bail was set at $150,000, the amount his family and supporters actually had to raise in cash was probably only 10% of that, $15,000. That would represent the standard fee for a bail bondsman, who is actually liable for the $150,000 if Zimmerman fails to appear. “Writing a bond” is the actual process of a bondsman filing documents with the court giving his word, or bond, that the defendant will appear when scheduled.

Zimmerman’s family will have put up some kind of collateral for the bond, such as a family home. If Zimmerman disappears, and the bondsman is unable to locate and recover him, then the bond will have to be paid to the court and the collateral will be forfeit to the bondsman.

All of that is brought to you courtesy of the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich. Amazing what you can learn from lighthearted crime novels.

Related articles

• Zimmerman Released on $150K Bond (abcnews.go.com)
• Zimmerman urged to keep low profile after release from jail (thegrio.com)

Van Jones

In the spirit of fairness, it is necessary to call out Van Jones for his interview on AllHipHop.com which was excerpted on The Blaze. Jones was, for a whole six months, the White House’s Green Energy Czar, until the fact that he is an avowed communist became a problem for the Obama administration and Jones resigned. The right wing pointed to Jones and built the myth that President Obama is a Marxist-Maoist-communist-socialist-fascist (which of the five is not like the others?) Muslim Kenyan. On top of the revelations that the President’s former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave a couple of anti-white, anti-American rants from his pulpit, Jones was a blessing to the right wing. They could go so far beyond just putting the President down as a “community organizer,” ignoring his career as a university lecturer. Guilty by close association was so much better than guilty of having taken a class in college or studying the apolitical works of Saul Alinsky.

Now, on the heels of Ted Nugent’s National Rifle Association rant, Van Jones has handed the right wing more fodder for their anti-Obama propaganda. For those who have never heard of it, AllHipHop.com is a fourteen-year-old hip hop news website. It has five million visitors a month, making it the most popular hip hop site on the web. The Blaze is a conservative news and opinion website founded by Glenn Beck right after his Washington rally in August, 2010. So, what you have is a hip hop website getting 166,667 hits a day being quoted to Glenn Beck’s fanbase.

Ted Nugent, on the other hand, spoke live to 30,000 National Rifle Association members on the same day they gathered to hear speeches from major Republican leaders including their candidate for President. Jones ranted about jobs and Nugent called for chopping the heads off Democrats in November. Major case of false equivalency once again.

But, even liberals and progressives need to distance themselves from what Jones was saying. He is neither a liberal nor a progressive, but a full-blown communist in a world transitioning away from communism because it is a failed system.

Jones compared factory workers, fast food restaurants and retail stores with drug dealers and slave master. His comments bordered on racism and extreme class warfare. His point was that our factories create pollution and kill people. During the interview, Jones called for the end of all pollution-creating industries and restaurants that serve unhealthy foods. His message is being put out by the right wing as “proof” Obama is really anti-job and anti-labor, which is sort of funny given that the right wing is so determinedly anti-labor.

Jones is a fanatic, as deeply committed to cleaning up the planet as Ted Nugent is to owning guns and being able to shoot as many bears as he wants. He does not speak for the administration any more than Nugent speaks for Mitt Romney.

Neither of them should be taken for spokesmen for the candidates in this election, but the fuss The Blaze is making over Van Jones misses the point about Ted Nugent. Days before the 17^th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, before an audience of ardent gun owners, Nugent was talking violently about Supreme Court justices, the President, cabinet secretaries and members of Congress. Jones wasn’t talking about blowing up factories or shooting up a KFC.

The Republicans are very big on false equivalencies this year…Bill Maher’s very small cable audience is not Rush Limbaugh’s millions, Hillary Rosen is not part of the President’s election staff and Van Jones’ public endorsement of the Obama campaign was not sought out as Nugent’s endorsement of Romney was. The scales are not balancing here, no matter how balanced Fox News claims itself to be.

