On June 1, For Greater Glory is being released in the theaters. Since no one, except maybe a few privileged critics, have seen the film so far, it is impossible to tell how closely it follows the facts of the Mexican Cristero War of 1926 to 1929. But, it’s about a popular uprising to protect the Mother Church from a viciously anti-church government, so it must be wonderful and the Church must praise it and recommend it and make fools of themselves.

Yes, full-blown, certified fools of themselves. If this movie, which stars Andy Garcia, is in any way accurate, it is about the personal ambitions of one man, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, an anti-clerical Mason who was offered a great deal of money (twice the normal army general’s salary) by a pro-church group to put together an army and who saw that army as a ticket to the Presidency.

A little background here. Mexico’s had a few too many revolutions to keep them all straight, especially since the United States’ history curriculums pretend we occupy this continent alone….

The Mexican Constitution is neither ambiguous nor namby-pamby about separation of church and state. It is absolute for a reason. The Catholic Church has a long and dishonorable history of running nations. In the twentieth century, they have been less obvious about it, but the Church still inserts its influence into secular legislatures and change has been slow in most of the so-called Catholic countries. Mexico was the first Catholic country to tell them to butt out.

Article 24 states that: “Every man shall be free to choose and profess any religious belief as long as it is lawful and it cannot be punished under criminal law. The Congress shall not be authorized to enact laws either establishing or prohibiting a particular religion. Religious ceremonies of public nature shall be ordinarily performed at the temples. Those performed outdoors shall be regulated under the law

Article 3 state: “I. According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. II. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice.” Article 27 states: “All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage just the necessary assets to achieve their objectives.” Article 130 state: The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law.” Churches must be registered and there are restrictions on priests and ministers holding office, participating in political campaigns or engaging in political activity. There are several specific regulations governing the actions of churches and clergy.

From the time the Constitution was adopted in 1917, through today, the strictness with which the state enforces the restrictions on the church have fluctuated. In 1926, the Church was very upset because the former President, Plutarco Elias Calles (who is being played in the movie by Ruben Blades) was an atheist and very anti-clerical.

General Enrique Gorostieta

Some, particularly the Church, call the Cristero War, or the Cristiado as it is also called, a war for religious freedom. Others call it a war to reassert the Church’s power over the state. American Catholic leadership is touting the movie as a glorious story of the battle for religious liberty. Gorostieta saw the Cristiado as a ticket to wealth and power. Gorostieta did not share the view of the leaders of the Cristiado who sought domination of the country by the Church, but wanted the Constitution restored to its 1837 Juarezian roots in which the government exercised a policy of non-interference and toleration for all religions, with a complementary policy of non-interference in the state by religions. He believed he could turn his militia of Jalisco farmers into a professional fighting force equal to the regular army. His dreams ended with a negotiated settlement and an ambush in which he was killed at the age of forty.

The American Catholic hierarchy is advocating a movie about a revolution to establish a state religion, to force one church’s doctrine on an entire nation. My grandmother came here to escape a Catholic nation that would not permit her to divorce the husband that abandoned her. My mother’s German Catholic ancestors came here in 1780 to escape a Lutheran government. The Catholic Church is recommending a movie that remind us just what our First Amendment means – the freedom from the union of church and state that brought so many of our ancestors here.

In Latin America the Catholic Church is losing ground fast. Upwards of 30% of the inhabitants of South and Central America have left the Church, either espousing no religion or joining evangelical Protestant churches. One of the big political and religious issues is birth control, which modern, educated people see not just as a right, but as a necessity for transitioning out of poverty and into a middle-class-driven economy.

I think it will probably be a very good movie. Instead of a Welsh man and woman playing a Spanish father and daughter as Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones did in Zorro, this movie stars Hispanics. Ruben Blades is Panamanian, but that’s getting nick-picky compared to how Hollywood usually casts films. He’s a hell of an actor, as is Garcia. But, I’m not betting on its historical accuracy. It’s a two-hour movie covering a three-year war and the stills are pretty heavy on the romance of Gorostieta and his wife. Movies about wars tend to go very light on the boring politics behind the wars, and the Cristiado was driven by politics not just by religious fervor. That’s the part no movie wants to explain – that religion is used and abused by politicians to recruit cannon fodder. That’s the downside of movies like this. If Lawrence of Arabia had spent more time on the politics and less time on Peter O’Toole’s handsome face, we might have understood the Middle East better. If Michael Collins had explored the reasons Collins negotiated away Ulster, we might have been less eager to send money to the IRA. Movies are very powerful tools for propaganda, and For Greater Glory could as easily backfire against the Catholic Church as it could support the outrageous claim that the Obama administration is “waging war on religion” by requiring health insurance to cover prescription drugs that prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Throwing kudos at a film before you know what’s in it or how people will react to it is incredibly foolish.

Related articles

• Cardinal Dolan Accuses Obama Of “Strangling” Catholic Church (lezgetreal.com)
• Viva Cristo Rey! (patheos.com)
• Cristero War film gets a release date (orthosphere.org)

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)

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.

Related articles

• Quick! Guess How Many Jobs Were Created Per Month During The Bush Administration… (jhaines6.wordpress.com)

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)

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)

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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• Rush Limbaugh Accuses Obama Of Leading War On Marriage (lezgetreal.com)
• There Is No Such Thing As “Traditional Marriage” (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Five myths about gay marriage (topix.net)
• Traditional marriage and families debunked (queeringthechurch.com)

"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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• North Carolina Amendment One (aka The Marriage Amendment)(babyloniusjournal.wordpress.com)

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• Amendment One Reactions (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• NC Amendment One Marriage Poll (joemygod.blogspot.com)
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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.

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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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.

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?

Related articles

• Japan urges Israel to show restraint on Iran(timesofisrael.com)

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• Ehud Olmert, Former Israel Prime Minister, Against Iran Strike(theuglytruth.wordpress.com)

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• Iran: Israeli Nukes Greatest Threat to Peace (abcnews.go.com)
• Manthorpe: Israel’s security bosses deride PM Netanyahu on Iran (vancouversun.com)
• Iran might sign NPT protocol for snap inspections (timesofisrael.com)
• Israeli intel ex-chief: Netanyahu’s policy on Iran misleading, messianic (EndtheLie.com)

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. 

Related articles

• Take Action: No Budget, No Pay(allthingsreform.org)

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• Pennsylvania GOP Senate Candidate Falsely Claims Obama ‘Gave Himself The Power To Spend At Will’ (thinkprogress.org)
• Lawmakers Gear Up for Budget Battle (myfoxny.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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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)

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

Ted Nugent

One would have thought that after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords the Republican Party would have wanted to distance itself from those who talk violent trash about Democrats. Nope. Didn’t happen. And at the National Rifle Association convention this weekend, the Romney campaign welcomed the endorsement of bat-shit crazy rocker Ted Nugent. I’ll let Nugent speak for himself, just as he did at the convention:

            “Your goal should be to get a couple of thousand people per person who’s here to vote for Mitt Romney in November. If you don’t know that our government is wiping its ass with the Constitution, you’re living under a rock some place. And that there’s a dead soldier, an airman, a Marine, a seaman, a hero of the military that just got his legs blown off for the U.S. Constitution, and we got a president and an attorney general who doesn’t even like the Constitution. We got four Supreme Court justices who don’t believe in the Constitution. Four Supreme Court justices signed their name to a declaration that Americans have no fundamental rights to self defense. That sounds like a stoned hippy! That doesn’t sound like a Supreme Court anything. It sounds like a supremely intellectually vacuous punk. And if you want more of those kinds of evil, anti-American people in the Supreme Court then don’t get involved and let Obama take office again. Because I’ll tell you this right now, 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?” Nugent warned that unless we remove Obama’s “vile, evil, America-hating administration….we’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year.” 

Nugent endorsed Mitt Romney “after a long heart & soul conversation with [him]…I concluded this goodman will properly represent we the people…” Romney’s son Tagg praised the endorsement, tweeting “How cool is that?! He joins Kid Rock as great Detroit musicians on Team Mitt!”

Um, “great musicians”? We won’t even debate that one.

There is some kind of mental disconnect between the Republican Party and the definition of speech that incites violence. They seem to think that talking about “second amendment remedies” and “crosshairs” and “don’t retreat, reload” and “chop their heads off” don’t constitution incitement to violence any more than the years of calling abortion doctors “baby killers” led to the murders of doctors and clinic personnel. Bill O’Reilly claimed no responsibility whatsoever for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who O’Reilly had called “Killer Tiller” for years. When someone acts on these wildly irresponsible words, Republicans and right wing media personalities hide behind the first amendment, insist that words don’t kill. But when a Muslim cleric calls for the murder of Americans, it’s a whole other story. Then, words are incitement, words kill, crimes are being committed.

Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to cover the fine line the right wing draws between their violent language and the violent language of a terrorist in another country.

Thursday is the anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah office building in Oklahoma City. It’s a shame that the Romney camp cannot see the connection between people advocating violence against the Democratic Party and our government as Ted Nugent did and the deaths of 168 men, women and children.

Related articles

• Ted Nugent on Democrats: ‘Chop their heads off in November’ (rawstory.com)
• Ted Nugent: Obama ‘Vile’ And ‘Evil,’ Voters Should ‘Chop [Democrat's] Heads Off In November.’ (mediaite.com)
• Ted Nugent Stumps For Romney, Says Obama Admin ‘Wiping Ass With Constitution’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ted Nugent to NRA: “Chop their heads off” (seattlepi.com)
• Ted Nugent: ‘If Obama Becomes President, I’ll Either Be Dead or in Jail’ (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Ted Nugent Endorses Mitt Romney Only After Gun Pledge (chicagoist.com)
• Ted Nugent trashes Massachusetts, says he endorsed Mitt Romney after getting gun pledge (dailykos.com)

Ganja Granny

As I sit here in Vermont, trying to figure out month to month how I’m going to pay the bills on my disability, sweet little old Darlene Mayes (73) of Oklahoma has it all figured out: become a marijuana distributor. She has been dubbed the “Ganja Granny”.

Last week police raided her home, finding 4 pounds of marijuana and $276,000 in bundled cash. Mayes told the police the cash was part of her retirement fund. Fortunately, neither she nor her son Jerry, who was also arrested, decided to shoot it out with the illegal semi-automatic pistol or the revolver she also had stashed.

Close up of high-quality bud

Investigators believe her pot-dealing network spanned four states: from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri. She utilized a network of dealers, including son Jerry, to supply up to 40% of the marijuana in that area.

Law enforcement expert Brad Garrett said, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone this age would be actively involved in marijuana distribution because there’s just too much money to be made. If they keep a low profile, they don’t talk to many people, and they don’t get greedy, they can go on for years.”

Now I know what I’m doing wrong…

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Joe Muto, The Fox Mole

He has outed himself as Joe Muto, a former associate producer on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show. On Tuesday, he started posting video, photos and comments about his workplace on Facebook and Twitter. He was discovered and fired within 36 hours, because he made no real effort to hide where the posts were coming from. Gawker dubbed Muto “The Fox Mole” and Muto has some vague plans about going public with what he knows about Fox. Maybe a book deal? Maybe a Fox exposé blog? No one knows what Muto is planning.

What did Muto expose? Well, it seems that Mitt Romney can pronounce the word “dressage” properly and in Muto’s view that is somehow indicative of what a pampered puppy Romney is. Sorry, I can pronounce “dressage” and so can anyone who has ever watched an equestrian competition during the Olympics or any number of television movies or nighttime soap operas about very rich people.  He also posted pictures of an unacceptable “gap” in the walls of the bathroom stalls. Those were his two big news items from the inside.

What a wasted opportunity.

If Muto really wanted the world to know what goes on at Fox News, the smart way would have been to take a lot of secret video and photos over several months and store them off-site. Then, when there are enough videos and photos to show patterns of behavior and corporate policy, put them on the web as a whole picture of what Fox News is.

Muto’s little exposé raises a couple of questions. It has been demonstrated that conservatives practice “low effort” thinking. What Muto did and didn’t do seems to indicate an inability to carry an idea through to its best results. Do those in power purposefully choose “low effort” thinkers as their employees? Is it a protective device they use to make sure they never have anyone around them capable of betraying them?

Muto can expect to have the full power of Fox’s lawyers descending on him if he tries to take anything more into the public arena. He had a great idea and he totally blew it.

Related articles

• Fox News Responds To Gawker Mole: ‘Joe Muto Is Fired Effective April 12′ (mediaite.com)
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• Gawker’s Fox News Mole Reveals Himself As Associate Producer, Suspended With Pay (mediaite.com)
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Our state wide unemployment rate is 4.9%, the fourth lowest in the nation. North and South Dakota, which hold the #1 and #3 positions have heavy energy employment and Nebraska which is #2 is a national anomaly, with a diverse economic base.

Our median income consistently ranks just above the national median, though, don’t try to tell that to Vermonters. We consider ourselves grossly underpaid.

Vermont is ranked one of the best states for public education, even though we still have teachers’ unions that go out on strike.

Vermont is ranked the best state in America for small business startups, even though we have some of the toughest environmental laws and business regulations in America and one of the highest state tax rates.

Vermont’s state bureaucracy is a mess, but that’s not our fault.  The entire state operational complex was destroyed by Tropical Storm Irene and we’re still trying to sort out where we’re doing state business. 

Vermont had the lowest foreclosure rate in America during the mortgage crisis. We did not have a building boom or a rush to get sub-prime mortgages or an unusual increase in housing prices. Somehow, we didn’t end up with a lot of people who thought they should be able to double the value of their house in less than five years. We also tend to keep what we have instead of building new. During the course of the housing market crisis, from 2008 to 2012, the average price of a home in Vermont only fell $16,000.

We still have small town downtowns. I lived for a decade in Georgia, and because I don’t like the boredom of interstate highways, I traveled the state highways. It’s depressing. Town after town has lost its downtown to an interstate off-ramp shopping center – chain restaurants and more Walmarts than any state should need.

We are leading the country in health insurance reform and have a Medicaid system that is better than anyone else’s. We need it because incomes are not spectacular in Vermont. Too many of us earn around $8 an hour in places that don’t allow full-time work. We also have an innovative system for caring for our elderly called Choices for Care that supports keeping the elderly at home instead of institutionalizing them in nursing homes.

We have had a major problem in recent years with drug dealers coming in from out-of-state because they consider us hick pushovers.

We are the only state in the union without a balanced budget amendment. We still try to balance the budget, but we don’t go ballistic if we don’t make it in any particular year. We just regroup the next year.

Prices are very high in Vermont, partly because we don’t have wall-to-wall big box stores, which get huge discounts from manufacturers because of the volume they purchase, and partly because of the distances for goods to reach us. Our prices are very dependent on the price of diesel fuel. We have around 200 miles of interstate highway which enter our state from New Hampshire at two point, none of which are in the southern half of the state. Interstate is not the most efficient way to get from here to there in Vermont.

Our biggest export, for at least the past 40 years, is our young adults. They leave for better paying jobs and more opportunity. Many have been coming home since the start of the recession.

It is a mixed bag of economic realities, and for most people seems depressing. National Republicans focus on the “bad” parts – regulations and taxes – while Democrats focus on the “good” – our state attempts at health insurance reform and social safety net. However, we have had a fairly stable time of it during the recession and recovery for a simple reason – we didn’t participate in the boom, so it was harder for us to go bust.

Let me repeat that: No boom, no bust. It’s that simple.

Right now, the Republicans are focusing on the slowness of the recovery. There are a lot of things Democrats can say about that, starting with the fact that American businesses are posting some of their highest profit margins in a century but not hiring or rehiring. That’s the wrong argument to make. Democrats should be defending the slowness of the recovery because booms just lead to busts.

