They Way I See Things

Lieberstrami

2009-11-02T20:24:00.000-08:00

My cohort, Deb, over at Turn Left wrote this about Joe Lieberman:

http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/11/02/the-return-of-the-3-million-man/

Not to be outdone, I wrote this:

Until not long ago, as I watched the Lieberman antics, I was locked into the pseudo-Christian dilemma of trying to decide if what he is doing (or pretending to do) was moral or immoral.I was convinced I could think of it all in terms of right and wrong. Eventually I came to realize that I was barking up the wrong tree.

The problem is that this tree has NO ROOTS. Lieberman is neither moral nor immoral: he is simply AMORAL. His thoughts and actions have no substance. He is an over-paid entertainer, a showman, who plays for money, grins and giggles…mostly for his own amusement. Sadly, beneath the garish mirth is untold misery because he is a hollow man. He is masquerading as public servant, when in truth of fact, he is a parasite. In leech-like fashion, he has attached himself to the artery of the public employment roles and sucks it drier and drier every day.

Public life for Lieberman is a sordid circus. He loves the center ring, the brass band and the elephant parade, loves to play the clown and sell nutritionless popcorn, but wants no one to know the animals in the cages out back are starving and diseased.

Lieberman is a morbid and dangerous monument to the moribund face of what the crumbling edifice of what democracy is becoming. He is a harbinger of terrible times to come. I guess everyone needs someone to look down to.

If Lieberman is allowed to proceed and continue unchecked, then we deserve whatever we get. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Any moment now, I expect to see the Connecticuit Israeli Police coming to arrest both of us.

Current events

2009-10-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

I read this article (you might do so, as well),
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/kaufmann

Then I wrote this:

In a word? "Yes." Just as in the discussion (?) concerning healthcare reform, our elected officials have develpoed a deaf ear and are acting instead as the "chosen few." Instead of listening with any sensitivity to the opinions, desires and wishes of the consitutuents who elected them, with the exception of Barney Frank and handful of others, they have chosen to become aloof and unresponsive.

With respect to both healthcare and this credit regulation legislation, the "representatives" are failing to represent and choosing to ignore the will of the very people who entrusted them with this critical responsibility of oversight and shepherding.

The word that comes to mind is "arrogant," and if one takes a quick trip through the dictionary, you find that this word comes from the Latin, meaning "to claim." In these cases it would seem to mean to lay claim to a superiority of wisdom and intellect that they have conferred upon themselves. The definition also mentions "haughtiness," thereby implying (again) a self-imbued sense of a heightened ability to make value/judgement calls on behalf of others they seem to deem incapable of doing for themselves (us).

The sadness of this conundrum is that we seem to be facing the need to legislate fiscal morality, and the task has fallen to those who have no moral compass to guide them in their task.

To be regarded as a schmuck is to be regarded as inferior and stupid, and I am sorely offended. You should be, as well.

Relative Values

2009-10-05T06:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on ABC's "This Week", hosted by George Stepenopulence, the first guest was the venerable, beady- eyed, ex fed-chairholder/warmer, Alan Greenspan. (NOTE: he is not in anyway green, but has spanned much too much time in the pubic domain). Each time George pressed Mr. Not-Green-Spanned-too-long for an answer about the economy, the stimilus packages, the unemployment, the recession or the Fed's possible actions, he responded with either, " We don't know yet", "We will have to wait and see", "It is hard to project these things", "We will have to wait for the report from the GAO/CBO", "These things are hard to predict", or "We have never had a sustained period of unemployment/recession/imbalance of debt/etc. like this with which to compare it to" (that is, historcally speaking, by the way, a completel bald-faced lie...and very bad grammar).

It would seem that Mr. Greenspan would serve us all much better if he were to return to the relative obsurity of retirement, rather than muddy the airwaves and prove , once again, that he doesn't know anything. Since I am one now, I can excusably and with impunity therefore decry old, staid and stale men, with granite in their ass and noodles in their brains, who have moved way past their prime and should stay home and watch re-runs of "The Flintstones".

Last week, as I trudged down a rainy street in Austin, and pondered the weather forecast with my son, he reminded me of a quote from a wilderness book writer, who said that " weather forecasters were invented to make economists look good." Yesterday, on this same TV program, Cokie Roberts (NPR) reminded us that "economists were invented to make astrologers look good". I am guessing that Paul Krugman might somehow (at last partially) agree. I have also just become more trusting as regards my horoscope.

And my other guess (and I'm not waiting on a report from the CBO on this) is that the longer the President and Congress listen to the malarky we get from the likes of Alan Greenspan, the longer we will continue to drift towards becoming a third world country, economically.

"How do we remedy the Situation?"

2009-09-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

Or, As Shara said later, this about "the paucity of langauge".

From: shara_thome@hotmail.com
To: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:46 AM
Subject: shara_thome@hotmail.com has shared: Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language
....but how to remedy the situation? Dumbfounded here.
Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language Source: austrolabe.com

For starters, let me say that I am "dumbfounded" by discovering there were so many Muslims living amongst the Aussies. But I suppose I shouldn't be, because Muslims can now threaten Danish cartoonists and cause ghetto riots in Paris. Be that as it may, that there is so much sudden concern for how to deal with the "Muslim problem" and the Muslim language(s), in places like down under and elsewhere, is perplexing. I say this because in Australia, where the concern for the Muslim invasion gets front page coverage while they slaughter, ignore and denigrate the aborigine; in the U.S. , where we sought to obliterate the native Americans and today force them into encampments, while still not dealing with our history of slavery and contemporary racism ( and the language obstacles involved there, bro); in Scandanavia the Nordic past is being ameliorated and watered down to appease the Muslim outsiders; in France they are busier worrying about headscarve etiquette than they are the quality of education and have almost foresworn the problems with the Moroccan and Algerian populations in favor of the Arab refugees; in England the disparities over Scots and the Irish have been put aside to worry about the employment and education requirements of the Muslim Indian refugees, and in Germany, the concern with Turks has displaced recognition of Jewish issues ...Nearly overnight, it seems, the world is obsessed with acclimating to, absorbing, yielding to and incorporting the culture and language of a people we regarded as ignorant, backward, infidel in nature,bloodthirsty and heathen, not so long ago.

Would that we were so afraid of the perils of rampant Christianity.

Note: In earlier centuries,the Spaniards (in particular), always solved the problem of cultural and linguistic assimilation by simply trying to make everyone Catholic. That insidious and predatory (and arrogant) practice, coupled with the Inquisition, has not worked out so well, except to make Mexico City a safe place for the Pope to visit. And I dare say that catechism classes for the masses of Muslims will not get very far.

As for your query, "but how to remedy the situtation?" , I am stubbornly and narrow-mindedly in the camp of Robert Frost, on this one. Disregarding for a moment the question of which tongue do you speak when you are in which land, "When in Rome" rings a bell. If you are visiting, simple attempts at the mother tongue are acceptable and errors easily overlooked, since everyone knows you are going home soon. But if you reside, more less permanently, in a land where the mother tongue is other than your own, it would behoove you to learn it and speak it as best you can ( and my bias is that Hispanics in America are not excepted). Anything less is a gesture of disrespect. But back to Frost:

Frost said (approximately) that "to teach a person to write is to teach a person to think". And thinking, real thinking (I think), is encumbent upon all of us. And if you think, you arrive at ideas. And if you have ideas you must find a way to express them. And for that you need words, and often new words. The current mood that has been identified in the U.S. as "anti-intellectualism"reveals how not thinking precludes new ideas: recent town halls are regurgitations of old thinking and old ideas and old words.

If our educational systems, world-wide, (to mimick Ms. Scheslinger) were to focus upon teaching and enabling children to think and to ask "why", to be inquisitive and become logical searchers and researchers of meaning, they would learn to use the proper, appropriate and substantive words required to promote better understanding. (I might suggest, at this point, that immersion in the Bible or the Quoran does not lead to this lofty end. Thinking requires a working knowledge of cause and effect, and neither of these includes a clue as to either.)

Hedges (as in the piece I sent you), Safire (too bad), Carlin (way too bad), Chomsky, Maher, Reich, Buckley and Vonnegut are all some examples of linguists (my broken record is playing, again) who took (and take) the time to find the words to express their ideas. To them, I say, "Right on!", and "Awesome!" (Think about those two expressions as they relate to cause and effect)

And there are enough people down under who speak that almost-South Carolina garble the Aussies call "English" that any self-respecting Muslim ought to be able to pick it up. Blimey. I'll have a Foster's.

Not NecessarilyThe News

2009-09-29T06:51:00.001-07:00

And people wonder why newspapers are dying....I saw this headline
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks(article below)in the WaPo this morning, and when I saw "billions" in earmarks, I thought, "Holy Shit!", stopped and read the story. It turns out that the "billions" is $2.65B out of $636B. If you have a calculator, you will see that that the earmark amount (still obscene in the manner in which it is being proposed) amounts to something like .04184% of the total defense budget bill under consideration. The Post has ponied up an eye-popping headline which misleads and agitates but largely misses the point, while stirring up, no doubt, false conservative ire over big government and waste.

The "obscene" number really is the $636B, which is nearly as much as the two TARP bills that were passed. Those were done with great fanfare and furor and debate, that this gets nary a notice. In fact, the headline says that it is "Lauded by White House". Well jolly good. Why? It never comments about that.

Let's see: that $636B for one year of "defense" (which is offensive to most) is only 80% of $800B for ten years of national health care would cost (or only 71% if you use the $900B estimate from the GAO), or only $80B or $90B per year to fund and yet we cannot even get a reasonable bill passed to enable, enact and accomplish that, in any reasonable form that does not throw billions in profits back at the insurance companies. Good work, WaPo. You make your industry proud.

And speaking of health care and insurance reform, there was only one (1) article that I could find concerning those issues. Here is the byline: In Delivering Care, More Isn't Always Better, Experts Say, by By Ceci ConnollyWashington Post Staff Writer . The thrust (if there is one)is this:
Medical professionals say the fundamental problem in the nation's health-care system is the widespread misuse and overuse of tests, treatments and drugs that drive up prices, have little value to patients, and can pose serious risks. The question, they say, is not whether there will be rationing, but rather what will be rationed, and when and how.
To begin with, just out of curiousity, who is Ceci Connolly and what qualifies he/she to pontificate on health care? May I see some credentials, please? Or perhaps a birth certificate? Is Ceci even an American name? Is this journalism or idle time gossip?
Secondly, this story an as old as a 60 Minutes program on the subject from two years ago. We have heard this old saw 1,000 times before, and it has not changed, one iota. And there is no substantive discussion in the article about either single-payer or the public option or how much money Max Baucus has in his pocket from insurance companies. The WaPo is making damn certain that we stay as wholly unfocused as possible. Journalism should help us define what is wrong in such a way that a corrective can be envisioned. This article merely reheats already overcooked leftovers. It is a half-eaten Big Mac, retrieved from a dumpster. This makes this newspaper (I use the term loosely)the Washington Posthumous, publishing obits instead of birth announcements.
Both stories provide unspectacular reporting about unspectacular non-news. They are misleading and erroneously fanciful and take up space, while wasting energy. And while so many bemoan the death of the newspaper media, and Obama speaks lately (and glibly)of bailing out the industry, the WaPo is not doing much to further its' cause when it publishes tripe like this. Maybe we should put an earmark in the defense bill for that bailout. A story about that would surely make the front page..on Saturday.

----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 7:43 AM

Message from sender: really?
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Sen. Thad Cochran's most recent reelection campaign collected more than $10,000 from University of Southern Mississippi professors and staff members, including three who work at the school's center for research on polymers. To a defense spending bill slated to be on the Senate floor Tuesday, the...

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Wisdom borrowed from Bageant

2009-09-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

Nice to know I am not alone in my musings. Noam Chomsky has been telling us, for years, that we have a one party system, called the "corporatocracy" and nobody listens. If , like myself and many others I know, are on SS, SSDI and/or Medicare, this should not be a pleasant read.

When "capitalism" ceases to be entrepreurship, but instead morphs into greedy, limitless and shortsighted, quick gain expansionist enterprise, we have lost our way.

We found out much too late that "compassionate conservatism" and "trickle down economics" and cheerful Clintonite free trade agendas were a bunch of bunk, that, altogether led us into our economic disaster and it is time to consider some alternatives. One would be what I have come to call "humanitarian, community based capitalism", where we are able to say to the profiteers, "OK. Thanks. Enough is enough", and we level the playing field and give everyone a chance. But, as I seem to recall, that is called socialism, Marxism or communism, and then people want to hang me from a light pole for even mentioning the possibilities.

I think that the much ballyooed "free market economy" is intent on making certain that some people are "more freeer" than others...sorta like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm who were more equal than others. And then current day conservatives, Libertarians and other ideologues warn us that we should be afraid of Obama and socialism? It is precisely that inverse, obtuse logic that drives Wall St., General Electric and CocaCola.

And let's see: by my latest reckoning, the U.S. goverment owns most of Genral Motors. And the largest auto company in Russia is state owned as well. And then there is China....But I must stop here: I must run down to Home Despot and buy the plastic plumbing fixture I can no longer buy from the local hardware store that is no longer here.

Subject: AlterNet: There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party Won Again> http://www.alternet.org/politics/142840>

Got up on the left side of the bed

2009-09-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Deb Dellapiana wrote an opinion piece at a blog site we shrae (sort of) this morning( you can read it here: http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/09/18/the-bait-and-switch-presidency/#comment-455), and I had to say a few words (Oh no! Not again!). Here goes:

You have correctly identified the largely presidential symptom of a deeper causality. Obama did not bait and switch, he just baited and did nothing. In a classic case of lousy customer service (and we are the customer), he "over-promised and under-delivered". One obvious result is that nearly the entire country has now decided to "Bitch and wait". They bitch about Wall St., a lack of jobs, foreclosures, too many immigrants, high taxes,expensive education, credit card rates, a lack of adequate (or any) health care, indifferent legislators and, under it all, having a black man as president. There are several ways to look at this. The first (spoken clearly by Maureen Dowd (NYT), Jimmy Carter (town hall), Eugene Roninson (WaPo) et. al.), is that the unrest over everything else has unearthed our nation's long-hidden dirty little secret: we are bigoted (we don't care much for women) and hugely racist( www.alternet.org/story/142630/). Nearly all of the other bitching and complaining is driven by the ugly truth that caucasian white America is overhelmingly terrified of having someone of color be the POTUS. So they irrationally yell and scream (and bitch) about everything else, most of which has been wrong for a very long time and was ignored, looked-over and glossed-over by an America, content to let Bush and Cheney shred the Constitution and pile up the national debt via the military. And the obfuscation is so insidious that when Jimmy Carter call us out on it, the WH soft-peddles it, the moderate democrats deny it and Rush Limbaugh calls Carter a rectal anatomical disorder on the radio (among other embarrassments).

The two-facted reason for this is that the citizenry of the US, just like the government and Obama, THINK TOO SMALL. The libertarians and the conservatives have it largely wrong about the size of government and our taxing structure: it is not too big, our thinking about it is too small and so we make the same old decisions about problem solving we always have and the problems remain. We think too small when we re-elect the same people over and over, who behave the same way,over and over because they/we think too small. And Obama is in over his head,unable to coerce a government of any size to work at all, because he thinks "too small" (using the internet to get elected is not big thinking: it is opportunism)and he is powerless to move a congress which wallows in thinking too small (which we elected by thinking too small), because (and here is the second facet):

As Noam Chomsky puts it (and writers like Naomi Klein confirm), we do not have a two-party system, we have a CORPORATOCRACY, driven by the money and influence of the greed-oriented big businesses and the shareholder corporations of America. And they pay the congressman (like Max Baucus) to contiue to think small and maintain the status quo. Tiny, old, repetitive thinking does not give birth to big, new bold ideas (which we desperately need). And politicians (including the newly elected Obama) and are more concerned with becoming re-elected than they are with performing the tasks for which they elected in the first place.

So we bitch and wait. We are victims of our own complacency, old habits, small thinking, and lack of courage to challenge the status quo, as long as have enough to get by. We are content to let our rights get taken away and/or abused, to allow the conservative mentality to say, "I've got mone, screw you", and happy to get through the day living on Fox News, instant consumer gratification and lousy non-nutritional fast food. And we let the government pacify us with programs like "Cash For Clunkers" (which turns out to be an anti-economic recovery program to benefit Detroit auto makers and finance companies). We are numb from shock and awe (Naomi Klein, again) and live in a perpetual fear of losing even more than we have already. And we are angry and unhappy. We can rant and rave, we can yell and scream , but we cannot innovate. We cannot "think big" or elect anyone who can, either, from all appearances.

The citizenry of America is, at the moment, anti-intellectual, non- analytical, anti-investigative, racially biased, narrow-minded, complacent and unwilling to upset the status quo apple cart because it might be a little difficult or cause some short-term (or long-term) hardships in order to prevent the ship from sinking (which it is).

So we bitch and wait. We paint ugly signs and march about the wrong issues, paint Hitler faces on the president, listen to Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and McConnel and Enzi and let Baucus screw us and keep thinking small and prolonging the misery of doing nothing new. We allow the fear of possible poverty and of any non-white, non-Christian movement to keep us inert: it makes self delusional bitching easier. has anyone simply come out openly and conjectred that Glenn Beck is just plain crazy? I mean,"nuts" as in mentally ill?

Sadly, perhaps Obama has realized that the conundrum and behemoth of old/small political thinking in America is much bigger than he is. So right now, he is doing what every American institution has always done to stay alive and prosper: he is conducting a very aggressive marketing campaign, by being on the television and making speeches every five minutes,in an attempt to prevent us from seeing the real problems of big money and ignore the real manipulations of our corporatocracy. He is pulling an empty delivery wagon down main street. But he is a parade of one and the emporer has no clothes.
As long as we bitch and wait, Obama, Boehner, Pelosi,Wall St., big insurance, big pharma, big energy and the off-shore banks are safe and secure. But we are fooling ourselves: we are really bitching that the system does not work and is failing quickly, and have unkowingly discovered that we can try to blame the failure on a black man (again). And beneath all of that we wait. We wait for a savior or an economic/cultural messiah to save us from everything we brought upon ourselves through our innattention to detail, small thinking and repeated social episodes of uncritical observation. And all we know is that we don't want that savior to be anything other than white, male, protestant and from Iowa.

Proselytizing By Accident

2009-09-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-05/inside-sarahs-church/?cid=bsa:mostpopular1

The various religious fundamentalists, deranged self-proclaimed luminaries, ritual sectarians and cultists who comprise groups like "Sarah's Church", Rev. Wright's isolated enclave-types, the ultra-conservative Jewish groups, primitive baptist snake-handlers, pseudo-oriental acseticists and miltant radical Islamists (to name but a few),

many of whom adhere to, promulgate and blindly wallow in strict misinterpretations of curiously arcane and out-moded ideological tenets and mythologies, thereby disabling their cognitive faculties and their awareness of reality,

therefore insisting to pretend to live in another, older, by-gone, anti-intellectual and unenlightened era...

are people practicing "religious pornography": they take what were in infancy good, purposeful and positive notions, and transform them into mental smut and emotional disingenuousness.

And those "other" people (like the author of the article above), who lend to these movements some degree of credibility and plausbility, by writing about them (with much of the same zealous bigotry they themselves decry)are literary voyeurs, using editorial gossip to describe the "oral" mental masturbatory rituals being performed. They proselytize by accident, by pouring gasoline on the fire and increasing the acrid nature of the smoke.

We would learn more about humanity by reading back issues of Playboy or Hustler. This sort of commentary is merely a lurid and arrogantly disdainful version of People magazine.

Responding to a Naderite

2009-09-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Clint. While the "right" may be the worst abusers in this category, methinks the left is often just as guilty. And I think the "langage as symbols" you are referring to is really more a matter as "language as a weapon"...however...

The dance partner, whom I have brought along to the masquerade brawl of human understanding, for quite some time now, is the one that leads me to "linguists" for answers, insight and authenticity. I no longer rely upon politicians or their spokespersons, ideological promoters, "advocates", commentators (who twist what is already twisted to make their own point: Fox Noise?), pundits (Buchanan?), moderators (who don't really moderate: think Presidential debates) , faux observers, "columnists", or orators and rhetoriticians to help me understand what I have just been smilingly "told". They are a uniformly unreliable group.

My chosen "linguists", our generation's "straight talkers", range from Bill Moyers, to Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky, to Robert Reich, John Stewart, Jane Hamsher,George Carlin and even Paul Krugman, UT Professor Galbraith and William Grieder... even though some are thought of more as economists or comedians. But they deliver understandable language and word constructs that reveal the real meaning and import behind the endless facade' of multi-syllabic stew delivered by wordy alchemists of confusion like Frank Luntz.

NOTE: Luntz, by the way, is no "word wizard", as Nader would have us believe. He is a malevolent manipulator of simple truths, the worst of a bad breed, who clouds and obfuscates for evil purposes, and does so with glee and gusto. (I cannot think of an exact Luntzian counterpart on the left, but if you listen to Harry Reid, Keith Olberman or Gov. Dean, any of the progressive bloggers or to any of the carefully crafted Obamaspeaks, the same admixture of obscure implications and insinuations exists in all those as well).

Mr. Nader is right,of course, as usual, but a little late to the party. The founding fathers knew, over 200 years ago, how bumblingly wrong this democracy could all go through psycho-babble (and it has: look at the complete non-separation of church and state?) and worked tirelessly against the possibilities. Even Dwight Eisenhower warned that "something evil" was afoot with the military industrial complex, and today we spend SEVEN times more on defense and weaponry than any other nation in the world. I think "Blackwater"is a pretty lame euphemism for "security". And of course, we cannot wait to "give" democacy to the Iraqis and the Afghans.

What Nader should be railing against the loudest is the resultant cultural-behavorial outgrowth of this vocabularistic nightmare: nobody trusts anything anybody says. And when this mistrust erupts into non-sensical shouting matches and causes people to behave irrationally enough to bring AR-15 assault weapons to public gatherings and town hall meetings, the cumulative effect is civic chaos and nearly irreparable polarity and division. The state of our communal mental health comes into question and we live on the edge of violence. Blind understanding, caused by such far reaching deception, leads to blind rage. Everybody thinks everybody else is full of shit. Plain enough?

The three authors that Nader lauds for their recent efforts are not so much practicing "semantic discipline" (What the hell THAT, exactly,anyway , Mr. Nader? How many times have we heard someone dismiss a remark, by saying, "Well,it's all just semantics, anyway"?), as they are demonstrating appropriate applicability and some much overdue linguistic precision and clarity. (Let's see: I think the word transparency comes to mind: whatever happened to that famous campiagn buzzword, Barack?) Moreover, these writers, along with many other capable linguists, are the communicators that we can count on to come through "in the pinch", and tell us what we need to know, when we are forced, finally, to ask our "leadership" to "Tell us, please, what you really mean?"

Mr. Nader could have just easily said that we need to stop being thoroughly "euphemized" before we become completely mentally "euthanized". I wonder if these language abusers that Mr. Nader bemoans are the "Death Panels" of our public awareness?

And I used as many $10.00 words in this response as I could manage, so that everyone could blame me for being just as guilty of obfscation as everyone else I am complaining about.

END.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 6:07 PM
Subject: Fwd: Words Matter - Nader
Great column, if you're interested in language as symbols, and how they have been manipulated by the right.............CR
---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org>Date: Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:56 PMSubject: Words MatterTo: alerts@lists.nader.orgEver wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.Here are some examples. Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!“Medical malpractice reform” is another misnomer. It used to mean restricting the legal rights of wrongfully injured people by hospitals and doctors, or limiting the liability of these corporate vendors when their negligence harms innocent patients. Well, to anybody interested in straight talk, “medical malpractice reform” or the “medical malpractice crisis” should apply to bad or negligent practices by medical professionals. After all, about 100,000 people die every year from physician/hospital malpractice, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report. Hundreds of thousands are rendered sick or injured, not to mention even larger tolls from hospital-induced infections. Proposed “reforms” are sticking it to the wrong people—the patients—not the sellers.“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.What is remarkable about the constant use of these words is that they permeate the language even if those who stand against the policies of those who first coin these euphemisms. You’ll read about “detainees” and “providers” and “privatization” and “private sector” and “free trade” in the pages of the Nation and Progressive magazines, at progressive conferences with progressive leaders, and during media interviews. After people point out these boomeranging words to them, still nothing changes. Their habit is chronic.A lot of who we are, of what we do and think is expressed through the language we choose. The word tends to become the thing in our mind as Stuart Chase pointed out seventy years ago in his classic work The Tyranny of Words. Let us stop disrespecting the dictionary! Let’s stop succumbing to the propagandists and the public relations tricksters!Frank Luntz—the word wizard for the Republicans who invented the term “death tax” to replace “estate tax” is so contemptuous of the Democratic Party’s verbal ineptitude (such as using “public option” instead of “public choice” and regularly using the above-noted misnomers) that he dares them by offering free advice to the Democrats. He suggests they could counteract his “death tax” with their own term “the billionaires’ tax.” There were no Democratic takers. Remember, words matter.Using words that are accurate and at face value is one of the characteristics of a good book. Three new books stand out for their straight talk. In Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, my former campaign manager, exposes the obstructions that deny voter choice by the two major parties for third party and independent candidates. Just out is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges. Lastly, the boisterous, mischievous short autobiography of that free spirit, Jerry Lee Wilson , The Soloflex Story: An American Parable.Not withstanding their different styles, these authors exercise semantic discipline.End.

Addendum to "Send More"

2009-09-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

This came unsolicited. You might like the video. I did.

Hi Ivan,I read your post about Afghanistan where you compare the military effortto that of Viet Nam. In your post, you point out that military operativeshave an incentive to wage war. I think the following video will fit wellin your post:http://www.newsy.com/videos/afghanistan_strategy_more_troops_or_new_tacticsThe video uses multiple news sources to examine how the media are framingthe implications of the recently released Mc Chrystal report calling forincreased troop levels in Afghanistan. It compares these sources toquestion alternatives to increased military commitment in the region. Ihope you will consider embedding the video in The Way I See Things.Newsy.com videos analyze news coverage of important issues from multiplesources. Its unique method of presenting how different media outlets arecovering a story gives context to complex policy issues.Please let me know if you have any questions,Rosa Sowrosa@newsy.com

Send more!