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Romney Rally spelling error

A definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” An addendum to that definition could be “doing what is failing elsewhere and expecting a different result.” The Romney plan for balancing the budget calls for severely cutting all social programs, hugely increasing the defense budget, drastically cutting all the regulatory and inspection aspects of the government, and cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. Not only have we been there, done that, but European countries are following a similar program (without the defense increases) and watching their recessions heading for full-blown depressions. It is currently believed that Greece’s austerity budget will permanently cripple the country, reducing it to third-world status within a few years. Without government jobs to feed paychecks into the economy, Greece’s youth unemployment is at 50%.

Remember that song from Beauty and the Beast “Tale as old as time…”? It’s beginning to feel like how to rescue a crashed economy is the “Debate as old as time.” My father was a 14-year-old drop-out, his brothers were also drop-outs, all working at whatever jobs they could get to put food on the table, even a few semi-criminal jobs, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for the Presidency. That was where the debate began. On one side, John Maynard Keynes, who said that in hard times, a government must spend to stimulate a recovery. On the other side, the guys who believed that the only good money was kept in the hands of the rich who would magnanimously trickle it down to the rest of us. Keynes has been proven right over and over again. Sanity should be defined as recognizing when something works and repeating it over and over with the same results. Roosevelt’s policies – huge government spending programs and massive public works programs brought us out of the Great Depression. When World War II ended, there were 16 million returning veterans, 11% of our population were unemployed adults. There weren’t enough houses or consumer goods for them. For five years, our entire economy had been focused on winning the war and supporting our troops, and our national debt was at 125% of that war-effort GDP. Ending the war would mean no longer manufacturing the same goods, so our GDP was in danger of shrinking. Once again, Keynes to the rescue with The G.I. Bill that provided education grants, home loans and business loans for the veterans, plus infrastructure spending and encouragement of both industry and labor unions. Truman hiked the top tax rate to 90%. We not only transitioned to a primarily peacetime economy, but we flourished.

That pattern, in lesser ways, has been repeated by every Democratic President since then. Carter was the least successful at turning around the economy, but none of the others had to deal with the type of international problems he did. Every Republican President, except Bush 41, has followed a policy of trickle-down economics that led to a recession. George H. W. Bush had to campaign against Reagonomics because of the recession it caused, but he didn’t go far enough in the other direction.

The problem facing President Obama in this election is overcoming the propaganda that convinced people that the somehow trickle down economics didn’t cause this recession and repeating the bad policies of the past will manage to create a different outcome.

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• NPR’s series on dead economists: John Maynard Keynes(molinaeconomics.wordpress.com)

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• Italy Joins France, Spain In Shifting Away From Austerity(lezgetreal.com)

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• Economy Killers | Paul Krugman & Robin Wells | Salon | 15 April 2012 (news.salon.com)

The Fate of our Government?

So, out of utter frustration with a congress that isn’t doing jack squat, I decided to look into how legislation and nominations get stalled in the Senate. What I found was pretty disgusting.

First there is the filibuster. This “unlimited debate” was enabled by accident, when the Senate in 1806 blindly followed the advice of Vice-President Aaron Burr to clean up their rule book, using the previous question motion as an example. This motion (which still exists in the House, thank God) empowered a simple majority to cut off debate.  Without it, there was no mechanism for the Senate to end debate. With the small size and less polarized composition of the Senate, no one really took advantage of this glaring loophole in the early 1800’s. The filibuster didn’t take off until after the Civil War.

Mr. Smith

We’ve seen it in movies, such as the filibuster conducted by Jimmy Stewart, playing Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana

For real life drama and laughs, during the 1930s, Senator Huey P. Long frustrated his colleagues while entertaining spectators with his recitations of Shakespeare and his reading of recipes for “pot-likkers.” Long once held the Senate floor for 15 hours. The record for the longest individual speech goes to South Carolina’s J. Strom Thurmond who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

That’s the thing about the filibuster. It requires a Senator to take the floor and talk… and talk… and talk. To keep the filibuster going beyond the Senator’s own endurance, another Senator opposing the legislation needs to be ready to speak as soon as the first yields the floor. With enough Senators prepared to do this, a filibuster can go on indefinitely.