We call them “bubbles” – the “tech bubble” and the “housing bubble.” They were great while they lasted, some people made a lot of money, and then the bubbles burst, the economy crashed and we ended up at least one step further back from where we started before the bubble. We can even look at the 1950s and 1960s and the explosion of American manufacturing as a bubble. We led the world in manufacturing, and people did very well during that time. Our middle class expanded as no other nation’s middle class ever had. We went from a 50% to 60% drop-out rate in my parents’ generation to a 30% rate for mine. College enrollment increased. And unions took advantage of the profits of their employers to negotiate wonderful contracts with cadillac health care and pay scales that are mind-boggling. Pittsburgh steel mills paid as much as $11 an hour to high school students who swept the floors part-time. Then, like any economic bubble, it collapsed.

That is the history of the American economy for more than a century, going back to the industrial revolution, to the railroad boom and the oil boom and so many other booms that didn’t create a permanent economic base, dozens of bubbles that burst. But, unlike the first part of that period, the last thirty years have not seen a viable replacement factor or an overall elevation of the economic realities of ordinary people.

A slow recovery gives us the opportunity to avoid another bubble, another boom cycle which will lead to another bust cycle. We need to re-invent our economy, find stability in it instead of chasing the next big thing that will create a few new billionaires and eventually a whole lot of unemployed workers.

The best thing we can do for our children’s future is creating a diverse, stable economy. We don’t need to jump on to the “next big thing,” even if the next big thing is clean energy. The “next big thing” has not done well for us as a nation. It has always shrunk back to an ordinary thing over time. That is the natural course of human innovation and development.

So, here’s Vermont, which is still making maple syrup, finely crafted furniture, and Franklin stoves, just as we did a hundred years ago. We have upgraded how we make the syrup and furniture and are making stoves for wood pellets, not just wood. We lost some computer chip makers because of 9-11 and its impact on small aircraft manufacturing, but replaced them with other manufacturers. We plod, we don’t go off the deep end over anything. That is how we have survived numerous recessions and how we survived this one.

It’s a lesson the nation could stand to learn. A slow recovery may be the best thing for this nation.

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Mitt and Ann Romney

There were a few images from the Clinton-Bush 1992 election that still stand out in memory. There was George H.W. not knowing what a grocery store scanner was. There was Bill knowing the price of a pound of hamburger and a gallon of milk. There was Barbara joking about her mother-in-law’s piano being washed out to sea during a nor’easter that damaged the family compound at Kennebunkport. There were dozens of California families weeping over their lost homes and possessions after raging brush fires. There was Bill talking about his mother, a working woman, her broken marriages, his father and stepfather. We didn’t have the terms 1% and 99% at that time, but the idea was there – Clinton was a 99%er who didn’t start making big money until after he left the Presidency and Bush was a 1% whose family had deep ties to the Saudi Royal Family and their oil.

Now, we do have those terms, and even though President Obama speaks of himself as a member of the 1% because of his income, it is understood that he was not always that way, that there was a working mother who left him to be raised by his grandparents, that she had two broken marriages, that she died too young partially because of the broken health insurance system in America, that he and his wife struggled with their student loan debt, that they know what the inside of a Target looks like and still shop there. He had a 99% life that became a 1% life through hard work and ambition. That’s the America dream, isn’t it? That’s what all of us hope for for ourselves and our children and grandchildren – a fair shot at the American dream.

And Mitt Romney? Well, that’s been a 1% life from the get-go. The Romneys haven’t really lived a 1% lifestyle all the time, not an ostentatious one at least. They had a strong streak of normalcy to them, a tendency to pile into a car for vacation instead of taking a jet, but it was never a matter of necessity, only of choice. And therein lies the difference. Mitt has chosen to stash his millions away in off-shore accounts. He has chosen to pursue the Presidency with the air of someone who believes he is just as entitled to it as he was to his trust fund. Mitt likes to talk about how he was successful, and isn’t that a good thing, but he had a massive jump start on that success, just the way the Bushes have.

The campaign to remove Barack Obama from the White House, in Mitt Romney’s hands, will come down to one issue – the economy. The Republicans still haven’t figured out why Bush 41 lost, so they can’t see how Romney will as well. For the past thirty-two years, since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, the American middle class has been paying dearly for the Republican “trickle-down, supply-side economics.” The middle class has shrunk, our incomes have shrunk, our poverty levels have increased. We have been riding a roller coaster of booms and busts, each bust deeper than the one before it.

And since 1980, women have favored Democratic candidates over Republicans in national elections. The 12% gap that favored Obama over McCain with women has grown to 18% favoring Obama over Romney. That’s a steep hill to climb and Romeny isn’t getting any help from his party on this one.

That “Ryan budget” that Romney likes so much? Well, it includes a return to block granting of Federal money for Federal programs. The last time we did that was under Reagan and the cost was day care. Because day care was not a mandated Federal program in the same way welfare and Medicaid was, it could be cut from the block grant money. That drove more women back onto welfare than any other factor in the Reagan years. For states, it was cheaper to keep a family on welfare than subsidize day care for four kids. The Republicans favor a return to the economic policies of Reagan and the Bushes, policies that sent millions of women into retail and hospitality jobs which paid at or just above minimum wage, were not full-time employment and had no health insurance. While the Republicans call Obama the “food stamp president” women know that it was the Bush administration that sent so many of us to Medicaid for health care for our children while we went without.

Republican strategists are saying that all Romney has to do is keeping talking about the economy and highlighting his wife to win over women voters. Fat chance. We’re not that stupid, guys. Look at the Forbes 400 list of billionaires. Not a lot of women on it, are there? Thirty-six to be exact, and only 9 of them are readily identifiable as not inheriting their money. Only 9% of America’s top 400 billionaires are women. Not exactly economic equality, is it? Those are the people Republican economic policies favor – the misnamed “job creators” who didn’t get where they are by creating decent paying jobs with good benefits. They got where they are by outsourcing our jobs, cutting domestic workforces to the bone and using every possible legal means to deny their employees health insurance.

In traditional macho-male societies, women fall into two categories – madonnas and whores. That has been the message this year from Republicans, from Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman who calls single motherhood “child abuse” to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” to all those men who claim that all women want is to kill their babies and have unlimited sex, so they need to cut off their drug dealers and defund Planned Parenthood. The wives of the Republican front runners aren’t helping that image. Karen Santorum is dedicated mother, but she’s also a nurse and a lawyer who has spent the past twenty years having babies and home schooling them. Ann Romney is a very nice lady who has never had to work and never had to put off paying one bill to pay another. They aren’t exactly connecting with working class American women. When Ann Romney talks about women’s issues, she says things like this: “Do you know what women care about? Women care about jobs. They’re angry and they’re furious about the entitlement debt that we’re leaving for our children.” Really? Sorry, Ann, but for too many of us, that “entitlement debt” – the part of the national debt that is caused by “entitlement” programs – that’s what’s feeding our kids and letting them go to the doctor, and supporting our elderly parents or disabled relatives so we don’t have to. How about the part of the debt caused by two unfunded wars that killed our husbands, fathers and sons, wives, mothers and daughters, or sent them home crippled and traumatized? How about the part caused by bailing out your husband’s fellow travelers, those Wall Street wizards who turned our mortgages into “financial instruments” and forced them into foreclosure? Frankly, my dear, most of us have not been indoctrinated by Fox News. We know better than to blame Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security for our national debt or our jobs crisis.

At this point, the only hope the Republican Party has of convincing women that they should vote Republican is not to tailor the message or send “Mrs. 1%” out on the campaign trail. The Party leadership needs to rein in the extremists, reverse the laws they have passed that hurt women, get misogynists like Grothman and Limbaugh to shut up, fund the largest provider of health care services for women in America and stop lying about it, admit that criminalizing abortions does not end abortions, get real and get honest about the false promise of trickle down economics, and put Fox News on notice that you will not support any more propaganda. In short, stop hurting us, insulting us and stop lying to us.

Yeah, and that will happen when the sun rises in the west.

Related articles

• Romney in fight to get female vote (timesleader.com)
• Challenges facing Romney in wooing female voters (newsday.com)

My street was developed about 100 years ago. The houses are smallish by Victorian standards, only 4 to 5 bedrooms. Many have been converted and have two two-bedroom apartments in them. The southern side of the street has double lots. We have a small public playground on one corner and are walkable distance from “amenities” like restaurants, churches, the public library and the biggest farmers’ market in the state. You can buy any house on the street for around $150,000.

That’s two houses on my street for the same amount that Sean Hannity just paid for the painting shown above, which is titled “One Nation Under Socialism” by Jon McNaughton.

McNaughton’s paintings are really hot property with well-heeled Republicans these days. The one at the end of this piece is a re-imagining of a 1775 portrait of French Queen Marie Antoinette by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty and is titled “Choosing The Next Vacation.” Many people, seeing the Michelle Obama painting accused McNaughton of playing on the theme of an “uppity Negro” in rendering the First Lady as the infamous “Let them eat cake” Queen.

But, back to Hannity and the burning of the Constitution. Art critic Christopher Knight completely avoided the political issues when he called it a bad painting. In his view, if the theme has to be explained to the viewers, it’s a bad painting. In this case, Knight is dead right. What has burning the Constitution got to do with socialism?

McNaughton explained on his website that there has never been a recorded example of socialism leading to the “betterment of the human condition or improved the liberty of the people.” Three historical examples come to mind immediately – any tribal people like Native Americans before the reservations, the kibbutzes of Israel and the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Then, there are the modern examples – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Canada, Australia. Those and many more are “socialized” nations which have or had strong social safety nets and nationalized health care systems. That still doesn’t explain why he depicted President Obama burning the Constitution to make his point about socialism.

It really doesn’t matter to Sean Hannity. The painting is worth the price of two houses to him because it reinforces his personal smear campaign of the President. Even when other commentators on his own network called him out on the lies about the Philadelphia New Black Panthers, Hannity wouldn’t back down. He continues to claim that the President was elected through voter fraud and voter intimidation. He insists that “known communists” form a shadow cabinet at the White House, men like Bill Ayers whose only contact with the President was membership on the same education committee in Chicago. But Hannity knows best. He “knows” this president’s mind and “knows” that Barack Obama is selling us down the drain to communism. If Fox lets Hannity get away with it, he could choose to display this painting on his show every night, drilling it in to his viewers’ heads that this president “hates America” and is working to destroy it.

This is a case of propaganda going around in a circle. McNaughton views the First Family the way he does because of people like Sean Hannity, so he creates art that reflects what they have told him, and then they use his art to further the propaganda. It does no good whatsoever to demand that conservatives provide proof for their accusations against the President. They can only quote the propagandists. That’s not proof. It doesn’t help to explain the facts to them. As Hendrik Van Loon wrote, “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” Sounds terribly elitist, but it is very true. So, Jon McNaughton will continue creating his libelous art and the Sean Hannitys of the country, people with enough money to throw away on pieces of schlock, will make McNaughton a very rich man.

Ain’t capitalism grand?

Related articles

• What Obama thinks of the Constitution – What we think of ObamaCare (thebusypost.wordpress.com)
• Ann Coulter: Liberals Use ‘Judicial Activism’ to ‘Invent Rights’ Like Gay Marriage and Abortion – VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• Tucker Carlson, Kirsten Powers And Hannity Clash Over Obama And Bill Ayers’ View Of Capitalism (mediaite.com)
• Sean Hannity Pimps an Exclusive Obama Tape and Jon Stewart Pimps an Exclusive Sean Hannity Tape [Video] (gawker.com)
• Artist paints bleak picture of Obama’s America (rt.com)
• Jon Stewart Says Sean Hannity Got the Wrong Tape (theatlanticwire.com)
• Hannity Tells President Obama To Give Spike Lee’s Money Back, Says It’s ‘The Right Thing To Do’ (mediaite.com)
• Sean Hannity shells out six figures to see Obama burn the Constitution (popwatch.ew.com)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are joined by their daughters, Sasha and Malia, and Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, Monday, April 13, 2009, as they wave from the South Portico of the White House to guests attending the White House Easter Egg Roll. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Reading about the President’s remarks at the White House Easter Prayer Breakfast Wednesday morning, I suddenly realized why right wing fanatics think he’s not Christian. Barack Obama is more Christian than they are.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, 6:5-14, Christ told his followers, “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Verily, I say unto you, They have their reward. But, thou, when thou prayest, enter into they closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. After this manner, therefore pray ye: Our Father, who art in Heaven….” You probably know the rest, with or without the Protestant addendum.

President Obama does not make a show of his faith. The First Family decided that their presence at a Sunday service in a Washington church would be disruptive to the congregation, a very Christian decision, to put others before themselves. The President prays daily. He just does it quietly, in the privacy of the family quarters, not in front of an audience. He does exactly what Christ told us to do. With the exception of The Lord’s Prayer, there are no formal prayers in the Gospels, no ceremonies, no rituals, no titles of bishops or cardinals or even priests. Christianity, in its beginning, was a faith of the people. Over time, the Roman Church wiped out all branches that practiced a simple faith of the people. The Protestant Reformation was supposed to restore that pure church. Instead, it has given us megachurches and televangelists and predictions about the future that verge on soothsaying.

During his remarks, the President spoke simply of how he draws strength from his faith, and how the life of Christ helps him put our lives and times in perspective. He said, “It was only because Jesus conquered his own anguish, conquered his fear, that we are able to celebrate the resurrection. It helps us provide an eternal perspective for whatever temporal challenges we face. It puts in perspective our small problems. It gives us courage. It gives us hope.”

Hope is what Easter is all about, isn’t it? The hope of eternal life, the hope of redemption. It has always been about hope, when it was the pagan festival of spring and when it was the Jewish festival of Passover. They are all bound together in a simple set of rituals celebrating renewal and life, and they frequently overlap on our modern calendars.

Those who trade in hate and fear have spread the lie that the President is a Muslim, from some anonymous woman at a McCain rally who called him an “Arab” to Rev. Franklin Graham who still has not recanted his lie that Muslims become Muslims through their father’s sperm. President Obama is a Christian by choice. Exposed to every manner of religious thought in the world, he chose to be baptized as a Christian as a adult. Admitting that would diminish those who spread the lies. They didn’t make the same choice in the same way.

Related articles

• Christian Historian Defends Obama (lezgetreal.com)
• Franklin Graham: Well, Obama Says He’s a Christian (lezgetreal.com)
• Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House (whitehouse.gov)
• Easter/passover Ramblings (ourpoetrycorner.wordpress.com)
• One in a Garden: An Easter Reflection (pnissila.wordpress.com)

Vote (Photo credit: Alan Cleaver)

The prediction had been that Wisconsin’s Republican Primary would draw out 35% of the state’s registered voters. The turnout fell far below the prediction.

With a total of 704,288 votes cast, the turnout was only 20.6%. A 35% turnout would have been 1,196,694 votes.

Worse news for the Republicans facing recall elections in May, exit polls showed that 11% of those who voted yesterday were Democrats and 30% were Independents. That means only 12.16% of Wisconsin’s registered voters identified themselves as Republicans and showed up for the Presidential primary.

Now, this could just mean that Wisconsin’s Republicans didn’t really care about the primary or it could mean that fewer Wisconsinites are now identifying themselves as Republicans. The recalled governor, lieutenant governor and three senators will need to get out more Republicans if they hope to retain their offices.

As for those Democrats, well, most of them voted for Santorum. That’s the fun of living in an open primary state. Poor Rick, he can thank 77,472 Democrats for his at least one of his nine delegates.

For a people who have lived that way all their lives, or even most of their lives, true freedom is scary. It can be downright terrifying to suddenly have a choice of where one can travel or who one can associate with or what job one can get or which of twenty candidates to vote for. It can also be terrifying to realize that everyone else the same freedom, including the freedom to somehow deny someone else his or her freedom.