2009-09-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged the report (from Politico), that the famed conservative columnist and pundit George Will had said that it is time to pull troops back from a seemingly un-winnable situation in Afghani-whats-its-place. The narrative noted that this surprising recommendation was coming, not only from a most unlikely source, but also just ahead of what would probably be a request from the General in Charge (that is a GIC, which is military lingo for geek) to raise the current troop level there by 21,000...which it just did (see below) This is after, you may recall, that even the SecDef (Deaf Sec?), Mr. Gates, a warmed over never-was-a-real-GIC from G.W. Bush... whom the benificient Obama allowed to keep his "over-all-the -other GICs " desk job... gave a "lukewarm" assessment of the situation and does not sound like he is very hot to up the ante in the anti-Taliban sand dune and poppy conflict: all this while Karzai practices US style-politics and steals the national election: perhaps Karzai thinks Afghanistan is Florida? If you hang enough chads you can be President? That whole process gores me.

At any rate, during the Bill Moyers interview by Bill Maher (which I so gleefully and enthusiastically forwarded to everyone on my blog list, as well), Moyers told the symbolic tale of a President standing before a large group of advisors, some of whom were military, asking what should be done to address a current conflict. After the suggestion was made to "send more troops, the President asks, "Are 20,000 enough?", and a military man says, "Send more". So the POTUS asks, "Are 40,000 enough?", and a miliary man says, "Send more". And when the President asks if 60,000 will do the trick, the military again responds, "Send more".

The job of the military is to make war, not achieve peace, and they will never be happy unless conflicts can be non-resolved and escalated and we spend more on troop deployments, bigger and more powerful weapons and maintain a devil-may-care attitude about how much collateral damage to the civilian population will be incurred. Hence, the answer will always be, "Send more". Lyndon Johnson kept following that advice concerning Viet Nam until Walter Cronkite exercised his influence on the American evening news audience and the citizenry of the U.S. said, "Enough!" and we took to the streets.

Inasmuch as there is no collateral damage occuring in this country, and the returning body bags and flag draped coffins are kept largely out of view (only George Stephanopolous tells us every week who and how many died), the majority of the American people are not either well enough informed or sufficiently outraged to tell Obama, "Enough!". This insulation from the reality of war in the middle East, and the passivity, prolonged ignorance about the horrors of the war and collective public indifference will continue to produce a deafening silence, about not only the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also about the current (and much obscured) debate about Cheney, the CIA, Blackwater and torture. Sadly, it seems as if the Geneva Convetion is thought by most Americans to be a rock band you can view on YouTube.

But the issue of the morning, the moment and of the week is Afghanistan. And in the face of an almost certainly untenable situation, where it is highly doubtful that US forces can "win" anything, in a country that does not want us, democracy or any other form of interference, the decision to "send more" looks suspiciously like the urging of idiots. Fools rush in, and later many are dead. Several other "empires" figured that one out, about Afghanistan, long ago. For a nation of smart people,we are pretty dumb.

A military escalation at this juncture will not even be as dubiously productive and worthwhile as the "Cash for Clunkers" ("Spend more!") elixir that was poured down the economic throats of the US public and Detroit ...and the benefits of that adventure are yet to be determned, to be sure. But many people are very happy with their new 18 MPG Cadillac hybrid Escalade that gets 4 MPG better than their "old" gas-guzzler version. Go figure. We sure know how to take THOSE to the streets!

Obama needs to say no and deny this both looney and lame-brained request to achieve a "conflict resolution" by "sending more troops" and broadening the nature of the conflict through troop escalation...because it doe not resolve anything. Although many are sick of hearing it , because everyone quotes it but does nothing to heed it, the fabled definition of insanity (from Albert Einstein) is "continuing to do the same old things you've always done and expecting to get different results" is still quite true. And the reality of this "send more" mentality is far more than merely disheartening. "Inane" comes to mind. Does anyone know the difference betwen an escalation and an Escalade?

We keep kicking this big fence post, over and over again, and getting a very sore toe. Are we just stupid and numb, or numb and stupid? Or are we just dumb and dumber? But let's"send more!". "Kick it again!" "Keep beating that dead horse until it comes back to life!" I think I am hearing Stephen Colbert in the distance.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
To: Ivan H
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 5:04 AM
Subject: ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083101100.html
It may be time to replace General McChrystal with General George Will...........CR

Cash For Clunkers

2009-08-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

This program spends a small amount of taxpayer money (relative to the size of bail-out packages) on a paliative program which puts perfectly serviceable used cars, that "regular"people could buy and drive, into junk heaps, money in the pockets of new car dealers ( who are too many and too rich), does nothing to put money in the pockets of those much ballyhooed "small businesses" like auto parts dealers and local auto repair shops (who cannot afford health insurance coverage for their employees), forces people to "feel good", gives swine flu shots to dead car companies like Chrysler (extended life support), does nothing to encourge plastic recycling, wastes dirty coal-fired electrical energy to grind up old cars that needn't be, lies to people about energy savings and makes them "feel good", will create mountains of used tires, make some people "feel good" and give those people with enough money to afford a new car one helluva deal (and feel good) on a new car/truck which may not be much more fuel efficient than the "clunker" which wasn't that they just let the dealer "kill". And it will sell lots of registration stickers and new license plates, fool people into "feeling good", give insurance companies a "reason" to up the ante on insurance rates for new, more expensive-to-repair autos and no doubt put money in the pockets of the auto industry leeches that sell extended warranties. But people with jobs will feel good by believing they are helping the economy by saving (?) $4500.00 of the money that we borrowed from China to let them give to a local dealer to give to a banker who got the money from Goldman Sachs...money which we will have to pay back later in taxes. But they will feel good. The program is too little too late, treats symptoms instead of causes (we should have challenged the auto companies to build cars with much better EPA standards decades ago) and puts a clown face on a social and environmental calamity. But is makes people feel good and creates another distraction. And the program does nothing to promote new technology: aside from a Prius or Insight or forty, most of the new, non-clunkers are still only oil and gas burning technological antiques. But buying anything new ( think flat-panel HDTV) makes people "feel good".

And Joe the Plumber can buy a new truck to drive to the town hall meeting where he speaks out against government programs and socialized health care, after he used his Medicare coverage to pay for his doctor visit after he hurt his back, reaching through the drive-through window (with engine idling) at the bank, cashing his Social Security check. So he can feel good. Note: he will feel even better after he stops at the drive-through window (with new engine idling) at the pharmacy to pick up his pain pills from the big drug company that opposes reduced drug costs and single-payer health coverage and homeopathic research.

The economy is badly in need of very serious surgery and a complete engine/drivetrain overhaul. Instead the government is handing out small $4500.00 boxes of band-aids and bottles of cod liver oil. The Cash for Clunkers program is simply another version of "take two aspirin and call me in the morning". It treats an ulcer with whiskey. The government is taking away the bread and having a "let them eat cake" sale. This is another example of a government sponsored program which recommends abstinence only while promoting unprotected sex or passes a bill to build football stadiums while health care clinics go un-staffed and underfunded and bridges fall down on the interstate. This is economic late-term abortion: kill the small child to give birth (birther?) to another mouth to feed that we hope will be more "perfect". But did I mention that it makes people feel good? Funny the right doesn't mention or object to all of this when they disrupt a town hall meeting. They don't hang in effigy the congressman who voted for THIS. Maybe they just feel too good

Potpourri...Say what?

2009-07-30T20:05:00.000-07:00

While waiting to watch The Daily Show yesterday, I watched this clip on The Comedy Channel:
A youngish, neatly dressed woman appears on stage and announces that she has “Roving Kidney Disease”. Since she does not know what it is, or what to do about it, she has asked her Dr. to speak.

A short, plump and bespectacled man in a white smock appears, chart in hand, and confirms her diagnosis. He points out that she currently has one kidney on her left thigh and another on the back of her neck. She asks, “What causes this?” He does not know, but asks if she has any bad falls lately?

At this point, as they talk (and she denies falling), we see short out-takes of comedic pratfalls: women being tackled unexpectedly by football players; women falling from kitchen counters; women walking into walls; women being knocked to the floor by clumsy oafs. Following these Dick Van Dyke-like routines, the DR. tells the woman that there is a cure: If she will bounce repeatedly on a small floor-mounted trampoline (shown), she will recover. She thanks him and he leaves.

The woman then begins casually jumping up and down on the trampoline, and talking about how grateful she is for her cure. After a few moments, she missteps and falls off, backwards into the (fake) wall behind her. The wall crumbles and she crashes onto the floor and out of sight. She quickly jumps up and reassures the audience: “It’s OK! I’m alright! Just a little set back!”

This is, I think, a metaphor for health care reform. We are treating the symptoms and not the cause, with antiquated technology after hasty prognoses. Then whatever meager steps are made toward wellness are then derailed by the un-health insurance companies and big pharma, and we fall off through a (fake) wall of recovery. And we get up say we are OK. Say what?

And then there is this quote, from the new book, The Death of Why, The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy, by Andrea Batista Schlesinger: “When was the last time you changed your mind on something important? I’ve changed my mind a few times. One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve never changed it while surrounded by people who agree with me.” Wow. I think this explains why so much of the “news” and “newsy” info we get is not news at all, but merely gossip. That is why I don’t read it or watch it much, anymore. We exist and subsist on newsfluff.

Faced with decisions about health care, gay and lesbian issues, the auto industry bail-out and the re-election of obviously corrupt politicians, we choose not to change our mind, and seek comfort and confirmation from those around us who will willingly and readily agree with us (read the book: the author does a much better job with this concept than I do).

With war raging in multiple countries, Goldman Sachs raping the country and foreclosures and unemployment at all time highs, why do we hear most of all about Michael Vick re-entering football for millions, what performance enhancing swimsuit will win the most contests and who is protesting it, and whether o r not Brittany has on underwear? Does it matter how much cash Ruth Madoff has stashed or that half of Michael Jackson’s brain is unaccounted for? Or that a man bit a dog? Say what?

And while I am at it, bringing together a cop and a college professor for beers (and the press speculating on who will drink which brand of beer) on a picnic table, outside the Oval Office, in order to quell racial tensions, is acting “stupidly”. Yet many of us (and the MSM) are fixated on the gesture. Say what?

We resist changing our minds; essentially we resist thinking. We listen to and tune in to what is easiest to accept without question or using the word “Why?” We accept half-truths or nonsense blindly and blithely. This is why Glenn beck has an audience that nods in agreement when he (stupidly) calls Obama a racist or Limbaugh says the same about Sotomoyor. Or how”birthers” gain an audience on a topic that is without substance or merit or grounding. Or Lou Dobbs calls Rachel Maddow a “tea-bagger queen” and gets away with the total absurdity of it all. Say what?
Having said all of this (so far), I am looking for a book, called, Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. It should fit in nicely with the talk about “anti-intellectualism” that is flying around, these days. “Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s anti-intellectualism!”

And speaking of half-truths and nonsense, I heard a local minister, on the radio this morning, say this (with regard to the role of churches and religion in hard economic times): “We need to teach and embody hope because that is the realization that God intends”. Say what?

Which brings me back to “Why?”, and Schlesinger’s book. She reminds us that we don’t ask why often enough because we have settled for easy “answers” (you can find out anything from Google) and instant gratification. We think we can keep the world afloat by buying more stuff, when the simpler fact is that nothing which breaks which is not essential to life does not need to be replaced immediately. Wal-Mart is not the savior of the world. There are things and stuff and items in life we can and should learn to live without, despite what the TV commercials tell us. Did I just hear someone ask, “Say what?”

Let me leave you with one remarkably realistic conclusion (about life) and one unbiased and very realistic appraisal (about what we are facing in life right now ). One is more sobering than the other, but both may help you ask “Why?”

The first is by Derrick Jensen, in Endgame:

The truth is that I am going to die someday, whether or not I stock up on pills. That’s life. And if I die in the population reduction that takes place as a corrective to our having overshot carrying capacity, well, that’s life, too. Finally, if my death comes as part of something that serves the larger community, that helps stabilize and enrich the landbase of which I’m part, so much the better. [quoted via Carolyn Baker: Sacred Demise]

The second is from the economist, Paul Krugman, in the NYT:
Medicare versus insurers
“I notice from comments that a fair number of readers think that Medicare has had runaway costs. What you need to ask is, runaway compared to what?
Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.
We don’t have a Medicare problem — we have a health care problem.”

Now, after both of these, you may be saying, “Say what?”...which I must remind you is dangerously close to saying “Why?” But whatever you do, do not say, “So what?”

RushBeckDobbsLimbaughism

2009-07-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

Is it any wonder that matters are amiss with the House and its' attempted health care reform legislation? They have given it over to the Energy and Commerce Committee. This is a group undoubtedly well-qualified to discuss the merits of health care and to remove it from the commodity sphere of commerce. Lovely.

I suppose that over in the Senate, they have given the task over to the committee for Playdough and Tonka Toys.

Meanwhile, FOX NATION is running a narrative that claims that the health reforms urged by Obama are a backdoor plot to offer slavery reparations for blacks, and that the plans ultimately will cause the deaths of white people. If you put this all together, does it spell "birther"?

None of the above should be considered a viable form of "public option".

Not only does this disgusting quagmire indicate that we have forgotten why we got into the health care reform game in the first place, but it clearly shows that we have lost the friggin' football!
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 3:11 PM
Subject: NYTimes.com: The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks

This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com U.S. July 29, 2009 The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks By David M. Herszenhorn The House Energy and Commerce Committee will resume work on major health care legislation, after House leaders and a faction of fiscally conservative Democrats who had stalled the bill apparently reached a compromise after days of fitful negotiations.

1. Op-Ed Columnist: 59 Is the New 30 2. Op-Ed Columnist: Sarah Grabs the Grievance Grab Bag From Hillary 3. Film Food, Ready for Its 'Bon Appetit' 4. The Minimalist: 101 Simple Salads for the Season 5. Brain Power: In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable » Go to Complete List

Unhealthy care

2009-07-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

As the "reform process" continues to wither, while all these blue dog guys dither, and the Republicans throw large spitballs, paid for by the health insurance and big pharma companies, I must admire Krugman's patience, calm and rationality. I simply want to strangle all these incoherent bastards. But even if we did that, we won't get single-payer. In fact we will be lucky to get anything at all which i s not a watered down version of the ugly, ineffective, expensive and largely useless programs we have now.

The United States will become a subservient third-world country, run by a coalition of healthy Canadians, Swedes, Brits and Germans (financed by China) because we will all be too sick to protest or offer resistance.

Our inabiity to conceive of, create, and institute real humanitarian,non-profit healthcare will be our own self-imposed disease of consumption, eating us alive, from the inside out.
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 8:03 AM
Subject: NYTimes.com: An Incoherent Truth

This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com OPINION July 27, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist: An Incoherent Truth By PAUL KRUGMAN On health care, the Blue Dogs aren't making sense. The conservative Democrats can't extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project.

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The New Old is the Old New

2009-07-26T07:08:00.001-07:00

OPINION July 23, 2009 Schott's Vocab: Stealth Starbucks By Ben Schott A Starbucks coffee shop in disguise.
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/stealth-starbucks/

The end of this article raises an interesting question. If, as the James Taylor song reminds us, that "one thing leads to another", and we start to see such 21rst century anomolies as the "local" hardware store re-appear, run By Home Depot, or a "local" neighborhood pharmacy, surreptitiously run by Walgreens or CVS, or a "local neighborhood" anything (how about a five and dime, run by Wal-Mart?), would that signal a re-birth of the neigborhood, the beginning of the end for big box stores and a corporate acknowledgement that neighborhoods and community are actually a good idea? After they have spent the last 25+ years working to destroy them both?

This is a wonderful and tantalizing notion, but my guess is that it is just a case of Starbucks just attempting to spin it's own spin, fighting a culturally induced entropy. This is moreover just the most recent reguritation of greed and avarice, a consumptive old wolf in sheepishly donned used clothing, pretending humility (Not so very long ago, this Schott's column ran a story about Wall St. workers who now wear "blue jeans" to work, and shirts with patched elbows. This is a self-serving and mocking attempt to convince observers to feel sorry for them, after the financial meltdown. In truth, the jeans cost $300./pr. and it is all a ruse: they still drive Porche's to work).

Starbucks is under attack from its own whorish self and finally realizing that it is commiting a kind of suicide by over-extension of sameness, and if nothing else, brought on by virture of its pervasive sterility and utterly humongous character. They are the coffee shop adaptation of Kruschev, pounding his coffee mug on the lectern, yelling, "We will bury you!" (which is, of course,the mantra of Wal-Mart). If the article is accurate, in stating that this "makeover of innocence" is occuring in a retail space of 16,000 sq. ft., then it is very clear as to how out of touch Starbucks really is with itself. How cozy and customer/user friendly can you be in a 16,000 sq.ft. space? And if all else fails, sell alcohol. Perhaps no one is immune to prostitution of some sort.

Like the now nearly-extinct 300 lb. bakery shop owner, perhaps Starbucks has consumed too much of its own product? Downtown Seattle may not be the greatest place for highly caffeinated hallucinating, but we should not forget that, only in America can you take a over-worn, unsaleable piece of anything, re-name, re-badge, re-brand and re-package it and some fool will buy it. It's the economy, stupid.

Curious

2009-07-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

This past week, my friend and co-conspirator in writing about political and cultural issues, Deb, put up a new post on a web site that she and I a few others contribute to. She was motivated, in this instance, by the dismissal of Lt. Dan Choi, for openly defying the terms of the DADT policy in our military. You can read it here: http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/07/01/the-injustice-continues-under-obama/.

As you might guess, the article expresses Deb’s displeasure with the military’s decision concerning Lt. Choi, as well as the general direction of affairs relative to the country in general, President Obama’s inactions and the LGBT community. She makes a very good case (as usual) and concludes by saying that the President is a “political coward”, and that “is not what the country needed”.

Now you should know that Deb is a very vociferous member of the LGBT community so it is not difficult to understand her basic position. And I was very much in general agreement with her, but I did not feel her statement went far enough. So I wrote this:

Before this post becomes the source of vitriol that swirls around solely LGBT/homo-angstian rhetoric, and some of the readers here climb all over Deb for per position, I must say that I think she is both right and wrong. Her outrage and indignation over the handling of Dan Choi( and DADT in general) is apt and well placed. But she is wrong in overlooking its' symbolic value, as regards the actions (or inactions) of the Obama administration on the whole.

Injustice is probably not the best word we could use here, and I'll tell you why. The outcome of the Choi hearing, as well as the President's comment to a retired Air Force officer, that this was a "generational issue" smack of the same position of mediocrity, appeasement, glad handing and moral molly-coddling that is evidenced by his stance on every major issue confronting us today: the financial debacle, the economy in general, LGBT rights, foreign policy issues (Israel/Palestine, Honduras), government secrecy and the biggest elephant in the room, health care. And Deb's conclusion that this stance is political cowardice may not be the more appropriate word , either.

What we do have a a betrayal of promised leadership and a strange and curious sudden lack of courage.Five to six months in or no, we were promised change. But, alas the world is of full of promise keepers/breakers: Ensign, Sanford, Pelosi (who lead her legislative body), Reid (who would lead his party), Bush who promised to be a uniter and a decider and was neither.

Obama appears to lack the courage to do the extraordinary so that the ordinary and necessary and morally correct may occur. He is languishing in a sea of mediocrity and half-baked actions.

If you want something worthwhile to occur, the required action must have some spectacular and extraordinary transformations accompanying it so that there will be a valuable and lasting effect. If you want to burn down a building, you have to start a fire and be prepared for the heat.

If you want to bake leavened bread, you must scald then milk befor you add it to the mixture or else the the microbes in the milk will kill the bacteria in the yeast and the bread will not rise. You will still get bread, but if you don't scald the milk first, but the bread will be flat, hard and disappointing. If you use only tepid water to make tea, instead of boiling water, you will still get tea but it will be weak and unappealing.

Obama needs to stop walking down the middle of the road, stop trying to appease and accomodate everyone, stop not trying not ruffle feathers , incorporating every side on every issue, take a firm stand, piss off a few people on the outer edges, stop pretending to be Solomon and make some strong tea and some substatial, chewable bread.

Injustice and cowardice? I think not. But mediocre fence-straddling and a lack of conviction to cause the extraordinary may be more like it, and Dan Choi is only one example of convictional terpitude.

A postscript:

Almost without fail, Deb’s posts get lambasted and attacked by a select group of right-wingnut, conservative, nearly illiterate, unabashed homophobes who attack her comments almost solely because of her sexual orientation. I posted my comments almost immediately and several days have passed. There has been no rhetorical firestorm or rebuttal from any front. I wonder why that is?

July Fourth Special

2009-07-03T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here are some holiday suggestions for ways to utilize the summer’s unfolding events and organize your priorities, so far. As you set off your firecrackers and bottle rockets, and 500 G military artillery shells (like we do here in Texas), and grill your steaks and hot dogs, and munch on watermelon, try a few of these observations on for size.

If you have watched the television at all, lately, you have probably noticed advertising for:

-Independent trade schools urging people to go back to school to learn new skills in law enforcement (municipalities have no money to fund these jobs), electrical/construction trades (the housing construction industry has crashed, nationwide), long-haul truck driving and drafting. There are no jobs to be had in these fields, but we are encouraged to take out student loans and go deeper into debt, anyway. And be sure to eat at McDonald’s every day, between classes. Then you can spend what you have left on an expensive weight-loss program. Google Dan Merino.

-Learning to use tools like PC-based stock trading programs to play the stock market or else run right down to the local office of your friendly neighborhood broker, to discuss re-managing your empty portfolio (on July 3, the DOW closed down about 225+ points…again). All we have to play with is monopoly money: we may as well have fun with it. Paper re-cycling bins are full of shredded 401k statements.
-A rash of new extended warranty companies who want to you pay large amounts of money to protect you from financial ruin if your “older” car breaks down. They know you can’t afford a new car, but want you to believe that a monthly payment to them (about the size of a small car payment) will protect you from the financial ruin roughly equal to not having adequate health insurance. If not that, then run out and take advantage of low-cost 60 month financing on a new vehicle that will no longer be manufactured by Genera l Motors. Or get guaranteed payments on a new car from Korea if you lose your job in the next few weeks or months.

-Immediately changing your auto insurance policy from company A to company B, because company A is surely charging you too much and company B has a much better payment plan. The combined monies that Progressive, Geico, State Farm, et.al. are spending on TV ads could finance the war in Iraq. And their rates go up, daily.

So let’s change gears. Before you get caught up in worrying about Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, un-health care, North Korea, the imminent crises concerning world food supplies and water or the fact that the Obama presidency has the remarkable look of being the mirror opposite of the Obama campaign, kick around a few of these entertaining activities:

Stay mesmerized by the meaning less and irrelevant death of Michael Jackson. He has does nothing but represent the bizarre, financially irresponsible and macabre and molest children for the last decade or so. Maybe we can spend more time talking about it and maybe you can contribute to the already bankrupt city of Los Angeles to help pay for his “memorial service”. Are we that stupid?

Keep your imagination titillated by speculating on the real reasons behind why Sarah Palin is resigning. This is, in all likelihood, a preemptive strike to get her out of the line of fire before some Inuit Eskimo Exxon baby seal scandal erupts or that we find out that her hubby is not Trig’s father. Or John Ensign is. Or that she got an STD from Mark Sanford in Argentina. Which she can see from her front porch. And she has done nothing but produce and intellectually molest children for the last decade or so, either. Are we that bored? Gullible?

And if you are still without enough diversionary fluff to keep you busy, run on down to Wal-Mart and buy a new HD flat-panel TV(on credit) and jump into the fray about whether or not to get Direct TV, Dish Network or Cable( I receive junk mail from all three of these four out of seven days a week. What tye spend on this marketing could pay my mortgage without batting an eye and they want rate increases) Then you can decide at the same time if you should bundle your telephone land line with the charges that you are about to be hit with by TimeWarner to surf the net and buy more stuff from the Home Shopping Network… or sell your old TV at a profit through ebay (after you buy the computer training program from the guy on TV who says he won’t make you rich but wants your money for some CD training disks). It’s fun. Really.

And don’t forget to take your gun to Church when you go the day after the fireworks and be sure to watch Fox News , so that you can ineffectively discuss DADT and DOMA and Officer Choi. And Michael Jackson is still dead. Really.

Follow up

2009-06-23T13:59:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I wrote a blog entry called "Inharmonious". In it, I sent along some remarks from Mssrs. Krugman and Reich about the shortcomings of Obama's response to the financial debacle we have on-going. I said that I wondered what Galbraith and Grieder might have to say. Well, here is Mr Grieder, weighing in.

He says, essentially, if we settle for weak solutions too soon, because the severity of the crisis seems over, it will be a terrible mistake. Seems awfully hard with which to argue. It is time to dig in our heels, not go out for ice cream.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090706/greider2?rel=emailNation

Reverse Psychosis

2009-06-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, a new feature, “Schott’s Vocabulary”, appeared as daily insertion on the Op-Ed page of the NYT. You can also access it directly on the web , here: http://www.benschott.com/.

As a “word guy”, I have been getting a lot of enjoyment from this effort on a daily basis. The column works well as social commentary, cultural analysis and very often provides a balanced view of the contrasts in contemporary international behavior. In short, if you can be honest enough with yourself, what Mr. Schott offers can help you see yourself much more clearly, against the backdrop of today’s larger humanitarian canvass( which is increasingly convoluted ,or a “convass”?).

Today’s entry is especially revealing , given the ongoing, cyclical and embarrassing debacle on Wall St., the current discussions about potential bonuses at Goldman Sachs and the state of bailouts for failing giants like General Motors:
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/poorgeoisie/?emc=eta1.

The “Poorgeoisie” seem to be out latest segment of self-delusionary, narcissistic and neurotic ne’er do wells, fooling only themselves. I first began thinking of these folks as using “reverse psychology”, practicing a mode of appearance designed to deceive the rest of the American public about their imagined “plight”, but then I settled on the word “psychosis” instead: they are practicing on themselves. These titans/giants/worker bees of the our financial system are, frighteningly and given the reins they hold, acting in a fashion which might be best described as mentally ill. They might be thought of as dangerous. They are perhaps psychotic. Thinking inversely.

Spending untold amounts of money in order to appear “poor” and/or “downtrodden” is apparently Wall St.’s version of credit card splurge: ignore reality, re-package absurdity and live in a personal never-never land that avoids the ugliness which constitutes what has become the essence of daily life for most Americans. If you sing, ”Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” loud enough, while wearing $300.00,pre-frayed jeans, as you exit your sadly two year-old Porsche, perhaps no one will suspect you had caviar for breakfast, on the rooftop patio of your $2M Manhattan condo. Life for them is still a “cabaret,my friends”. Is it any wonder that, given this sort of disparity in the perception of “real life”, we are having trouble getting back on our feet? Or even finding out feet?

I tried to get an appointment to see my therapist about this, but he was booked. He is getting new patches sewn onto the elbows of his linen shirts and getting his Gucci loafers pre-scuffed.