There is a Senate rule adopted in 1917, when it was demanded by President Wilson on the grounds of national security, which allows for “cloture”, or the forced closing of debate. Thing is, it requires 60 votes. When cloture is invoked on a rules debate, it requires 67 votes to get things moving.

So if there are enough Senators willing to talk a bill to death, it is going to die. As party-polarized as Congress has become, getting 60 Senators to agree on anything is nearly impossible. Because of this, a new “procedure” has snuck into being… the “hold”.

The practice of “holds” (requests by senators to party leaders to delay floor consideration of legislation or nominations, or statements of intent to filibuster if legislation or nominations reach the floor), is nowhere recognized in Senate rules or precedents. It has, however, become a prominent feature of today’s Senate.

Once a Senator submits a hold, which used to be anonymous but now have to be owned up to, it effectively kills legislation or a nomination. There’s one Republican Senator who currently has over 300 holds in place.

Why does it kill legislation? Because the Senate Majority leader will usually not even request consent to consider a measure if there is a hold on it. Why bother? He or she already knows there’s a filibuster waiting in the wings. All it will do is waste time. The only reason to allow a filibuster to happen is for political propaganda reasons; this bill was introduced and then killed by the other party’s filibuster, the evil so-and-so’s.

So it boils down to the incredible situation we have now, where one contrary Senator can block a piece of legislation or a nomination with a memo.

Is there any hope of getting rid of holds and filibusters? Nope. There is no way that either party, when in control of the Senate, is going to outlaw those means by which they can be bullies when they wind up in the minority. They would rather be able to stop the legislative process than do the jobs they were elected to do.

the Signing of the Constitution

Our Founding Fathers have got to be rolling in their graves. Maybe that’s why we’re having earthquakes in the mid-Atlantic states.

Related articles

• “The Minority Defeats The Majority”, Again: The Media Needs To Tell Readers The Truth About GOP Filibustering (mykeystrokes.com)
• Fear Keeps the Filibuster Alive (motherjones.com)
• Senate Republicans Filibuster Buffett Rule (thinkprogress.org)

I have watched and listened as the War on Women has assaulted the right of every woman in the United States to a safe, medical abortion. We’ve all heard the rhetoric. We’ve read the horror stories from before abortion was legal – and yes, it touched my family, too. I lost a great-aunt to an illegal abortion long before I was ever born. From what my mom said about her, I would have liked Aunt Barbie. I heard the horror stories first hand from Mom – she was a registered nurse, and worked emergency rooms before Roe V. Wade. She made me understand why, when abortion doctors had targets printed on their backs, the ones who hung in there were the old ones, the ones who had tried desperately to save women dying from botched abortions before it was legal. They knew that if safe medical abortions were outlawed again, the abortions wouldn’t stop; they would go back to killing women.

What I haven’t read about is the other side of choice. Not the absence of choice, with women dying or struggling to support and raise children they hadn’t planned on or wanted. No, the other side, where the answer was yes, I want this child.

My daughter, who is now 34 years old, knows that I contemplated an abortion. I was single, alone, her father wanted me to have one… we were both scared. She knows that instead, I chose to have her. She knows that while her conception was unplanned, her birth was a choice I made. Leaving when she was six months old was the choice her father made, even after being there for her birth. He was only 20, and still scared. I had a family that was willing to help me. My daughter and I were both lucky that way. She is the best and most precious thing I ever did with my life.