That is what is happening in the countries of the Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. True freedom may be something to celebrate, but it can also be something to fear. Everyone else has the same freedom. What if a majority of them do not want everyone to be equal or free? What if that freedom extends to people who aren’t like us or who do something we don’t approve of? Too many decisions to make and no experience making decisions. It’s very scary.

When frightened, human beings retreat into the known and familiar, their comfort zones. They are easily persuaded that “the others” will rob them of their new freedoms and “the others” must be contained in some way. For the survivors of the Arab Spring, the comfort zone is Islam. It is ancient, known and highly structured. It is a replacement for the structure of a totalitarian regime, but one that appears to be outside the politics of mankind. It is God’s structure, so it must be beneficial.

America’s right wing is raising the alarms over the drift that Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have taken toward political parties that identify themselves as Islamist. They equate Islamism with the Taliban, Iran and terrorists, which is ironic since one of the most Islamic nations in the world is Saudi Arabia. They are also stuck in a trio of old concepts about the Middle East – pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism and the restoration of the medieval Caliphate – and they don’t understand what any of them really mean. They are contradictory at best and enemies at worst, and not supported by a majority of people in the region.

The rise of Islamist parties in the newly liberated Middle Eastern countries is not a reason to panic. When the thirteen colonies attained their freedom from England, the Continental Congress offered George Washington a crown. They wanted to make him our king. They were falling back on the safe, the familiar, because the other option was scary. The only model they had of an elected government was England’s parliament. Without a king, who would oversee the parliament, who would the prime minister report to, how would they have continuity as opposing parties traded the majority between themselves? When they finally worked out how to run a government without a king, they still clung to the familiar and safe – no rights for women and the continuation of slavery. We are still fighting for equality for all citizens of this nation, for full access to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, for the right to be individuals and not slaves to social conformity as defined by the dominating culture.

The nations of the Middle East and North Africa were created by outside forces. They penned in nomadic people, divided tribes, lumped together people who were historical enemies, ignored all the natural divisions of the region. At this time, no one is suggesting going back to the drawing board and remapping the entire region (though that would be a fabulous idea.) So, it is necessary, as the tribal and ethnic divisions of the region threaten to fracture the existing structures as they did in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, to create something to replace the “national” identity that was embodied in a single person like Moammar Qaddafi or a single party like the Baathists of Syria. Islam provides that unifying force, so long as the rights of non-Muslims are protected. The committee writing the new Tunisian constitution has chosen to do that.

The risk in this process comes more from our right wing and the right wing in Israel than from within these nations. There is a millennium of history here, and none of it assures the people of the Middle East that we are capable of honoring their freedom. From the Crusades to the invasion of Iraq, the West has proven repeatedly that we consider Muslims barbaric, inferior and in need of our guidance and supervision. If we can quiet those who insist that all Muslims are the enemies of non-Muslims, if we can calm the fears of the people of the region, they will be able to co-habit with the non-Muslims among them.

In the face of freedom and modernism, the people of the Arab Spring are seeking a security blanket, a way to feel comfortable with their new reality. For now, they will accept Islamism and its structure. These revolutions were begun by the younger generation and they will, over time, relax the structure of their nations. And, just as the United States has evolved from a land of privilege for the few, these nations will evolve into more secular governments and lives. We can only hope that it doesn’t take them over two hundred years to do so.

Related articles

• Tunisian Islamist Party Rejects Constitution Based In Sharia (lezgetreal.com)
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Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandment monument

Roy Moore was elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, but he was removed from office in 2004 by a special state court before he refused to obey a Federal court order to remove a very large Ten Commandments monument from in front of the state’s Judicial Building. He is running to regain his office, and won the Republican nomination on March 13. His Democratic opponent if Harry Lyon, but various interests in the Republican Partyare seeking to run an independent candidate against him. Moore claims that his enemies are the big business wing of the Republican Party “who has never been able to buy me or control me.”

Moore gained a lot of supporters with his “protection of religious freedom” position, and fighting him has never been done properly.

Above is a picture of the monument Moore erected. If you can’t read it, it says:

1. I am the Lord Thy God

2. Thou shalt have no other gods before me

3. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

4. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

5. Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it Holy

6. Honour thy father and thy mother

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery

8. Thou shalt not steal

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness

10. Thou shalt not covet

Are those your Ten Commandments? They are not mine. They are not even a complete rendering of Exodus 20:1-17.  That’s the underlying issue. Those who claim to be defending religious freedom, and those claim that America is a Christian nation, represent one form of Christianity, not all of them. That is the real issue. It is easy for them to claim to speak for Christianity. Very few people question that statement. After all, they also like to go the broad way – citing Judeo-Christian traditions and values. Ever known a Jewish Christian? At least they have dropped the Judeo-Christian-Muslim nonsense that was popular a few years ago. Now, they can be openly anti-Muslim as all good Christians should be.

Take those Ten Commandments. Moore’s supporters in 2004 toured with a mock-up of the monument on which the second commandment read “Thou shalt have no other god.” It may seem like semantics, but there is a vast difference between “Thou shalt have no other god,” “Thou shalt have no other gods above me,” and “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The first one is absolute. There are no other gods. The second and third, which are the older translations, allowed for the existence of other gods just as long as they were secondary to Jehovah. That was essential to the conversion of pagans in the early days of Christianity. They are an expression of tolerance for other faiths, so long as they are not placed above true Christianity. It is that translation that makes it possible for Christians in many cultures to incorporate the rituals of their old faiths into the new one, including ours. Those Puritans that Americans are supposed to idolize banned popular celebrations like Christmas, Easter and Halloween because they were overlaid upon pagan ceremonies and rituals. The Yule log, the holly and ivy, Easter eggs, everything about Halloween, those are all taken from the older rites. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” allows us to celebrate these holidays in the ways we traditional have.

In Catholicism, the commandments “I am the Lord thy God” and “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” are combined into the First Commandment, while “Thou shalt not covet” is divided into “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Catholicism and Protestantism not only have difference versions of The Lord’s Prayer, but they have different commandments. Which one should we adopt as part of our American government? There are multiple Catholic translations of the Bible, running the range from the most modern and colloquial to the older Latin one, and even more Protestant translations, from the beautiful King James version to modern ones that are almost unrecognizable in the liberties they take with the translations. And those are just the Christian translations. There are also Jewish and Muslim translations of the Bible that differ from the Christian one.

That is the real issue – which form of Christian are we supposed to be? If a government agency or elected official chooses one Bible or one form of Christianity and says that one represents our nation or a state, what about all the others who believe in the Bible, but not in that particular translation or interpretation?

When this country was founded, no one serious thought about freedom of religion in terms of Buddhists or Muslims or even Jews. What they were looking at was nearly 300 years of Christian-on-Christian war in Europe, wars that had already spilled over to North America in the French and Indian War. They were looking at the way the English had treated the French Canadian refugees from Nova Scotia and the way Catholics were treated in England and in the colonies where they had no legal rights, things that were going on during their lives. It was the taxes levied on the colonies to pay for that French and Indian War, which was part of wars over which faith would sit on which nation’s throne, that were the flashpoint that stated our Revolution.

The religious-freedom-fighters, or more accurately, the theocrats, keep asserting that this nation was founded on “Christian principles” and “Biblical principles.” But the truth is it was not founded on any principles that existed at the time. The Constitution was a wholly radical document. And the laws written after it were based on common principles, principles that existed in almost every culture on earth, not just in Christian nations or nations that followed the Christian Bibles.

Roy Moore should not be fought because he’s not liked by the corporations. He should be fought because he is demanding the power to choose one form of Christianity and say it is our official religion. His position is not just un-Constitutional, but a rejection of what our founding fathers believed. As Washington, Adams and the entire United States Senate affirmed in the Treaty of Tripoli, “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion….”

There is no single “Christian” religion. There are dozens of religions based on the life of Jesus Christ. We don’t need anyone deciding that just one of them is our national religion.

Related articles

• On The Agnostic’s View of the Ten(Twelve) Commandments (thetalmidrebbe.com)

The Gutenberg Bible

Valerie Tarico of AlterNet has written a wonderful piece analyzing what life would be like for wives if we lived in a strict Biblical society. It is worth the time to read it and learn what it says. The best arguments against blind ideology are based in exposing the flaws in the basis of that ideology. You will find the article at

http://www.alternet.org/sex/154721/captive_virgins,_polygamy,_sex_slaves:_what_marriage_would_look_like_if_we_actually_followed_the_bible?

One Last Time: Newt Gingrich, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni this week has come up with the ideal way to treat Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich – ignore him.

Bruni makes it clear that Newt is so far out of the running that it’s a waste of his supporters’ money for him to keep running. Somewhere in Georgia, second wife Marianne is having a giggle-fest. After all, didn’t Newt justify his affair with Callista by saying “Callista will take me to the White House”? Newt is polling lower than Ron Paul, and everyone agrees that Rep. Paul’s campaign is just playing to the same fringe devotees that have supported him in every other campaign he has been in. Paul uses campaigns to get his ideas out, not to seriously become president.

Today’s big news from the Gingrich campaign is how many people he just fired. The estimate is one-third of this staff has been let go. Beyond that, all the news from Newt has been his rants about something President Obama has said or done, his endless outrage and instances of being “appalled” by our President, his extreme warnings of what will happen if President Obama remains in office, you know, cats and dogs living together, streets running with the blood of upstanding, moral, faithful husbands…..

I know that the delightful Barney Frank said he never thought he had lived a good enough life to see Newt running for President, but isn’t Rick Santorum even better proof of a good life? No one ever invented a definition for “Gingrich” to protest his homophobia.

So, this is it. Last report on Newt. I agree with Mr. Bruni. The best thing the media can do is stop feeding Newt’s bottomless ego. Then, without the nourishment he craves more than a new wife, Newt will go away. Please, go away.

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"Karen" and her baby, just before she had to give him up. Photo undated.

It is common practice in totalitarian regimes to make dissidents disappear. People are arrested and no one ever knows what happens to them. It has happened millions of times just in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and is continuing today in repressive regimes like Syria. In Spain, under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the practice of “disappearance” took a horrific twist. When the security forces moved in on a family, killing them or arresting them and jailing them, only to kill them later, the youngest children were taken and adopted by couples loyal to the regime. Sometimes, pregnant dissidents were kept alive so they could give birth and then killed after the babies were adopted out. There has been an attempt since the late 1980s to identify those babies and connect them with any living family members.

But what if what you are trying to do is not repress political dissidence, but to repress an idea, create a myth?

The myth, which began in the 1940′s and extended into the 1980s, was that an entire country was infused with religiosity and middle class morality, and that every young woman was a virgin until marriage.

You need to go back before the Second World War to understand the dynamics. The nineteen century was the heyday of “middle class morality,” mostly because it saw the greatest increase in the existence of a middle class in Europe, America and the English colonies. As George Bernard Shaw frequently noted, the upper class couldn’t be bothered to have morals and the lower class couldn’t afford it. When it came to unmarried girls, the distinctions were most noticeable. If an aristocrat or daughter of an extremely wealthy family became pregnant out-of-wedlock, a private, illegal abortion could be arranged, or a very quick marriage conducted as in the case of Winston Churchill’s parents. In the lower class, a girl would give birth and either drop the baby off at an orphanage or keep it and arrange for it to be cared for by relatives or neighbors while she went off to work. If a lower class girl could afford it, she might arrange an illegal abortion. Only in the middle class was a tight control maintained over daughters. Should one of them get pregnant, she ended up being shoved out the door to fend for herself.

But the First World War started to change all that. The liberation of women after the war, during the Roaring Twenties, crept out of upper class and into the middle class. Adventurous girls discovered that sex could be fun. The Great Depression was an anomaly for society, cutting through all those class lines and turning the structure inside out. Then, the Second World War resulted in a mass loss of virginity. “I’m going to the front and may never come back,” has always been a good seduction line. But that led to an upsurge in unwanted pregnancies and single motherhood. During the war, the prime methods of dealing with those pregnancies was orphanages and illegal abortions. After the war, when society was resettling, when the middle class was exploding, a whole new direction needed to be taken.

The myth of the moral middle class was spread out to encompass the children of those working class immigrants of the 1920s. The loose morals of the lower class and the adventurousness of the 1920s were “forgotten” – the grandparents who engaged in a wife-swap, the ones who weren’t married to each other. The new parents of the post-war years lied about their own younger years and about their parents, they built the ideal society by building a myth. Then, they had to protect the myth.

So, when an unmarried girl or young woman became pregnant, if she was still living at home with her parents, they could arrange for her to “visit relatives” for a year. In New York City, the relatives always lived in Pennsylvania, preferably in the Poconos. The baby would be taken as soon as it was born and the girl sent home, with no evidence that she had been spoiled, except a very vague sadness about her. Most of these young mothers did not agree to give up their babies. If they were very resistant to giving up the baby, they would be told it had died during childbirth. Most never saw their baby, never held it, never even knew if it was a boy or girl. The records were sealed, if there were any.

The Catholic Church was very involved in this process for a simple reason. It had the bureaucracy to pull it off. It had orphanages that it had run for decades. It had nuns who were trained nurses and medical aides. It had the adoption services. Even those who were not Catholic knew they could send their errant daughters to the nuns. And it had a culture of secrecy, which protected the identities of both the mothers and the adoptive parents.

It wasn’t just happening in the United States. It also happened in Canada, Ireland and Australia, and those are just the ones that have come to light recently. It seems that the exposure of child abuse in the Catholic Church as peeled back another Church secret – the taking of babies. The countries we know about will only be a beginning. Just as it took time for countries to acknowledge the abuse of children by priests, it will take time for countries to face the traffic in babies that the Church engaged in.

There was an actress in the 1940s and 50s named Loretta Young. She was the epitome of a lady. She had a flawless reputation. She was the antithesis of wild Hollywood, even if she was married three times. In 1935, however, she was “very ill” and didn’t work for months. A couple of years later, she adopted a little girl. It was remarkable in that she was unmarried and single-parent adoptions were rare. Only after Loretta Young died did it become public that the baby girl she adopted was her natural child and the year she took off from work was spent in hiding having her baby. Fifteen years after the birth of Loretta Young’s daughter, Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman was driven out of America as morally unacceptable because she was married to one man and pregnant by another. Young hid her pregnancy because it would have destroyed her image and career. Bergman was persecuted for hers. They are very public faces of a societal flaw.

There are no records, obviously, of illegal abortions, and the records of these forced adoptions have been sealed for decades. They need to be acknowledged, not just for the sake of those who were denied their children or for the sake of those children, that they might have questions answered, but for society as a whole.

The practice of hiding unwed pregnancies and denying that illegal abortions existed protected the myth of a moral nation. But that myth has prevailed, even after so much has been attempted to dispel it and prove that women have sex and get pregnant without being married and can raise their own children if they choose. That myth is driving the Republican narrative of what this country was at some perfect time in our perfect past. It was expressed in a comment by a Rick Santorum supporter who claimed that in his time girls kept their legs together, and the comments of Wisconsin politicians about how the liberation of women has destroyed society. It is expressed by Santorum himself in his belief that the availability of birth control leads to immoral behavior. It is shown in all the laws trying to criminalize abortion piece by piece, inch by inch, because these people think that abortion didn’t exist before Roe v. Wade and will cease to exist if it is re-criminalized.

Dan Rather Reports is following these stories. A producer and crew from the show were in Canberra, Australia, when Parliament released its report on illegal and unethical adoptions in the 1940s through 1980s. It’s a good beginning. The stories need to be told. All the stories need to be told. The method by which the myth of the 1950s was sustained needs to be exposed to the light, needs to be used to refute the attempts to drive us back to those times. We need to hear these stories and those of women who went through illegal abortions in order to fight for our rights, rights we thought we had already won, the right to have and raise our children no matter what circumstances they are born in, the right to be an unwed mother without being cast out by society, the right to control our reproduction, the right to abort a pregnancy in its earliest stages if we feel we have no other viable option and to do so safely and confidentially.