Acronymns

2009-06-20T05:04:00.000-07:00

Due in large part (I understand) to the nearly illiterate communications skills of Paris Hilton (someone called her "Perez" Hilton in an email to me the other day...as in Simon Perez? Scarey), many young people, on the MySpace, Facebook and Twitter sites call many people their "BFF"s. This ostensibly means "Best Friend Forever". While an endearing term (in the moment, anyway), logically speaking, this condition is both probably and literally impossible.

By now I am certain that everyone knows the embarrassing and scandalous plight of Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), a now-disgraced member of congress who was, while for sometime being separated from his wife, had an long running affair with an employee, who was the wife of another employee... and also during that same time employeed the woman's 19 year-old son as a policy "consultant", all of this done with public funds and while he was an elected representative of the people of Nevada. The Senator can truly multi-task.

Senator Ensign is a member of the extremely conservative Four Square pentecostal church, a sworn member of Promise Keepers ("marriage is sacred and sancrosanct")and has (as we now can know) loudly and hypocritically protested the "immoral" and "despicable" behaviors of Bill Clinton and Sens. Craig and Vitter (Bill Maher has pointed out that during his campaign, the Senator refused to be alone in a car with another woman [not his wife], for appearance sakes, but apparently being "in" another woman without a car was acceptable behavior. Go figure) . He "came out" only after the husband of the "in flagrante" woman in question threatened both public exposure and extortion. The Senator has betrayed himself, his church, his matrimonial fraternity, his wife and his constituents.

In my book (Face,Place, Space or otherwise) this makes Sen. Ensign a "MMF", or "Miserable MotherFu@#er", of which he is quite literally both.

Vindications of the Senator are no doubt about to be forthcoming from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and "MMF" works well in the abbreviated text of Twitter.

Have a nice day... with your neighbor's wife.

Inharmonious

2009-06-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Both Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th)
this morning in the NYT, and Robert Reich (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/)
in his blog posted on 6/18, indicate that they are not happy with the compromise and short-sighted nature of Obama’s proposals for over-hauling the economy and our financial policies. They both indicate that the proposal is not real reform or even anything like it. The news reports on NPR (npr.org) and other articles in the NYT and the WaPo would seem to express the same disappointment. I would like to hear what both Galbraith and Greider have to say, but I have not found anything yet this morning. My first guess is that they would both concur with Krugman and Reich, and that Grieder will be much more pessimistic and critical. And I am willing to bet that Bill Maher (Real Time, HBO, Fri. nite, 10:00 P.M.EST) will have grand time with this debacle tonight.

David Sirota has a piece in Truthdig this morning (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090618_daring_to_dream/) and I have entered a long comment there, about governmental small thinking, semantics ( you cannot literally “re-invent” anything) and the fact that if we do not come up with some new ideas, new solutions and new approaches to the challenges of the modern world, we will be constrained to remain Neanderthals, waiting for the return of the ice age of human ideological survival. That age will be financed, of course, by Lehman Bros. and have really piss poor health care.

Happy Juneteenth.

The Man Who Isn't Here

2009-06-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

There may well be some terrible and urgent truth to the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. The word ‘change” stings harshly this morning. The President is not here: he is in France, or Cairo or Buchenwald or Canton or Green Bay. Or on a date night. In reality he has been thrown into a toy store. Like W was, he has so many toys to play with, that he appears overwhelmed. He plays with each economic or military toy just enough to leave is fingerprints on them but not enough to learn to use any effectively enough to bring about change. I had hoped for better.

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/yes-i-can/?ref=opinion. I was just thinking a few days ago, the President keeps talking about “my” Secretary of State, “my “ Secretary of Defense and “my” financial advisors. Funny: I thought they were “our” government officials and employees. I don’t much care to see Obama’s birth certificate, but I would like to see the bill of sale that shows that we sold him the whole country. His ego (like W’s) suddenly runneth over, he has appears to have forgotten he got hired for this job (not annointed) and works for us. He did not buy the United States like he bought General Motors. I hope he does not sell us to the Italians.
http://progressive.org/wx060909.html. Emanuel does not only appear undisciplined, but seems like the reincarnation of Karl Rove, the junkyard dog. He is unpredictably brash and his behavior betrays bias, brusqueness and angry aggression. He is as reassuring and comforting as falling into a prickly pear. As a right hand man for change, he belies a left-handed skullduggery-business-as- usual. He is a brutal reaffirmation of the politics-as-usual status quo. He is very much here, the President is not.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21632. This is just one essay that describes why the POTUS is all “all hat and no cattle”. His speeches, though eloquent and carefully crafted, lack substance and follow-though. We just spent eight years receiving the same disinformation from W, except it came in the form of sentence fragments and poor grammar. “Walking the walk” is very hard to do when you are not even in the room.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31232667/
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/140570/stop_being_distracted_by_loudmouths_like_limbaugh%3A_the_real_problem_is_lousy_democrats_like_evan_bayh_and_ben_nelson/.
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140489/we%27re_screwed_on_everything_from_health_care_to_the_economy_if_the_dems_don%27t_shape_up/
http://www.alternet.org/world/140526/bill_moyers%3A_the_rise_of_private_armies_--_mercenaries%2C_murder_and_corruption_in_iraq_and_afghanistan/
I know this is more material than you want to read (or attempt to) in one sitting. But the sum and substance is roughly this: Show business, glitz, glamour and razzle-dazzle are alive and well with this Presidency, as in the last. The promised change, transparency and grit are totally absent, glossed over and hidden by flowery speeches and dog and pony shows. The President goes today to Green Bay, WI, to talk up health care reform. Why? To what end? This will help this cause as much as his trip to Elkhart, IN helped to re-vitalize the RV industry. Someone should remind him that he promised to actually listen to the citizenry and not stage-manage a diversionary tactic that tries to hide the nasty ambitions of big health and big pharma. He is not here. He is out to lunch while the legislators have lunch with the AMA, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

The real problem is lousy democrats. Well, doh. The president exerts none of the sway of his office over his own party members, who are still wedded to big industry and finance. Did he learn nothing from Ronald Reagan? He welcomes the traitor-like likes of Arlen Specter, does nothing to limit the incoherencies of Nancy and Harry and Louise and offers no resistance to the Blue Dogs, who are more cur dogs than blue. And he should pull Lieberman and Graham into the Oval Office and read them the disciplinary riot act that is so long over-due. We are screwed…if the democrats don’t shape up. Same story, new page. The President fails repeatedly to listen to wise observers like Grieder and Richard Wolff and Krugman, who might make a difference and enable real change, and instead surrounds himself with old-line defenders of the “way things used to be”, like Biden, Geithner, and Jaba the Summers and uses Hillary Clinton as a lightning rod and innocuous pacifier.

Private armies and mercenaries: The wars and rumors of wars rage on and continue international carnage and promote ill-will, no matter what vagaries the President spouts from a pulpit in Cairo. At the current rate of the loss of hope and procrastination of change, Guantanamo will still be open for business in two years, new black-ops detention/torture centers will be open in other locales and we will soon own a second billion dollar embassy/fortress/stronghold in Afghanistan. Think what you will about the Taliban, Pakistan and nuclear weapons proliferation.

The youngish rising star of Midwestern politics strode onto the scene and emailed and twittered and sweet-talked his way into the hearts and minds of the younger voting populace. Then, through his promises and spell-binding “speechifyin’” ( stunning in contrast to his predecessor I see now in retrospect), he made the boomers stand at the window in the maternity ward and gloat over the newborn in the crib, up front and center. He was there for that.
The economic slide is still sliding, the foreclosures are closing in on human habitation, and, in a fashion no less blatant in its use of distractions, fanfare and hoopla than that of the previous administration, there is no evidence of new thinking and new solutions to new problems which have outgrown and overwhelmed the old approaches. As this possible” new way forward” is ignored, any real opportunity for that once super-hyped hope and change will rapidly fade. Where is that guy?

Obama is the man who is not here. I know that many people hate to hear me say this, but I have to agree with Mr. Greider: if Mr. Obama does not get on the stick, if he does not start singing from the songbook he sang from to get elected, and dancing with the girls who brung him, we are screwed.

Nobody Likes The Truth

2009-06-09T05:57:00.001-07:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090608_hold_your_applause/

Many people do not like Mr. Hedges, because of his stance on religion, but when he tells the truth and explains ugliness and indefensible cruelty for what it is, you must give him some space. I concur with this, almost without reservation.
There is no excuse for torture and even less for continued wars that decimate civilian populations with robot bombs (check the cartoon by Mr. Fish…how appropriate). One commenter cautions that the President moves “slowly and thought fully”. I think not. He hardly moves at all and is, as we say in Texas, “All hat and no cattle”. Eloquent speeches save no lives and he does not move slowly: in fact he does not move at all. He ensures that the status will remain very, very quo. He continues to offer the hot air-euphoria of hope while short-changing reality.
Our foreign and humanitarian policies are duplicitous, xenophobic, prejudiced and myopic. Speaking out of both sides of our mouth, in Bush-like protected environments of suppression and repression, will become a venomous snake that will come around to bite us on the backside. Anti-American sentiment will continue to grow and tensions will rise to a boiling point, at which time the tide will turn against and overrun our smug arrogance and feigned innocence, the ugliness will turn against us and everyone will be scratching their heads (and their asses), and be asking, “Hey what happened?” Well, what happened was that we abandoned liberty and freedom and justice for all. And we called it democracy.

A Metaphor?

2009-06-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

Air France flight 447 is a metapohor for the U.S. economy. It has crashed in a huge sea of debt and we have sent out an armada of financial rescue vehicles. Sadly, Capt. Geithner and First Officer Summers are in charge, and all they have managed to do is find dead bodies and the wreckage of the old ship of state. And they have blamed the crash on the Greenspan/Paulson air speed sensors. You might draw parallels between the number of bodies recovered (16?), the total number still missing and the job loss rates. Dog paddling lessons are recommended

The New American Mythology: Boy. Are We In Trouble

2009-06-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

The citizens of the United States, in this, the first part of the 21rst century, are living in a land of make-believe. We are making our way through every day, pretending to have our lives dependent upon, and grounded in, two myth-guided (sorry), retrograde and faulty suppositions. The first one revolves around the once-sacred notion of “democracy”; the second hinges on the modern misconception of “progress”. Boy. Are we in trouble.

For most of the last century, and most especially during the last decade, we were all sent to bed with visions of terrorists and catastrophe dancing in our heads. We have been told, taught, propagandized into believing and cajoled into maintaining a trance-like mental state that stated that democracy was the answer to everything. Well, it’s not. This is 2009, and panaceas are as dead as Kelsey’s nuts (Ask Bill Maher). The predominant notion has been that any nation in the world which did not already have a democratic form of government should be made to have one, whether it wanted one or not. If a nation did not seem willing to accept democracy as way of life and government, it would have democracy imposed upon it, bribed to accept it or bullied into it through the imposition of a titular administrator (Iran) who could be paid enough to abide by the general norms of democratic life in America(think Egypt). Of course there was also the technique of employing a totalitarian military onslaught, designed to end in “democratic” submission (This oftentimes failed: I give you Viet Nam and Iraq). This particular form of retrograde thinking is our continued salute to the British Empire. I thought we were done with them? But gosh: look at how well all that worked out for them in India.)

There are many rationales for this sort of thinking. First of all, if every nation in the world was democratic, it was supposed to mean that we would not have any enemies. This would be enhanced by the fact since we had “converted” them to democracy, they would be forever thankful and love us unconditionally. This thankfulness and eternal affection would come about, we believed, for one reason: everyone knows (or is supposed to) that democracy works. This “given” is precisely the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the works, and the shoe in the machinery. This idea is its own sabotage. Contrary to popular mythology, democracy does not automatically guarantee bliss, equal wealth and happiness. All too often it works just the other way around: bliss, contentment and happiness only come well after you have worked hard enough to establish real democracy.

And incidentally, democracy and Christianity were not born as conjoined twins. In fact, they are not even kissing cousins. That is just one thread in the fabric of the new American mythology, and one which has proven disruptive, dangerous and toxic in the culture wars (see below). So don’t try to hit me with your Bible.

Why any population, governmental body or group of sane individuals would actually want democracy because it works, is beyond me. The prime example of why this set of beliefs is fallacious is the current, sad state of democracy in the United States. Nearly every day, democracy in this country is failing us. There are many causes for this continual failure, but it all boils down to just two.

The first is that democracy in America is now governed by very weak ideas or ideas that have already died (read The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller. “Taxes will go down”: not). Nearly every day, people in decision making positions at every level of every government make decisions based upon old, stale, faulty, worn-out and ineffective and grossly inappropriate ideas. They prolong sloth and waste. They perpetuate bad habits and injustice. They foster and breed misery and injustice. Democracy in the United States is broken, in large part because it relies upon out-moded ideas, problem solving without adequate forethought and ideas which no longer “fit” our needs and realities. Our thinking tries to apply the solutions of ages past to the new age of the internet, global warming, international mercantilism and financial terrorism. Our ideas are no longer appropriate to the age in which we live. We seem to keep forgetting that learning from history also means that simply repeating it is most often a mistake. (These decision makers are almost invariably the reason we have those little signs that say, “Plan ahead”, and the last letters are jammed together because the sign space is too short.)

Put somewhat differently: information travels 50 times faster than it did five years ago; we are outstripping our planet’s resources and/or polluting them at a rate which may leave the succeeding populations dying of hunger, thirst and heat in just a few decades; the world’s goods are no longer produced “locally” anywhere on the planet, which has caused massive shifts in work force locales and wealth distribution; the titans of industry are still acting like this is 1925 in America; bankers still manage money and capital like it is still 1850..and all the while, our democratic government ( which many say is “too big”) is using thinking which is “too small”. Instead of governing by thinking in bigger, new and healthy ideas, which are in turn big enough to embrace, regulate, manage, coordinate and respond to all the changes evident in the 21rst century, it thinks only in ways that accommodate all of the strategically inappropriate, and outmoded cultural behaviors just outlined. We are dying from an overdose of status quo. Instead of being Darwinian, and evolving to keep pace with contemporary cultural and economic developments, the government is remaining a carnivorous dinosaur and hatching the same old eggs, day after day. And if you continue to reproduce the same old same old, and ignore the incoming asteroids…well, you get the idea. Boy. Are we in trouble?

A side note: when the overriding government practices and prolongation of this mythology are pervasive and unavoidable, the population tends to drink deeply the toxic wine of nostalgia. They long for today to be yesterday, this month to be last month, or this year to be last year: those were the times they (we) understood and could cope with, without extra thinking, configuring, concentration or devoting time to problem solving or adaptation. But that is another essay.
However, this national pastime of drinking the old wine generally tends to lead to the election and (sadly) re-election of politicians who have learned to benefit from the hangover effect of nostalgia: Politicians who can continuously reinvigorate the vision of the happiness of what was once (thought and remembered) to be “good”, can manage to live long and prosper in this environment, as long as no one discovers the dinosaur eggs. And because everything is relative, i.e., everything is connected to everything else, when you link up that political marketing-prolongation strategy with the antiquated financial institutions, heavily laden themselves with motives of self-preservation and irrepressible greed, you get the main component of broken democracy: politicians who are bought and sold and no longer represent the very people whom they can thank for their office. As such, they become the main catalysts and perpetuators of stale and dead ideas and keep the dinosaur eggs warm. And they keep telling us that taxes will go down. Boy. Are we in trouble.

Another side note or two: If the notion that making, causing or insisting that every nation be democratic will make everyone love us were to be true at all, it would seem to follow that we would need less military might. In reality, one enormous proof of our stale and inappropriate ideas, and the influence of the financial communities, is the existence of the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world. And the United States has the largest military budget in the world, which is wildly disproportionate to the GDP. The Navy, for example (a huge component of the military) is today largely irrelevant. It consists in the main (on the main?) of floating city/state airports and skulking, stealthy black atomic powered and armed submarines which carry enough firepower to scorch the face of the earth many times over. And just recently the Secretary of Defense “defended” (how ironic) his re-allocation of military weapons funding by explaining to the American people (you and me) that now funding would be distributed more “appropriately” amongst conventional weaponry, unconventional weaponry and weapons of “future conventionality”(or some crap like that). This political hot-air and antiquated thinking is all stale and wrong-headed. It is buried in the past. It is lethal nostalgia. Nuclear armed submarines, robot drone airpower and laser guided missiles fired from another continent still do the “same old, same old”: they kill lots of people indiscriminately and without feeling or emotion or responsibility. And our “bought and paid for”, not-fairly-elected politicians perpetuate this not-any-longer-here world of non-thinking. This is not the democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Their democracy, especially as viewed by Jefferson, periodically revised, refreshed and re-invented itself through the infusion of new ideas. By breaking with England, they were declaring war on the regurgitation of old ideas and ways of life. Where did that get to? Boy. Are we in trouble.

Which brings us to the second tear in the fabric of the new mythology: the fallacy of the idea of “progress”? You might be led to think (there is a very funny book by Texas author Kinky Friedman, called, You Can Lead a Politician To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think), that what with the speed of electronic communication, the daily exponential advances and discoveries in health and science and the increasingly sophisticated developments in manufacturing, that we would be moving forward, making progress, as a civilization. Not so. For several reasons, we are, as far the economy, the culture, race and healthcare, running backwards. The United States is in retrograde. We are suffering from self-imposed entropy. Boy. We are in trouble.

In large part, precisely because politicians can zero in on the power of the elixir of nostalgia, moving (in fact very nearly rushing) backwards has been promoted and disguised as moving forward: only skillful politicians can turn wine onto water and make you pay extra for it. After we rolled out of the conflicted legal ideas and moral concepts of the Nixon years, and muddled through the doldrums of Jimmy Carter, we strode into the Reagan years, the first Bush era and later on to Bush II, wherein the operative word was “fear”. (I have not forgotten Bill Clinton. His administration capitalized on the unrealistic giddiness of not being gripped by fear. Please read on). The Reagan gang sought to make us afraid of “big govmint” (yet another example of small thinking). As such, they went about demolishing government structures, union organizations and regulations that kept affairs in order, financially. The Reagan crowd made the term “general welfare” obsolete. The first Bush was still fighting the cold war, telling us to fear oil shortages, threats to democracy, fear losing the Saudis (his bankers), middle-eastern madmen and lack of military might (all old, stale and moribund ideas). The second Bush took all this much farther, urging us to fear (post 9/11) Arab/Muslim terrorists, even more oil loss, WMD’s, loss of jobs, unknown threats to democracy and the potential failure of fundamental Christianity to save the western world (interestingly, we were told to trust his ‘gut” instead of his faith. Oops). We were also told we were too stupid to defend ourselves, and that we needed wars and a larger military industrial complex to protect us and that Dick Cheney should supervise that from an undisclosed location, while W cleared brush on the ranch and fed his pet goat. The only lasting and tangible net result of all of this is that you cannot board an airplane without taking your shoes off. Yes. Trouble. Us.

Naomi Klein, in her book, The Shock Doctrine, explains this nicely. To loosely paraphrase, the mentality throughout these years was this: as long as the population was kept in a state of “shock”, kept constantly on edge and worried, driven by a non-descript fear of anything and everything that moved, it would approve of, support, fund and be complicit in almost anything (like torture?). These would include bigger military budgets, increased laxity in and inattention to financial affairs, more deregulation, distorted human rights and a decrease in both social services and concern for the environment. Deplorable, politicized and inept Ashcroft/Gonzo judicial malfeasance did not help. The net result of all of this was that we have moved backwards. Our social and financial institutions have gone retrograde.
If your neck hurts, it is from looking backward over your shoulder, too much.

(Many will argue these following points, but… during the Clinton years, the smiling, happy mantra of the big guy in the White House were that “Happy Days are here again”. FDR and the cigar had returned and we largely ignored the failure of the movement to make any progress on the biggest “old-thinking” gorilla-in-the-room we had (and still have), which was health care. In the years that followed, health care has gone retrograde even more, but we were too busy being in shock to pay attention. Fast forward to 2008-2009: We were told that we could rescue ourselves from fear and escape from the tendrils of shock by embracing “hope and change”. The electorate chose that and now there is a not-quite-as-big big guy in the White House who smokes cigarettes instead of cigars and hope is fading as change seems to be more and more elusive every day: military strategies and spending appear unchanged, financial woes grow more woeful every day (it is too early to tell yet whether Obama is bought and paid for, but he hired Larry Summers and is moving along the same path from normal beginnings to millionaire, just like Bill and Hillary Clinton) , unemployment grows by leaps and bounds, health care becomes more expensive and less available all the time, and the much-vaulted “progress” (change) has yet to make an appearance. Perhaps what occurred is that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was merely replaced by ,”Happy Days Will Return Again”, which, of course, they never will. Tomorrow will never be yesterday and such thinking is deceptive and retrograde.
Consider this: another old, stale and obsolete idea is that you should “keep your enemies closer”. That is bullshit. You should keep your enemies (and the enemies of the people) at bay by pummeling them with honesty and strong doses of reality. Instead, Obama retained a Secretary of Defense who has prehistoric thinking, has brought the health care industry to the table (so?), appointed banker-foxes to oversee banker-foxes who are living n the chicken coops rent-free, placed Neolithic-reasoning conservatives in positions of national and international influence. Then he placed Hillary, the wife of our last unrealistic master of Make Believe and mythology (President Clinton), who is his unabashed and outspoken arch-rival, in charge of international foreign policy. This is all small thinking. It is nothing new. It is not change. It is com-promise without the promise. So far, no good. Boy. In trouble we are.

To go into retrograde mode means that you are moving backwards and deteriorating. But few seem to be noticing. Experiencing entropy is the same phenomenon only worse: energy and essence disappear without any hope of being renewed, ever. The United States is in clearly in retrograde, as can be clearly observed in several key areas: the military posture, the economy, race relations and cultural “dumbing down”: it is all an entropy of our collective consciousness.

The military budget and stance are either static or growing. The recent military budgets have increased rather than decreased (more backwards disguised as frontwards), we still have two major wars in progress and we are building more aircraft carriers and submarines. We still have Blackwater in our employ. We have a billion dollar embassy of dubious value and usefulness in Baghdad and are building another in Islamabad…for another billion dollars. Our military efforts are moving backwards in terms of real-life usefulness while claiming progress. And we have 50,000 troops stationed in Germany? The less we are supposed to need the military, the more we feed it. This is regress, not progress. We are being snookered. Boy. Are we in trouble.

The economy is upside down and running in reverse. We continue to used borrowed money and increase future debt loads by giving money to bankers (whose old thinking, combined with deregulation, failed) to ensure that they can continue doing what they have always been doing ( the definition, according to Einstein, of course, of “insanity”). This will guarantee that nothing will change; the bankers will not be required to embrace any new ideas and can remain comfortably ensconced in their old thinking. (Read anything by Paul Krugman). The banking and auto industry bail-out programs have been sold as life support systems, to be used to keep the patient alive until it can breathe on its own. Instead the money is flowing upward, padding banker’s coffers, rewarding them for thinking in antiquated fashion, instead of flowing (trickling?) downward, into the economy at large. Some of it is even going out of the country altogether (GM will build its next “profitable” car in China?). This is retrograde, entropic disintegration at its best. Boy. Are we in trouble.

Racism, bigotry, ethno-centrism and xenophobia are at their worst and getting worse than that. Black men are blamed for everything and universally labeled as drug dealers; people of (any) color are held in suspicion, arrested for almost no reason and routinely jailed for practically nothing: the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the civilized world. Our fear of immigrants has never been more heightened and we have been conditioned to believe that any Muslim is a terrorist and an infidel (Contrary to current rumors, the Quran is no more a “how-to” manual for killing people than is the Bible: read them both). The membership rolls of racist, ultra-right wing hate organizations have exploded and the Reagan-era defamatory slurs about “welfare mothers driving Cadillacs” are everywhere again. I receive at least one cartoon or joke on my computer each week, equivocating the POTUS with a monkey. This is retrograde human relations. Anyone who thinks this is progress needs to seek professional help. Boy. Are we in trouble.

But beneath nearly all of this is our cultural retrograde. What many call the “culture wars”, it is an expression of the right-wing, left-wing bifurcation that expresses itself in poorly thought-through positions on guns, abortion, the immorality of war, the justification for greed and religion , all run amok. Pick one. Charles Pierce has written book called, Idiot America, subtitled, “The culture wars are over and the idiots have won”. I have not read it yet, but if what he said while being interviewed on television is any indicator, I had better read it soon. Pierce’s observations go hand in hand with the now-long standing trend in the U.S. identified as “anti-intellectualism”. As daily life becomes ever more difficult, we are admonished to, for heavens’ sake, whatever you do, DON”T THINK! To do so might mean you might learn something, your head might hurt, you might have to forego or give up a prejudice and might have to face the reality that tomorrow can and never will be yesterday. Idiots employ that faulty reasoning and huge cross-sections of the population follow that course (It cannot be called a train of thought, because the boiler in the engine is cold). The O’Reillys, the Limbaughs, Inhofes, Steeles, McConnels and Boehners live for, in and of this misconstrued vision of reality and misunderstanding of the basic constructs of our cultural milieu. And they all believe that taxes will go down, as well. And before you get all excited, there are many questions about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (and other liberals), as well. Curiously, but hardly surprising, the Democrats have found the very same night deposit box at the bank that the Republicans use.

In the past several months, after the TARP intervention, the banking industry has reportedly spent more millions on lobbyists and legislative contributions than has been spent for welfare and food stamps in most major U.S. cities. Google let me down here: I can’t find the source.

When you think in retrograde, you get retrograde, backwards, non-progressive and entropic results. Such non-thinking turns in on itself and becomes hugely counter-productive. Retrograde thinking and behavior allows you to continue to believe that being a white, Anglo-Saxon male who suppresses female, gender and minority rights is “OK”. It’s not. In the whole of the world, in the “big picture”, being that white Anglo just described increasingly means you are increasingly becoming a minority. And Jesus did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, did not handle snakes, was probably a progressive Jew who may have been black and “Aryan” is the derivative form of the word “Iranian”, which means your great, great, great grandfather may have been a camel-riding “towelhead”. Get over it. Get over all of it. But yes, I know: if the idiots have won, this has all been a big waste of time.

Our democracy is a broken mythology (largely because of money) and its failure to function has joined forces with anti-intellectualism and idiots to impede and deny what is now mythological progress. Boy. Are we in trouble?

This just in (compliments of Clint): http://www.openleft.com/diary/13658/the-human-development-indexa-better-measure-of-where-we-stand. Yes. Are we in trouble.

No Longer News or General

2009-05-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

I just heard another story on NPR about the “death of newspapers”. This particular story was about the small publications and electronic postings and blogs that have rushed in to fill the “void” created when the Seattle Intelligencer folded recently. (Note to NPR: There is no void) I was immediately reminded of the book I mentioned a few weeks back, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. (Matt Miller) That book is about our desire to hold on to dead ideas that prevent progress and throttle forward thinking.