I have a daughter of my heart, Steph, who faced the same choice not once, but twice. The first time was with her high school sweetheart. They were engaged, so the choice was to have the baby. They stayed together for a time after Sebastian was born, but then he split. The second time was a few years later, with a man who had loved her from afar for years. They had just started dating when the birth control failed. His response to her “I’m pregnant” was unalloyed joy. They’re married now, with Logan and their youngest, a girl named Morrigan, and soon he’ll be adopting her first son. If they don’t know already, then someday both those boys will know that they were chosen, that their mom wanted them.

Then there’s my grandson. He wasn’t planned, by a long shot. His folks were another loved-from-afar, finally got together, forgot the condom, oops. There was the first knee-jerk thought of abortion on his dad’s part, but that didn’t last long. He was told in no uncertain terms by both the mom and me that while he was welcome to stick around, he could leave if he wanted, but we were going to have the baby. You see, she’d been told that her chances of ever getting pregnant were astronomical, so she was stunned when it happened… and then she was so grateful to a compassionate goddess for this incredible gift. No way was she going to choose to abort it.

Dad stayed. He is now thoroughly in love with his son, as well as my daughter. Felix is seven months old, and an amazingly happy and loved child.

That is what each of these children will know, or know now. They are loved, in a very special way. They weren’t planned, but they were chosen. Their mothers, and sometimes their fathers, chose to have them, chose to keep them, chose to love them.

What a beautiful thing to know about one’s self. Every child should know that they are here because their parents chose to have them, either as a planned child or a chosen unplanned.

What a horrible thing to learn, that the only reason you are here is because your mother had no choice… and that you were never wanted.

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• The X Case 20 Years Later, and Why I’m Pro-Choice(auroralapetite.wordpress.com)

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This Sunday 22^nd April french voter will choose between 10 presidential candidates. The polls are currently giving the socialist Francois Hollande and the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy winner of the first round. Out of the ten candidates three of them are women: the extreme left-wing candidate Nathalie Arthaud, the green party candidate Eva Joly and the extreme right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. However, according to the polls none of them will be present for the second round.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans topic has not, as often, been considered as an important societal issue. During this campaign candidates used the fear of the other The association Sos Homophobie in its annual report of 2011, shows that there the last few years, the number of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender has increased. Compared to year 2010 there is 18% more testimonies. Since last year, internet has been the first play where homophobic discrimination takes place. Assaults in public places has increased 43% between 2009 and 2010. However, these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. They represents the number of cases identified and reported and not all other victims. The fact that there is still discrimination based on your sexual orientation should remind us on the importance of the next presidential elections. It is the opportunity to make mentalities change.

In the context of the presidential election this same association submitted to the candidates twelve questions on equal rights, the fight against discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity. Each party answered to the questions, which shows an effort to take in consideration the LGBT’s rights. Anyhow, the results of the questions shows us that all political parties are not willing to do much more effort. As usual, there is a strong contrast between the left and right parties. None of the right-wing parties are open to same-sex marriage and equality in access to parenthood. On the other hand, all left-wing parties are in favor of equal rights between heterosexual and homosexual people. There is just one question on which they all agree on, which is to help and support people victim of homophobia.

It seems hard, if not even impossible, to fight homophobia if the States doesn’t give the right message to the people. A start would be to give equal rights to everyone. By refusing to give homosexuals the same right of marriage and parenting it puts them in a different category. The heterosexuals are considered better, more worthy. This creates and encourages discrimination based on sexual orientation. Nonetheless, these issues are not considered as essential in the campaign. Even though all the parties have expressed more or less their opinion, only few plans on actually realizing it. Four candidates, the socialist Francois Hollande, the left-candidate of Front de Gauche Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the anti-capitalistic Philippe Poutou and the green candidate Eva Joly wants to give same marriage rights for all couples. The centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, agrees with them concerning equal parent rights for everyone. The other candidates say they only agree to give same-sex couples the right to a civil union which would be comparable to the marriage. That is still discriminatory towards LGBT people.