We need to say loudly and clearly that the America they want to take us back to was a lie, and we have no intention of resurrecting the lie just to satisfy their warped sense of middle class morality.

Related articles

• Church Spent Decades Stealing or Coercing Babies from Unwed Mothers [Holy Crap] (jezebel.com)
• Catholic Nun Accused Of Abducting, Giving Away, Selling Children (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin’s Grothman Calls Unwed Motherhood Child Abuse (lezgetreal.com)
• Adopted or abducted? – Dan Rather – Yahoo News (richarddawkins.net)
• Your baby is dead: Mothers say stillborn babies were stolen from them (theprovince.com)

Ricardo Montalban

So, what is a “white Hispanic”? It seems to be a term most Americans can’t wrap their heads around, and no wonder. They have no clue what an Hispanic or Latino is to begin with.

Most of us think of race as comprising one of three groups – to use the colloquial terms, white, black and Asian. But within those three broad categories are dozens of, pardon the term, sub-species. Human beings are similar to any other animal on the planet. There are felines, and within that designation of feline, there are big cats, medium cats and small cats. And within those small cats there are American Shorthairs and Persians. Humans are the same way.

Native Americans are racial Asians, sub-species Amerind. There are even sub-species within those sub-species. But, for Latin Americans, that is the starting point.

Along came those Spanish conquistadors and their very small armies. They conquered Latin America, but never colonized it to the extent that the English, French and Germans colonized North America. The actual termination of colonial rule was not nearly as important as the absence of mass immigration. The United States and Canada attracted Europeans who were disenfranchised at home, either through religious affiliation or the hereditary class structure. Latin America, which was still under Spanish and Portugese rule for decades after America became liberated, did not attract groups of Europeans who didn’t want to trade what they had known in Europe for the same structure on a strange continent, and one that was so totally different in climate and environment. There were only two things the conquerors were very good at – imposing Catholicism and the Spanish and Portugese languages.

There was a separate immigration to Latin America and the Caribbean, from Africa. Because the native populations of the Caribbean Islands were decimated by conquest and disease and the natives of Brazil were really good at disappearing, the Europeans brought in Africa slaves to work their plantations

There were basically two classes of Spaniards and Portugese who came to Latin America – the upper class who were the leaders of the military and the government, and the lower class who were the foot soldiers. The foot soldiers were not provided with wives from their native land, as the French soldiers in Canada were, so they married Native women and created a whole middle racial group – the mestizos or mix-bloods. Eventually, they became the base of the middle class. The Spanish upper class remained in that position right up through the beginning of the twentieth century, when the middle class rose to political power. The Mexican Civil War was fought on these racial lines.

There was another element to life south of the Rio Grande that most North Americans don’t know about. National borders were ignored to a large extent, treated as what they are – man-made lines of political jurisdiction having no relationship to real life. They were useful for tax collectors, but did not control where people lived to any great degree. If you were a Chilean ambassador who decided to retire to the Dominican Republic, as my grandmother’s uncle was, no one questioned it.

There are some sub-species, ethnic divisions on the Iberian peninsula that need to be explained as well. Iberia has a long history of conquest and occupation. The final result was a literal division of the peninsula into areas where the majority population reflected an invading group. Along the western sea coast, Portugal and the old Spanish province of Galicia were the Celt-Iberians, some of whom were the last great Celtic invaders of Ireland in pre-Christian times. The rest of northern Spain was dominated by the Germanic tribes who invaded around the third century C.E. In the center and south were the remnants of the Phoenicians, Romans and Moors. Celt-Iberians look Irish, the way my grandparents did – fair skinned, light eyed, blonde and red-headed. The Gothic-Spanish look German, blonde and blue-eyed. England’s Henry VIII’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, was half Celt-Iberian and half Gothic-Spanish, and a red-head. Everyone else pretty much looks like what Americans think of when they think of Spaniards – like Antonio Banderas. And in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France there are the Basques, a whole other ethnic and language group.

Have you got all that? You need to, because, surprise!, understanding those divisions is essential to understanding the basic racism that exists in Latin America. Latin Americans are just as prone to racism as North Americans. The Spanish and Portugese brought along their internal bigotries, and then layered the native population and mestizos below that.

So, a white Hispanic is any person who was born in Latin America or is descended from Latin Americans but is of pure European heritage. John Wayne’s first wife was a white Panamanian. My grandparents were white Chilean and Puerto Rican.

The late Ricardo Montalban was a white Mexican. Most people remember him from Fantasy Island or from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, but he was at the center of one of the few temper tantrums my father ever threw about the perceptions of North Americans toward Latin Americans.

Ricardo Montalban and Lena Horne, "Jamaica" 1957

In 1957, Montalban opened on Broadway in the musical Jamaica, starring opposite Lena Horne. There was some reaction to the casting, but it was low-key and mostly confined to hate mail that Montalban personally received. Five years later, Richard Kiley was cast opposite Diahann Carroll in No Strings. All hell broke loose. The press was filled with both opposition and support for the casting of a white man and a black woman as romantic leads. Dad’s tantrum included the words “What the hell do people think Montalban is?” He wasn’t too thrilled with the movie Anne of a Thousand Days either, because the producer cast Greek actress Irene Papas as Katherine of Aragon, going with the stereotype that all Spaniards are dark and ignoring the fact that Katherine was a red-head. It wasn’t that my Dad was a bigot, in fact he was one of the most color-blind people I ever knew. He just objected to Americans not understanding that Latin Americans are as diverse as North Americans. He truly felt that the casting of Ricardo Montalban opposite Lena Horne should have infuriated racists as much as the casting of Richard Kiley against Diahann Carroll.

Robert Beltran as Chakotay

On the other end of the entertainment industry stupid range was the reaction when Robert Beltran was cast as a Native American on Star Trek: Voyager. Native Americans objected, saying that the role of Chakotay should have gone to a Native American. Beltran’s response was priceless – “Mexicans are Native Americans,” followed by a few choice words about the intelligence level and education of North Americans. It’s a weird twist on bigotry, how the Native Americans of the United States have a hard time understanding that the border between Mexico and the U. S. cut through the territories of eleven different native tribes.

The press has labeled George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic.” It is a misnomer. His mother is Peruvian, but we have no idea where she fits on the Latin American spectrum of ethnic and racial identities. His father is Jewish. He was born in the United States Zimmerman should not be labeled as any particular race. The use of the term “white Hispanic” by the press in the Zimmerman-Martin case is an attempt to fit it neatly into the racial context of a hate crime. But the case should be giving us an opportunity to look at the nature of multi-ethnic and multi-racial identity, especially in the minority communities. When Alex Haley traveled to Africa to find the last links to his ancestor Kunta Kinte, he was surprised by how much darker true Africans are than African-Americans. He should not have been. He knew how many white ancestors he had. Racial identity can be, especially in the Western Hemisphere, as much a matter of self-identification as of actual genetics.

There was an episode of the old TV series Hill Street Blues in which Lt. Ray Calletano (played by Nicaraguan René Enríquez) is receiving an award. Instead of meekly thanking everyone, Calletano rips the proceedings apart, railing against the bigotry evident in the Mexican food being served because the white Americans don’t know Tierra del Fuego from the Isthmus of Panama. I was reminded of it when my boss, who is Puerto Rican, started talking about Thanksgiving. My grandfather may have been born on that island, but I was not raised in its culture. My grandmother, though born in Chile, was raised in England. My childhood was a mixture of cultural influences from England, Germany, German Judaism (Dad’s foster parents) and Italy (Mom’s aunt married one and gave birth to too many cousins to count).

Nothing has changed since 1986. Latin America, not including the Caribbean Islands, is a land mass only 642,322 square miles less than the United States and Canada, and has a population 158.6 million people larger than the U.S. and Canada combined. Calling everyone from that region “Hispanic” or “Latino” is wrong. We are not one color, one race, one ethnicity. We are as diverse as the residents of the United States and Canada. The one huge difference is that the Native Americans south of the Rio Grande didn’t end up on reservations. The vast majority of people living in the United States and Canada speak English. That doesn’t make us all English. The majority of the people south of the Rio Grande speak Spanish. That doesn’t make them Spanish. It is time we started understanding that.

Related articles

• NYT: George Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic crime watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla. (lukeford.net)
• Breitbart.com Says: Hispanics Are Not ‘White’ (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• What’s to Become of Hispanic Identity? (adage.com)

Trinity Broadcasting Network headquarters, Costa Mesa, California

I was raised Roman Catholic, so extravagance in a church is not surprising to me. The Catholic Church owns some of the most important art works ever created and there is probably enough gold in the vessels and gilded on every surface to fund the budget of a medium-sized nation. But I also knew that one of the foundations of the Protestant faith was a rejection of all those accouterments of wealth.

Living in the South, as we did for more years than I like to remember, it is nearly impossible to avoid the televangelists. One in particular caught my attention, because she had outdone Dolly Parton in the bouffant wig department, and hers were platinum pink. She favored tight knit shirts and long skirts with a shawl wrapped around her somewhat ample hips. Her name is Janice Crouch. The stage set for her show, well, technically it was her husband’s show, was decorated in pure, tasteless, over-the-top-Louis XVI gilding. Everything was gilded. One practically needed shades to watch the show. It was addictive, for someone raised in traditional religion, in its oddness and ostentation.

Jan Crouch had no shame. She frequently showed viewers their horse farm and thoroughbreds. Tara was a shack by comparison. Then, she would turn around and solicit funds for her personal mission – delivering toys to poor children in Africa or some other God-less place. She favored white dolls for the girls, and, I think, trucks for the boys. It was the white dolls that riveted me. Anyone could find ethnically and racially appropriate dolls in any Walmart. Even Barbie has a black friend. But Jan Crouch’s dolls were white. They also solicited funds for their television stations around the world.

from left: Janice Crouch, granddaughter Brittany Kroper, Michael Kroper, Paul Crouch Sr.

And then there was their choice of Bible translation for Jan’s tearful readings. Did you know that they had “summit conferences” in ancient Persia and Babylon? Now, as a Catholic, I was not raised in an Old Testament tradition. I was barely raised in a New Testament tradition. Catholics are very big on the Apostles and the early Christian philosophers, not as much on the contradictions of the Bible. But even I recognized that the words coming out of Jan Crouch’s mouth weren’t in any Bible I’d ever encountered, and I owned the King James, the Catholic and the Hebrew University Bibles. In being modernized and rendered into colloquial American, the words were being twisted to a certain degree. Not much, but enough to alter the meanings of passages. I knew about Revelations, even though the Catholic Church dismisses it as unimportant, but here was a woman preaching that Daniel’s visions about a specific set of Kings in a specific time almost 3,000 years ago were somehow predictions of the activities of the nations of the Middle East today.

That was when I finally understood the evangelical zeal for a holy war against Islam. It was being preached to Christians by televangelists like Jan Crouch. They were taking the history of ancient Judea and saying that it was relevant to the modern Middle East, that the visions of an ancient prophet given to ancient kings were visions of tomorrow. In the minds of their followers, all that ancient history was being mashed up with modern politics and modern Christians were taking the place of ancient Jews and none of it makes any logical sense. Archeologists have been proving for almost a century that most of what is in the Bible is not entirely accurate. The Old Testament is a written rendition of the oral history of a nomadic people. It doesn’t stand against the written histories of the city-states and civilizations of the region.

Islam didn’t even exist in the time of either the Old or New Testament. The wars of ancient times are only relevant to the wars of today in the bedtime stories of Iranian and Afghan parents who use Alexander the Great as a boogie man. It is the wars waged since the birth of Islam which are relevant, starting with the earliest conquests by Mohammed, which are cited by Jews who sort of skip over the next 1,300 years, as proof of the historical attitude of Muslims toward Jews. It is the Crusades that are relevant, and the centuries of conquests and occupations of the Middle East and North Africa that are important, and the effects of the Cold War and the conflicting support given to those nations by the United States and the Soviet Union that are important, not the wars of Nebuchadnezzar.

But, there she was, Janice Crouch, she of the pink bouffant hair, obtusely, subtly preaching hate. Frankly, she’s a very scary lady because she is damned good at what she does. All the major evangelical preachers have been very good at what they do, lead the gullible and profit off them.

It was no surprise to me to find that the Crouchs are being accused of taking $50 million from their followers to fund their extravagant lifestyle. They are hardly the first, they will not be the last. Thirteen mansions and their estates, private jets, race horses, the hundred grand for an RV for the dogs, the Crouchs have done very well by their Trinity Broadcasting Network. They are about as far from the virtues of poverty and service to the poor that Christ preached as the Vatican is. Wall Watchers, the religious watchdog group, rates Trinity Broadcasting as one of the thirty worst ministries in the world. No surprise there, either. The only thing that surprises me is how long it takes to expose these people and why, even after their sins and crimes are exposed, people still believe in them.

I left the Catholic Church a long time ago, but I retain a deep affection for two of their saints – Francis of Assisi and his friend Clare, founder of the Poor Clares order of nuns. They lived what Christ preached, lives of service to the least among us, lives of personal poverty after being born into wealthy families, lives of forgiveness, compassion and love.

Related articles

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• A Perfect Cotton Candy Angel Like This Could Never Commit An Illegal Act (dlisted.com)
• Lawsuits bring scrutiny to Trinity Broadcasting (hosted.ap.org)
• Lawsuits Allege Financial Shenanigans At Trinity Broadcasting Network (losangeles.cbslocal.com)
• Televangelists Sued Over $50 Million Fraud Scheme (inquisitr.com)
• Televangelists: Private jets, 13 mansions and a $100,000 mobile home just for the dogs: Televangelists ‘defrauded tens of million of dollars from Christian network’ (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Paul and Jan Crouch’s Granddaughter Suing for Unlawful Distribution of ‘Charitable Assets’ (slaughteringthesheep.wordpress.com)
• Suit: ‘Cover-ups of sexual and criminal scandals’ at TBN – Sheep or Goats? (blogginghounds.wordpress.com)

U. S. resident without health insurance

The latest poll (every day there’s a “latest poll”) says that 51% of Americans want the Supreme Court to throw out the whole Affordable Care Act. Republicans are going to have a ball with that poll number. It’s right up there with the one they have been quoting for two years – 76% of all Americans oppose Obamacare.

But the poll that came up with that 76% number has been misquoted ever since it was published. The real results showed that 38% disapproved of the law because there was no public option, 38% hated it outright and 24% approved of it. That is not the same thing as 76% oppose it. There are a few people credited with the quote, but whoever said it was absolutely right “There are three kinds of untruths – lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Why doesn’t anyone ask the right questions? It is impossible to know how people feel about the Affordable Care Act unless the questions start being more complete and more definitive.

What are the right questions? Well, let’s start with what people know or believe about the law:

Does the law prevent people being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions? Does it cover young adults under their parents’ insurance when they cannot get insurance on their own? Does it create “insurance exchanges” that would allow individuals to join a group, the way employees of a company belong to a group, and the number of people in the group will lower the premium costs for everyone? Does it increase the choices of types of insurance a person can buy? Does it create “death panels” that will deny care if the patient is considered too far gone for care? Does it deny insurance companies the right to terminate insurance when a patient uses the insurance too much for the company’s profit? Does the law create a new Federal bureaucracy with tens of thousands of new employees? Does the law hit people with penalties for not being insured? How much is the penalty? Do you have insurance through your employer?

How much do you contribute to your insurance premiums if you have employer-provided health insurance? How much is your deductible? How much are your co-pays? Do you have life-time limits? Do you have prescription coverage? Do you have dental? Do you have vision coverage? If you buy your insurance privately, how much do you pay for it? How much do you use it? In a private policy, what are your deductible and co-pays? Do you have state insurance? What are your premiums, deductible and co-pay?