Let’s face facts: “newspapers” have not printed any “news” for a very long time. They report on what happened yesterday or last week or last month. They tell us about the automobile accident in front of the local liquor store yesterday morning, the missile North Korea fired two days ago, who died during the past week and what line of judiciousness has been taken out of context from an appeals decision made by a SCOTUS nominee seven years ago. They offer (all too often) locally biased reporting of actions, social deeds or indecency, political misdeeds, unfaithful womanizers, corrupt former mayors, illicit love affairs of last year, some yellow journalism: most of this is sensationalism, but hardly “news”. And of course there are pages and pages of advertising for products we do not need, everyone apparently desires and fewer and fewer of us can afford to pay for, on each succeeding day the economy continues to crumble. And on Sundays, more than other days, the paper is used as a “propaganda mule” to carry pounds of glossy paper advertising “supplements” for even more “stuff” we don’t need, or “Sunday Magazines” that report and recount even older social trends, gossip and lengthy nostalgic recounting of the warm and fuzzy remembered events of days gone by. And we waste countless reams of paper which we (mostly) trash and (sometimes) recycle.

We do not get news from newspapers anymore. We get, at best, stories that are 24 hours old, that we have already heard from CNN, MSNBC-TV (or .com), Yahoo News or the AOL home page on our laptop. We saw or read all of these from the flat-panel TV in the coffee shop or taco restaurant or while surfing the net on our Dell mini-laptop or Apple Air or IPhone in whatever friendly locale has free wi-fi (another reason to skip Starbucks). Maybe (probably) we can do this on our computer at work, while the conclave of managers down the hall decries and bemoans our corporate lack of productivity.

The electronic age has rendered the printed page a Tyrannosaurus Rex Press. It is serves no more purpose than to exist as a reporting device about what was or was not yesterday. And as far the value of the research and exposure/educational value of the investigative reporter go, the good ones now have daily blogs or work for web sites, and just as many quickly manage to publish books, almost overnight. And Amazon’s Kindle means you don’t even need to buy the printed version of that.
Newspapers are no longer “news” papers and have not been such for a very long time. Like so many other aspects of modern life, newspapers have lost their way, been preserved and perpetuated for too long and have lost their relevance. Hell, most people in the U.S. don’t even read anymore, anyway. In increasing numbers they wait for John Stewart or perhaps Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olberman to tell them what it all means. Newspapers continue trying to inform people who do not want to be informed, unless it is about their 401K or something about Brittany’s underwear. Like the British Empire, the newspaper empire no longer exists. And that noise you are hearing in the background is the sound of the magazine industry crumbling alongside the newspapers. I have heard it said that the average New Yorker knows more about current events from looking briefly at the jumbotron TV in Times Square than from almost anything else. We should stop weeping for the dead newsprint mastodon and put our efforts and energies behind the continued expansion of unfettered, un-managed, open electronic information systems. If the government wants to do something really helpful to American life, it should guarantee and (OMG) subsidize the internet and not let Time-Warner et.al. get richer by metering and charging for my emails and WWW access. And it would naturally follow that taxing internet usage is counterproductive as well. (That is a message that should be sent to the Congress, but I understand that most Arlen Specter types don’t know what the internet is, anyway. There was story about it in the newspaper, but they didn’t read it).

The newspaper ship of state has become the Titanic of the information industry. It has a huge hole ripped in its hull, it is sinking without hope of rescue for any good reason, and the best thing we can do is to save as many passengers as possible, so that they can go back to work somewhere else.

And speaking of sinking ships, those newspapers almost daily carry countless pages of advertising for automobiles. Despite cars.com, electronic AutoTrader and countless others like them, too many auto dealers continue to advertise too much for an ever shrinking audience. Which brings us to General Motors. We seem hell-bent on bailing out this behemoth and no one is clear as to why. The obvious answer is always that we will save thousands of jobs, but the General is not as has not been ”general” for a long time, except to generally subsidize fat cat top exec salaries and offer meager returns to the myopic and backwards-thinking stockholders, who are still driving Cadillacs. The General has been largely out of touch with the changing needs of the personal automobiles for decades. The General should have started being specific about the time the first Datsun hit our shores and it has not (The General gave a disdaining nod to the Volkswagen, called the Corvair, and we all know how that turned out). The Chevy “Volt” is too little, too late and too expensive and already laden with dated technologies, and the recently disclosed revelation that GM will return to maybe a new prosperity, which may be just a still-born and very expensive re-birthing of a dead monstrosity by importing more fuel efficient, old-technology, cheaply produced autos from China is an affront to all Americans and American workers, who are paying the bill to save a dead whale. Despite the current hoopla and the kind (and empty words) of Barack Obama, General Motors is doomed. Get over it.

General Motors is the automotive version of the Titanic newspaper sinking, while working for decades to live off the past and throttle new ideas. And while guilty of greed, poor or non-existent visions of the future, haphazard bookkeeping, and short-sighted gain taking and tax breaking, they are not alone, just the most immediately visible. Chrysler, is about to go on life support, with the help of the American taxpayer and the Italians. But Tony’s Tiny Buggyworks has never made it in the US and this will only be a postponement (albeit it glamorous and expensive) of the end. Ford appears to have more alert accountants, a little better balance sheet and slightly more and better vision, but no one believes they can re-invent themselves fast enough to keep from eventually being overtaken by the world-wide shift in eventual transportation needs. Despite the recent and difficult to imagine developments in auto production in China and India, the future of transportation lies in mass transit (Chinese and Indian peoples are thinking like 1950’s and ‘60’s Americans and will strangle themselves with oil woes and highway construction) and the former “Big Three” will wind up being footnotes in the history books.

The Mercedes arm of Daimler-Benz (the Smart Car is ultimately not so smart) and BMW will discover one day soon that, despite their aura of haute couture , or VW’s insistence that they will be the eternal “people’s car”, the future of what they do best in this decade will be almost hopelessly irrelevant in the next one. Toyota is obviously out in front, with Honda pulling a close second, but they, too, need to start thinking in terms of mag-lev trains and something they can sell that does not use an internal combustion engine (or some variant) and runs of four rubber tires. Mitsubishi and Fuji Heavy Industries will either wind up building personal conveyances as a novelty or find something else to manufacture, altogether. The General, given the world-wide prognosis of the industry and the transportation needs of the future, does not deserve any hall passes to go to men’s room and smoke something funny in perpetuity. We should quit playing pretend and “used-to-be” with both newspapers and the auto industry. And the US needs to begin thinking transportation “new-frustructure” instead of re-paving interstate highways for autos we do not need.

After the battle of the Alamo, in a surprise series of military “lucky strikes”, the Texian Army destroyed the arrogant General Santa Anna’s army and captured him (he was betrayed by the discovery of his silk underwear). There were many who wanted to hang him from the limb of one of our famous Texas live oak trees. But Stephen Austin and others thought it best to make the General sign away his claims to lands and property rights and send him home to Mexico in disgrace. It was a quiet, discreet and mostly un-objectionable way to get rid of the problem and end the nuisance. We should work out the same sort of arrangement with newspaper corporations and the US auto industry.

Nostalgia is always counter-productive and winds up smelly, musty and stale. The least we can do is stop making it so damned expensive. And does anyone have a clue what we should do with all of these soon-to be-dead, toxic used car batteries? Maybe the General can devise a way to manufacture an electric Yucca Mountain and the non-newspapers can report on how they did it yesterday.

This Horse IsNot Dead Yet

2009-05-28T06:28:00.001-07:00

I have been chided and excoriated lately for chiming in and attempting to further the notion of many cultural observers that there is a rising tide of "anti-intellectualism" in our society.

Anyone who doubts this reality should listen carefully to the tidal wave of remarks being made about Ms. Sotomayor's nomination to the SCOTUS.

Rove has implied she is "stupid"; Pat Buchanan said, literally, that she is not "very intelligent"; she has been derogatorially referred to as a "schoolmarm"(implying that this is a bad thing) and criticized for being "too careful" and precise in her grammar and wording when she speaks and writes (another sleight which implies a mental shortcoming). Rush Limbaugh publicly promotes confusing the terms "racist" and "bigot"with "ethnic experience". Pick nearly any conservative mouthpiece and you will find a pejorative, down-with-thinking remark that can be attributed to them in the last 72 hours.

People so tenaciously hugging the far right shoulder of the highway of disruptive discourse are resisting critical thought and honest debate at every turn. They confront obvious truth (the nominee's outstanding and impeccable credentials) with obvious untruths. They use ugly words and defamation to assail the unassailable, and malign the un-malignable. There is a tremendous tendency and willingness to equate innate characteristics (being Hispanic) with characterizations ( being inferior and unqualified). These mental obstructionists would have you believe, through obfuscating derogatory oratory, that black is white, being correct is inappropriate and linguistic precision is counter-productive. Hot air may float balloons, but it can suffocate civility.

Those leading the charge of anti-intellectualism are seeking to halt effective logic, in favor of irrational and emotional backlash, hence attempting to make the world rotate backwards and cause civilization to turn in on itself.

Lowering the Bar

2009-05-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

I thought the (insipid) remarks of Inhofe (yesterday) were "enough"...I know: not punny...but Buchanan is lowering the chauvinist bastard bar even more. I suppose when you have nothing useful to say, and your ego is out of control, you will say anything. If I were Buchanan's mother, I would reach for the bar of soap.

The rank ranks of Republican emabarrassment are swelling. Swell. Just what we need.

Subject: Buchanan on Sotomayor: "Not that intelligent"

> ihentschel@austin.rr.com has sent you a link to an article on Salon.com:> > "Buchanan on Sotomayor: "Not that intelligent""> If Republicans keep trashing the Supreme Court nominee, they'll wind up an even tinier minority than they are now.> Joan Walsh> > http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/05/27/supreme_court/index.html>

I wish they were kidding...but they're not

2009-05-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

Remarks such as these make me furious (and they should you, as well). These are chauvinistic, neathanderthal-like utterances which have no place in our society. If these "representatives" believe that this is acceptable language to be used in this debate, then their fitness to continue serving should be put under careful and very critical scrutiny. These men spew a particularly distasteful form of malevoent and self-serving filth.

Think Progress: "Inhofe worries that Sotomayor may allow 'undue influence from her own personal race, gender.'"> Check out this post on Think Progress:>>

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/26/sotomayor-inhofe/>> "Inhofe worries that Sotomayor may allow 'undue influence from her own > personal race, gender.'">

I am astounded...and you should be, too

2009-05-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

I strongly fear that the legislative branch of our federal government may be terminally mentally ill. The current popularly elected members just sent a bill to the President, for his signature, which deals (not very effectively) with credit card use and abuse, and deception and dubious, usurous lending practices. This legislation claims to have a direct and beneficial effect upon almost anyone in the United States who uses a credit card. Many say it is too little too late, many say it is less than worthwhile and some even say it is yet another concession to Wall Street, the banking industry and credit card companies.

Be that as it may, this legislation bears some curious amendments, one of which allows anyone who has a gun license to carry a loaded weapon into a national recreational park just because. These two legislative actions should NEVER have been considered together, never been disussed in the same breath and never been used as competitive pawns in a game of financial life and death for American consumers. The United States is in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the debate about the many measures that may be necessary to "fix" it, has been polluted and corrupted by a curious discussion: it concerns the highly unlikely circumstance that might "require" someone to shoot a black bear. Brilliant. Genius. Astoundingly stupid. Crazy,even.

The members of the legislature who wrote and attached this amendment to the credit card reform bill should be examined very soon by a psychiatrist. Their essential thinking and logic is deeply flawed. House of Representatives and Senate members who voted for this and/or failed to object strenuously enough to prevent and avoid this sheer lunacy should be immensely ashamed of their behavior and their lack of intestinal fortitude. Their moral fabric and their personal integrity have been severely marginalized.

Put another way, these legislators fondled and had foreplay with our credit cards, and then they had unprotected sex with national gun control, in the back of an FWD SUV in Yellowstone Park, all without kissing us first.

If you are able to provide me with the the name of even one member of this once august body, who can say with a straight face that they collaborated in this act of NRA-sponsored idiocy (and moral carelessness) in good faith, and who can swear that they really and honestly believe they have participated in this travesty because they really and honestly thought it was good, in anyway whatsoever, for the American people, I will give you a medal. Good luck with that.

But these guys and gals are sick, and you (and I) elected them. You may think I am wrong. But just think about whether or not you really want to wear protective body armor on your next hike through Glacier National Park.

Don't Believe EverythingYou Read in the papers

2009-05-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Before you read the last article here, you should look at:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05152009/transcript4.html, which is, of course, liberal, informed, seditious, and subversive...

And then read this, as well: http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2009-05-19-12-55-38-news.php.

Then go ahead and read this article (down below), which, although published by the venerable NYT, may lead you to ask a few questions, not the least of which is:

If the Taliban is indeed a relatively small group of sort-of college educated thug-like, red neck gang bangers, why are we giving them so much press and why are we being told they can hold off the entire Pakistani army? We are being told that they arecapable of holding the world hostage, and that extreme military might is needed to stop them. Sounds to me more like they need to have their snotty noses wiped and be told to go back to school and STFU.

Could it be possibly be that the neo-cons and military industrial power players described in the PDA article are feeding us enough semi-truths that we will follow the "shock doctrine" described by Naomi Klein and let them keep waging the unhealthy and unending wars described here?: http://www.alternet.org/democracy/140106/the_disease_of_permanent_war/.

OK. Now you can read this one. Have a nice day.

Oh. And don't forget that the credit card regulation legislation pending before congress today has an amendment tied to it to allow people in national parks to carry AK-47 assault rifles. then Google "BlackRock" and see if you can still look your congressman in the face without losing your lunch.

Today: May 20, 2009

WAR STORY The Taliban Is Using Our Weapons
The United States originally armed the Taliban when it fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Today, though we may now be its enemy, the Taliban still has a way of getting its hands on our weapons, apparently: After discovering that the weapons on 17 or 30 insurgent corpses in Afghanistan were identical to weapons the U.S. had provided to the Afghan government, The New York Times reports that it is likely “that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.” The United States has failed to account for thousands of rifles issued to Afghan Security forces. “With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.”

Read it at The New York Times

Posted at 6:37 AM, May 20, 2009

Who Turned Out The Lights?

2009-05-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30700262/

I am so interminably grateful that we have Ms. silicone-implant,opposite sex marriage, semi-nude photograph California and an extended Donald Trump press conference to keep us away from the silly news stories about wars, torture, the Green Zone, single-payer health care, hold-ups to Presidential appointments, the Taliban, rape in the military, withheld money for Katrina victims, Texas charging women for rape kits, inflammatory "insights" from Sen. Sessions and infant mortality rates in Alabama. It leaves almost no time to consider the merits of Sen. Vitter running for re-election on family values, Newt Gingrich re-emerging as a tyranosaurus "ex" and Michael Steele as missing the whole point that he is a token black man for the RNC. Little things like that.

MSNBC spent at least 90 minutes on little miss tempest in a c-cup this morning, while no one is following the hideous immorality of US soldiers shoving Bibles at Afghanis so that they can "murder for Jesus."

Who shifted our priorities and shut off our moral compass?

Not necessarily the news

2009-05-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

The Good Times as We Knew it Aren't Coming Back, So Now What?
> http://www.alternet.org/workplace/139895
>

I am aware that many readers will accuse this author of being a utopian/liberal/socialist/pinko/commy, but the notion that we could actually have a government that was a facilitator, a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", instead of one that is an impediment to human progress, an overlord or a source of endles frustration, should not be a new figgin idea. .

It will keep the politicians and the bankers awake at night, but frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!

A Bonfire of the Profanities

2009-05-05T04:33:00.000-07:00

Gird yourself, brace yourself, temporarily mute your sensibilities, and read this article:

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/04/soldiers-hunt-for-jesus/

"Al Jazeera report: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have Pashto Bibles, told to 'hunt people for Jesus.'"

Good. Now that you have done that, peel yourself down from the ceiling and read on.

I read this article twice, after which I had to pick my jaw up from the floor (it had missed the desk top completely, on the way down), subdue my feelings of rage, indignation and horror, and remind myself I was indeed living in 2009 and not in the midst of the Crusades, lopping off the heads of infidels, in search of the Holy Grail. Jeebus Asparagus! Can this be real? Is this even remotely possible I an “enlightened” age? I kept hoping that Lt. Col. Hensely was a fictional character.

As is my nature, I sent the story out and about, among my circle of friends, detractors, and critics, and my email screen lit up like (pardon the expression) a friggin Christmas tree. An infuriated Buddhist reminded me that the Dali Lama has said that “Buddhism is not for everyone”, the implication being that cramming your religion down another’s throat does not work. Even worse, using religion at cross purposes with itself is both counter-intuitive and heretical (In this case, it amounts to, “Excuse me. But I want to kill you in the name of my lord and savior”).

A Coptic Christian Arab fired back that he would tell these antagonists “Get this stuff out of my lands”.

A non-Christian, non-Jew, non-Arab “plain white American” added that he would not want this “stuff” in his lands either.

All were shocked, offended and as mortified by the gall and moral turpitude as I was.

Clearly we have a chain of idiots responsible for this bonfire: the first is the one who thought this perversion up( lit the match), in the first place. The second is the officer who approved it(put wood on the fire). The third is the procurement officer (or officers) who authorized the materials preparation(poured on the gasoline), and the fourth is the person who outlined and presented the procedural guidelines(fanned the flames). The chaplains involved (“This is general order #1”?) and who attempted to disguise the proselytizing as “gift giving”, should be summarily dismissed, disenfranchised, disgraced and de-frocked. These boys have got their Bible-learnin’ all wrong.

The nearly unthinkable and wholly inconceivable notion that a set of widely-held religious beliefs, the accompanying morals and the humanitarian foundations that accompany them, might be wrapped around the military goals of murder, death and destruction, like a putrefied pork rind, is disgusting. I do not know what else to call it. Using the misinterpreted tenets of any form of theism as a guise for hideous behavior is simply anti-theistic.

Evangelical Christians should be stunned at the audacity of it all.

Christians of any ilk should be shamed and embarrassed.

Christian leaders, east and west, religious thinkers and theological luminaries should be roiling with anger and resentment.

Any Muslim believer or practitioner should be enraged, affronted and infuriated (is it any wonder that so many are willing to take up arms or strap on a bomb?).

John the Baptist, beheaded as he was, should be acting now as the [headless] horseman of the apocolypse, railing against such despicable goings-on (we could use his waterboarding skills, now).

Even practitioners of the dreaded protestant “Jesusology” should be horrified in the manner in which their core beliefs have been maligned, misused and misrepresented.

And any Jew who smirks at this should be reprimanded and labeled as a fraud.

Indeed, the core of any serious belief in the humanity of man should be seen as marginalized and contorted beyond recognition by this action. It is heretical, profane and blasphemous.

This is a brain-dead and bone-headed activity which should be ceased immediately. It makes us barbarians at the gate.

If you claim to be Christian, you might ask yourself, now, “What would Jesus do?” Well, he sure as hell would not do THIS.

The Specter of Things.

2009-04-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

Senator Arlen Specter has never been a conservative, nor a liberal, nor a moderate, nor an independent. He is a trimmer -- a sailor who trims his sails to meet any incoming political breeze.

-------Rabbi Arthur Waskow 6711 Lincoln Drive Philadelphia PA

This is part of a comment made almost immediately, on an article by Chris Hayes at The Nation.
I could not have said it better myself. I have been counting the days since the last election for Specter (and perhaps others like him) to change colors, post new flags and switch parties. He was, however, on the top of my list of “usual suspects” that one might expect to work out a way to make political hay from the recent demise of moderate conservatism around the country.

Although the dear Senator professes to represent the people of PA, he continues in his current role as representing only himself, his lobbyist supporters, his paychecks and his extensive numerous benefits as a congressman. He has already vowed to vote against the EFCA and will no doubt vote in favor of his generous industrial/hospital healthcare supporters to fight against any effective national health care plan. This will not, of course, impede or alter the contribution-free health care plan he receives as partial compensation for his office.

Faced with certain failure if he had attempted to get re-elected as a Republican, in a state where the red voters have been increasingly over-run by the pink and blue ones, he took the most expedient route and simply changed party affiliations.

This is Washington street theatre, a few prominent Democrats will hail this as “monumental change” and the intellectual fondlers of the new majority will linguistically soil themselves in public for a day or two. Then the stage will be cleared and the props put away, and it will be business as usual. We will still have swine flu scares, Wall Street pecuniary obscenities and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And human slavery and child pornography and massive job losses and multitudinous home foreclosures.

And as for Specter and his sudden acts of political clarity and charity? I don’t care. And in all honesty, you probably don’t either.

The Three Reasons

2009-04-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to the entire article,
http://www.openleft.com/diary/12800/nprs-planet-money-guys-feed-rachel-maddow-a-snow-job
And here is the opening gambit.:

NPR's "Planet Money" Guys Feed Rachel Maddow A Snow Job (+)
by: Paul Rosenberg
Sun Apr 12, 2009 at 13:45
[subscribe]
On Friday, Rachel Maddow was all set to tear further into the absurdity of GOP stimulus rejectionism, when she got sideswipped by a pair of NPR bozos, Adam Davidson and Alex, from NPR's Planet Money podcast (no link for these losers). A quick Google shows that Maddow had Blumberg as a radio show guest back on September 22, to discuss the then-three-page bailout plan, so there's at least some history there. But it's doubtful she had any idea what she was in for with these journalists, touted for explaining economics in terms "regular people" can understand--Gosh, and here I thought Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and dozens, if not hundreds of other real economists already did that. I surely would have loved to had Krugman or Baker on with Maddow when these jokers were spouting their stupid speil, essentially laying down covering fire for SC Governor Stanfords complaint that "Going further into debt will not solve a problem that was created by too much debt."
Then there is this summary:

In a nutshell, here are the 3 big lies these guys are pushing:
(1)'The problem was caused by debt.'
(2) It's a multi-factor problem, so no one should be blamed.
(3) Deregulation in general, and repealing Glass-Spiegal in particular was not really a major factor.

If you read the whole article, and then read the comments, it is 1)curious how immediately dismissive Mr. Rosenberg is of the entire interview, and 2) how many angry commenters agree with the assessment. However….

“The problem was caused by debt” .Well, yes it was. Krugman, Reich, Galbraith and Greider all say so. It is a fact which is hard to ignore. The banks, investment banks and big guns like AIG, Goldman Sachs and Solomon Bros. et.al. kept borrowing money on borrowed money without the collateral required to bolster them. That is why the transactions were called “credit default swaps”. Everyone was betting on the fact that the credit arrangements would not go into default. But without reliable underpinnings, they were destined to crash, mostly because the billions in outstanding home mortgages were overblown, under-collateralized and sold at sub-prime to people who could not make the payments. Pile credit card debt on top of that (also without collateral backing) and then introduce unemployment, caused by a decrease in consumer demand and the debt load and obligations of big manufacturers like GM, and what follows is a big downward slump of gigantic proportions. These boys are right: in large part, this great reckoning WAS caused by debt and turning a blind eye to the monster it had become. Hell. If all else fails, borrow some more money. That of course raises the question of the wisdom of Geithner borrowing even more to solve the problem. Hmmmm…

It is a multi-factor problem so no one should be blamed. Well DUH!!!! Of course it is! But this was not expressed properly: in truth, everyone is to blame because everything is connected to everything else. Everybody piled on the bandwagon, everybody played the game and everybody made their own contribution by going deeper intodebt. The homeowners borrowed from the banks, the banks and mortgage companies borrowed from each other and the government borrowed from the rest of the world (mostly China). In the end, nobody had the cash to pay the bills and we are all suffering the consequences. As a group, Americans want to have one villain, one cause, one single source to blame, deride and hold accountable. It simply is not that simple. Everyone contributed to the stew we cooked up, and while some are more guilty than others (like the Wall St. greedy-monsters, Bernie Madoff, mortgage brokers, etc.), mom and pop with a $500,000 mortgage that they could only afford with two jobs (one of which they lost), three SUV’s and a personal debt load they could not support, and their kids in college carrying credit cards they had no business having, the Chinese bankers who loaned the money and the failure of the overseers to over see, all pitched in. Then the boat pitched over. These two guys pointed out, very clearly, that “lots of people, doing lots of thing independently, thinking they were doing the right thing at the time, taken together, added up to what we have now” (That is an approximate quote).

Deregulation…in general…was not a factor. While many people have laid much of the blame squarely at the feet of the repeal of Glass=Spiegal ( and well it should be), that one piece of legislation was only one cog in the gear of the great financial machine that got bound up when everyone’s assorted shoes got thrown into the machinery. We were already using an antiquated banking system, handed down to us by the Europeans and the Bank of London, and when we laid off or transferred regulators, followed the blind un-wisdom of trickle down economics, played games with tax formulations that saved us after the Great Depression and let the banks, finance companies and insurance companies co-mingle funds without oversight and safety nets, we were doomed to some eventual downfall. It does not take a genius to figure that one out.
This interview was not all that bad. These guys speak in relatively plain English and don’t make any attempts to spin or hype anything. They do, however, sport a genuine “transparency” that we were supposed to get from the Obama/Geithner gang, which has thus far been completely missing in action. Rachel let them go and left us to our own devices and conclusions. Would you rather listen to this discussion or to Newt Gingrich or Eric Cantor or Sarah Palin tell you what’s wrong with the economy? Here: have a tax cut. That will fix everything.

Resurrection Blues

2009-04-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-10/10-reasons-the-resurrection-really-happened/

Choke. Gag. Gasp. Turn Blue. Vomit. Wretch. Go into shock.
I thought that April Fool’s day and Easter were two different events.

World's Largest Water Park?

2009-04-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/somalia/5130003/US-warship-arrives-at-site-of-pirate-kidnap.html

This on-going story has just up-ended my apple cart, or maybe dumped my canoe upside down in the river. Nuts.

For some time, now, I have been planning to write about our mis-use of “frames of reference”. That is, I was have been thinking about how we tend to plan and organize our current and future actions, based upon how we see our current situation through our visions of the past, or the “frames of reference” we commonly use to interpret where we have been and what we need to do now. This has most particularly with our military resources.