With the eleven other questions the candidates continue to draw the difference between the left- and right-wing parties. One question concerned the blood donation. In France, if a man has had once a sexual intercourse with an other man it is enough for lifetime ban on blood donation. This to prevent the risk of HIV contamination. The green candidate Eva Joly and anti-capitalistic candidate Philippe Poutou are both saying that the selection should not be based on prejudice, but on real medical facts. Nicolas Sarkozy talks about only refusing it to people who have had sex in less that a year. Marine Le Pen expresses herself all against. Once again, refusing blood donation from gay people because of the “risk factor” reinforces a negative image of gay people assimilated to sickness.

The conclusion of these twelve question is that the difference between left and right is more than ever accurate when talking about minorities issues. Only the left-wing leader of Le Front de Gauche: Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the green leader of Europe Ecologie : Eva Joly answered positively on 11 out of the 12 questions. The Green party represented by Eva Joly is already, since 2001, the first political party to have claimed the recognition of LGBT parents/families and equal rights with different sex families. Already then they also suggested the right for adoption for same-sex couples. In contrast to them, Marine Le Pen answered negatively to all questions except one, which concerns assistance to young people victim of homophobic attacks.

For the french people, who takes the gay issues into account for the elections, have suddenly narrowed their choice. Even though some of the right-wing candidates promises changes, it is not one of their main issues. Nicolas Sarkozy, when elected in 2007, promised to give more financial rights to gay couples, nothing ever happened.

With only a couple of days left before the first round of the French presidential election, the polls estimates the socialist Francois Hollande and the right-wing leader Nicolas Sarkozy winners. The first one suggests, in addition to the equal rights, a ministry of women’s right conducted by a women. This in order to reduce the gaps between men and women in the society.

Which is not so much of a surprise. What is surprising, on the other hand, is the great popularity of Marine Le Pen, who is estimated to have around 15%. She is representing the extreme right-wing party: Le Front National. This party collects the people’s fear and then distributes a message of hate and discrimination. What is frightening is the normalization process that goes along the fact that this party is fighting for the third place at the elections. More and more people identifies to what the party represents and says. More and more people therefore convey this message of hatred.

This years campaign feels like it only started three weeks ago. And even since then, there haven’t occurred any debates (that because the top runners wanted to wait for the second round). When it concerns social issues it seems like it is always the same. The left-wing parties puts the focus on these issues, while the right-wing parties knows their existence but does not put a priority on solving them.

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Dry mouth?

Today (4/20/12), Anders Behring Breivik brought survivors and victim’s relatives watching his testimony to anguished tears. He was describing, in calm deliberate tones, the details of his 90-minute shooting spree on Utoya Island last July 22. He explained his detachment with “These are gruesome acts, barbaric acts,” he said. “If I had tried to use a more normal language I don’t think I would have been able to talk about it at all.”

Breivik spoke calmly about the shooting rampage, beginning when he took a small ferry to Utoya Island. He was disguised as a policeman, carrying a rifle and a handgun and drinking water, because he knew he would get a dry throat from the stress of killing people.

Breivik’s first two victims were Monica Boesei, a camp organizer, and off-duty police officer Trond Berntsen, a security guard. “My whole body tried to revolt when I took the weapon in my hand. There were 100 voices in my head saying ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’” Breivik said.

But he did. He shot Berntsen first, then Boesei as she tried run away. As they lay on the ground, he shot them both twice in the head.

The first shot was “extremely difficult,” he declared, saying he then entered a “fight-and-flight” mode that allowed him to continue the operation. He said he couldn’t remember large chunks of the time he spent on the island before surrendering to police commandos. Still, he recalled some of the shootings in great detail, including inside a cafe where he mowed down young victims as they pleaded for their lives.

On the shoreline

Some teenagers were frozen in panic, unable to move even when he ran out of ammunition. He changed clips. They didn’t move. He shot them in the head. Others pretended to be dead. He said he shot them, too.

Breivik continued around the island, luring youth from hiding places by telling them he was a police officer who was there to protect them. When they came out, he killed them.