Do you believe that the more people belong to an insurance pool, the lower the premium costs for everyone?

Do you know where the United States ranks against the rest of the world for health care costs? Do you know where the United States ranks for health care delivery – based on life expectancy, access to care, infant and maternal death rates, and other baseline deliveries – against the rest of the world? (The correct answers are #1 at nearly twice the #2 nation and #37).

Do you think Medicare has been a successful program? Do you think in some states Medicaid patients have better coverage than private insurance patients? Do you believe that Medicare and Medicaid patients have access to any doctor they want? Do you think some doctors refuse to accept these patients? Do you think emergency rooms are being overused as primary care facilities because people on Medicaid cannot get private doctors? Do you know how many hospitals have shut their emergency rooms?

What do you know about nationalized health care in other countries? Do you think they deny care? Do you think the waiting lists for care are too long? Do you think they undermine personal freedom and choice? Do you think they outlaw private physicians and hospitals?

Do you know which president first proposed nationalized health insurance? (Answer: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) Do you know which presidents have supported nationalized health insurance? (Every one since up to Dubya.) Do you know how large corporations view nationalized health? (They support it as more important to their bottom line than killing unions.)

Do you know the difference between single-payer health insurance and a national health care system?

Do you believe that only communist countries have nationalized health care and the presence of nationalized health care means a country is not a democracy?

Do you know how the Federal employee health insurance system works? Do you think the government – you as the taxpayer – pay for all health care for Federal employees? Do you know that the Federal system is an employer-provided system just like major corporations like General Electric? Do you know that the Federal employees’ system is just a pool for private insurance companies? Do you know that the President and his family are the only people who receive free health care from the taxpayer?

Do you oppose any government health insurance system? Do you support limited government health insurance systems for specific Americans, like Medicare? Do you support a total single-payer government health system?

The baseline premium for Medicare is $99.90 a month. The yearly deductible is under $150 and the co-pays are 20%. Is that better than your private insurance?

Polls tend to ask a half-dozen questions at best. They go for the broadest questions, ignoring the fact that nothing in life is broad, that everything has nuances and details that need to be understood. The entire health care battle has been conducted in these broad strokes. The only people out there who seem to be looking at the details are the leaders at AARP, and their focus is the attempts by Republicans to kill Medicare. We really, the administration really, needs to understand how little people understand about the Affordable Care Act and what they need to better explain. They need to see how much misinformation and propaganda is flooding the debate. We can no longer afford to have our major national policies determined by how little people understand the issues. This isn’t 1859, we cannot allow our future to be determined by something as simplistic as “The South wants to keep their slaves,” and “The North wants to take away our rights.”

If you want to see how dumbed-down our country has become, think about the census form you filled out. One page, right? Nine out of ten households only got the one-page form. It used to be four pages and all of us got it. We keep shrinking our information pool and operating out of less and less comprehension of who we are and what we think. The health care debate impacts our future economy, our life expectancies, our chances of epidemics, our productivity, every aspect of our lives and our future. It deserves more than a six-question poll.

Related articles

• Why “Affordable” Health Care Is, And Will Continue To Be, So Expensive For Us All (neosecularist.com)
• Fewer Employers Offering Health Insurance (lezgetreal.com)
• Republicans Self-Destruct Over Medicare (lezgetreal.com)
• Breaking it Down: The Health Care Law and Cost Control (whitehouse.gov)
• Here’s A Quick Way To Understand What Is Happening To The PPACA Next Week (theinsurancebarn.wordpress.com)
• Supreme Court Prepares to Tackle Affordable Care Act (news.health.com)
• House Republicans Accidentally Accept The Constitutionality Of The Affordable Care Act (thinkprogress.org)
• Faces of the New Health Care Law (whitehouse.gov)

Candidate Rick Santorum

GOP Presidential Nomination Candidate Rick Santorum visited a shooting range in Texas Thursday, and as he was taking aim, a woman shouted out that he should pretend the target was Obama. Since Santorum was wearing headphones, it is doubtful that he heard her. He certainly didn’t comment on the inappropriateness of any American jokingly or not suggesting assassinating our President.

Which was good because at his next event, he endorsed the President for re-election. Well, to be honest what he said was that if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee, people should just vote for Barack Obama. He explained that “You win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opprotunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If they’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk of what may be the Etch-A-Sketch candidate for the future.”

Hear! Hear! Agree absolutely. We would rather have Rick Santorum running against President Obama in the fall than have Mitt Romney. That way Americans can clearly choose between the theocrat and two men who believe in the separation of church and state. We can choose between a man whose primary focus is social repression under the guise of saving our economy and our issues-oriented President instead of between two men who actually talk about the issues that matter. “It’s the economy, stupid.” And frankly, most Americans do not believe we can save our economic future by making women stay in abusive marriages or defining single motherhood as child abuse or denying women access to family planning. Been there, done that, just before the Great Depression actually and for two hundred years before that.

We need to have a choice between a President who believes that the economic policies of Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower arc, which dragged us out of the Great Depression and re-invented the American economy into a manufacturing powerhouse are better than the economic policies of Taft, Hoover-Coolidge, Reagan and Bush43 who plunged us into national debt and economic depression and recession, but which made a small group of people fabulously rich. This election should be a clear battle between demand-side and supply-side economics, not a battle between a secular nation and Opus Dei.

So, bring him on. I want Rick Santorum to be the candidate who wins in the Republican convention. I want him to choose some equally repressive man as his running mate, someone like Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia. I want America to finally choose between the phony idea that we are an evangelical Christian nation and the reality that our founding fathers didn’t want religion to control our government. They wanted to have our leaders inspired by religion and were themselves inspired by it, their personal codes of conduct were tied to it, but they emphatically did not want America to turn into England or France or any other place where not belonging to the right church meant you had no secular, civil rights.

Santorum can backpedal all he wants, quantify his standing ovation of a fire-breathing evangelical to say he wasn’t applauding the man’s call for all non-Christians to leave America, but for his general religiosity, but the fact remains…Santorum is a theocrat who would impose his personal, extreme religious views on our laws. I want Americans to vote for or against him on the national stage. I want this argument laid to rest for once and for all, and for us to prove that the “Christian right” does not represent a majority of all Americans.

So, go ahead, Republicans – give us the clear choice. We welcome it.

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The Republicans frequently point at Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as the best of the best of the Republican governors who are the point men for their war on liberalism. Did someone hand out horse-blinders in 2010? They can’t see the war for the individual battles and that is becoming very apparent in Wisconsin.

The first volley in Wisconsin was the protests against Walker’s “budget” proposal that stripped public sector unions of the power to collectively bargain anything other than pay and then set a legislative limit on pay, effectively denying those unions any bargaining power. He claims that he has freed public sector workers from the shackles of unions that were allowed to have union dues deducted from paychecks. Instead, he has shackled public workers to the whims of the state.

The second volley was the recall elections of six Republican state senators and four Democratic ones. The goal was to break the Republican majority in at least one chamber of the Wisconsin legislature. The recalls failed to achieve that goal, merely reducing the Republican majority to one senator. So close, yet so far away.

Now, there are multiple battles being waged and the unions are the least part of them. They led the recall drive to unseat Walker and another four state senators, but the real battles are being fought out of the realm of labor rights. What they are exposing is the underlying corruption and the lengths that Republicans will go to to achieve their one–party rule goal.

The Wisconsin Republicans controlled the Congressional and state redistricting following the 2010 census. Wherever possible, they destroyed Democratic-leaning districts, shifting district lines to break up these districts and absorb them into Republican-leaning ones. Then they passed a photo-ID law to address the non-existent problem of voter fraud. Just to make their repression of Democratic votes more feasible, the administration announced the closure of Department of Motor Vehicle Laws in Democratic districts, citing the need to tighten their budget belts. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that a party can do such publicly visible things to repress the voting rights of their opposition and be praised for it. Two State judges have shot down the photo ID law as violating the state’s constitution.

Walker is up to his dead eyes in a multi-year investigation into the use of his Milwaukee County Executive staff and office to run his gubernatorial campaign. Over a dozen arrests have already occurred and Walker has hired two attorneys to defend himself and started a defense fund to cover the costs. As the case has slowly evolved, it has exposed Walker’s attitude – that he is entitled to certain things because he is the darling of the Republican Party and their favorite money machine, the Koch brothers, and to hell with ethics rules and laws.

Then, there is Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser. When Prosser was running for re-election last summer, his opponent was declared the winner, until the county clerk in Waukesha “found” enough Prosser votes to overturn the previously announced results. Calls to investigate this county clerk, who has a history of funny elections are being ignored by the Walker administration. Why should they bother? She always comes through for the Republicans.

But Prosser is involved in his own ethics case, and his ideas about it are stunning. He was accused of physically assaulting, strangling, another Justice, Ann Walsh Bradley, during arguments over a case. Prosser’s new “defense” tactic is to demand that every member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court recuse him or herself from the ethics case because they are biased. Yup, the poor man is just being targeted because he’s a conservative. Justice Bradley put her neck between his hands just to get him off the bench. Only the Supreme Court can hear the ethics case of a Supreme Court Justice, so Prosser’s call for a mass recusal would effectively kill the case. The Republicans need to retain control of the Supreme Court because they are planning to appeal the decisions of the lower courts which killed their photo ID law. Short circuiting Prosser’s case would keep the court in Republican hands.

Which leads us to the recall campaigns against four more Republican state senators. One has resigned, leaving the Republicans with a tied Senate instead of a majority. And then there were three. One of them is the controversial Glenn Grothmann. Grothmann truly believes that he is invulnerable. His district would never in a gazillion years remove him from office. But, he has recently been making some very anti-women statements and introduced a bill that would classify being a single mother as child abuse. The state senate recalls were initially an offshoot of the battle between the state’s public sector unions and the administration, but that has shifted as the Republicans have introduced and passed laws that impact more than just the unions.

What do Prosser and Grothmann, or more accurately the recall elections of the four senators have in common? If Prosser manages to duck the ethics case, he is not safe. He can be impeached by the state legislature. The configuration of the State Senate is essential to Prosser’s continued presence on the bench, and the continued existence of the photo ID law.

Walker is portraying his recall election as purely part of the union backlash against his union-busting measures. He is claiming loudly and frequently that national unions are funding the recall and running it. But the union busting is only part of what Wisconsinites are mad about, and Walker can’t see that. His budget cut one billion dollars out of municipal budgets, and banned municipalities from raising taxes to compensate. Concurrently, his budget cut one billion dollars in taxes for “job creators” promising that lowering taxes and removing regulations would create jobs. But the state has lost jobs every month since he took office. That hardly provides justification for the pain his budget cuts have caused. He cites how much progress they have made toward reducing the state’s deficits, but ignores the cost to schools, police departments, fire departments, street repair and all the other things the municipalities have responsibility for. Walker and all the Republicans who sing his praises cannot understand how not producing job growth damages their argument that job creators need to be taxed and regulated less.

It is an awful lot to keep track of, so many divergent battles. But they are all interrelated. That is what Walker and the national Republican Party, and those who support it, do not comprehend. Wisconsin is a classic case of “the tangled web” woven to deceive. But webs are fragile. Cut one portion of it and the web collapses. That is why spiders spend most of their time maintaining and repairing their webs. Walker compared his situation to the Battle of Waterloo, the deciding battle between two empires. He’s wrong. This is about the state of Wisconsin being a microcosm of the war for the soul of America.

Related articles

• We need to see the internal records of the Wisconsin Judicial Commission in the case against Justice Prosser. (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser charged with ethics violation (twitchy.com)
• Wisconsin Judicial Commission Files Ethics Complaint Against Justice Prosser For Alleged Choking Incident (thinkprogress.org)
• Things Just Keep Getting More Interesting In Wisconsin… (lezgetreal.com)
• Prosser v. Bradley – The Return (volokh.com)
• Wisconsin Voter ID Law On Hold (lezgetreal.com)
• Recalled Wisconsin State Senator Quits (lezgetreal.com)
• Mysterious Booms Rattle Wisconsin Town (newser.com)
• Scott Walker’s Waterloo (lezgetreal.com)
• A Union Candidate For Lt. Gov. In Wisconsin (lezgetreal.com)

President Obama

I hate politics. I hate it even more when a man I respect gets forced into pandering to the folks out there who can’t follow the truth. It’s been “leaked” that tomorrow President Obama will announce, in Cushing Oklahoma, that his administration will be doing what it can to expedite the permitting process for TransCanada to build the southern half of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. That “southern half” is the part that will be from Cushing to the Gulf Coast of Texas. In January the President denied the permit for the full pipeline, because the northern half was slated to cross the critical Ogallala Aquifer in the High Plains, and some members of the Republican Party in Congress were preparing to blackmail the President into making a quick decision… so he did, just not the one they wanted. After all, a healthy chunk of Speaker Boehner’s personal stock portfolio is directly traceable back to TransCanada.

Ogallala Aquifer - US Geological Service

Now here’s the thing. The Republicans have been going around blaming rising gas prices on the President, and that permit denial is one of the things they wave in the air – ‘Oh, if he’d just approved that pipeline we could be getting all this extra oil from Canada and our gas prices would drop.’ Unfortunately, because it’s a simple and easy to digest rationale, a good chunk of the American public believes it.

It’s a crock. First off, that oil they want to pump to the Gulf isn’t staying here once it’s refined.  Second off, it takes time to build a pipeline, so it’s not a magic bullet for lower gas prices right away. Third, there is next to nothing that the government can do to lower the price of gas or crude oil BECAUSE WE, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DO NOT OWN THE OIL BENEATH OUR FEET.

We don’t own it and we don’t drill for it. We sell leases to oil companies, most of which are foreign conglomerates, and they drill. Then they send it to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and then they ship it overseas… because Europe and Asia pay a whole lot more than we do for gas and crude. Other countries with oil fields own that oil, and in many cases have government-owned companies drilling it and refining it and selling the final products in-country. Do you really think Saudi Arabia has a gas price crisis? Ever?

Since the Republicans started on this latest obfuscation about gas prices, President Obama and the White House have been trying to explain all of this to the American people… but they don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear that Daddy in the White House is going to wave his magic wand and make it all better. They still haven’t figured out that without the cooperation of Congress, a President really has his hands tied. And the last thing this Congress wants to do is cooperate with the President. Since taking over control of the House, the Republicans have made no bones about the first priority on their agenda: making sure that President Obama is a one-term President.

Existing and Proposed Keystone Pipelines

TransCanada Logo

So TransCanada announced last month that they are willing to go ahead with the uncontested southern portion of the pipeline, which doesn’t need approval from the Feds, as it doesn’t cross an international border. There is currently a bottleneck at Cushing because of the oil arriving from both U.S. oil fields and oil arriving from Canada via the existing TransCanada pipeline. This new southern pipeline will ease that bottleneck and serve to get more crude and oil shale product to the Gulf Coast refineries on a daily basis. Yay. We’ll pick up the temporary jobs from building it, a few permanent jobs maintaining it, a few more IF refineries add to their payrolls to process it and the oil ports will have a bit more ship traffic.

Well, that’s enough to make some easy sound bytes and that’s what the President will be doing tomorrow. About the only contribution the White House can make to ‘expediting’ the permitting process is to lean on a couple of state-level agencies to get off their asses and approve it. The job creation bit will be played up, and he’ll give up on trying to explain the realities of global oil prices to the people.

It’s sad that the realities of election politics are prompting him to give up on teaching the American people about the new global economy we are a part of. We need to understand how the Arab Spring and the growth of the Indian and Chinese economies affect us. We should have had it shoved down our throats that Osama Bin Laden’s most ambitious plans for anti-American terrorism would have attacked our economy. We should understand that the conspicuous consumption of Americans is something unique to us, and it’s not really a good thing. I’m sorry, but no one outside of the military really needs to be driving a Hummer and sucking down all that gas. If you need that 4-wheel drive, get a Jeep. If you need that level of “protection”, move.