My biggest and best (I thought) example of using the wrong frame of reference was the DOD and the huge amounts of money they spend on the Navy. Consider this:

Civilizations have had navies as far back as we have had history chronologists to report them. Early on, the battling folks of Mesopotamia used the Mediterranean and the likes of the Nile as water parks to move troops around to conquer and bloody one another. This great tradition carried on most prominently with the Brits (Rule Brittania, and all that rot) , the French and the Spaniards…even the mostly landlocked Germans had grand battleships and U-boats, and today even Iran has a Navy (though I’m not sure why…will they use it to wipe Israel off the map?).
All this time, I have been thinking that we don’t really need a navy: we have aircraft to move themselves and personnel and now the drone wars are even delivering hellfire bombs without pilots. And these robots don’t even need an aircraft carrier in the neighborhood for support (aircraft carriers, to some, are just huge, floating, monstrously expensive floating city/airports that are gigantic sitting duck/missile targets on the ocean). We no longer need to float huge compliments of men and materiel from London to the Falklands, or from Madrid to Mexico, or Paris to Patagonia…well, wherever… to conquer and plunder and subdue undiscovered countries, battles at sea are no longer needed to gain territorial supremacy, the big boats (sorry, “ships”) cost unfathomable amounts of money, and their immediate value is no longer commensurate with what we spend on them. Just exactly who needs a “navy” anymore, anyway? (My apologies to Jimmy Carter).

But then comes this latest ‘water park” story: a merchant ship of the high seas is assaulted and nearly captured by an old “frame of reference”: pirates. Now I know that this is nothing new and that this has been going on for some time now, and I have been using the failure of anyone to do anything to stop these antique antics as another justification for “Why navies?”: they have not been able to help at all. But this story has a new twist. In the apparent spirit of American independence and defiance, the largely American crew overcame the pirates and took back the ship…almost. It seems like they lost the captain to a couple of pirates who made off with him in a life boat (I almost loved it: I thought for sure we maybe had made-for-TV movie in the works). And thence comes the Navy! The USS Bainbridge steams onto the scene and casts an entirely new pall on the situation. John Wayne has arrived.

For a short time I thought my entire premise about the irrelevance of the navy was ruined by the appearance of this destroyer. Perhaps suddenly a frame of reference has suddenly come back into vogue and was providing an overlooked and forgotten usefulness.

Well, almost. Maybe.

It turns out that as I write this, the escaped life boat is adrift off the hull of the merchant ship and out of fuel. Literally dead in the water. And the US Navy ship is a highly sophisticated “missile” ship. What? Something smells like overkill, here.

Perhaps the Bainbridge has a small boat or two it can put in the water to attempt to overtake, over-power and capture the life boat and its occupants, free the Captain. But at the moment, the only offensive capabilities the ship seems to have are highly sophisticated, (presumably) laser guided missiles, designed to obliterate much larger military targets and kill people many hundreds of miles away. Methinks the lifeboat is hopelessly over-matched and outgunned. Even assuming that one of the missiles from the ship could be trained and fired upon the lifeboat, the end result would not even be splinters.

It remains to be seen what might happen next. In recent Iranian or Chinese speedboat fashion, perhaps the occupants of both the lifeboat and the Bainbridge could moon one another in an act of sophomoric defiance. Or perhaps the members of the little vessel and the big vessel can have a literal pissing contest: that would seem like an American thing to do: we are good at polluting oceans.

Meanwhile, I am back to my original question: what good is a navy today, anyway, out on this giant water park, and why do we insist of upon using a frame of reference that says we need to spend so much money on one?

My dad was in the Navy. He used to repeat, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Somehow that makes more sense to me, today.

Too Much Stuff

2009-04-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

I am simply overwhelmed this morning and have decided to “whelm” you as well. Every leaf I turn over today has a new tree sprouting under it, and I am just going to pass along the juiciest new shoots that popped up most recently. Here goes. Some are fun and some are not. And you won’t have time to read them all , but neither did I. You think you are special or sumpthin’?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/magazine/05wwln-medium-t.html?emc=eta1. Now here is a story about a lady who took a big leap forward in technology, only to have it backfire. She went backwards but is still light years ahead of anything I have available.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/workplace/135182. If you believe this hot air for even a minute, I’ll have Larry Summers send you part of his $5.2M he got from speeches to hedge funds and then I have a bridge to sell you. This is pure, unadulterated crap.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/sex/135094. I used to travel in Iowa. I am dumbfounded. Can Nebraska be next?

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/135155. When the forces at work in the above story and these folks collide, it should be great fun. Of course, Sarah is working on becoming a Scientologist, which should screw up everything. My recent blog about “Jesus is not alright with me” let me vent some about this.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/135161. Bill Moyers continues to be a light in the darkness. If this makes you mad, then you should read the transcript of his interview with William Greider (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03272009/transcript2.html) . If you read both of these at the same time you read the Geithner story (above),you will need extra valium.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/135162. Maybe this is the best for (almost) last. As usual, I am too smart, too late, and should have been reading his work sooner. Same biting edge as Fred on Everything, but far more eloquent. This of course means that I have another book to read. Rats.

Last but not least: I just finished reading The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, by Matt Miller. The reviews of this book vary greatly, but I think it is well worth the time. The thrust of the book is neatly summarized in a sentence on page 230: The sooner we clear out the cobwebs of our minds, the less jarring and disruptive the years ahead will be, and the less damage these old ways of thinking will inflict on the country. I have certainly spent far more time on less productive pursuits. Without saying so, explicitly, Miller cogently and concisely refutes the Republican notion that “tax cuts, tax cuts and tax cuts” will save the country and the economy. But there is much, much more.

Good luck with all this.

We NeedTo Take This Seriously

2009-04-05T07:22:00.001-07:00

I read this piece this morning and my heart just sank. I have been reading for weeks (ever since it became evident that Obama would be President) that the wing nuts were coming loose, and that ragged edges of the right side of the populace was becoming a mass of tattered flaps, blowing wildly in the breeze. The first lunacy I remember was learning that itinerant white, fundamentalist preachers in the rural south (TN, KY, WVA, AL,MS) were actually telling people that the first thing Obama would do, after taking office, would be "enslave" white men and rape all of their women. At first I laughed, and then I read it multiple times,along with murmurings about loss of firearms, absurd gun control hysteria from the NRA about the right to bear arms...and worse. I had no idea that being aMuslim was the moral equivalent to having an STD, but I soon learned that, as well.

This story on TP makes me newly aware that this wild-eyed weirdness is all too real and "in our face" and screams for some form of corrective action.

I am the first one to defend free speech, the free press and open public discourse, but the rantings (and the irrational behavior they generate) and dizzyingly idiotic proclaimations of Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter ( and that crazed Bachman creature from MN) cause me to stand up and loudly demand, as the say in txtng and twitter, "STFU!!!!!

The incitement to maniacal riot, civil unrest of such a destructionist nature, and the wanton taking and loss of human life, by people who have had their brains unfairly tampered with, needs to be brought under control. I cannot say that I have any immediate resolution or remedy or rectification, but perhaps calling the hate-mongers into account for the ramifications of their dangerous and pathologically corrosive speech, might well be in order.

This is the 21rst century. We have the scientific and medical resources to effect curative applications and treatments that will help prevent people from being driven to these acts of totally depraved and incoherent acts of murder and genocide. We have the ways and means to treat and care for people and not let them become so overwhelmed by their "percieved" yet non-existent villians and monsters that they are driven to run completely amok. But we need to pay attention to some of the causality, as well. Outright public lying is not a positive influence on society. (Of course, you can be the Governor of SC and refuse funds for effective public education,but that is another column).

The cadre of obscenely irritating hate-mongers of the airwaves and pulpits of America need to be put in check. It is time, perhaps, to identify a legal muzzle for this clearly detestible and insidious manipulation of people who are so easily molded and motivated to do the unthinkable. It might be arguable that there should be some form of punishment for creating such an unhealthy environment of agitation that it premeditates and promulgates horror. If hate speech prompts lunatic hate crimes and needless death, some corrective retribution may well be in order.

We let W, Cheney, Gonzalez, Ashcroft, et.al., get away with this sort of despicable rationalization for hate crimes around the world for years. They told us it was "for our own good" and that terror would overtake us if we did not act so viciously. Now the terror is all coming home "home to roost" in our own backyards, when the guy next door grabs a shotgun or an uzi and blows away portions of the nieghborhood, because some malicious blowhard on the radio tells him or her that it is "for his own good". We are supposed to be more civilized than this.

Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2009 8:16 AM
Subject: Think Progress: "Right-wing's false claims that Obama will take away guns 'has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms.'"
> Check out this post on Think Progress: > > http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/04/right-wing-guns-claim/> > "Right-wing's false claims that Obama will take away guns 'has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms.'"> >

Jesus is not alright with me.

2009-03-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

This is not about AIG, Prop 8, HR645 (coming to an empty field near you), gay rights, Geithner, Michelle Obama’s arms, Iraq, Ruwanda, the octo-mom, Cheney or any of that. It is about GOD, dammit.

We used to enjoy four seasons in the cycle of life: spring, summer, fall and winter (even when it was one of discontent), but now we seem to have five. Just as cyclical and predictable as the other four, the silly season of pre-occupation with “God” shows up, regularly now. Alternet had these two, just this morning:

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/132781/zombie_newt_gingrich_wants_more_brains%2C_er_religion/
and
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/132775/this_week_in_god%3A_religion_costs_counties_cash%2C_%27i_believe%27_license_plates%2C_and_evolution/

Over the past few months, OpEdNews has posted “articles”, written by noted authorities like Brian Wisenheimer-Schmutz, on the importance of “God” in society, why and how religion is “subtly” re-shaping the world and why, without faith, the world will end next Tuesday afternoon. Many of these have threatened to be a “series” of articles (God help us), and when OEN runs the good ideological narcissists off, they pop up elsewhere, threatening their serial abominations, there. After many others beside me have (presumably) protested and objected, the threats and the extended, vapid and pointless diatribes mysteriously disappear (thank God).
Cyclical and periodic episodes and outbreaks such as these always prompted a flood of comments, many of them from self-proclaimed atheists, whose use of space and waste of literary oxygen are as pointless as the ones the God-people offer, these last only a day or three, and then inevitably re-surface shortly thereafter, seemingly unable to resist uninvited repeat performances. I guess pointless misery loves pointless company. The crux of my complaint and criticism is that these writings mention nothing about ethics and never address the pragmatic issues of our world. They prattle on about faith and belief and then pass the collection plate.

Born Again Crustaceans (they have the shelf-life of a shell fish), proponents of Jesusology (which has nothing to do with Christianity), adherents of Mariology and the like (which are the antithesis of any substantive theology) and the ravings of condemn-mental-ists ( who preach that anyone who is black, Muslim, Hindu, gay or not willing to swear that Jesus is lord and at least acknowledge anemic Presbyterianism, are driving me NUTS. God. Dammit.
We have a financial crisis (largely brought on by a collapse of morals and ethics), war and starvation in places like Darfur, homeless crowds, empty food pantries, no reasonable health care programs for the common man, racial and sociological iniquities and battered stem cell research programs, and yet…

We have huge numbers of people with nothing better to do, and insist upon attempting to distract everyone with palaver-like talk of the “God machine” (unintelligent design), the vengeful deity of something-or-other and meaningless gobbledygook about faith and silly thoughts of rescued fetuses flying upward towards heaven, right after the abortion doctor is murdered and his family left to pick up the pieces.

This all needs to stop. Freedom of thought and speech is one thing; ideological abuse and the routine torture of logic is another. We cannot afford to be diverted from the real agonies of the day, distracted from the urgent realities of abject poverty, murderous dictators and despots, armies that use rape as weapon (in lieu of bullets),the insipid and dangerous thinking of homophobes and racists and selfish, narrow-minded bigots who attempt to routinely deny the basic rights of life to anyone who does not fit their vision of nirvana. Anyone, that is, who does not fit comfortably behind their mysterious shields of theistically –inspired ignorance or a completely warped picture of salvation, which is manifested in a saccharine-like portrait of a Jesus figure, with (absurdly) blonde hair and blue eyes.

This is the 21rst century and we should have long-since outgrown this pseudo-mysticism by now. We should be beyond any allegiance to a papal figure or uber-ministerial, Billy Graham-like ideologue, either or both of whom may have the gall to absolve holocaust deniers, blame aids on condom use or dictate moral principles to a world they do not understand (if you don’t follow my reasoning, here, ask Sarah Palin’s daughter about abstinence). Primitive Baptist churches are primitive only in their stunted brain development, Mormon-esque restrictive thinking is a form of intellectual and spiritual slavery (human belittlement), the selling of indulgences should be as illegal as selling heroine to kids on the street and pointless anti-philosophical theosophical meanderings (done in order to bolster one’s hapless ego) should be forced to go before a jury of rational thinkers before the words are unleashed on an innocent general public, already at risk for spiritual and humanitarian starvation. Preying on the weary to pray is a really cheap shot.

To add insult to injurious behavior, the Huffington Post reports today that there is an emerging relationship between Sarah Palin (and hubby) and the scientologists. Apparently, “Jesus is just alright with me”, until you find another God machine mode which is better suited to your lifestyle and temporal convictions. This is to say that loyalty among the God-people is subject to modifications and contortions.

Ah. There’s the word I’ve been missing in all of this: Integrity. I guess that one is not in the God machine dictionary.

Stop wasting my time, god. Dammit.

Excuse Me While I Stay Confused

2009-03-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

My friend, Ron, said to me yesterday, “I read Mr. XX, and then Mr. XXX, and then Mr. XXXX, and then I read the NYT and then I read the WSJ: who am I supposed to believe? Who can I trust?”You’re asking ME?

Bill Maher asks, “Why can’t we just admit that we just don’t f@#*king know?”

Barbara and I watched a talented lawyer explain, on television, about the legality or potential illegality of AIG bonus contracts, then turned and looked at me, and asked, “Can you explain that to me?”

To which I said, “Huh?”

It is very apparent that we are all consumed by AIG and the economy, right now. (Some people are so consumed that they are sending death threats to AIG executives: ouch). Ron (see the guy above) said yesterday that he thinks we are all looking for the “next big bubble” to make everything OK, again. I think most of us are looking for a nice, simple, single answer to both a simple explanation and solution to a very complex mess.

Here is what Paul Krugman had to say this morning:
March 20, 2009, 9:05 am
AIG
Preliminary thoughts on the tax bill:
1. It’s not the way you should make policy — it’s clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free
2. But — there wasn’t much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people.
I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but its part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.
This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

Then there is this, from James Galbraith, who is NOT a populist economist:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Economy--No-Return-to-by-the-web-090319-85.html
I think we should listen more closely to him and less to many others???
Or try this one:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-I-G--A-National-Embarr-by-James-Raider-090318-537.html
I keep searching for a better word than embarrassment, but I cannot find one. Obscene, maybe?

Or maybe this observation:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090319_the_geithner_problem/
This article raises the question, “What did he know and when did he know it?” Last night, on CNN, Geithner said he knew about some “things”, a few days before the bonuses became public knowledge. These “things” sound very much like the “strings” the Governor of Texas says are attached to the unemployment funds for his state in the stimulus bill. He says these strings prevent him from accepting them, but he can’t seem to say what the ‘string things” are, exactly.
Meanwhile, Governor Palin (AK…remember her?) is declining funds as well. But in her case, she is threatening to decline those ‘earmarked” only for education: she says those “strings” in the legislation that require Alaska to “grow its’ government”. I would suppose that not educating the populace is one good way to guarantee that Alaska will not grow. And Governor Sanford (SC) has asked to use the education portion of that states’ share of the stimulus to pay down debt, thereby neglecting education and laying off 7000 teachers. I think he and Gov. Palin are just stringing us along. Or perhaps they knew “things” before Geithner did? (I just heard three political pundits call for Geithner’s head and two more explain the actions of Palin and Sanford as preparatory actions for elections in 2012. I fail to see the connections, but I’m confused.
Eric Cantor (OH) has been very resolute about being the voice of “no” about almost everything having to do with TARP, TALP and AIG, but when actually pressed on MSNBC about how he would vote about the bonus legislation, would not say. Later, in order to stay center stage but ideologically impure, he went Republican-Lite and voted for the anti-bonus actions. This is something like Senator Chris Dodd saying he did not put language into the AIG-related legislation right before he said he did. This is also something like John Kerry saying he was for something before he was against it, or Mrs. Clinton being against Barack Obama for President before she was for it as soon as she was named to be the SOS.

Are you confused yet? Are you feeling just a little like an Orwellian pig? Did you bring your lipstick? Are you tempted to fly? Or at least fly off the handle? Well, add this to your plate of imponderables:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031802283.html?wpisrc=newsletter
The headline here is: “Fed to pump $1.2 trillion Into Markets”. This is, of course, another mind-boggling amount of money, coming right after a grandfatherly Bernanke told 60 Minutes that “we will not let the banks fail”. The next day the market rallied (Barbara said it was the Bernanke factor; I think it was because it was Monday and stocks [Geithnerian things] were cheap). Steven Pearlstein (WaPo) on MSNBC is just now telling me that it is obvious that “the depression is much worse than they thought” (they being the government?) and that we should be braced for much higher deficits. And the other “thing” I liked about the morning stories was this:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090319_a_government_of_men_not_laws/, wherein David Sirota sounds somewhat like Galbraith.

But this should make you uneasy as well:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/19/cnbc-rich-wall-street/. I really like this one. We are still some of us, anyway) hanging onto the notion that only the rich and greedy can manage money. But given the give-aways and short-sightedness that allowed us to give away billions of TARP funds (and now TALP…rhymes with SCALP) funds without accountability, I don’t think letting the government manage our money is such a hot idea, either. Would you give your money to Barney Frank? My father would call all of this rationalization of the rich being in charge “bass-ackwards thinking”. For once, I agree with him.

This next story is both confusing and transparent:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/19/financial-roundtable-lobbyists/. Having failed to engineer profits from attempting the defeat the stimulus bill, the lobby folks are trying to carve money out of the budget for special interests. We have no shame. Or integrity. Or logic.
All of which brings me to the congressional antics and how they all contribute to my confusion…and yours.

Over the last decade, the lasting effects of the great “uniter” have only added to our great “division” and bifurcation. The chasm between right and left, conservative and liberal, has just been growing. Beginning most recently (and openly) with the complete and total rejection of any Republican votes for the stimulus bill, and moving on from there, the most important issue being kept alive in Congress right now is NOT the welfare of the country, but whether or not you are a Democrat or a Republican and how loudly you can proclaim your allegiance.
Last week, the Republicans stated flatly, that their goal was to “bring down Democratic numbers”. Ideological purity has completely superseded the national economic welfare as the rule of the day.
Except when such ideological purity runs counter to your personal agenda (Google Maxine Waters and the President “keeping his facts straight”), your wallet or your political ambitions. Take, for example, the small group of “blue dog” democrats, deciding this week to establish a “secret” society, having joined forces to form a small sub-group in the Congress that would work closer with Republicans to thwart the economic policies of their own President and party. I wonder if they have a secret handshake? Do they understand the nature of “splinter groups”? Do they understand that splinters can get infected? This dedication to obstructive obstinacy seems endemic to, and symptomatic of, our nationally confused awareness of misplaced priorities.

(Former staffers of the Bush administration, perhaps 70% of them, have either abandoned ideological purity to write profitable tell-all books or have been unable to find jobs because of their prior devotion to that former Rovian moral ”high ground”. I can’t help but wonder if they are re-thinking their allegiances)

And then we have Sen. John McCain and other Republicans are opposing the appointment of Chris Hill to represent the U.S. in Afghanistan. General Petraeus thinks this is a good choice. Despite continued Republican calls to listen to the “generals on the ground”, because Hill is not “their boy” and not a staunch Republican, this group is opposing the appointment. This is silly and counter-productive, to say nothing of being hypocritical and not of much help in advancing the cause of peace in the region. But is all stubbornly ideologically pure. And no one in Congress seemed to care about the AIG and bank bonuses until the public got wind of it. Then, suddenly each side said it was the fault of the other (or of Bush and Paulson, or of Obama and Geithner), making a national economic crisis a political football. Then the House passed a bill (with sudden Republican participation) to eliminate, prevent or tax the bonuses. I will give them this: they finally displayed real transparency: were able to see right through their phony concern. Now that bill is off to the Senate, and I am hearing that the bill is potentially illegal, to the point of being unconstitutional. This means it may be scrapped, altogether. What a waste of time. I have called the recent behavior of Congress to be theater; Mr. Raider (in the earlier article) calls it “circus grandstanding”. In either case it has all been duplicitous or perhaps much ado about much of nothing. Except for the damn crisis.

Let’s confuse the issue, a little more:

The Congress is thinking about giving the corpse of Chryslers several more billions of dollars. Why?

Gordon E. Liddy, the AIG boss guy, is working for one dollar a year (really?) and is volunteering to sit before congress and be grilled, saying that the bonuses are distasteful but obligatory. He also says Bernanke and the Federal Reserve approved the bonus package long ago. (Geithner’s staff says the same thing).

Venerable General Electric Corp. is in trouble, having just lowered their annual dividend to pennies, to raise cash. They have also disclosed that their biggest portfolio item is the GE Capital group. And that that group has invested heavily in questionable real estate. Why? (And most of what they manufacture, they do so off-shore…except for the missile guidance systems for the DOD)

Crown Books is advancing $7M to George W Bush for a book of memoirs we don’t need or want to read. Why? (Maybe the folks in Calgary know “things” we don’t.)

J.P. Morgan and other banks, along with General Motors, is either declining further bail out monies or returning them, citing too many “strings”. After the last cash infusion, they are suddenly profitable (it makes you wonder whence came the crisis?), with Citibank claiming profits in the billions (and remodeling their executive offices).

And Michael Steele is, well…Michael Steele. Explain that one. He has even Rush stumped.

Oh, yes: Mr. Cheney, is that an assassination squad in your pocket or are you just happy to kill people?

I know full well that I have co-mingled TARP, TALP, stimulus funds, education, unemployment, economic advisors, political expediency and poor domestic policy, but I am confused. In the time it has taken to write this, I have found five or six more articles that I could have cited or quoted or referenced. But they have all been muddled and contradictory of each other. I had to turn off MSNBC. I was just getting more confused. If you think you can say all of this better, please do. I no longer know whether I should change my hopes or change my mind. I do know that a few more words of wisdom from the wise and I may lose my mind. I need a nap.

Stagecoach Driver, Economist, Bouncer

2009-03-16T16:43:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a stagecoach called “The United States of America”. The reins to the coach and the horse team were given over to a short, smirky, ex-town drunk from Texas, sometime around the year 2000. His name was Uncurious George, and he came from the town of Born Again Cistern. He and the guy riding shotgun, Dickless Dick, were supposed to get the coach through the next eight years without incident, no loss of life, no financial loss and no loss of dignity. And they were also not supposed to lose any luggage and to tell the truth about their pilgrim’s progress. They were supposed to deliver thee coach intact, in reasonably good shape and without harm to the passengers.

They were also supposed to take the coach and head west, from New York, for Los Angeles. They had about 280 million passengers in the coach, and a whole bunch of political ambulance chasers strapped up-top, who were along for the ride and slated to telegraph stories back their media folks as the coach travelled. Most of them were pretty main stream types, but there was one who was really Foxy, with bad eyesight and just a couple who wrote only with their left hands. Uncurious George would not speak to them “direkly” (in fact he could barely read or write), so he used spokespeople, who came and went through the revolving door at the rear of the stagecoach. The last one was an intellectually bleached blonde, Dana Peroxide, who served synthetic pablum laced with melamine from China for breakfast. Dickless Dick , given the slightest provocation, hid in an un-dick-closed location.

Before they could even leave NY, George and Dick got into a nasty bar fight down on Wall Street and took out two tall skyscrapers: when the cops arrived, George and Dickless denied even being there. They made lots of toxic dust, kept the NYFD busy and got their coach rates raised because they managed to ground all the airplanes.

The next several years were just more of the same. The next big event was a big bar fight in Iraq and then the two of them barely escaping with their goat skins in Afghanistan, spending like drunken sailors, ignoring the coach riders, feeding the pressers up-top bull shit, and signing checks from the surplus they got with the coach, as well as signing statements absolving themselves of any responsibilities for any calamity caused by their bad handling of the coach. They paid no attention to the passengers needs, stopped only at Chinese-owned Wal-Marts, performed no routine maintenance on the coach, the horses or the roads or bridges and told everyone that everything was OK because they had decided it was. They lost more luggage than anyone realized, and the closest they came to maintaining dignity, was the indignance they aroused in foreign countries from their lawless arrogance. They parked the stagecoach at prisons around the world, tortured the prisoners there and tortured the coach passengers with liable, lies and deceit.

After nearly eight years, with the wheels coming off the wagon, running on broken spokes and with broken down horses, the coach passengers were fed up: they had paid full fare for years and only gotten as far as Chicago. The pressers up-top were starting to discover they had a left ear as well as a right one, the check was NOT in the mail, and some guy back in the Wall St. rubble, named Paulson, had just joined the apocalyptic movement and announced that the end was perilously near, right around the corner, and everything really sucked…and he needed $700B, no questions asked. By the time the coach finally came to rest at the stop in Chicago, the passengers were looking for tar, feathers, rail and rope (they already had a jackass). They all got off the coach and stayed overnight in empty, foreclosed houses. And everyone was hoping that there might be a change in the works.

Just about everyone had decided that George would no longer be allowed to drive. In fact, some had even posited that he might be drinking again. Over the next several weeks and months, a search went underway for a new driver.

No one knows just exactly when the call came, but the rumor is that Mel Brooks called, and alerted everyone to the fact that there was dark-skinned renegade guy, staying at the bunkhouse in Chicago. He was known to be a straight-shooter and could handle a team. No one had ever had a minority driver before, but he looked so much better than George and Dickless (and nobody in the conservative camp had a Blackberry), that in almost no time (and several million dollars later) Kid Barack was given the reins and the roadmap (or what was left of it: about all that was left of the Constitution map was a few tatters. It turns out, Dickless had been using a secret paper shredder and never had any intentions of getting to Los Angeles. But that partially explained why they had always managed to find a place to stop for dinner where Dickless could get broiled Halliburton.

Eventually, some time around the middle of January, with The Kid at the reins, and a new guy riding shotgun (Big Bad Joe Bidenhammer, a former Amtrac conductor), the stagecoach left Chicago. Champagne flowed, Jesse Jackson tears flowed, everybody back in Washington balled everyone else and no one was able to tell, at least right at first, if that bright orange glow was the sun setting in the west or that it was just the radiance of Kid Barack. They had a new team of horses, new grease in the wheels and the smell of delusionary Obamanism was everywhere.