One girl, who was on her cell phone for part of the massacre, crawled under the dead bodies of her friends to escape his notice. Others managed to get into the water, where they swam for the lakeshore. People at the camps around the shore went out in their boats, despite the continued sounds of gunfire, to rescue children in the water.

Inspirations, Real and Unreal

World of Warcraft

One thing that is becoming appallingly clear is the disconnect between this person and reality. He told the court today that in addition to playing World of Warcraft as a cover for his more serious gaming-based “training”, he played the games Modern Warfare and Call of Duty to train in the use of his weapons (although he did belong to an Oslo shooting club). Shooting someone twice in the head is called a double-tap, which is encouraged in video wargames, and was popularized in the movie Zombieland.

Zombieland

In describing his actions on the island, he said he did not anticipate his victims’ reactions. “Some of them are completely paralyzed. They cannot run. They stand totally still. This is something they never show on TV,” Breivik said. “It was very strange.”

Earlier in the day, Breivik said he took to the Internet to learn how to carry out his bombing-and-shooting rampage, studying attacks by al-Qaida, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Breivik also said he had read more than 600 bomb-making guides.

He called the Islamist al-Qaida “the most successful revolutionary movement in the world” and said it should serve as an inspiration to far-right militants, even though their goals are different. “I have studied each one of their actions, what they have done wrong, what they have done right,” Breivik said of al-Qaida. “We want to create a European version of al-Qaida.”

Breivik said too many Norwegian men were “feminized, cooking food and showing emotions.” In some of his writings, Breivik had condemned his “super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminizing me to a certain degree.”

Obviously, not enough.

Related articles

• Breivik shocks court with massacre description (cbsnews.com)
• Anders Breivik studied ‘each’ al-Qaida attack before Norwegian massacre (thestar.com)
• Breivik studied the Oklahoma City bombing before rampage (newsok.com)

George Zimmerman

Circuit Court Judge Kenneth Lester has set bail for George Zimmerman at $150,000. Conditions of his release are that he cannot have any firearms, drink alcohol or use drugs. He must observe a curfew and wear an electronic monitoring device. He may be allowed to leave Florida.

He will not be released immediately, as details need to be worked out between the attorneys and law enforcement, both in Florida and wherever he intends to hide until his trial.

He apologized to Trayvon Martin’s parents in the courtroom, telling them he had not known Trayvon was unarmed.

Combat Medic Memorial at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX

Imagine this: you, as either a civilian or serviceperson, are severely wounded. The soldier/sailor who reaches you first has no hands-on training in dealing with the type of trauma you have suffered. Faced with having to amputate your shattered limb to save your life, with arterial blood spurting into his face, he throws up instead of properly applying a tourniquet and doing a field amputation. You die.

That is the scenario that PETA and a misguided congressman will make real if their efforts to eliminate combat medical training that uses live anesthetized goats and pigs succeeds.

U.S. Coast Guard Seal

The Coast Guard is defending the practice after PETA released a video on Wednesday of a goat’s legs being removed with tree trimmers during what it claimed was training for Coast Guard personnel. PETA has called on the Pentagon to stop the practice in all branches of the military.

Medic treating child casualty

Lt. Cmdr. Jamie C. Frederick, spokesman for the Atlantic Area of the U.S. Coast Guard, did confirm that live anesthetized goats have been used in Coast Guard training to treat combat wounds. “Animals used in trauma training are supported and monitored by well-trained, experienced veterinary staff to ensure that appropriate anesthesia and analgesia prevent them from experiencing pain or distress,” Frederick wrote in his e-mail. In the video, the goat is obviously anesthetized while its legs are cut. Later it starts coming out of it, and one of the men calls for another “bump” of anesthesia.

“Effective combat trauma training and treatment results in lowering the fatality rate of U.S. troops deployed in combat situations,” Frederick wrote. He said the training has also proved invaluable in noncombat situations, such as when Coast Guard members were the first to respond to Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.