Bright Shiny Gas Pumps

Okay, I’ll climb down from that soapbox.

President Obama, on the issue of gasoline prices, is being forced to pander to the ignorant, and tomorrow the Republicans will count coup. They will have made him stoop to their level, and that is incredibly disappointing.

Related articles

• Obama heading to Keystone XL Oklahoma site(cbc.ca)

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• Pipeline from Cushing to Gulf Coast will proceed, TransCanada says(newsok.com)

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• Obama to Visit Oklahoma to Talk About Oil Drilling(blogs.wsj.com)

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One of the nine car bombs set off in Syria

From its beginning over a year ago, President Bashar al-Assad has maintained that the uprising against his government is the work of outside terrorist forces, groups like al Qaida. He gets a little murky on the details, wanted to blame Western interests and neighboring countries and some nefarious pan-Islamist movement for the terrorism, though the groups and governments he blames for it all have opposing agendas. Those Syrians who oppose his regime have repeatedly cited the fact that the opposition began with peaceful protests in the southern provinces and spread peacefully to the north and that al-Assad had ample opportunity to stop the uprising by instigating the reforms he has been promising since he took office in 2000. They cite attacks on unarmed civilians who are attending funerals, shelling of residential neighborhoods and the arrests and torture of those who speak out against the regime as proof that the escalating violence is the opposition’s response to the regime’s violence.

But a third party has emerged in this revolution and though they appear to oppose the regime, they are reinforcing it.

No group has claimed responsibility for the nine car bombs that have exploded in Damascus, Aleppo and Daraa in the past three months. Around a hundred people have died and hundreds more have been injured in these incidents. The targets have been government offices, usually those tied to the security forces and police agencies. The victims have mostly been civilians who had the misfortune to be on the street at the wrong time.

The regime says these car bombings are proof they are fighting “armed foreign-supported terrorist gangs” and the opposition is accusing the regime of staging these bombings to justify their violent crack-down on opposition. Both are wrong.

There is a third option neither side has considered. The al-Assad government won’t suggest it because they really are benefitting from the bombings and the opposition won’t suggest it because it is a bit too obtuse. What if it is one of the many terrorist organizations that have been supported in some way by the Syrian government?

The two groups most suspect in any move to overthrow a non-Islamist Muslim government are the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaida. But neither is secretive about their actions and the Muslim Brotherhood has become more political than military in the thirty years since they started the insurrection in Hama that Hafez al-Assad put down so violently. The Brotherhood is very politically active in post-Mubarak Egypt and al Qaida is trying to gain control of whole provinces in Yemen. If either were involved in Syria, they would take credit for it. Though Hezbollah and Hamas are not known for using car bombs in their terrorist acitvities, they are openly supported by the al-Assad regime. They hold significant power in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, but have increasingly relied on Syria for material support as “charitable contributions” that ended up in their hands have been staunched. But several smaller terrorist groups have found sanctuary in Syria as they did in Libya. . The overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi has left the smaller groups with fewer places to run to ground. They stand to lose the most if the al-Assad regime falls. Many were founded by former Syrian military men and they are known for the use of car bombs and indiscriminate killings.

Western countries have tried for decades to convince the Arab world that extra-national terrorist groups are as much of a danger to Muslim countries as they are to the West. Frankly, the Saudi decision to “punish” bin Laden by stripping him of his citizenship and access to the family fortune was a chicken response. King Abdullah II of Jordan has tried to convince his fellow Arab leaders that they cannot continue to put band-aids on one country at a time and not address the issues that afflict all of them. Crisis management is not a plan, it’s a reaction.

The Arab League has taken the lead in the attempts to bring a peaceful solution to Syria. The first thing they need to do is find out who is responsible for these car bombings. Until the al-Assad regime can separate the bombers from the people who want real reform in the country, and until the opposition can be assured that the regime is not behind these bombings, there is no possibility for real dialogue.

Related articles

• Car Bombing Shakes Aleppo (inquisitr.com)
• Suicide Bombers Attack In Damascus (lezgetreal.com)
• Syrian state TV: Two blasts strike Damascus, casualties reported (rt.com)
• The Assads at war: killing and shopping – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

The Department of Health and Human Services, sorting its way through that 1,100 page Affordable Care Act, has issued a ruling about health insurance purchased by college students with their fees. The policies must include contraception coverage, just like the 28 states that already have that requirement.

Yup – here we go again. President Obama wants us taxpayers to fork over our hard-earned money so college co-eds can spend more time on their backs than in class.

Not to be overly snide about this…okay, to be really snarky about this…Limbaugh’s comments are proof positive that the man dropped out of college. He never carried a full class load with a couple of professors who thought that his students had nothing better to do with their time than consume a few additional books during the semester. And that doesn’t even consider non-traditional students who are returning to college while working in some retail outlet that wouldn’t give them health insurance without a government mandate because it would reduce their owners’ position on the Forbes 400. For a non-traditional student, a college health insurance policy could be a blessing. Who the hell has time for continual sex?

Church-affiliated schools will have to offer the contraceptive coverage on the same terms as the policies they offer coverage to employees. Church-affiliated schools that self-insure will not have to provide contraceptive coverage to their students. No one has determined yet how institutions that self-insure will be asked to comply with the baseline for health insurance, though HHS is offering a few options and asking for public input. Under their proposals, a third party would get involved in the coverage, either the companies that manage employer’s self-insured plans or one of the multi-state insurance exchanges.

The whole controversy over contraception is doing more than creating an image for the Republican Party as being at war with women. We already knew that because of the almost 100 abortion laws that have been proposed and/or passed in the past year. What is becoming very apparent from all of this is how much simpler “Medicare for All” would have been, the public option that so many of us wanted.

Related articles

• Speaking Of Polls – Republicans Losing Birth Control Debate (lezgetreal.com)
• Fewer Employers Offering Health Insurance (lezgetreal.com)
• Who’s Paying? Georgetown Undergraduates Pay Over $1800 Per Year for Health Insurance (crooksandliars.com)
• Updated Estimates for the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act (bespacific.com)
• GOP “Ultracraziness”: Experts On “Lady Stuff”, Ultrasounds And Contraception (mykeystrokes.com)

No, it isn’t Photoshopped. It’s real. You can buy one for $3 from a site called “Stumpy’s Stickers.” There are other racially offensive items on the site as well. The urban-myth-debunkers at Snopes have verified the bumper sticker, along with T-shirts of a similar nature, even if they can’t verify this particular photo.

There is a “Dontre-nig.com” website, but attempts to access it get a “bandwidth limit exceeded” message.

It isn’t the racism that bothers me so much as the way people think this is acceptable behavior. The web is even worse. The anonymity of posting on a comment stream with an avatar and screen name makes people comfortable writing the most heinous things about our President and his family.

Though the First Family is not able to do anything about these slurs, there are some people who can. Frequently, the more offensive posts get blocked because of down-thumb votes or are removed because of complaints to the site monitors. But some of the avatars are photos of living people, like Kurt Russell in his Escape From New York costume or dead people who have living descendants like John Wayne. Though there are court cases saying that these images do not belong to the actor, they do belong to the production companies who made the films. If the actor or his/her descendants were to make the request that these images be blocked from use as avatars by offensive persons, the production companies could bring actions against the people who are illegally using copyrighted materials.

As for the bumper stickers…well, I would never recommend spray paint. That’s vandalism. But a good roll of duct tape would be a great idea.

Related articles

• DON’T RE-NIG: Racist Anti-Obama Bumper Sticker Emerges (blippitt.com)
• Racist Obama Bumper Sticker Crosses the Line (jasondrexler.wordpress.com)
• Crazy Talk: ‘Don’t Re-Nig’ Bumper Sticker (theroot.com)
• Racist Anti-Obama Bumper Sticker Goes Viral (mediaite.com)
• ‘Don’t Re-Nig in 2012′: Racist anti Obama bumper sticker goes viral (thegrio.com)
• Three Ways To Cope with the Coming Plague of Obama Bumper Stickers (pjmedia.com)

Rick Santorum in his favorite milieu (by Lockerz)

In a recent Pew Research Center poll, on 29% of the respondents knew that Rick Santorum is a Roman Catholic, and 38% believe he is a born-again, evangelical Christian. Santorum makes no secret of his Catholicism. The error in perception is based on the manner in which Rick Santorum appears more right wing than the Pope himself.

Santorum is not one of the 88, 000 lay members of The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei, but his home church, St. Catherine of Sienna in Great Falls, Virginia, and the secondary school his sons were sent to are deeply associated with the very conservative Catholic group. A lot fo what people believe about Opus Dei is rumor, myth and exaggeration, but the very conservative nature of the group is not.

Rick Santorum has risen farther in national politics than any evangelical Christian since Pat Robertson, and he has done so at a time when the Republican Party has been using evangelical Christians to increase their vote totals. When Robertson ran for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1988, this nation had not gone through over a decade of the party creating ballot issues over abortion and same sex marriage, we were not being inundated with laws based on nothing but religious fervor. Santorum is our first chance to bring the dialogue to a national level, to see what the future of this nation would be if the religious right continues to eat away at our religious freedom.

Santorum does not believe in evolution, a belief he shares with many evangelical, fundamentalist Christians. But it is a belief that is not part of Catholic teaching. The official position of the Catholic Church is based on the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the early years of the fifth century wrote his Seminal Principles. In it, St. Augustine laid out the Big Bang Theory and the theory of evolution, without ever having seen a fossil or a living example of evolutionary adaptation. St. Augustine wrote that God created a ball of matter, programmed it to become the universe as we know it and ignited it. These days we call it “intelligent design,” and see it as a compromise between belief in an omnipotent God and the science of evolution. But Santorum does not believe in what his own church teaches. In those states with evangelical Christians dominating school boards and textbook committees, evolution is taught as an unproven theory side by side with “scientific creationism.”

The Catholic Church has an official policy banning birth control, but American parish priests have been ignoring it for decades. It finally sunk into them that too many children were coming to Mass without their parents and leaving the church after Confirmation. It is a little hard to keep a church going if it is going to excommunicate 98% of the adults for using birth control. Countries in Europe and South America that are predominantly Catholic have lifted their bans on the purchase of birth control. Rick Santorum has said that he would support any state that outlawed birth control. Santorum himself did not come from one of those classic Catholic families of 12 children. His parents only had three.

The most extreme elements of the anti-abortion movement equate birth control with abortion, even when doctors and experts try to explain that most birth control prevents fertilization and does not kill fertilized eggs. Santorum supports laws that ban abortion in all cases, even in the event of a threat to a woman’s life. He would rather see women die than abort a deadly pregnancy.

Santorum equates birth control with immorality, claims that it encourages bad behavior. He has a real problem with sex for any reason other than procreation. And he places the onus on females to maintain a moral society.

As noted earlier, the Santorums sent their two eldest sons to the Heights School, a private Washington, D. C., secondary school associated with Opus Dei. The Santorums have had eight children, all of them completely home-schooled except the two eldest boys. Their seven living children range in age from 3 to 21, four sons and three daughters. Isabella will tragically probably not survive childhood. Elizabeth is a junior at the University of Dallas. Ironically, their eighth child, Gabriel, was born prematurely at 20 weeks and only lived for a couple of hours. Twenty weeks is the gestational age at which the Catholic Church believed the unborn received their souls and abortion before 20 weeks was not murder, until 1588 when Pope Sixtus V defied almost 1600 years of Church teaching to issue his anti-birth control, anti-abortion edict.

We are all aware that Santorum equates homosexuality with humping farm animals and raping children. That’s old news for Santorum. What is new is the threat that as President he would strip away what few rights gays and lesbians have achieved in the past 20 years throughout the country.

Santorum’s latest stand is “English only,” as expressed to the voters in Puerto Rico. If they want statehood, they should make English their official and only language. For as long as I can remember, Puerto Ricans have voted against statehood, but that is not as important as Santorum’s embracing of the “English only” only agenda. Santorum himself is bi-lingual, English and Italian, compliments of his family. Immigrant families evolve into “English only” over an average of three generations. Only in the Deep South, which has virtually no history of non-English-speaking immigration, is there a belief that immigrants learned English right off the boat. Santorum’s statements are not just anti-Hispanic, they are anti-immigrant. They denounce the very process that his own family went through from his grandfather’s arrival from Italy to himself.

This is a presidential candidate who said that President Kennedy’s statement that he believed in the concept that is the foundation of our pluralism – the separation of church and state – made him want to throw up. This man would deny women the things we have fought for for over a century, whose views of women are as repressive as those of the most conservative Islamic country.

Up to now, we have dealt with the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians and their agenda one state and one law at a time. Rick Santorum is allowing us to see the consequences of this agenda on a national stage. Those of us who live in liberal states cannot ignore Santorum’s views because he is running for President of the whole United States, not just governor of Nebraska. We can’t say “Oh, that’s Idaho’s problem, not ours.” Rick Santorum is everyone’s problem and he has extended the debate beyond the immediacy of a single vote on a single law in a single state.

Santorum has said that there is no place in this nation for a man of faith in politics. That’s one of the great lies of the right wing. There is plenty of room for men of faith in politics. There is just no room for their religious doctrines in our civil laws. Saint Santorum is focusing the debate, making us all aware of how widespread is the impact of the propaganda of the right wing that America was founded as a Christian country, how many people have been flimflammed into believing that liberals are all godless heathens who would shut their churches. In Rick Santorum we finally have someone who can galvanize those who have been unaware, those who think the right wing agenda doesn’t hurt them, those who have been persuaded by the generalizations to support things they don’t truly understand. For that reason, Rick Santorum is the best damned thing that has happened to make us protect the uniqueness and freedoms of our secular state.

Related articles

• The Anointed One: Santorum, the Subculture, and Me(caelumetterra.wordpress.com)

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• Santorum Believes That State Should Not Tell Churches What To Believe (lezgetreal.com)
• Santorum: Separation Of Church And State Makes Me Want To Vomit (lezgetreal.com)
• Rick ‘Ahmadinejad’ Santorum (The News, Switzerland) (themoderatevoice.com)
• Rick Santorum Says Separation of Church and State Makes Him Want to Vomit: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• Papist win in Dixie? (jackrich.wordpress.com)
• “Rick Santorum Is Not A Catholic, But A Papist”, Supports Opus Dei, Regnum Christi (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• Santorum … said what ? (ynative77.wordpress.com)
• “Opus Dei”: Rick Santorum’s Old-Time Religion (mykeystrokes.com)
• What I Like about Rick Santorum (bothwell.typepad.com)

President and Mrs. Obama at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast

As an adult, Barack Obama exercised his free will and chose to be baptized as a Christian. He had not had any formal religious upbringing as a child, though he was exposed to every manner of religious thought by his anthropologist mother. His parents had separated when he was just a month old, so the fact that Barack Obama, Sr., was a Muslim hardly presented an opportunity for influence. He spent five years, from age five to age ten, living with his mother’s second husband, a Javanese Muslim, and though he attended public school in Indonesia for two years, he also attended the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School there. Take your pick of who was the more powerful influence – a father he knew for a month, nuns who taught him for two years, a stepfather he knew for five years, a mother he knew for 34 years, grandparents he knew for 47 years, or a wife he’s been married to for almost 20 years? Well, according to a frightening number of Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama, the greatest influences on Barack Obama were his mother’s husbands.

A Public Policy Polling survey shows 52% of likely Republican voters in Mississippi think the President is a Muslim, 12% think he’s a Christian and 36% aren’t sure. In Alabama, 45% think he’s a Muslim, 14% think he’s a Christian and 41% aren’t sure.