But the festivities and glee did not last long. To begin with, the old team of horses had only numbered four, and now Kid Barack had to handle eight. And three of the eight were Republicans, they pulled slowly and to the right and farted and Rushed around. Then, some of the people The Kid wanted to bring along to help, either couldn’t come along because they owed too much money to people back at Club Fed in Washington or had been sleeping around with too many stagecoach suppliers. Then the guy who was supposed to replace The Kid in the bunkhouse turned out to be a crypt keeper, and all of this meant that The Kid had to learn how to handle eight horses, keep the passengers happy (who all wanted to be in LA “yesterday”), handle his Blackberry, go find a birth certificate and get the pressers up-top top stop looking for scandals and start paying attention. That was all right after he found out that the checking account was over-drawn, the coachline’s credit limit was almost tapped out and Uncurious and Dickless had left some diplomatic, financial and foreign relations stink bombs in the back of the coach. (Did I mention that the coach had no brakes, either?)As quickly as everyone had become elated, many became deflated, just like the DOW Jones daily averages, and there was even talk of “let’s shoot the sheriff”. Mel Brooks urged patience: Blazing Saddles do not blaze forever. But the folks on the right started screaming socialistic treason and whining and the folks on the left started screaming for Kid Baracks’ head because he failed to turn water into wine. Eye of Newt was being hailed as the next millenium’s curative, to be possibly coiffed with some Alaskan mousse, and the right rang their Jindal bells but no one came to dinner except a Steele band from Jamaica, Queens. The progressives argued that there was no progress, the far out lefties, who are never satisfied how left anything gets, remained dissatisfied.

That is more or less where we are right now: the idio-ides of March. Just like we want everything else in America, instantaneously and right now and lots of it, with the help of the opportunistic pressers and the practitioners of naivite’, who have wanted to have their cake and eat it too (It doesn’t work that way),we are busily being anxious, schizophrenic children. Sooner or later, the horses will come under control and Kid Barack will learn how to better finesse them. (One or two from SC may need to be shot; they shoot horses’ asses, don’t they?), Rahm the man Emanuel, the team manager will fill out the ball team back at the office, stagecoach sales will pick up eventually and the passengers will realize they are a lot closer, perhaps, to Denver than they thought. They will learn to drink tap water and skip the Evian and the new holy trinity may well be Krugman, Reich and Galbraith. It will take awhile to know if Geithner can play ball if he ever comes out of his ivory clubhouse, and Kid Barack will learn to be a better economist. We will be able to take all of this to the bank…if we have one left.

I am very tired of the American desire for instant gratification, but I am equally tired of empty, childish, right-handed, obstructionist rhetoric. No matter how you mix up the letters from “tax cuts”, it does not spell nirvana. I am also tired of the new Obama team coming late to the party. This “after the horse is out of the barn, let’s close the AIG barn door” is ludicrous. He is the President, for crying out loud. Dickless is gone and Uncurious thumbed a ride to Dallas, where he can do us little harm. We can say anything bad about either of them we like. We paid for that with the full-fare rate we have been paying for the last decade. And maybe, once Kid Barack gets the horses under control, he will stop authorizing the use of the words “clarity” and “transparency”, since they ultimately mean nothing. That alone would make the stagecoach ride less bumpy and more comfortable. And if he will just lock Princess Pelosi up n the tower…

We could use a few good dogfights. It’s time to stop being nice. It’s time to kick some ass instead of kissing it. Obama may realize that he has the reins, but I wonder if he is also knows he is the bouncer at the entry door to this nightclub called “Reality”?

I Would Like To Think

2009-03-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

I would like to think
Like Noam Chomsky
But talk
Like Bill Maher.

If I could put
My thoughts together
The way the eastern sage
Chomsky chomps away at them,
Making finally and at last,
After too many words and paragraphs
That can leave me gasping for brain oxygen,
With the sense I need to
Make sense of what is often not,

And then at some other time,
Reconvene those thoughts,
Have them meet up
In Real Time
More Maher-like, curt,
Smarting , smart and pointed
Like bullets clearly
In the direction
Of some who then wish
They had not been in
The line of fire;

If I could coalesce like Chomsky
And reconnoiter like Maher,
If I could trap logic like the Noam
And grind up raw thought
Like the Billy gnome, gruff,

Then I would like to think
That I could write like…
I had thought to say
A Frost or a Hemmingway, but
I would probably just write
Like me

and
I would like to think
That would be
Just fine.

Social Injustice!

2009-03-12T10:58:00.001-07:00

This should perhaps be a headline in The Onion...but it's not!

Iraqi Shoe-Thrower Gets Three Years in Prison!

Protesting journalist goes to jail for heaving a heel at a heel! Three years in prison for doing right is wrong! He should have gotten:

-Three years in the Caymans

-The use of a yacht

-At least some of those virgins I keep hearing about!

Threw the Glass darkly

2009-03-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

The nation’s conservatives still seem to maintain an insatiable need for juvenile , pseudo-celebrity-like, temporarily spectacular diversions from the world in which the rest of us live. I think this is called “accident avoidance”: they are actually trying to accidentally avoid actually “thinking”. For instance, you have these annoying, recurrent anomalies:

-Rush ”I want Obama to fail” Limbaugh, bouncing up and down for 85 minutes in front of dazed and confused CPAC attendees; then he stayed on television, doing that for days for even more dazed and confused TV viewers;

-Karl “This economic mess is not George Bush’s fault” Rove, appearing almost everywhere on TV, almost all the time. Why is anyone still listening to him? He can do that but he can’t testify to Congress?

-Ann “I’m an anorexic asshole” Coulter, using up planetary oxygen for no discernible reason;

-Glenn “Stem cell research will lead to a master race” Beck, proving nightly that someone can repeatedly put together two sentences in the same paragraph that have nothing to do with one another. Yes, CNN really pays him to do this;

-Sarah “I can be as dumb as an Alaskan moose” Palin, who makes up both legalities and realities as she goes along, and is still seen as a heroine. I am just waiting for the revelation about heroin;

-A fourteen year-old talking ditto head who can rattle off conservative vapid talking points better and faster than

-Newt “I will run for President if it looks like it’s worth it and won’t if it don’t” Gingrich, who has not figured out that A) no one listening , B) no one gives a damn, and C) that nostalgia died with Ronald Reagan;

All of these appear to both resist and foil any attempts at serious thought. It is easier, I surmise, to pretend at thinking rather than actually do it.

Then there is the Pope: he is forgiving or excusing or absolutionizing (?) a holocaust denying priest and then says he is travelling to Israel and Palestine to pray for peace. I used to pray that pedophile priests would derail the catholic Church. That didn’t work, so maybe this obvious proof that papal infallibility is in fact complete absurdity will help the cause.

The Congress is battling over $8+B in earmarks which are “only a small %” of the total budget bill (but still $8+B, which we are not supposed to noti ce), which John McCain said he deplored during the campaign, then said were OK now that he was not the President. And of course Lindsey (“I am as dumb as a post”) Graham said they were horrible except for the ones that will fund his convention center in Myrtle Beach. And Obama and Enamuel think they are OK because they are “Bush’s earmarks” and not their fault. Maybe. Possibly.

And the fight over Prop 8 in CA is a mis-guided mal-a-prop-ism and a waste of time, money and energy. Even the venerable conservative George Will, on television, on Sunday morning, said that “homosexuality is about as interesting for most people as discovering that someone is left handed. Who cares?” That may be the only thought-provoking conservative thought I’ve heard in years. The end of times?

And “Daylight Savings Time” does not save any daylight: it is only supposed to save electricity. We can’t even freakin’ save energy in this country and get the terminology right. I only threw the glass darkly because I couldn’t see anymore…and neither could anybody else, apparently.

Enough, already.

2009-03-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

This was a very bad way to begin the day:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/129920/

Is Obama Bringing Too Much Religion into the White House?
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 5, 2009.

Our new President is trying my patience. As Obamaphoria has subsided somewhat and the celebratory smoke has cleared, as the clouds of bliss have wafted away and some of the ugliness of life’s realities have made themselves apparent, I am finding myself gasping for breath, as one disappointing revelation follows another. Getting smacked in the face with this headline, even before my obligatory coffee, so early this morning, is really pushing the edge of the envelope.

Firstly I am offended by the ghastly apparition of the Geithner/Summers series of economic brain farts. The worst part of these is not that they smell bad; they just don’t smell at all. Geithner needs to PLEASE go back from whence he came and calmer, more capable heads need to be brought to bear upon the travails at hand. I’m not terribly happy, either, with the strong hints that we may carry forward some torture practices around the world of our nefarious prisons and detention centers. And on March 4, the President single-handedly declared war on the wasteful spending of the military industrial complex. Optimism and progressive thinking is one thing, but naiveté’ and sticking your head into the mouth of a hungry lion without a safety net is something else. At the end of the classic movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the two hapless heroes prepare to rush out into the courtyard and attempt an escape...against impossible odds. Obama (Butch) is in this one all alone (Joe Biden is no Sundance), like the Lone Ranger, and he has absolutely no idea how many Mexican/Indian/corporate armament-building moguls are perched with guns outside on the wall. Once again, while I can applaud forward thinking, I do not have much time to watch a poorly planned suicide. He is supposed to be more clever than that.

But this morning’s religious news threatens my total exasperation. In the first place, the United States was NEVER intended to be a Christian nation. The founding fathers fought and wrote and argued against that condition from the very onset of our fledgling nation. In one misguided step and after another, over a period of 200+ years, there have been moves afoot to impose, insert and infect American society and government with “Christian” inspired beliefs, mores and practices. Enough, already. I really had hoped that this ongoing use of the infiltration and poisoning of independent secular humanity with saccharine religiosity had reached its zenith during the Bush II administration, but the monster seems far from dead. This Alternet article would seem to indicate that we should brace for another round of government-religious foppery.
“Jesusology”, and its many offshoots and perversions (including those theistic step-children under the umbrella of AIPAC and modern Jewish militarism), have attempted, over the years, to either infiltrate, color, shade or camouflage the basic inter-dependent relationships between men and women in our society. They seek to lay claim to innocence for complicity in the world’s genocidal horrors, starvations, racial inequities and assorted hatreds, by simply invoking the word “God”. I have simply had it.

We have “In God We Trust” plastered all over government buildings, seals, coins and documents, inserted “under God” into the pledge of allegiance (which we periodically attempt to eliminate and regularly ignore), waste time and money arguing for and against placement of the twelve commandments and nativity scenes in public places, both take out of context and misquote “Christian” writings and utilize misappropriation of “Christian” beliefs to impugn, harass and discriminate against people of color, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, occasionally Jews on the wrong side of the political fence, and atheists and secularists, as well. Our “assumed”, God-given religious supremacy has warped most of our day-to-day perceptions of our fellows, their essential needs and how we choose to proceed or falter.

And Now Barack Obama wants to attend prayer breakfasts, make promises and continue to misuse, abuse and mal-manage monies associated with “faith-based” programs and initiatives. To invoke (God forgive me) Newt Gingrinch, “Does he think we are stupid?”
Apparently so. The religious right (if they have taken the time to read and pay any attention) should have discovered by now that George W. pandered to them for their votes, created a White House office for faith-based affairs, and then made sure it did nothing and remained unfunded. It created, propagated and sustained a belief that anything that was deemed “faith-based” was good, wholesome, Christian (not “Christ-like”) and somehow more beneficial than any other form of social intercession into poverty, racial hatred, social injustice or matters related to sex education or gender equality. For the record, I think that it is possible to have “faith” in the basic goodness of our fellow man and to make efforts to attend to his or her needs without having to make the special efforts to tie it to Jesus-oriented, guilt-ridden sympathies related to the misfortune of Jews or any other racial, ethnic or religious group that has fallen victim to holocausts, inquisitions or other forms of persecution. At least the lions on the Roman coliseum were non-discriminatory about who they devoured and decimated. We, however, by designating a program as “faith-based”, use our cultural ethos and its appropriated arrogance to name names and be particular about whom we single out to “help”(or not to), in order to symbolically wash away our sins of neglect, economic isolation, discrimination and social and gender estrangement.

I can (somewhat) excuse Rick Warren’s empty rhetoric. I can figure out a way to ignore and laugh at the likes of Rev. Wright. Hell, I’ve been tolerating Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for as long as I can remember. And despite the clamor to the contrary, Billy Graham is not and never has been the protestant Pope of the United States. This is all religious foolishness, used to offer distractions and divergences to Americans, used as sideshow entertainments and emotional panaceas to soothe and calm the American confused and somewhat schizophrenic humanitarian psyche.

When all else fails, it seems the best we can do is to throw logic to the wind, fall on our knees and pray, and hope the God we are praying to is the one most sympathetic to our plight. If we are really lucky, he/she/it will really get down on that lazy, feckless, faithless guy next door that we detest for his faithlessness. We are, after all, “faith-based” in our motivations and actions, and so very much better than he/she is. Perhaps we should contact the Center for Disease Control and see if they can find a vaccine for jesus-based infestations and faux good will. Perhaps addressing this ailment should be a new element of our universal healthcare. Perhaps we could wake up and smell the coffee and stop proliferating crucifixes.

And I think we should start collecting taxes on Church properties. Think what that would do for local budgets. I’ll bet I’ve really pissed of a bunch of folks, with this one. I need more coffee.

It's Not Clear, Either

2009-03-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I took issue with the position of some Republican governors, that some of the funds available from the $787B stimulus package would impose distressing permanent legislation and policies on state governments, concerning future payments from entitlement funds, specifically unemployment benefits. As time has gone on, much of the mythology accompanying this has been dispelled, the waters are calming and quieter heads are prevailing.

However, in a manner much like using the term “transparent” to describe how President Obama would like the government to be about its’ financial affairs(it hasn’t been and probably will not be, despite the web sites available to track federal monies from taxpayers dollars) the latest word to be center stage in public discourse is, “clear”. Well, just as I suspected, many conditions that were claimed to be “permanent”, on second inspection, were not, and much of what the legislators claim as “transparent” turns out not be see-through at all. Add to those, now, nearly every time a politician or bureaucrat says:

-Let’s be clear here (or “about this”),

Or

I’d like to be clear on this,

Or

We should be clear, here,

Or

I want to make this crystal clear,

one can be very nearly completely almost assuredly possibly certain that whatever you are about be told is (or purported to be) clear, will not be. Clear, that is.

Along with being very nearly stunned in recalling the number of times then President-elect Obama used the word “clear” in his acceptance speech, on a Sunday morning political talk show, Peter Orzag, the new main man at the OMB, prefaced his responses to George Stephanopoulos with qualifying phrases about necessary clarity three times in five minutes. My friend Barbara, who is a much better student of human behavior than I am, reminded me that both Obama and Orzag probably were coached by the same handlers, urging them to use some variation on “I want to be clear” as a technique to give themselves both linguistic and mental breathing space before attempting a potentially taxing response.

This is all well and good, but in almost every instance, what follows the disclaimer about chrystallinity is usually something like this: “First all we will need to do this…”, then, “Secondly, our attention should be focused on…”, which if followed by, “And lastly, we should not lose sight of…”, and by then, any chance that any thing at all had any chance to be “clear” has been lost. And Sen. Harry Reid likes to be clear as well: what that usually means is that he about to make an excuse for something the Democratic congress failed to do or compromised on. I would just as soon he left that kind of clarity in Vegas. And if Harry’s explanations are not clear enough for you, Nancy Pelosi will make sure you get it later: she will stand behind a lectern, flanked by beaming dems and say, “Let’s be clear about this…”, and you will feel a kind of California warmness. She hopes. (In Orzag’s defense, he did illustrate that when someone like Bill Gates makes a $1000.00 donation to charity, after the current tax cuts expire, the Mr. Gates’ tax deduction will drop from $350.00 to $280.00. Clear. Precise. I can understand that. There is something to be said for economists sticking to numbers).

Conversely, showing no evidence whatsoever of coaching from democratic handlers, Secretary Gates, on Meet the Press the same day, made doubly sure (to my way of thinking) that nothing was clear, using a kind of unclear political double-speak when trying to answer David Gregory’s questions: queried about the residual forces announced for Iraq into the next several months and years, Gates did not explain or make clear anything, by saying that the proposed 50,000 troops to be left there will be a “transition force”, and a “way station” on the road to Iraqi independence. He also said that they would be re-named in a “different role”, for “a different kind of mission”. Really? This is, of course, bullshit. He said this residual force will make it “safer for those remaining” (And who is that, exactly?) As has been pointed out repeatedly, every one of the 50,000 combat ready troops are, in fact, truly combat ready. They march around in body armor, carry automatic weapons and hand grenades and kick in doors, looking for insurgents. The only reality which Mr. Gates made clear is that, despite the linguistic gymnastics, nothing will change (To his credit, when asked what might constitute “victory” in Iraq, he only offered that that would be for someone else to decide, later).

Along these same muddled lines, Congressman Cantor, when asked point blank, TWICE, by George Stephanopoulos, if Republicans were going to vote for the new proposed budget, Cantor completely dodged the question, TWICE, and even managed to make the discussion less clear, by inserting a dig about the stimulus bill, claiming it was “Speaker Pelosi’s bill”. It was not “Pelosi’s”, of course, and he offered no clear indications about the upcoming vote. Stephanopoulos finally gave up his search for any clarity. And in order to further his genuine lack of clarity on both the economy and the stimulus bill, Cantor said that we should be “preserving and protecting new jobs”, as the “focus on economic growth”. Now, I don’t know where Mr. Cantor has been hiding, but you cannot “preserve “a new job, and the task of “protecting” should be for existing jobs. And last I heard the stimulus bill was as much about “jobs” as anything to focus on economic growth…in addition to Republican tax cuts (which he earlier said did not exist). The only clear revelation here was that Cantor himself was not clear about the content of the bill. Had either Gates or Cantor told me up front that they were going to be “clear” in their remarks, I might have been more comforted. But telling me (Gates) that the “same-old, same-old” will have a new “role” as a “way station”, and having Cantor answer the voting question by saying that “people want results” and the Republican party is the party of ”new ideas” is all not very clear at all, but rather insulting and infuriating. Verbal contortionism does not for clarity make. Sam Watkins, a Republican strategist, said on MSNBC-TV this afternoon, that Republicans did not get re-elected in recent voting because they did not “talk the talk and walk the walk”: well, that’s pretty not clear. What the hell does that mean? And RNC chairman Steele has decided to reinvigorate the party by infusing it with hip hop and Michelle Bachman. Those are two truly new ideas. Are you clear on that? Traditional Republican should be clearly infuriated.

But there were some moments of clarity on Sunday…or at least moments of clear protestation. Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation) lashed out with clarity and precision when she told George Will and Karl Rove that the Republicans, since the days of Ronald Reagan, had been “starving the beast (government)” while “feeding the rich” though tax cuts. Clear enough. Karl Rove made it abundantly clear that while not complying with a subpoena to appear before Congress, but he was happy to show up at NBC to get paid to sit on a panel. Rove also used a variation on ”being clear”: he offered to “set the record straight”, at one point (whatever it was that he set the record straight on went right over my head…but with great clarity). Also last week, at CPAC, Sen. McConnel asked, “Who would you rather hang out with, guys like Krugman and Reich or Rush Limbaugh?” This made very clear the fact that he can really confuse apples and oranges. If you would like to draw a comparison here, in order to make something “clear”, you should at least find another economist to run up against Krugman or Reich: last time I looked, Limbaugh has no credentials as an economist. In fact, Limbaugh makes a career out of guaranteeing that nothing is clear except his girth and his bombast (As I think about it, I am much happier to “hang out” with Krugman, who says that the only thing we know for sure is that nobody knows anything for sure, and that the only reality which is clear is that there are almost no clear realities. Somehow, I prefer that nebulous innocence to the vacuous emotional tirades of Limbaughism). And Newt Gingrich asked the same CPAC group, “Do they (the democrats) think we are stupid?” Actually, Newt, the clearer reality may be that ever since trickle-down economics, voo-doo economics, “Read my lips: No new taxes” taxes, the desire to tinker (and wreck) social security and then cut taxes for the uber-rich( who can most afford to pay them…we do, after all, have a progressive income tax), the Republicans have been counting on our being stupid for years , while we continually fell for those lines of thinking which have put the United States in this current financial mess .

Speaking of which: After repeated promises of transparency and attempts to “be clear on this”, the new President reached into his hat and pulled out a rabbit named Geithner. Mr. Geithner (and his second in command, Larry Summers) were supposed to be clear about what we needed to do next, about the economy. Geithner has never used the word clear that I can find, has said and done (almost literally) nothing which I can see is clear in any way, and our economic situation seems only to deteriorate further every day. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/workplace/129574/
Geithner has thus far been so completely unclear that he is like a fogged-up mirror, in the least, and as permeable as a brick wall at the worst. And Larry Summers is sounding like he has used Cantor’s speech coach: if we are lucky, sometime this summer we might hear him say something which is helpful, forward looking and makes it ”clear” that he and Geithner are capable of and planning to do something for the good of the country besides give money to AIG and General Motors (talk about a couple guys who could use some new ideas). While it is “clear” (sorry about that) that the economies of scale at stake are enormous, the President told us…CLEARLY… that Geithner’s resume up to the task. I’m waiting. This Geithnerian drama lacks drama, and Bernanke and Summers are likely breathing the same rarified air and drinking from the same purified water: there is no substance, there are no minerals or supplements, and no impurities to be filtered out through discussion. Perhaps without substance, one does not need to ponder the need for clarity.

I hope you are clear on all of this, because I’m not. At the moment, unless something changes, all I see ahead is Rumsfeld’s long slog through the unclear mud of double-speak. While it used to be that “on a clear day you could see forever”…and even General Motors…despite repeated claims to the contrary, no one has made anything “perfectly clear”, at all. And we are not that stupid.

Presidential Correspondence

2009-02-25T21:43:00.000-08:00

I received this email from FactCheck.org, right after the President’s speech:

Fact-Checking Obama's Speech
February 25, 2009
The president gets facts wrong about oil imports, mortgage aid and the transcontinental railroad, and more.
Summary

President Obama's first speech to a joint session of Congress was stuffed with signals about the new direction his budget will take and meant-to-be reassuring words about the economy. But it was also peppered with exaggerations and factual misstatements.

He said "we import more oil today than ever before." That's untrue. Imports peaked in 2005 and are substantially lower today.

He claimed his mortgage aid plan would help "responsible" buyers but not those who borrowed beyond their means. But even prominent defenders of the program including Fed Chairman Bernanke and FDIC chief Bair concede foolish borrowers will be aided, too.

He said the high cost of health care "causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds." That's at least double the true figure.

He flubbed two facts about American history. The U.S. did not invent the automobile, and the transcontinental railroad was not completed until years after the Civil War, not during it.

He claimed that his stimulus plan "prevented the layoffs" of 57 police officers in Minneapolis. In fact, it's far more complicated than that, and other factors are also helping to save police jobs.

The president also repeated some strained claims we've critiqued before.

Note: This is a summary only. The full article with analysis, images and citations may be viewed on our Web site:

Shortly afterwards, I sent it along to everyone on my blog distribution list. Not long after that, my friend and tor-mentor, Ron, responded thusly:

One has to wonder why his speech writers don't run their material by these checking folks BEFORE the speech is delivered.

I thought about this for a few moments, and offered these thoughts in return:

As a Dem, I would have to jokingly remark that that "would take all the fun out of it".

As a Repub, I would have to feign outrage, and yell, "You're goddam right!"

As a cynic, I would only ask, "Well, what do you expect? He is a politician"

As a skeptic, I would say that "You have to expect this sort of sloppiness in politics".

As a Libertarian, I guess I would call it "ongoing government fraud and a waste of tax payer money".

As an Oklahoma redneck, I'd have to say that "that damn n#@&^%r is lying again”.

Ron seemed to enjoy this:
Oh, shit! This is great writing! Always a pleasure to read you when you hit this level--p.s. stop drinking that coffee now before it's too late and you are unable to sleep again, forever.

Then I realized that I had missed a salient observation. I had neglected to include:

The lawyer: "Certain liberal allowances were made and concessions granted in the interest of expediency and the public good".

This all could have been avoided if President Obama had simply said:” Americans can do anything, which is how Henry Ford was able to invent the modern automobile industry in this country, enabling workers to afford responsible mortgages . This has played a significant role in making our heath care costs less than we had originally thought and helped reduce our oil consumption since 2005, because of the railroad we built right after the Civil War, which has dramatically affected the employment status of Minneapolis police officers. “

But I guess it wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it, then, would it?

IT IS NOT PERMANENT

2009-02-25T06:09:00.000-08:00

Post Script: Since this was first written, Sen. Chas. Schumer (NY) has chastised Gov. Jindal, et.al., by saying that the stimulus money was not a buffet, wherein states could pick and choose what monies they would or would not take: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/24/schumer-multiple-choice/. In other words, get a life, get with the program or get lost. Sen. Barney Frank has hinted that there may well be a legal precedent for this condition, although I do not know about that: taking off-the-cuff television remarks at face value is risky.

Then the President gave a speech on the economy: (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29375944/) and never directly mentioned the controversy with the governors at all…which I thought was both polite and politic. Not everyone was completely happy with some sought-after details (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090225_getting_warmer/), and FactCheck.org bemoaned some shortcomings (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29377101/), but Howard Fineman, commenting immediately after on MSNBC-TV, said the speech “exuded confidence”. And the next morning there was this: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/02/25/obama_speech/?source=newsletter

In the Republican rebuttal (not many “re”’s and lots of “buts”)and offered by none other than Gov. Jindal himself, there was no clear follow-up to any of the substance of the President’s remarks, but rather offered a long and rambling apology for past governmental failures and yet more supports for tax cuts. It had all of the (pardon me) “earmarks” of a lead balloon, and did not even please some traditional conservatives: (http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/24/jindal-fox-ncot/). The basic message seemed to be that “the right is right and everyone else isn’t.”, and I was reminded of a scene from an Eddie Murphy movie, when his character responds to criticism by holding his hands over his ears and yelling, “I can’t hear you! Nah-nah, nah-nah!” As for Jindal’s reminiscence about walking down a grocery store aisle with his father, and his father making the statement, “Americans can do anything”, I thought Jindal might try walking down an aisle of a Wal-Mart and look at all of the products from China.

Most baffling, however, was a response I received to this article, after I posted it on another site (http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/), from a man from the red state of Tennessee. He told me that he had had a long, heart-to-heart talk with his congressional representative, who “educated” him in the complicated ways of government (That sounds patronizing: “Hi! I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you!”). She explained (?) to him that to accept the unemployment funds would require the state to set up laws and regulations that would later require his state to pay out funds it would no longer have. Or something. (Curiously, TN is among some red states that are broke or nearly so, and they do not have the money even now. This makes the point moot, because you cannot spend money you did not not have in the first place. Or something.). He therefore told me I should “investigate more” (I did) before I “judged” (I didn’t). I got the distinct impression that a) he got led down a primrose path by his representative, and b) he didn’t carefully read anything I said about the permanence, any more than Bobby Jindal paid careful attention to the President’s remarks.