Other branches of the military use similar training on goats and pigs and have defended it as a way to replicate wartime injuries and prepare medics and front-line troops for treating catastrophic injuries in the field of battle.

Training with a simulator

PETA and other animal rights groups, as well as some medical professionals, say the practice is cruel and unnecessary. They promote the use of human simulation models over animals. The group also asks U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate “apparent serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act.”

US Rep. Bob Filner

U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, a California Democrat, has introduced legislation that would phase out such use of animals by the military. He said he’s faced fierce opposition from the Department of Defense. “With these animals, they can break their limbs, or they want to simulate broken bones or a gunshot wound, and it’s not clear if they’re anesthetized or not,” he said. “You’re torturing animals when you don’t have to.”

Opinion

Okay, so based on the opening paragraph, it’s fairly easy to figure out my opinion on this latest PETA campaign. Rep. Bob Filner is so obviously ignorant I’m not going to waste time on him.

Simulation dummies aren’t going to provide anything like the watery bowels terror of being faced with someone bleeding out under your hands. Cadavers aren’t going to be a substitute for experiencing the resistance of living tissue to being manipulated.

Someone on the comment stream suggested death row inmates… not going to dignify that one.

What this boils down to is a knee-jerk reaction to one of life’s uncomfortable realities, akin to the reaction of meat-eating people to meeting a veal-calf face-to-face. How many of us have blithely watched the forensic shows on TV use pig carcasses to test out theories? Better yet, “Myth Busters”? Ever seen the show testing airplane windshields? They shot frozen chickens out of a cannon!

We make the assumption that those animals were humanely killed for our use. Ever seen a mass chicken slaughtering operation?

So the military has been using live animals. We assume the animals suffer, even though we are told and shown that they are anesthetized during the training procedure. We are horrified by the sight of an animal’s leg being cut off with tree trimmers. We vaguely imagine the animal’s life afterwards, crippled… which is a crock. You can bet that at the end of the training session the attending veterinarian puts the animal down, before it ever regains consciousness.

No, it’s not pretty. But it is neither cruel nor unnecessary.

These training sessions are not restricted to medics. They include frontline grunts who’ve had no medical training, but may have to care for the guy next to them when the IED goes off.

If these men and women aren’t trained on a living, breathing, bleeding victim, they’re going to freak in the field. There’s going to be that moment of panic, that temporary loss of everything they learned in the simulations, which could mean the difference between leaving the scene in a medivac chopper or a body bag for their buddy.

Comforting Hands

Yes, the actual techniques can be learned “clean”, but that bloody experience with the goat is just as important. Why do you think that warriors speak of a youngster being “blooded” in their first battle?

If you want to end the need for the training, end the wars.

However, in the interest of fairness, here is the PETA video. Please note that the whistleblower, while asserting that the goats were shot and hacked apart later in the day, curiously doesn’t supply film to back that up.

Related articles

• Removing Goat’s Legs For Training? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Coast Guard Defends Using Live Animals in Training (abcnews.go.com)
• PETA Kills Almost Every Animal It Gets (joemygod.blogspot.com)

This is what happens when those who seek power and influence without conscience engage in a co-ordinated campaign of propaganda designed to dehumanize others, create fear, foster hate. This is the consequence of making people see entities instead of people, entities like Muslims, illegals, the government, libtards, Jews, the New World Order. This is the price of politics taken to the extreme. Seventeen years ago, the haters and doom-sayers and conspiracy theorists were considered to be living on the fringe of society. Today, they are running for office and publicly supporting those running for office. In 1995, there were 850 militia groups. In 2008, there were 150. Today, there are over 1,200. The rhetoric aimed at Democrats feeds their recruitment, as does the facts about the economy and the way those facts are distorted.

There were 168 human beings crushed to death seventeen years ago today, 168 innocent men, women and children who never harmed another person, dying in great pain and fear.

We should have learned from that day. We didn’t.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Park, the Field of Empty Chairs