You can’t really blame them. The right wing propagandists have done a marvelous job of creating this impression. In fact, only John McCain has seriously and emphatically rejected the idea and that was over three years ago. Everyone else hedges their answers, says “He says he’s a Christian…” and can’t wrap their minds around the basic contradiction of condemning him for two – count them – two anti-white-American rants by Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a Baptist church and the idea that he’s a Muslim.

There really is no cure for stupid, but there is a cure for propaganda – find a way to shut it down. The news that over 300 companies and organizations are prepared to prevent their products and services being advertised on hate-filled, lie-filled programs on radio is a good beginning. Now, if they would just extend that to television. It didn’t take an advertiser for Keith Olbermann to decide to dial back the “That woman is an idiot.” statements and drop his “Worst Person in the World” segment, at least until he figures out a better way to do it. All it took was for Olbermann to hear himself being used as an equivalency to Rush Limbaugh. The only thing that would stop Fox News is a loss of advertising. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t care what is on his networks as long as they make money. Losing money would make him care about the content.

As for Keith – I will really miss “Worst Person.” The stories are still valid, the manner in which someone commits an act of hypocrisy, or pushes a law that is twisted up, or lies through their teeth, it’s just a matter of finding a gentler way of exposing them, isn’t it?

Related articles

• Barack Obama: Muslim or Christian? (theroycroftreport.com)
• Half of Republicans in Deep South Think Obama Is a Muslim – RollingStone.com (blog) (rollingstone.com)
• Well, look. It’s like this. ARE Republicans stupid? You tell me. (wellthisiswhatithink.wordpress.com)
• Many Alabama and Mississippi Voters Believe Obama is a Muslim [Video] (inquisitr.com)
• Alabama and Mississippi Republicans don’t believe in evolution … but do believe Obama is a Muslim (dailykos.com)
• Plurality of Republican voters in Mississippi, Alabama believe Obama is a Muslim (examiner.com)
• Pitifully stupid (horsesass.org)

The White House, from the south lawn (Creative Commons)

According to the right wing and the Republican presidential candidates, the Obama administration has repressed oil production, made us more dependent on those crazy Arabs for oil, driven up gas prices to force us to invest in green energy and imposed regulations that stifle the oil industry.

So, in response to all that BS, the White House has issued “The Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future,” which explains how White House policies have improved oil production, increased oil exports to 52% of our production, reduced oil imports by 23.6%, and brought us to the point where we have more producing oil wells than anywhere in the world or at any time in our history. Part of the reduction in oil use comes from programs that have weatherized older homes and increased gas efficiency in our cars. Part of it, admittedly, is a consequence of the fourth warmest winter since they started keeping records, and the fact that in the past four years, we are traveling less because so many of us can’t afford to travel. It is a mixed bag of causes and effects, but the final results are fairly positive. Unless, of course, you are a conservative.

The Republicans are hoping to use the rising gasoline prices to undercut the President’s approval ratings. They are also insisting that every piece of positive economic news is bogus and our economy is in the crapper. It doesn’t matter what facts the White House presents or even what facts are presented by independent sources – if it reflects positively on the President, it must be a lie. And they are being believed. After all, their message is being presented by the “fair and balanced” news network and denied by the lamestream media.

In 1929, the stock market crashed and it set off a series of bank failures and business failures and a global depression. Nothing positive happened until 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and bullied this country into drastic action. The economy started to recover, but in 1936, there was a set-back, a reversal of some of Roosevelt’s policies. The economy started to slide again. It took World War II and some radical economic policies to finally bring us to the point where our economy was booming – a 90% top tax rate, investment in infrastructure, ballooning union membership, a re-invention of our economy into a manufacturing dynamo. Think we have high unemployment? Unemployment was at 25% during the 1930s. Sixteen million veterans returned from World War II. That was 11% of our total population. The G. I. Bill was passed in 1944 and was the greatest stimulus package ever created. It paved the way for returning veterans to get educations, start small businesses and buy homes.

The United States national debt in 1929 was approximately 20% of our gross domestic product. We ended World War II with a national debt of 125% of GDP Our current debt is 99%. It was 1960 before our national debt was down to the pre-war level of 40%. It took 30 years to recover from the Great Depression, and even then our national debt was double what it had been at the start of the GD.

But in America in 2012, we apparently do not have the ability to wait more than six months for our economy to recover from a massive freefall caused by eight years of truly bad economic policies – the same policies that caused the Great Depression and every recession we’ve had since then.

One last piece of history, okay? The Treaty of Versailles punished Germany for World War I. The economic burdens placed on Germany had desperately depressed the economy before the Great Depression hit Europe. In the depths of a far worse economic situation than we can imagine for a Western nation, the Germans elected a coalition government and Adoph Hitler became chancellor in January, 1933. The Nazis had promised economic recovery, and after Hitler eliminated the non-Nazis in the coalition, the Nazis delivered economic recovery through massive defense spending. You know the rest of the story. People in the midst of a collapsed economy don’t necessarily make the best choices, and they certainly don’t make good choices if they have been brainwashed into believing that the sun rises in the west and the sky is purple.

Related articles

• Economic Good News Everywhere (lezgetreal.com)
• The Consequences of the Great Depression (schools-history.com)
• Military Keynesianism Can’t Work … Because WWII Was Different from Current Wars (ritholtz.com)
• Primary Cause for Economic Depressions: Economic Injustice (adask.wordpress.com)

Richard Fox's Trailer (John Gibbons/AP)

On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 6, Richard Fox, his girlfriend Jeanette Ogara and three friends were sitting in his RV trailer in a tiny rural mountain community near the Mexican border, drinking beer. Fox and Ogara’s 4-year-old daughter was asleep in the bedroom. For some reason Fox went outside, where he had a homemade cannon packed with gunpowder from fireworks and some sort of projectile. He lit the fuse on the 21” long, 2” diameter steel pipe and it exploded. A piece of the shrapnel sliced through the paper-thin wall of the trailer, hit Jeanette in the chest and killed her. Fox injured his leg, and a couple of his friends had minor shrapnel wounds.

Richard Fox and Jeanette Ogara

On Thursday, March 8, Fox was charged with murder, exploding a destructive device and child endangerment. Their daughter is being cared for by her grandparents.

Turned out Fox had pleaded guilty two years ago to misdemeanor battery against Ogara in 2006. He was placed on probation and ordered to complete a 52-week domestic violence recovery program. The probation ended in January. He also served at least three prison sentences in the 1990’s for auto theft and weapons possession convictions.

Fox pleaded not guilty to all the charges Thursday, and Superior Court Judge Charles Ervin set bail at $3.5 million. If convicted, Fox faces life in prison without parole. He remained jailed.

Friends say he is devastated about Jeanette’s death.

Personally, I don’t see them being able to get a conviction for murder. Negligent homicide? Sure. He was an idiot with one too many post-probation beers in him, but Jeanette being in the path of the fatal piece of shrapnel was just rotten luck. The other two charges will stick.

So, yeah, note to self: beer and cannons don’t mix.

Related articles

• Frantic boyfriend called 911 after woman hit with mortar (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• Man pleads not guilty in girlfriend’s death from homemade mortar (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• Calif Cannon Death Suspect Has Criminal History (abcnews.go.com)

American troops in Afghanistan

First, it was an American “preacher” who publicly burned a Qur’an. Then, it was a group of U. S. Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Afghanis, who the Marines claimed were Taliban fighters. Then it was the accidently burning of several Qur’ans while clearing out the air base at Bagram. Now, a United States soldier has gone on a rampage and killed 16 Afghan civilians.

Each incident creates an increased risk of attacks on our troops and a breakdown of any efforts to ease our way out of the war. In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 54% of Americans want to withdraw even if the Afghan army is not ready to take over security in the country.

Okay, we’ll skip over the long list of what we’ve done wrong in the past eleven years. Like a few dozen armies before us, we have now learned – well, at least some of us have learned – why the common wisdom holds that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. The one thing we need to agree on right now is that the longer we stay, the more we feed the hatred and resentment toward us. It is time to stop providing terrorists with recruiting slogans. We went into Afghanistan because our leaders refused to understand the history of the region, from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the eastern border of Pakistan…they do not hate our lifestyle or our religions, they hate our occupations of their lands.

The President has expressed his sadness and regrets for the murderous actions of one soldier. Our military leaders in Afghanistan have apologized. The man responsible will be tried for his crimes. It is not enough. The Afghans want the Marines who desecrated their dead and the soldiers who burned the Qur’ans arrested and tried. The Afghans would prefer they be tried by an Afghan court, but we might be able to slide past those two incidents if we at least arrested them men responsible and incarcerated them for a token amount of time. The murders of 16 unarmed civilian men, women and children is not something we can slide over, and it is not something we should slide over. Even if the verdict is that this man committed this atrocity because of a psychic breakdown, he must be properly punished, and he must be seen to be punished by the Afghan people for the sake of our remaining troops.

These incidents have made our presence there untenable. We need to escalate our withdrawal, or we will end up losing as many of our men and women in Afghanistan as we lost in Iraq. We also need to consider the idea that the urinating, burning and killing are intended to force our leadership to withdraw. Our troops know what is at stake when the Afghan people feel we have committed a crime against them and their beliefs. We train our troops to respect the native culture and Islam. It is getting hard to believe that the men who are doing these things don’t understand the consequences, especially when someone posted the video of the urinating incide on-line and someone else allowed Afghans access to the bonfire at Bagram.

And here at home, we need our politicians to sit down and shut up. The world is watching and listening. No modern nation lives in isolation anymore. Even the most undeveloped nations have residents who are hooked up to the worldwide web and know everything that happens anywhere in the world. The riots in Afghanistan caused by the Qur’an burning by Rev. Terry Jones should have proven that to our poltiicians. National borders have little meaning for information. When Afghans read that Newt Gingrich has condemned our President for apologizing for the Bagram Qur’an burning, and know that he is running to be our next president, they have reason to fear for their future if Gingrich is elected.

Barack Obama learned the hard way that candidates do not have all the information about any situation – not the conditions on the ground in wars or the mess in the banks. Those ten weeks between the election and inauguration are a crash course in reality. In situations like this, the candidates and even members of Congress need to admit their ignorance and stop mouthing off.

Related articles

• Burn Cigarettes not Qur’ans (iaoscc.wordpress.com)
• Gingrich Denounces President’s Apology For Qur’an Burning (lezgetreal.com)
• It All Just Keeps Escalating in Afghanistan (freerangereason.wordpress.com)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg

If you wanted to conduct a poll showing support for corporations and those politicians who have sold their greedy little souls to corporations, you might think the Bloomberg National Poll would be the company to conduct it, right? After all, it is part of that vast media whatever-it-is that is owned by New York’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Forbes’ 2011 tenth-richest person in America. Unfortunately, even the Bloomberg organization has a base level of ethics and their poll of 1,001 America adults found 63% were opposed to the laws implemented in states like Ohio and Wisconsin that stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining and rewrote their benefit packages.

The poll shows that only 46% of respondents felt that public employees should be willing to accept benefit cuts. The divide in the responses fell along party lines. There is a difference between being willing to take benefit cuts and having a union denied collective bargaining rights. That difference is what happened in Wisconsin. The public sector unions agreed to have their members pay more for health insurance and contribute more to their pension plans. But they fought the loss of their collective bargaining rights, because that is what unions are all about. Unions exist to join together the voices of the members to speak as one when confronting management, whether that management be a corporation, a small business or a government. One employee alone has no power. One hundred employees together have power. And that power was not harnessed just for higher wages and healthcare, but to make mines safe to work in, to cut work schedules so that people were not standing at dangerous machinery in states of utter exhaustion, to limit the power of management to fire people for no reason except to replace them with someone who will work for less money. Every single advance that was made in the safety of the workplace, made not just for employees but for customers in stores and patients in hospitals was begun by unions. And most Americans remember that.

The same split in responses was evident in answer to questions about whether the governors and state legislatures had curtailed unions in order to balance budgets or harm unions. The majority of respondents did not buy the budget balancing explanation.

One respondent, retired teacher Dale Palmer of Zephyrhills, Florida, said “The Republican Party sees an opportunity to attack and possibly destroy the base of their opponents’ political power.” He sees state’s budget problems as a consequence of the economy and tax cuts, not public sector unions. “They’re putting it now on the backs of their enemies even when these particular unions are willing to bargain.” Well, that about sums it up. Even Democratic-led states are being forced to lay off workers, negotiate benefit packages or cut salaries to deal with budget deficits, but those states aren’t blaming the unions or trying to deny the unions their rights. They are trying to work with the unions to mitigate the damage.

The rest of the poll shows that the Republican message is not taking hold. Asked about public vs. private compensation, 43% said that public workers are better paid, 21% said they are paid less and 27% said the pay is comparable. The Republicans have being saying that not only are public sector workers vastly overpaid, but their benefit packages are “cadillac.” They are pushing a reverse kind of envy concept, in which private sector workers are supposed to resent anyone who has better health insurance and a pension plan.

On the matter of political influence, 63% said that corporations have far more power to influence politicians than unions do. And 72% have a favorable view of public sector workers, compared with 17% who have an unfavorable view. Nice contrast to Congress’ 10% approval rating.

But the really bad news for Republican Party strategists came in the Republican responses to a question about whether or not public employees should have the right to collectively bargain for their wages. The plurality of Republicans agreed that they should, while the over-all agreement was at 64%. And 55% of Republicans (63% of all respondents) said that governments should not have the right to void their pension obligations to retirees. Independent Anthony DeMarco of Havertown, Pennsylvania, supports curtailing collective bargaining rights, draws the line at cutting pensions “If it had been something that was agreed upon in the past – and everybody at the time agreed to it – you shouldn’t be able to change it retroactively. A deal is a deal.”

Randy Turner of Springfield, Missouri, believes that unions are a corrective force against government power. “Trying to make us not have a right for unions for anything is wrong. They help our economy, they help the job market – all kinds of things our government doesn’t help.” Turner is a construction worker in a “right to work” state who does not belong to a union.

Overall, poll respondents who view unions favorably outnumber those who don’t by 49% to 40%, and a majority say that unions are appropriate for teachers, nurses, firefighters, prison guards and police officers. They were more divided over union membership for office workers and custodians.

Selzer & Co., of Des Moines, Iowa, was the firm hired for the poll. They questioned 1,001 adults across the country and the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%.

The take-away from this poll is simple – the Republican message is not resonating the way they want it to. Even though only 11% of the America workforce belong to unions, and the most unionized industries are the public sector, entertainment, media and sports, there is still a residual respect for unions, a collective memory from those days when 40% of Americans belonged to unions and we had a solid middle class.

Betty Friedan, 1960

I am a child of the women’s liberation movement. I spent the first twelve years of my life in a world where mommies stayed home and raised their children while daddies went off to the city to win the bread. I vividly remember the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the day when one of our neighbors did the unthinkable – Mary got a job, not because she needed to but because she was bored out of her mind keeping house. I remember the extremists like Germaine Greer and the backlash against the more aggressive feminists. But mostly, I remember feeling that true women’s liberation should mean the ability to choose, not just for women but for men as well. If a man wanted to be the homemaker, he should be able to. If a woman wanted to be a homemaker, she should be able to. And both should be able to choose a career path if that is where their fulfillment lay. That was the ideal. The reality has never kept it with it. Men are still derived if, like my younger brother, they prefer to stay at home. Women are still challenged if they choose a career. But the most important aspect of the expected roles of men and women is the one least spoken of…..we can’t afford to stay home and be full-time homemakers.

I envy Rick Santorum’s wife. Oh, not the part about being married to a sexist religious fanatic, but the part about being married to a man who always earned enough that she could choose to stay home if that is what she wanted. I never had that choice. More often than not, I had to work to make ends meet, and since I never really wanted a career, I was stuck in whatever jobs I could get – a huge range of jobs over the past 40 years, just jobs, just mindless paycheck-producing jobs.