Lately, many politicians (Jindal, Frank, Obama, Biden) have said repeatedly that we “need to be clear” and that America’s affairs should be transparent. Apparently they are nowhere near “clear”, because it increasingly appears that the only persistent condition that is permanent in America (i.e., from the understanding of my friend in TN) is that some continue to insist upon selective perception and hearing only what might soothe them. Or something.

It is not Permanent

2009-02-23T21:58:00.000-08:00

Filling The Room With Smoke

After listening to some Republican governors in the press for the last few days, you cannot help but wonder why some of them insist upon punching more holes in the bottom of a boat which is already sinking. Largely representing the RNC is Gov. Bobby Jindal (R. LA), there is a move afoot to decline certain federal monies from the $787B stimulus bill which just became law (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/governors-on-the-stimulus/#more-9101) .

Here is a report of some of the news on 2/23/09, the very day the President brought together a confab of affected, affecting, inflicted and inflicting economic players and decision makers at the White House: http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#url=http%253A%252F%252Fpr.thinkprogress.org%252

It goes without saying that there are far more people either unemployed or under-employed in the country right now than we have seen or experienced in a very long time (the boat is sinking). A leading (and phony, stumbling) argument for several governors pretending at fiscal heroism (Schwarzeneger and Crist excepted, to name two) is this: they claim that “strings attached” to such funds will force the states to alter their rules and regulations on the eligibility for the states’ unemployment payments, and thereby hamstring and cripple their budgets in the future, long after the stimulus funds are exhausted. It would begin to appear as if posturing, grandstanding (and an irresistible urge to obfuscate) has completely overtaken these state executives. They are puffing up their chests when they should be grabbing buckets and bailing water. Their desire for “personal gain”, political advancement and national publicity, seem to matter far more than their desire to effectively serve the constituents who so desperately need their help, right now. Indeed, HardBall, the MSNBC-TV program (Chris Matthews) on 2/23, played clips of three republican governors who as much as said they were posturing for a run for president 2012, by taking a stand against acceptance of some stimulus funds. It would seem that when your priorities are completely misguided, enabling the boat to sink quicker is somehow interpreted as a way to save lives (read: your own skin) in the immediate future: governors, high, and dry, and warm and comfortable in their mansions, apparently don’t share the same wet feet that their constituents have when the boat starts to take on water. This is especially odd when you think about Louisiana.

In some ways, I suppose, I should not be surprised at this dyslexic appraisal of our state of affairs. The recently unpregnant Bristol Palin has just been quoted as saying “abstinence is not realistic”, among teens, but the religious right sees it differently:

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/128265/. And Fox News reporters today (Countdown, MSNBC-TV) said that, despite the straightforward quote, Ms. Bristol said abstinence was “absolutely realistic” (yes, you read that correctly). You might just guess, that in the minds of many in the GOP, black is white, up is down and yes is no (and “no” seems to be a favorite GOP word, these days). For some of our illustrious leaders, even bass-ackwards seems ass-backwards. Doing the wrong thing seems to be the right thing, or so thinks the right, and these headline-grabbers are hoping you won’t remember how they made you dogpaddle, as the boat sank, when they come up for a next election…and we are “left” behind.

After today’s White House gathering, Gov. Jindal was all over the television, applauding the President’s efforts, while simultaneously attempting to hamper and stultify them. It was a photo op which did nothing to help the unemployed and disenfranchised of Louisiana. He doesn’t get it and I don’t get him. I hope no one else does, either. I think this is what you call operating without a hint of shame. If he is the rising star of the GOP, the dawn may a long time coming.
Firedoglake ran this today: http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/23/obama-on-cable-chatter-im-looking-at-you-jindahl/, and the President said (something like) this, to today’s assemblage: “ When we are talking about $7B out of a package of $787B, which is 5 ,6 , or 7% of the total, it sounds more like politics than anything else…which doesn’t make sense, when we have work to do”. He also reminded them that there was still “plenty of time for campaigning”. If this was a poker game, he just called their (the governor’s) bluff.

During all of the discussion prior to the passage of the stimulus bill, the universal descriptor for the Republican congressmen was “obstructionist”. They were also tiring and boring, and were testing everyone’s patience with their tedious linguistic pranks (Boehner was banal and Graham is crackers). They developed a party line that was anchored in the faulty mortar of more tax cuts and a lack of “real stimulus”. And now, even after they failed to stop the bill’s momentum, the governors have pretended to take up the mantle of smoky confusion to prolong the agony of tedium and empty rhetoric. To refuse needed funds out of grossly misguided principals is destructionist: has no one thought ahead to the costs of “re-construction”? Politics for politics’ sake is always expensive, down the road, and the state of the nation (and the states) has no time for peacock feathers and glory hounds. But see Jindal strut.

There are no perfect solutions for this completely imperfect economic travesty, and there is no faultless foresight concerning the crisis before us, but there is some awfully good hindsight about the last eight years of tax cuts and de-regulation that got us into the fix in which we are semi-fixed. We seem to be sitting atop a legacy of either doing nothing or doing as little as possible, and we must do something (I once had an “uncle” Alex, who used to say, “Let’s do something, even if it’s wrong”: we may be there). In some ways, the proposed delays, distractions, arguments and completely unhelpful “posturing” is akin to the environmental studies that stop needed construction projects: there is a small rabbit in the road, ahead of the bulldozer. Rather than spend a million dollars and two years’ study before the levee washes away the town, someone should stop screwing around and move the damn rabbit . It will take about ten minutes and save the local landscape from devastation the next time it rains. (Does the GOP even realize it is raining?)

This nonsense about “permanent” and/or irreversible state legislation about future unemployment policies is hogwash. These “united states” are still free to introduce legislation which augments, alters, defies or flies in the face of federal programs, whenever they like. They have certainly done so often enough in the past. I do not know what the governors are smoking, but the room is becoming hazy. Perhaps these captains of their ships of state are hoping the populace will get contact stoned from the smoke, and then somehow forget and not hold them accountable later on. But I hope we are not that gullible and short on memory. If anything should be permanent right now, it should be a determination to see that all of those we hold responsible stand up and act that way.

Stupid...And More Stupid

2009-02-20T11:30:00.000-08:00

From the Department of "I don't get it".

I was nearly prepared to write blog today about hypocrisy and duplicity (perhaps the new monikers of government), when this showed up in the NYT:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/against-stupidity-2/?emc=eta1

John (I picked a bad time to stop drinking)Boehner, Lindsey (nationalize the banks) Graham, Nancy( my family has money) Pelosi, Barbara(send me your tired, huddled masses and all of your money...NOW) Boxer, Sen. (I hang out in men's rooms)Craig, Sen.(I sleep around) Vitter, Rep.(I get all the facts wrong)Cantor and few others, including other assorted Republican grandstanders and state governors, just "don't get it". They rail and rant and stomp their adolescent feet in opposition to the stimulus, then they take credit for any portion of the bill that will put money into the hands of their constituents; or, as a mayor or governor, they say that even though they think the bill is bad idea (generational theft?), they want to be first in line to take the money. One person who may "get it", is Anh Cao, the Vietnamese-American Rep. who recently got elected in Louisiana, because after saying he would vote for the bill, ultimately did not: he buckled under pressure from his Republican obstructionists and now his constituents are now calling for his removal from office. Oops. And right now, some mayors and governors are saying that while they will welcome the cash, they object to being told by the Feds about how and where to spend it. They sound like the bankers who made $350B evaporate into the ether, last fall. Perhaps Hank Paulson is advising them?

Either I am missing something here, or else hypocrisy (I was for it before I was against it) or duplicity (I was against it before I was for it)are the watchwords of the day, and these professional comedians really expect us to believe them, trust them and that they will look out for us. Krugman (above) calls alot of this stupidity: he is more blunt than I like to be (you can laugh, now).

There are some other stupids:

Every study I've seen (and apparently Bill Clinton reads the same ones) from prominent economists says that tax cuts don't help in our current situation. They may not help at all, may actually be bad and that cash infusion for infrastructure, food stamps and extended unemployment benefits give back much more bang for the buck. Continued harping for tax cuts is STUPID.

GM wants umpteen billion more dollars to lay off 47,000 people and close factories. The little car company that could (Saab) has just filed for bankruptcy back home in Sweden, Hummer is on the block ( a special stupid for it even BEING in the first place)and Saturn is on the way out( the dealers are looking for a Chinese or Indian manufacturer to keep it alive?), and , finally, Chrysler is looking for another chunk of money (To give to speculative investors?) for funeral expenses (Chrysler is already dead: they are out shopping for coffins). All of this, as well as our tolerance for this foolishness, is STUPID.

Starbucks is closing many, many store and laying off 7,000 people. At the same time they are introducing instant coffee, or exactly a product they made their fortune campaigning against. STUPID.

J C Penny and Lowe's Home Improvement both say their fourth quarter sales were down 10%. Penny says their profit was down 50% as result. Lowe's says the profit drop was 60%. Who is doing these books? Are we supposed to believe this? STUPID.

Magic tricks: Bernie Madoff makes $50B disappear. Texas "Not a billionaire" Stanford makes $8B disappear. Then he disappears. Scotland's Wedgewood China goes belly up after a hedge fund makes their entire pension fund disappear. United Bank of Scotland admits to helping hide fortunes of taxable money in Swiss accounts, but pulls a George W. Bush and vows not to release details. STUPID.

The stimulus bill was signed just a few dozen hours ago and people are already claiming it doesn't work. NOTE: This document is the product of possibly the largest and slowest moving governmental body in the world. "You want it WHEN?" STUPID.

In February of 2009, in the 21rst century, we still have people trying to make the United States a Christian nation. Try looking around the world and your neighborhood: if you cannot see the ethnic and religious variations, you are just plain STUPID.

A hard-liner secular Jew in Israel is backing Netanyhu for PM and urging, among other absurdities, oaths of loyalties to the Israeli government by any of the several million non-Jews living with rocket range. Hypocritical, duplicitous and STUPID.

Prominent Israelis and defenders/promoters of Israel are decrying the new US mid-east envoy as "too fair", and "too even handed". Heaven forbid we should avoid favoritism and promote any equality of treatment. STUPID.

The new RNC chairman, Mr. Steele, is promoting a re-birth of the GOP through the use of hip-hop. We have a few thousand important issues staring us in the face, and he wants to recruit new blood into his party through the use of a musical venue which sounds as foreign to most Americans as the tone poems of Bela Bartok. STUPID.

Nearly everywhere I look, I see politicians and civic leaders speaking out of both sides of their mouths or reversing themselves over night. The ex-Reverend Ted Haggard (Colorado Springs) and ex-Gov. Spitzer (NY) are poster boys for hypocrisy. Every Republican congress member who voted "no", in lock step against the Recovery Act, then stood up to take credit for its benefits (or the pork they managed put in it, ala "earmarks are bad" John McCain)are guilty of duplicity.

And if we sit back and swallow all of this without criticism, oversight or scrutiny, then we are, sadly very STUPID.

Everybody has their Liebermans

2009-02-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

There is this story on MSNBC.com, this morning:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29276575/

You can read the whole article for yourself, but the by-line that got me reads like this (next to a photo of a guy who looks unsettlingly much too much like Paul Krugman):

Israel's Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Lieberman, who has called for the country's Arab minority swear loyalty to the state or lose their citizenship, has backed Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister.

My old Texas Instruments calculator seems to be broken, so I can’t say exactly how many people I will piss off with this comment, but that’s the way the unleavened cookie crumbles. Following in the footsteps of, and in the best traditions of, American politics, the Israelis have been busy playing the election game. This last race was a troublesome threesome, starring the venerable retread (and to some reviled) Netanyahu, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni (I still think her name sounds like an anorexic Italian sports car) and the third party, the Beitenu. This third party, the Ralph Nader/Ron Paul element, the salt-in-the-wound, itch-where-you –can’t-quite-scratch, annoying-like-a mosquito bite group, is apparently fronted by a man named...you guessed it…Lieberman!. From the photo in the article, he appears to dress much more casually and with a much nicer flair than our Connecticut chameleon, but he is very outspoken about his positions concerning what Israel “ought to do”And he is completely unapologetic about advising President Shimon Peres as to what stance to take and how the “new” government should be structured. It reminds me of the old joke:” Hi! I’m from Beitenu and I’m here to help you!”

I both know and know of many people in the US who are disgruntled, discouraged and annoyed by Joseph Lieberman and his curious impact on the last election. He dresses drably (and speaks with the same lackluster drone), muddies the waters and makes no secret of his desire to be in the limelight and garner public attention for his changing an changeable positions. I think the Democrats have been very kind to him, considering how many times he has thumbed his nose at them. I have yet to sense anything worthwhile that he has contributed to either the process or the outcome.

The (real) Israeli Lieberman frightens me more. There are too many words and phrases in this article that bother me: hard-liner, ultranationalist, government reign, threat to mid-east peace, and that ominous line (up above) about “swearing loyalty”. I am very concerned about how much obstructionist, militaristic and pugnacious thinking has risen so much to the forefront, especially when nearly the entire world is appalled by the recent genocide in Gaza. And history is littered with self-appointed “advisors” to kings, tzars and Presidents, and I don’t recall any of them promoting bright spots in world development.

But the last influence the world community needs right now is a hard-line position on Palestinians, when almost everyone would like this decades-old conflict to be ended as soon as possible. And the term ultranationalist just reminds me of the carnage, not so long ago, in the Balkans. And the simple fact is that no one needs to reign over the mid-east: somebody needs to get to the Israeli leaders and not-so-gently remind them that the days of King David are long over and democracies don’t reign.

But more disturbing than any other reference is the one about “swearing loyalty” to the government. Great and memorable(?) leaders like Adolf Hitler and kings and of the realm and their ilk have called for such measures over the centuries, and it has always been a story without a good ending. In the case of the Jews, after the Third Reich, I can’t imagine how such a phrase could even begin to roll off anyone Jew’s lips. If the Israelis are going to follow the US democratic model, they should pay attention to the fact that we ask people to “swear allegiance to the flag”, which is quite different from swearing loyalty to the government. An essential component of a vibrant democracy is the ability that we always are able to question the government ( I think Rush Limbaugh just had a heart attack).

Liebermans, Liebermans everywhere, and not a chance to think. I have been thinking a lot lately, during the foreplay and aftermath of the passing of the stimulus bill, about how totally inappropriate, backward looking and oddly askew the language and remarks of the Republicans have been, and wondering how this recent obstructionism and recalcitrance would be resolved. I have also wondered why Joe Lieberman has been relatively quiet. But now I see the world stage is like Wrigley’s chewing gum: with two Liebermans we can double our trouble and double our (not so very much) fun. I wonder if Avigdor wants the Palestinians to wear arm bands?

The Great Divide Just Gets"Divider"

2009-02-17T13:00:00.001-08:00

“There's nothing wrong with Republicans deciding to play the role of the obstructionist opposition, and in the unlikely event that this stimulus bill does not get the economy going and additional economic recovery legislation is not passed through Congress, they may stand to benefit politically.”

I lifted this from this article:

Letting Republicans Bury Themselves
by Jed Lewison
Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 09:15:03 AM PST

Posted on
http://www.dailykos.com/

I replied to my fellow e-mailers, like this:

The writer may be correct about Obama's "covert" strategy, but I think the truth is that the less Obama fought back, the deeper the Republicans dug themselves in, trying to attract attention to themselves: they have an ad on TV already, claiming credit for portions of the very bill they voted against. They have become increasingly delusionary in recent days. When Lindsey Graham recommends nationalizing the banks, Newt vows to stop "the administration in its tracks" and Cantor leads the fight to disavow the very housing aid portion of the stimulus that he and his colleagues called for as pre-eminently necessary just days ago, they have clearly lost their way and look more ridiculous every day.

The excerpt I pulled out (above) is just plain wrong thinking. In these times, it is VERY WRONG for the Republicans to be obstructionist "just because". That they "may stand to benefit politically",whether the plan succeeds or fails is a lousy way to lead and protect the people who elected them. I am sick to death of making excuses for politicians who are more concerned about re-election than earning the checks and benefits they draw. You are supposed to enter politics to display and exercise maturity and wisdom, not become a professional grand-stander and master of double-speak.

On the whole, I found the article a bit Polyanna-like.

I may have been over-reacting to the fact that I expect pieces in KOS to have more meat on their bones, but I have been noticing for days now, as the hot-air balloon-like debate over the stimulus became increasingly hysterical, that Republicans are acting more and more disconnected and without any real sense of immediacy. As our needs become more dire, the less they seem willing to put their shoulder to wheel and help get something done.

Only recently did we manage to get the “uniter” out of office (of course we all know that that the only thing he united was a movement of people who worked hard, together, to remove him). Bush was, of course, a divider, creating anxiety, and angst and sorrow and regret, along with injustice, constitutional abuse and internal terror across the land. The United States became a land divided and one which ultimately placed great hope in the vision and energy of Barack Obama. It appeared to many that the halting and stumbling pattern of our socio-economic situation might become changed for the better.

But many in the government, Republicans by name, mostly, decided to be, almost overnight, obstructionist, both just because they could and because their self-righteous indignation over having been “hammered” in the last election seemed to give them the self-appointed right to smear, handicap and hobble the new administration. They seemed to adopt a uniform blanket of a complete lack of self-awareness about the new reality. It has been an amazing fait accompli.

Alas, the harder they seem to work at this, the more ridiculous and obscure and (nearly) obscene their claims and objections become, the more completely out of synch with the national mood they become, as well. Instead of working to close the great divide of the last years, they have made it worse…or at least tried to. They speak less and less to the subjects at hands, avoid confronting the real priorities and make every attempt to perfect histrionics, drama and sensational language. Meanwhile, Americans lose their homes and their jobs and drown in debt, bankers and hedge fund managers worry over losing their third home on the seashore, take home enormous bonuses and spend weekends on yachts in the Caymans where they have hidden bank accounts. We are also in the midst of giving out more “bail-out” money to beleaguered and inept auto manufacturers (and their suppliers) and are waiting for the next wave of organizations to mobilize for hand-outs and rescue plans, because they have over-extended, over- indebted themselves and engaged in sloppy business practices. I am waiting for us all to learn how to spell the word g-r-e-e-d.

It is impossible for me to know what the hell John Boehner is thinking when he throws an 111 hundred+ page document on the floor of the Senate chamber, feigning disgust. It may be a great display of theatre, but it does not tell me that he understands anything about its import. I don’t know what Lindsey Graham( as I said above) is thinking (a professed fiscal conservative, anti-facist, anti-socialist), when he announces it is time to nationalize the banks. It may be dramatic but it doesn’t tell me he knows anything about which he pontificates. I don’t know, when Rep. Cantor vows to be obstructionist about the housing provisions he supposedly fought for earlier, what has happened to his brain. And the obscene language being used in Republican TV commercials against AFSCME, or the Republican ads, somehow claiming credit for portions of the very bill they fought to defeat (or just would not vote for) are supposed to move the country forward, when they blatantly and stubbornly shout “No!” in the face of everything.

The divide can only become wider if the American people are supposed to ignore the complete lack of energy being put forth by the RNC to rectify our deficiencies, while touting useless tax cut programs and wasted time and energy for “abstinence only” sex education programs (even Bristol Palin says they don’t work) and simultaneously railing against family planning funding…do I need to go on? I don’t think so.

The behavioral displays of the Republicans are erratic, essentially dysfunctional and downright disturbing. There may some order in chaos theory, but there is no theory in the Republican chaos of being completely illogical and maintaining a determination to repeat the same old procedures that never work. I am astounded that they simply cannot discern the difference between forward and backwards.

I heard a commentary the other day that said that the financial crisis will not end until the bankers are happy, and the bankers will not be happy until we back large trucks, full of money, up to the doors of the banks and unload it with “NSA” , as it often says in the personals. It looks to me like the Republicans are all trying to join the Teamsters Union and get licenses to drive 18-heelers. They seem to think they don’t need to make any sense, listen to anyone or do anything else in order to get re-elected. It may have worked that way in the past, but if they persist in that attitude, the great divide will only get “divider”.

I would like to believe that this Republican act is just that: an act. But somehow I think they may really be that stupid.

Talking While Under the Influence: Lying

2009-02-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

I am wont to think there should be some sort of etymologically-based breathalyzer test for politicians. It needs to be capable of detecting gross lies and exaggerations, mistruths and the demonic rhetoric of evil that results in the attempted destruction of intellect. It should be connected to rooftop sirens that screech in a loud and horrifying manner all across the land, whenever powered up. My guess is that it would not take long for sales of ear protectors and ear plugs to skyrocket, because any blessed silence would be gone, forever. Political ideological cacophony is deafening.

It needs to be said, at this point, that I accepted this sort of loud-mouthed behavior and criminal abuse of language and truth all during the campaign season, because it comes with the territory: you naturally expect to hear rude remarks, falsehoods, slander, evaluations and claims and counter-claims that range from the outlandish to the ludicrous. But you assume that, like having the measles or a sore throat, it will all go away, eventually. However, coming right after the last election, and escalating heavenward at an alarming rate ever since, then achieving near light speed velocities and volumetrics after the inauguration, the verbal garbage permeating the atmosphere and airwaves has become thick, like Los Angeles smog on a bad day in August.

There is an old saying about used car salesmen: how can you tell when they are lying? Their lips are moving. I know that I am not the first person to make this analogy, but politicians and used car guys have a lot in common, because neither have much “street cred” and the chronicle of history does not work positively in their favor. That little old lady from Pasadena NEVER drove that used car only back and forth to church on Sunday, and that legislative tax break being touted just before the upcoming election will not ever, ever save your job or make you and your brother-in-law rich. Controlled lip movements, to initiate the mesmerizing stupor of temporary belief in the impossible, has become an art form. I am quite certain that Julius Cesar employed this modus operandi, and we know where that got him. It just seems that our tolerance has surpassed that of Brutus, et. al. and we more readily accept mediocre duplicity.

A few days ago, I began try to keep track of and recording instances of the worst abuses of truth I could cull from the daily news reports. I finally gave up because I ran out of space, time and note paper. Suffice it to say that if you listen, even briefly, to the arrogant statements of John Boehner, the verbal flailings of Lindsey Graham or the obtuse pontifications of Newt Gingrich, or perhaps even switch over to the incomprehensible summarizations of “political progress” uttered by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, you will get the drift of just how badly matters have deteriorated. I’m skipping Barbara “Give me more money” Boxer, for now.

But the events of the week of Feb. 9 have lowered the bar for the “highs” in contorted reasoning and the verbiage that has proclaimed it. In short, if you listen to the remarks of virtually any one member of the entire Republican delegation of congress people who make up the U.S. House of Representatives, NOT ONE of whom voted on two separate occasions for the $787B stimulus package, or…you can subject yourself to the non-stop and non-sensical floor speeches by nearly every one of the Republican Senators (save three) who followed the House vote, in lock-step.

But before I continue my critique of that litany of orally repugnant travesties, I feel compelled to bring to the forefront the speeches, claims and punditry of the right-wing press, the conservative talk show talkers and the paid-by-the-word conservative and ultra-conservative commentators on the network and cable television programs, many of whom have masqueraded as economists. Never mind, for a moment, that the bulk of the legislators deciding our monetary and financial futures right now are not economists either (most are bloody lawyers, who presumably went to college and law school, and also, presumably at least took Econ 101 somewhere along the line), the faux news anchors on networks like Fox, and the hired guns who emanate from think tanks and “research foundations” and appear with them on the six o’clock news, probably understand less about economics than Joe the Plumber (who we all know has done a great job analyzing the mid-east non-peace situation in Gaza). The dearth, girth and breadth of misunderstanding and misinformation which pours forth from these “experts” is literally overwhelming. It freaking makes my head hurt. The absolutely astounding reality of this is how many people actually believe this balderdash to be truthful and accurate. I’ll leave it to you to decide what to believe from the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, but don’t come crying to me when you discover that your intellectual underwear and underpinnings, as well as your wallet, have come up missing.

But back to the actual criminals…er, suspects. I will not even begin to assemble a complete list of examples of gross linguistic misconduct available (for reasons listed earlier), but there are just a few noteworthy examples I will cite, in order to make my point. First, there is Mr. Steele, the new figurehead and titular (and titillating) leader of the (new) Republican party. He has said that the jobs to be created under the stimulus plans are not jobs but merely “work”. The last time I had a damn job, it sure looked and felt like work to me. In a frantic and manic attempt to parse words to build an indefensible case, he has uttered the utterly absurd. Needless to say, he has been the butt of jokes on every liberal news program and caustic blog since he embarrassed himself on national television last weekend.

John Boehner has said repeatedly that this legislation was said by the President to be about “jobs, jobs, jobs”, and it has become all about “spending, spending, spending”. Some of his colleagues have complained (in a similar vein) that the effort was not a stimulus bill but a “spending bill”. The President himself has actually offered the querying retort, “What do you think a stimulus bill IS, anyway?” Then, on Friday afternoon of this week, before the Senate was to cast their vote on the package, as a sort of entertainment topper to his earlier bleating, Boehner held up the 1100+ page document (finally 1700 pages) before the assembly, in order to make the following complaint: the document had just been delivered for inspection only a few hours before, and that “no one had read it”. He asked (somewhat rhetorically) why the congress had not been given the time over the weekend, “on the plane, the train or the bus home”, to read the bill before having to vote. To begin with, I wonder how many members of this esteemed group would have gone home, anyway: they all have nice digs in DC. Secondly, I am very skeptical that any one of them would take a bus. Lastly, if that were the chosen weekend task, they all must be able to read one helluva lot faster than I can. Consider these probabilities: I am very doubtful that anyone went home for a short weekend (not like Amtrak Joe Biden, and even he lives in Washington, now), riding a bus would put any of them much too close to the proletariat they seek to avoid, and I have this hunch that almost none of them ever really read much, anyway…unless it is polling results about their chances for re-election. And BTW, as the texters and twitter folks would enter, earlier in the day, one of Boehner’s fellow obstructionists told the assembly that the document was only 800 pages, or “about a billion dollars a page”. Either someone is lying, can’t count or exaggerating or someone is doing all three. I have given up trying to figure out which is what or why. But Mr. Steele has said that this work that Boehner and his fellows are doing is not a job, or that the job they are doing is not work, but we are paying them to do it anyway. Frankly I have to wonder “Why?”