Women now make up half the workforce in America. In 40% of families, it is the woman who is the primary earner. That’s not really surprising if one has kept track of where our economy has gone. Women still work for less pay than men, so in many fields they are the preferred employee. Fewer and fewer of us have jobs that pay living wages or middle class incomes, so just keeping a decent roof over a family’s heads takes two incomes.

It is too easy to say that the increase in women in the workplace is a result of women’s liberation, but it is a false conclusion to an incomplete picture of labor in America. Before and during World War II women were very much in the workforce. The majority of factory workers at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries were women and children. It was work that did not require physical strength. It was also a time when there were no Department of Labor statistics because there was no Department of Labor. One is dependent upon the anecdotal evidence for a picture of the workforce, anecdotes drawn from the efforts of groups that were trying to improve the lives of the working poor in America. The 1950s, the point from which these comparisons of women in the workforce are drawn, were an anomaly in the history of American labor, a time when America was shifting its entire economy, a time of 40% union membership and social forces that created a strong middle class. Women have always worked.

The greatest shift in the workplace is not the number of women working, but the percentage of two-income households in which the woman has the higher income. That is something worth noting, something worth celebrating. With a little care, as the economy recovers and reinvents itself once again, we might see a greater equality in income between men and women. Now that would be the fulfillment of what we started fighting for fifty years ago.

Related articles

• US Economy: Women Leaving Workforce Over Past 20 Years (wire.kapitall.com)
• Stay-At-Home Dads Are The New Status Symbol For Alpha Women (businessinsider.com)
• Happy International Women’s Day! (startstrongaustintx.wordpress.com)
• PM wants more women to join workforce (thehindu.com)
• Women in the workforce: Some progress, but still more likely to be poor (washingtonpolicywatch.org)
• How Access To Contraception Helped Shrink The Gender Pay Gap (thinkprogress.org)
• Women’s Impact On The Economy, By the Numbers (thinkprogress.org)

Rush Limbaugh at 2009 CPAC when he bounced to the chanting

Keeping track of Limbaugh’s lost advertisers is futile. While there are some companies that advertised directly on Limbaugh, others bought time from Clear Channel which could run their ads on anyone’s show and still others were ad purchases from the local station which carried Limbaugh, and fall into both categories. The number runs anywhere from 28 to 45 at this time, though Limbaugh claims he has thousands of sponsors and this loss is no more significant than dropping a few french fries at the drive through. As a protest, it is very effective. As a means of removing Limbaugh from the air, not so much. That will be determined solely by his ratings, just as the loss of advertisers didn’t force Glenn Beck from the air, his loss of viewers did.

We really owe Ms. Fluke our thanks because Limbaugh’s tirade exposed the way almost two-thirds of Americans are depicted by the right wing, and it goes far beyond the assertion that everyone who isn’t a Christian conservative is amoral. The more people have listened to Limbaugh’s words these past few days, the more we can see the pattern, the more exposed the underlying propaganda is.

Sandra Fluke

Ms. Fluke pays for her college health insurance in her college fees. If she is paying for her education with loans, she is paying interest on her insurance premiums. Georgetown University and its student health insurance are a closed system. The only way in which the government is involved with Georgetown is in providing student financial aid and some grants directly to the school. What Sandra Fluke and presumably many of Georgetown’s students want is comprehensive prescription drug coverage in the health insurance they pay for. Georgetown is affiliated with the Catholic Church, but it is not a school of theology, does not solely and specifically train priests and nuns, but hires and teaches people of all faiths. Being a Georgetown student is not being on welfare or using the Medicaid system.

But that is what Limbaugh accused her of….having sex on our taxpayer dime. That is what he kept saying, that she wanted US to pay so she could have oodles and oodles of sex, sex at sex-addict levels. The easy thing is to focus on the smear on Ms. Fluke’s character (she really ought to file a defamation lawsuit), but somewhere in the background, we are starting to understand the never-ending smear on all our characters.

The right wing narrative of what constitutes a liberal is based on a picture of someone who receives government assistance as the classic “welfare queen” – a woman who got pregnant at 15 and has popped out a dozen kids by God-knows how many men just so she can collect bundles of money from the government. She doesn’t exist. During the Clinton administration, states were initially given waivers to rework their welfare systems. The best, like Tommy Thompson’s Wisconsin, created workfare systems which became models for the entire country. Workfare did not do as well in states like Mississippi where a lack of public transportation and lack of jobs prevented a successful implementation. But it was a beginning. The Clintons went into the White House determined to curtail life-long welfare, and in most places they did. In 1996, a 60-month benefit limit was established for federal welfare, but many states have a shorter benefit time frame.

Then, there’s the numbers. There are a lot of programs intended to keep people from starving to death on the street or in unheated apartments, but real welfare recipients? Only 5% of the American population is on public assistance. That’s 5.9 women and 9.6 million children. The greatest number, 43.2%, are families consisting of just one woman with one child. But in the right wing narrative, every Democrat is a welfare recipient. Only 1% of the Federal budget is spent on public assistance.

But ask any trueblooded conservative, and they will refute those numbers based on nothing but the words of right wing media personalities. They have no facts. They will deny the facts and claim the government is lying about the facts because they cannot let go of that outdated model of a welfare recipient taking something they don’t deserve from the deserving.

After posting on news site comment streams, with my usual liberal/progressive slant, I have been accused of being unmarried, perpetually pregnant, never having held a job, having a dozen knuckle-dragging children, being a drug user or drunk, being unwashed, being a ho, living off the taxpayers, spending my welfare money on Starbucks double-lattes, urinating in public….and that’s just the reprintable stuff. But, I’m 63, married for almost 40 years to the same man, have only two adult children both of whom are college educated and self-supporting, own my own home, have worked since I was 16, paid taxes all that time and hate Starbucks. I’m not even collecting Social Security yet. The only thing they get right is that I don’t belong to an organized religion. Right wing commentators, pundits and so-called journalists have portrayed everyone who disagrees with their political or religious views as being a communist, un-American lowlife who is living off the hardworking American.

Rep. Jackie Speier

Congresswoman Jackie Speiers put a face on the real women who get abortions, and she doesn’t look like some debauched bitch who kills babies because she’s too lazy to use a condom. By attacking Sandra Fluke, Limbaugh finally put a specific face on the picture he and his ilk have painted for the conservatives. It was a face that didn’t fit with the late Andrew Breitbart’s drunken screed that occupiers were all filthy rapists. It was a face that didn’t fit with the James O’Keefe portrayal of an underage whore in a feathered vest. It was a face that didn’t fit with any of their characterizations of who and what a liberal is. By flat-out lying about what Sandra Fluke testified to, by “apologizing” by calling her testimony anecdote and unprovable hearsay, Limbaugh peeled away the mask. He showed how the propaganda works.

Limbaugh broke the rules of the narrative. For all these years he and the rest of the right wing media have done an excellent job of only issuing personal attacks on public figures and smearing the rest of us in stereotypes and generalities. It is one of the few truly journalistic things they have done. Journalists seek out the single person to make the story relate more fully to the reader, listener or viewer. Propagandists avoid the single person because the point is to great a vague “they” who are the enemy. Jackie Speiers doesn’t look like a murderer and Sandra Fluke doesn’t look like a whore sucking on the welfare teat. We look at these women and see ourselves, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends. Now, it is personal for all of us.

More than damaging Limbaugh, this week has damaged the narrative and cracked the all-encompassing character assassination wide open.

Related articles

• CAUGHT ON TAPE: Limbaugh’s 70 Sexist Smears (thinkprogress.org)
• Sandra Fluke Rebukes Rush Limbaugh’s Apology (lezgetreal.com)
• Patricia Heaton joins Rush Limbaugh in apology to Sandra Fluke (calgaryherald.com)
• “From The Mouth Of A Bully”: Rush Limbaugh’s 53 Smears Against Sandra Fluke (mykeystrokes.com)
• Sarah Palin defends Rush Limbaugh over Fluke ‘slut’ scandal (theprovince.com)
• Jacoby: Rush needs better apology (bostonglobe.com)

Senator Bernard Sanders, Independent of Vermont

When we lived in Georgia, I was frequently asked how Vermonters could elect that crazy (insert expletive) socialist, Bernie Sanders, to Congress. This is one of the reason we love our crazy socialist (aside from the fact that he’s passionately dedicated to the people of this state.)

Bernie has organized an appeal to the Justice Department to enforce the provisions of the Wall Street reform law and take action against speculators who are helping to drive up oil prices, and therefore, the price of gasoline. In a letter signed by 23 Senators and 47 Representatives, the case was made that at a time of high supply and low demand, the price of oil is out of proportion with the regular pattern of the free market. Our demand for oil is at its lowest level since April, 1997, but our gasoline price is $3.70 a gallon, edging toward the high it reached during the Bush years.

The letter cited a report from Goldman Sachs, published in Forbes Magazine, that showed how speculators have added 56¢ to each gallon of gas. That view is held by Exxon Mobil, the Saudi government, the American Trucking Association, Delta Airlines, the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

During his press conference this afternoon, President Obama said that he had asked the Justice Department to re-open their task force on speculators, which is possibly one of the fastest responses any Senator ever got from a President.

Thank you, Bernie. Love you, and you can sign a six-year extension on the lease of your apartment in Washington. We will send you back.

Related articles

• “Tired of High Gas Prices”? (leftperspectives.com)
• Sanders and 69 other members of Congress to federal regulators: Stop oil speculation (yubanet.com)
• Wednesday Night Video – Bernie Sanders on The Ed Show (polentical.com)
• Wall Street greed fueling gas prices (cnn.com)
• 70 Members of Congress: Curb Wall Street Speculation On Oil (thinkprogress.org)
• Sen. Bernie Sanders Introduces Bill To Offer “Prize Fund” To Lower HIV Costs (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Bernie Sanders proposes to ax fossil-fuel subsidies and add 10 million sun-powered rooftops (gogreennation.org)

It would seem from a variety of news pieces this week that those of us who cherish the civility of good manners may have hit our tolerance limit for “free speech”. First there was the “silence gun” out of Japan, which scrambles the brain circuits responsible for speech and renders the target silent. Then there has been the ongoing story of how Rush Limbaugh has finally been called out for crossing the line for calling a Georgetown law student a “slut” and a “prostitute”; he has been made to apologize (albeit reluctantly) and is bleeding advertisers from his radio show (7 at last count).

2 Cell Phone Jammers (c) darkcreek.com

Today comes word of a Philadelphia vigilante by the name of Eric, who has been shutting down loud cell phone users on the city’s number 44 bus route with a cell phone jammer. While a lot of his fellow riders think he’s their hero, what he’s doing is unfortunately a federal crime punishable by jail time and a $16,000 fine, because of the potential to jam crucial emergency calls (the bus company assured the public that the communication systems on the buses themselves don’t use cell-phone technology and have always been impervious to this type of jamming). After the reporter for the NBC affiliate who talked to him advised him of that, he said that he would be getting rid of the device and would suffer through those obnoxious, loud cell phone calls again.

Being a cell phone user, I’m glad that my calls are protected, as I have used it several times for emergencies. As a person who is royally ticked at the lack of civility in our daily lives and our public discourse, I want to clap Eric on the back.

President Barak Obama, 2009

So here’s my current hobby-horse: the absolute disrespect shown to President Obama from every spectrum of our society. I would love to draw comparisons to President Reagan, but that wouldn’t work because he was beloved by all (if you believe that – there was a lot of speculation at the time that he was just reading from a script someone else wrote… and then it turned out to be true). Let’s hark back to President Carter, instead. He had his share of assailable newsbytes; he was a peanut farmer from Georgia; the hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran happened on his watch and he refused to invade Iran; he admitted in an interview to “lusting in his heart”… oh, there were just so many of them, including the kamikaze duck.

President Jimmy Carter

HOWEVER, he was always President Carter. He wasn’t referred to in the mainstream media by just his last name or, God forbid, his first name. No one would have dreamed of saying anything about his wife as has been said about First Lady Michelle Obama. No one would have dared go so far as to suggest that his daughter be gang raped.

There are four factors to consider in this.

There used to be the belief that even if you did not respect the person sitting in the Oval Office, you still respected the office. This man was our president, had been elected by a majority of the people in the nation, and was our Commander in Chief. There was still, even after the debacle of the Vietnam War, that ownership and respect for our President. After all, the generations that were commenting and reporting at that time had been raised by parents who came out of two world wars, and we were raised to respect the president, right or wrong. That didn’t mean the duck wasn’t news, it just meant that no one got mean, nasty and vicious about it.

The second factor is that the Internet didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t really a forum where every Tom, Dick and Jane could spew any type of crap and do it anonymously.  The mainstream media was fed by actual reporters and correspondents who checked their facts before going public with a story. News organizations weren’t owned by Disney, they were either news divisions of the major networks or independent print newspapers. They got news feeds from respected sources like Reuters or the AP. They had reporters in the field. Commentary was limited to the editorial page, not headlines. News anchors were veteran reporters who had put in their time in the field, not someone hired because they had good hair or impressive cleavage. National news didn’t do many feel-good stories; you got those from your local news shows and your local papers. The people who were putting information out there for the public took responsibility for it, put their names and reputations behind it, and took seriously the reasons for the “Fourth Estate” (a free press) to exist at all. With the explosion of the Internet, blogs and comment streams have become the playground of conspiracy theorists, nutcases and just plain God-awful nasty people who feel they have a right (and they do) to spew any sort of crap into the blogosphere and not be held accountable for it. And our national news organizations are all owned by entertainment organizations or international media conglomerates that don’t have any sort of commitment to reporting the news accurately. They won’t even call out an interviewee for blatant lies.

Then we have the two factors that have led to all this incredible manure showing up in the blogosphere: bigotry and politics.

Unfortunately, after electing our first mixed-race President (please do remember that his mother was white), we have discovered just how racist this country still is. President Carter and his family are white. Aside from calling him a Georgia cracker, there wasn’t much to go with there. President Obama is a mutt (his own word), but called by everyone an African-American. His wife is undeniably black, as are their daughters. The racial slurs on comment streams, blogs and websites are mind-boggling. I was a child in the sixties, but I remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (I remember JFK, if truth be told). A substantial proportion of the nation mourned Rev. King, and vowed to continue his work. The ones that didn’t kept their mouths shut on the national stage. Now we are seeing just how much racism still exists in this country, and it is both sickening and depressing.

But I said “bigotry”, not “racism” earlier. That’s because the other bigotry that has landed on President Obama’s head is religious. Yes, his biological father was raised Muslim and his stepfather was a secular Muslim, but his mother was raised as a secular Christian. Yes, he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother remarried, where he attended both a Muslim school for two years and then a Catholic parochial school for two years. He has refused to make official any kind of church affiliation now that he is in the White House, the first president to do so, but he was baptized as an adult into the Trinity United Church of Christ (our Founding Father John Adams was a member). He is a Christian. However, because of his fathers’ religious upbringing as Muslims, and his oh-so-not-Christian name of Barak Hussein, he is still being called a Muslim and has inherited all the misinformed anti-Muslim fear and bigotry that has grown out of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror. So the claims of him being a closet Muslim and an advocate of Sharia law abound.

Make this required reading, please!

Finally, there is the sad fact that in our politics the concept of civility has disappeared. From the campaign trail and political ads that vomit bald-faced lies to the floor of Congress where politicians play chicken with our government, it has become a disgrace and an embarrassment. When the supposed leaders of our local, state and national governments are out there throwing the mud as far and as hard as the idiots on the comment streams, it gives those very idiots the license to do the same damned thing. A sitting governor would never have dreamed of being so crass as to get into the President’s face and shake a finger at him thirty years ago, at least not in public.

I want a return to honest reporting, respect for the President and his family, and civilized behavior. I’m tired of swimming in filth every time I read the “news” online, or sit through political ads on TV. Enough is enough.

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