(After Boehner’s rant about being inconvenienced, he bombastically dropped the entire printout on the floor of the chamber, only making him appear more oafish and contemptible than he had been beforehand. Good theatre; poor plausibility)

There have been a thousand thousand other examples of linguistic air pollution and vocabulary abuse, but the one that has me baffled the most is the oft (now) repeated wisdom of Sen. John McCain. He has called this legislation “generational theft”. Just ignoring for a moment that this phrase is a synthetic language construct and devoid of referential logic (I can construct fluffy bullshit as well as any Washington bureaucrat), it attempts to throw blame around anywhere it can be plunked, accurately or not. This man is attempting to make the point that, as everyone should know by now, we will be borrowing every last cent of this $800B to rescue our nation’s economic future, and that by passing this bill, we will be indenturing the children of the children of the children of those of us living now to pay it back: It is not generational theft, it is debt extension. He is using this argument in an attempt to waylay, demean, sabotage and obstruct the single most important (and the largest financial) piece of legislation in the history of the world. Curiously, he has completely overlooked the trillions of military dollars previously spent by his President, and the leader of his party, to play deadly war games in Iraq, Pakistan, and the other assorted “-stans’ where the United States has been “planting the seeds of democracy” and killing thousands, on a daily basis. This “debt extension” and “generational theft” he has managed to overlook. Not only is this rhetoric and logic myopic and misguided and misleading, he is lying and obfuscating reality. It scares the crap out of me that this man could have become the President.

Granted, the few most heinous and blatant examples I have given to make my case for the polemic breathalyzer have been Republican, but at the moment, they have reigned supreme with their onslaught of evil gibberish. They seem determined to clog the machinery (the pipes of credit?) in the short run, without any concern for the outcomes and needs of tomorrow. And I will happily give you that our newest financial savior-in-chief, Mr. Geithner, has so far been just as uninspiring as Hank Paulson ever managed on a good day (he is nearly as ghoulish). Larry Summers has yet to impress anyone and seems prone to a resuscitating an old version of doublespeak, while Joe Biden has demonstrated several instances of foot-in-mouth disease.

This Orwellian, obstinate, pointlessly confrontational and contorted communication practice must be brought to an end, if we are ever to rise above the level of primitive plutocracy. We are sacrificing dignity and humanity for semantics of plastic and artificial logic, all linked to money and the very greed which has brought us to this point of “bailout” in the first place. We seem unable to learn from our mistakes but rather doomed to compound them.

OTOH, BTW, (I am forced to laugh at myself: I am torturing the very language I am striving to save), we have President Obama, and his revelatory oratory. When he first began delivering speeches, I was impressed with his choice of words and his delivery, but I was also skeptical: my pleasure may have come only from the sudden and wondrous departure from a style of vapid, short grunts of near unintelligible and meaningless faux Texan blather. This was such a cathartic revision of public oratory that perhaps I was succumbing to its charm too easily. But now I think my skepticism was ill-founded. He does reason and speak with a very welcome freshness and alacrity. The gutturally nuanced and poorly framed language of fear and doom have gone, and these Presidential words are actually pleasing to the ear.

Oddly enough, this may in fact be the “stimulus” for the opposition’s verbal toxicity. Having been confronted with both inspirational and positive nature and content of the President’s delivery, they may have been traumatized. They all may have realized, perhaps even somewhat unconsciously, that they have been cornered, and have consequently resorted to the basic instinctual choice between fight or flight. Since, in this electronic world, no one can flee very far and never successfully hide from anyone (or escape the being found out, ala Governor Spitzer); they have chosen to put up a fight. However…

My son has a tee-shirt which says:” I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man”. Methinks that that the (mostly Republican) primordial, ooze-like blustering is a revelation that they have only managed to bring “a knife to a gun fight”. They are outclassed, out-gunned, out-spoken and out-reasoned and can only manage to come after our benevolent T-Tex with a crude club. He is sipping Chardonnay and they are swilling cheap beer. As for the Dems, they may also just be overwhelmed by the power, persuasive ability and the sheer tsunami-like adrenaline rush that this President affords the general public (who are not already transfixed by talk radio), and are fumbling for words that they desperately hope will keep them on anyone’s radar screen. They must be a disappointment to the President.

In either case, both the conservative miscreants and the left-sided liberal underlings would do well not to run from, hide from or attempt to belittle the presence of some genuine and uplifting language ( even Chris Matthews has noticed that). In spite of everything else which has sounded recent sour notes within the fledgling administration, there is still an element of hope. If any of these entertainers are going to engage in talking under the influence, whether that influence be fear, ignorance or sheer incompetence, they should learn to take better cues from President Obama and stop embarrassing both themselves and their constituents, by continuing to verbally stagger around, drunk-like, across the public landscape of language, in a kind of linguistic stupor. Their inadequately thought-through lack of thinking has left their intellectual pants hanging down low, exposing the crack in their logic, like the backside of Joe the Plumber.

President Obama could well prove to be our very own renaissance man, providing impetus and stimulus to become better than we have been. If our public mouthpieces can take the proper cues, and upgrade and uplift their thinking and their vocabularies, almost anything is possible. But at the moment, the bulk of them seem to be cowering and nervous, worried far more about their self-preservation than the health of our society. It should go without saying that this continued insistence on lying will obliterate any eventual useful bipartisanship and nullify any chance for meaningful compromise. Continued talking while under the influence is certain to put us into the wall. Any right-minded NASCAR driver can tell you that.

Stuff That Can (Or Is Going To) Go Wrong

2009-02-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

Congress should be indicted for murder: Before you jump to the (perfectly reasonable) conclusion that I am about to clobber the Republicans for acting like spoiled children and incompetent jerks about the rescue plan this week (they did), there is plenty of blame to go around for everyone. The Congress, as a whole, has worked hard to murder the entire country. While Republicans in the House and the Senate, who now represent the last of the red areas of the country, have proven themselves to be intractable, stubborn, short-sighted and obstinate, just to prove a point (or try to), the Democrats have simultaneously proven that they have been born without backbones (Reid and Pelosi are jellyfish) and have allowed the discussions to wipe out much needed provisions in the bill to save schools, education, infrastructure and health care. Collectively, these over-paid idiots (Claire McCaskill included) have wasted valuable time, laughed in the public’s face, claimed immunity from sanity and behaved like uninformed buffoons. And all of that is on a good day. (The infrastructure of this country is woefully inadequate and collapsing. It must be repaired and soon, so why not do it now, and kill two flocks of birds with one stone?) . If the US was a business (it is, really), and we were not making money (we’re not: it’s called the GDP), we would make layoffs (including upper management) and stop paying people until the economic conditions improved. I move that we lay off and stop paying the Congress until they manufacture something we can sell/market at a profit, i.e., JOBS. If members of Congress can only act like clowns, let them go get jobs in the circus.

Misuse of Personal Pronouns: As much as I loved the President’s first press conference for its eloquence, detail and good grammar, he got his ego shoe stuck in his mouth. He kept referring to cabinet members as “my” secretary of the treasury, etc. No they are not: the cabinet members are OURS. W’s megalomania is over: stop that shit. This is supposed to be “Yes WE can”, not “Yes I can”. And speaking of the press conference, why on earth did he snub the grand dame of the press corps, Helen Thomas, by not answering (even obliquely) her question about nuclear weapons in the Middle East? Potential grandeur was spoiled by arrogance. Huffiness ruined the moment even if he did call on The Huffington Post.

How do you spell mistake? Geithner. He is guilty of tax malfeasance, is just another over-rated Wall St./Harvard MBA banker, cannot speak in public ( Paulson did as well but looked more ghoulish) and made a presentation to the people on Tuesday that left even Krugman and Reich saying, “Say what?”, while the Dow tanked so badly that Wall St. almost shut down for the week. No details, no clarity and no…oh, no… transparency. God, I am beginning to hate that word. Transparency in government isn’t, and only means that you will get to see what the government wants you to see, when they want you to see it… and when you do see “it”, it will be too late to do anything about it. Geithner is a surefire way (so far) to take the “can” out of yes we can. Go ahead, hope otherwise if you like.

Stop mixing up terms: Governments and politicians have always played fast and loose with words and phrases, but the current torrent is becoming intolerable. Beginning with the faux financial crisis of last fall, when Paulson and company introduced TARP, now we have TALF (?), and most sadly, pork, earmarks (thank you, John McCain), stimulus and spending, and all have become interchangeable. The President has asked, with regard to the spending bill “What do you think a stimulus bill is, anyway?”, and just this morning I heard Orin Hatch (R-UT) call the entire “stimulus” package an “earmark”. This sloppy use of terminologies (employed, I think, just to confuse the public) is misleading and irresponsible. Oh, I forgot the favorite term, “Christmas tree”. Bah humbug.

Gaza, The West Bank and Israel: We certainly forgot all about that mess in a hurry. The MSM has gone stone deaf again while many Gazans are still stone dead and suffering. And amid the aftermath of that turmoil, Israel is actually trying to play at normalcy and have an election. I’m sorry, but Tzipi Livni sounds like an anorexic Italian sports car. And Obama has said zip about any of it. Maybe we should just give them a few more F-16‘s and hope the problem goes away? Calling Dick Cheney.

Bipartisanship in Congress is a Ruse: Get over it, move on, and worry about something we can work with. The only goals of the legislature are to get richer (Daschle, etc.) and re-elected. And they will pursue those goals if it kills the country (see the first paragraph), and it surely will. Dogs will not mate with cats, and elephants will not fornicate with donkeys. The only successful hybrid animal I know of is called a jack-ass and we have plenty of those in government already without encouraging more illicit and obscene behavior. Stop wasting our time with this useless palaver and do something that will move the country forward. Pining about bipartisanship will do nothing to prevent you from falling off of a cliff of philosophical, political euphoria.

One Place We All Go Wrong: Linguistically, and in terms of truth and substance, we have been served up shit stew for so long, that we are immediately and completely bowled over by the rhetoric and style we have been given by the new President. Everything is relative: in the press conference, President Obama alluded to the fact that the American people would be prone to listen to reason and practicality. He actually said that we would welcome “rational argument”. Bullshit: we are impatient, have unreasonable expectations and want immediate gratification. It may be reassuring to hear him say all of that, and it may make us feel momentarily warm and fuzzy, but it just sets up unrealistic estimations of our status quo and puts hope on an unattainable pedestal. Remember Condi Rice (where the hell did she go?) and aspirational horizons? Please don’t do that to us, again.

Breaking Bad Habits, Attracting Private Capital and Making Nice with Iran: Good grief! Why even waste time and oxygen talking about changing bad habits is Washington? That is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around in a swimming pool. Smoking is a bad habit (and addictive), which is why the makers of nicotine patches make so much money. And like quitting smoking and drinking alcohol, bad legislative habits are bound to have a serious recidivism rate. So while it sounds good, don’t expect much “change” (I doubt John McCain will sell many houses or K St. will go away any time soon).

And in keeping with the brandishing about of silly terms, enticing private capital to buy “toxic assets” is complete and utter nonsense. This country was not built on credit default swaps and will not be saved by anyone buying them. Anyone who offers this as even a partial solution to our financial problems (Geithner) should have his/her mouth washed out with soap. No successful entrepreneur made his fortune by buying up worthless crap. If all the cars in your used car lot won’t start, you’re screwed.

The President said that some of Iran’s actions have been “unhelpful”. Well, after all the dirty deeds and conniving and political skullduggery the US has been up to in that region for decades, what do you expect? We have a lot of explaining to do.

I surely wish the new President and his (precariously co-mingled) cadre of cabinet members and advisors the best, and of course that means I mean the best for our country, as well. But, as my friend Ron and I have oft discussed, the “wheels seem to be coming off the wagon” (this morning he embellished that with “the cotter pins are coming out of the axles”) and the prognosis is not good. As I sit and write this (and watch MSNBC), a member of Congress, representing the Blue Dog democrats, has just said that if any details of the current stimulus bill are altered in the compromise discussions this week, the “blue dogs” will withdraw their support and vote against final passage of the bill. Having heard that, I will close with these observations:

Such radical, narrow and inflexible thinking is largely why we are in the mess we are in (combined, of course, with greed, avaricious behavior and irresponsible regulation: I really do think that John Boehner and Lindsey Graham have had brain damage) brings me right back to my first paragraph. But if we do indict these reprobates for their despicable behaviors and such spectacularly poor stewardship the country, how in the world will we EVER find a jury of their peers for the trial?

A Vocabulary Lesson

2009-01-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

And not in any particular odor (yes, some it stinks)

Obama is the new POTUS, and at least for awhile, the POTUS is the new cool. America is (mostly) happy. I think it is time to have some fun.

I have often been called a cynic, and am just as often asked why I am so damned skeptical. Let’s just start with these, to set the record straight.

NOTE: I used a Webster’s for almost all of this erudite research. Other sources noted as required.

Cynic: “Doglike”; a person who acts out of selfishness. I think it was Oscar Wilde who defined a cynic as “someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” This is not me. I know the cost of nothing because I have no money. I know the value of everything because I have so little of anything.

Skeptic: “Thoughtful; curious”. This is much higher on my list of endeavors. I think it helps to tone down my malice aforethought.

However, I have also been called a curmudgeon: This comes from the French, meaning “evil heart”. In today’s parlance, the definitions are” avaricious; churlish; miser; cantankerous”. I like the cantankerous part: it warms my evil heart. But to drive home my points, I must exhibit tenacity: to hold fast; adhesive; sticky; retentiveness. This may well explain why many of you so often implore me to “give it up”. I would say I am sorry, but you would all know I couldn’t mean it and it is not at all curmudgeonly.

On to the vocabulary business. Let’s begin with:

Bail-out. In earlier times, this phrase was meant to describe the act of bailing water OUT of a sinking boat. As applied to AIG, Chrysler, GM. Citibank, et.al. it seems to have become pouring more water back INTO the sinking boat. I think this is called an adverse action which has an inverse effect. And people who are in the money business were supposed to have gotten their feet wet long enough ago to know the better. But it will probably take a lengthy and expensive trial to determine who is actually at fault, and then a very large crane to raise the long-sunken boat, much like we pulled the Airbus 360 out of the Hudson.

Transparency: A recent and popular favorite if you are an Obamite (does obamite have a number in the periodic table of elements?). I know that transparency means that you are supposed to be able to see through the veil of secrecy and obfuscation afforded by government lackeys and bankers and lobbyists, but it is simply the wrong word. Let me just remind you that the plastic wrap you put over a dish of leftovers is transparent as well. It seals the packaged substances, keeps out fresh air and lets you put them away in the cold and dark of the fridge. But, even though you can see what’s in the package, you can’t touch the contents, it remains largely out of sight, can easily be forgotten and can grow moldy and of no further use. (Sounds to me, skeptic that I am, like some Senators I could name). The dictionary says that when something is “transparent”, it has been “uncloaked”. And, being so uncloaked, it becomes obvious: in the way as to be easy to see or understand; plain; evident. I would be very happy if the Obama gang would stop offering me transparent views and uncloak a few things, to make them easier to see, make them more plain and much more evident. If no one has noticed, the first $350B of the TARP program was so “transparent” that it completely disappeared behind a cloak of Bush-Cheney-Paulson-Bernanke smoke. Obvious also means to meet a certain criteria, and withstand or prevent obfuscation. I guess we missed that one. And I am not being cynical…I am being thoughtful.

Now here is a word that can open a delightful can of entomological worms: Perseverance. In its noblest of forms, this word means to continue on a given course in spite of difficulties and setbacks. The new Pres just loves this one. And so do the jubilant masses. However, in the midst of perseverance is “severe”, and I, in my thoughtfulness, don’t believe that most Americans grasp, in any realistic fashion, how severe matters are, economically, culturally and societally. And then the emotional cascade begins to form like this:

Despite the efforts to imbue (to soak; wet; to fill (the mind); permeate),

People will become disillusioned ( disenchanted, dismayed)

Because so much of the rhetoric and the slowness of the efforts will cause wide-spread dismay (removed from power; subdue; defeated)

And they will be unable to sustain (to uphold; keep in existence; prolong)

Because their enthusiasm and momentum will soon abate (to beat down; pull down; put an end to; to deject; lessen; diminish)

Because they have become dismayed (subdued, defeated).

All of which means they will have lost the fortitude to persevere. Well, crap. This is not what the forecast says.

Why the glum outlook, you may ask? Well, my thoughtful skepticism has moved me to uncloak the obvious, to peek behind the curtain of double-speak and to stop looking at the lack of transparency in the bail-out scenario, and to identify the absurd (clearly untrue; inconsistent with reason; contradicts obvious truth) influences which seem to dominate our day to day reasoning.

We are bombarded and assaulted by broken down ideologies and paradigms which promote apathy (from the Gr: to suffer; 1. lack of emotion;2.lack of interest; listless condition;indifference), which in turn results in an atrophy (to waste away; fail to grow, from the Gr: “To nourish”, hence, insufficient nourishment),and eventually societal entropy (available energy diminishes in a closed system, or a loss of energy available for useful work in a system undergoing change)[www.thefreedictionary.com/entropy]

Put simply, everything goes to hell and nobody gives a rat’s ass.

HOWEVER, once you have set out to identify these absurdities in our culture (and perhaps to measure your life by them, as I have begun doing), you can learn to be alert, responsive, reactionary and as vocally and openly objectionable as those who spew them. But first you must learn to be aware of the temptation to accept the temporal (transitory, temporary) nature of your daily intake of (largely useless) information and then resist the temptation to gravitate toward the immediately mind-numbing (atrophy causing) nature of the sensational (vague without reference to specific stimulus; external stimulation; sensation of happiness). Let me give you a few examples of what to watch out for:

The “bail-out” isn’t. There will be no miracle cure and pain will be in the offing. Any other understanding of the depth of situation is absurd.

Transparency isn’t transparent. It is merely an illusion of transparency designed to give you the sensation of happiness (see above). To believe that is to believe in the absurd.

Joe Biden says Americans should “work harder”. This is an insensitive and self-aggrandizing statement that befits an idiot looking for re-election. My friend Barbara has suggested that if he had said “greater participation”, it would have sounded better. As it stands, it is absurd. He should have asked us to persevere.

One prominent right-wing radio talker has called for the Obama administration “to fail”. This stretches the definition of absurdity to obscenely inappropriate behavior. No one needs this much sensationalism.

A Wall Street executive has just remodeled his office in an amount in excess of $1M. Citibank has just taken delivery a multi-million dollar private jet, manufactured in France. These are both absurd and obscene.

Nancy Pelosi has said that she has broken through the “marble ceiling” of Washington. No she hasn’t: if she had, her head would have broken open and she would understand more about America and its problems than she s does about being re-elected. Absurd.

Senate and House Republicans, after already having been given much more in tax-cuts in the “bail-out” than is warranted, are asking for even more. These cuts will go to the top fractional percentile of the populace who control a disproportionately large share of the national wealth. Go back and re-read the definition of absurd.

I could go on, but the “absurdity identifier framework” I have vocabularized (?) here can be applied to evaluate almost any news story or lightning bolt of information that comes your way. If you begin with the candid assumption that most news is both temporal and sensational to begin with (it sells), then you must first ask yourself if what you have just heard/read/seen will perpetuate (make lasting; enduring forever, indefinitely) an ideology or a paradigm that will cause apathy, atrophy and entropy, and then attempt to make a determination about why this person or organization was moved to say/broadcast/publish it (I think publishit should be a word). Examples:

John Boehner has said that the clause in the proposed “bail-out’ bill, which allocated health care money to help with unwanted pregnancies and family planning is simply millions of dollars for “contraceptives”. Absurd. He is perpetrating a baby-momma stereotype and wants to be re-elected by his religious right-wing constituents.

The right wing has suggested that re-funding the Pell Grants would be a waste of money. Absurd. Pell Grants make college education possible for the most unlikely of candidates from low-income families, like, say that of Barack Obama?

There are no “shovel-ready” projects. Absurd. How quickly did we re-build the collapsed bridge on I-35 in Minneapolis? I think the Republicans were about to have a convention, there.

I learned a new word this week, and “uncloaked” a new perspective on the non-transparency of another. Adventitious means accidental; extrinsic; not inherent. I am struck that most of the sensational (and therefore usually temporal) “news” that I get is adventitious. It comes from and is perpetuated by some one or some thing extraneous to the issue at hand. It usually serves to distract and disperse perseverance. It propagates eventual apathy, dismays and disillusions.

Anything said by Dana Perino: absurd. The jury is still out on the new guy.

A party-crashing Republican, at an Obama celebration party Barbara and I attended last Saturday, bowled me over. As the other guests around the room made toasts to the new administration and expressed optimism about the future, post-W, this man took the time to offer up a lengthy statement of praise for John McCain, because he had “served his country so well”. This was not only absurd; it was in extremely poor taste. If I had had a rope and tree…but that would have been absurd as well.

This leads me to the word most closely allied with Transparency: accountability. I fear this is more cloak and swagger. Accountability is wholly dependent upon those who do the accounting, and we all know that ‘Figures lie and liars figure”: Think ENRON. As the great bail-out debate rages on, and transparency is seen not be, all I can say is that what you think you see may not be what you will eventually get, and it most certainly will not be what you thought you paid for.

Please do not ask me why I offered no definitions for ideology or paradigm: I was just too apathetic to look them up.

Please remember: I am not being cynical here, just skeptically thoughtful. Isn’t that absurd?

I Stand Corrected

2009-01-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

When my enthusiasm, indignance, ire and zealotry combined to prompt me to write the last blog, “Neo-Retrovision”, I made few historical errors, a few grammatical slip-ups and some errors of omission. Although I did offer a mid-article disclaimer, in “retro-spect”, I fear that that was not enough to absolve me of my crimes. Very much in the spirit of what appears on the second page of the NYT, after they make a faux pax, I feel constrained to offer this:

The lecture I referred to in that blog, on mid-first millennia history, revolving mostly around misunderstandings about the cooperation of Muslims and Jews during that time, was in fact presented by Mr. Roy Casagranda, an Assistant Professor of Government at Austin Community College, here in Texas. Barbara forwarded the blog entry along to him, and he was kind enough to respond, in true “professorial” style, with a variety of comments and corrections. I re-print them for you here. At the end I will make several feeble attempts at explanation, clarification, justification and other forms of excuses for my (almost) inexcusable behavior:

I caught a couple of typos. I made the corrections in brackets below.Europe ({i}n both beneficial and despicable ways), through it{'}s deft manipulation of money and power, and was then pushed further along after theAramco was the Arabian American Oil Company until 1988 (today it is called Saudi Aramco). Nothing to do with Farsi. Shah is spelled with an 'h' not a 'w'.

The US never lifted a hand to stop the Holocaust. We refused to accept escaping Jews from Nazi occupied Europe, unless they had technical skills that we wanted. IBM sold Hitler the census data containing all the information on who had Jewish ancestry, including hundreds of thousands of Christians who had no Jewish identity. And throughout the massive bombing campaign that reduced nearly every single city in Europe to rubble (Prague, Rome, Heidelberg, and Paris were more or less preserved) not once did a bomb fall on a concentration camp, on a death camp, nor upon the railroads leading to them. The US might have wanted to fight WWII, but not to save the Jews.The time period at the bottom is off. Islam came about in 610 AD. The Arabs began conquering an empire in 633 AD. That amicability lasted even through the Crusades to the Contemporary Period. It fell apart a bit when the Mamluk seized Egypt, it was brought back a bit when the Crusaders joined the Arabs in the Battle of Ayn Jalut when the Mongols were defeated for the first time in 1260 AD (first battle to ever have a cannon by the way). The intolerance that we see today did not really start to implant itself (with one major exception Egypt from 1250 to 1517) until after the British, Italians, Spanish, and French carved up the Middle East between 1830 and 1920. The real event that caused Islamic intolerance and religious strife was the creation of Israel and then the subsequent perception that Israel was Europe and the US's new Crusade. The last sentence seems to use Arab as a term for Muslim. Remember that Arabs are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim.

My turn:
First of all, I finished writing this diatribe at two in the morning. That there were only two immediately noticeable typos is a miracle. I do take exception to the business of using an apostrophe with the word “its”. The jury is still out on the when, if and maybe about when that can and should be used. My apologies to the Shaw: I was thinking of him mostly in terms of “oh.pshah”, anyway, for all the good he did the people of Iran. And you can spell Aramco (Ameriramocomobilxon?) however you see fit. The English-Arab translation still means, “I have most of your money and you don’t”. And the line about Farsi was just a thrown in for cynicism: most of what has happened since the formation of this venture has been farcical. Get it?

On a more serious note, I certainly stand corrected on the historical data: that is why Prof. Casagranda is a professor and I’m not. However (and I say this because if he saw it this way, then perhaps you did, too) I never meant to imply that the U.S. went into or vowed to fight/win WWII for the sake of or because of the Jews and the Holocaust. Sadly, that was probably an ugly and impossible-to-ignore aftermath of that war. The U.S. overlooked much, as did many other countries and races, until the horror had become unspeakable. The U.S. did, however, enter the European theatre as much to buck up Great Britain, and France and to no doubt worry about the future of mid-east oil, especially after Hitler went after North Africa. I still tend to believe that most of the western world, after being on a binge-like spree of militarism after the war, and led by the “great victor” the U.S., was prompted to settle the European Jewish survivors where they are today, for most of the reasons I stated in the original blog. Hence, my conclusion that that Bill Moyers was (and is) wrong, and that the conflict today is not between the Jews and the Canaanites of the books of the Old Testament.

Whether I can prove it or not, I still contend that after WWII, most of the western world, even after the Crusades were long over, still felt it could do with the eastern world pretty much what it willed. That is why you have the British provincial regionalization of Iraq, the Shaw of Iran and the western financial institutions thinking they had the Saudis in their back pocket. That was, of course before, Japan brought us the Toyota, the Chinese grew to several billion people and learned how to copy anything and bubble-wrap it, and the Saudis leaned how to spell OPEC.

Professor Casagranda’s last correction points out probably the most serious error in the entire piece: being an Arab does not automatically mean you are Muslim. Arabs can be Muslim, Jewish or Christian. But in my own defense (and I do sincerely apologize for that blunder), I went back and watched the Moyers’ piece again, and at the end of his commentary he made the same mistake. So although I am indeed guilty, I am in good company!

Update: That initial blog posting was done over a week ago, and the blatant atrocities in Gaza continued. Here are a few more recent observations from Prof. Casagranda:

"Day 22Death Toll 1,203Wounded 5,400I have included the Gaza, Texas map with locations bombed by Israel. Eastern Gaza City south of the Jabaliya concentration camp has really gotten a lot of attention from Israel. Israeli suggestions of a ceasefire are merely a rouse. They will do it unilaterally without solving any of the underlying problems such as the 18 month long siege of Gaza. So Hamas will have no choice but to fight back. That will then allow Israel to say, "Oh my G-d, look at those terrorists." Then they will strike back and continue the massacre.
On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Roy Casagranda wrote:
Death toll 1,159 and 5,200 wounded. http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/13/catastrophically_misguidedincomprehensible_policy_renowned_jewish_playwrightOn a personal note the talk with the Jewish American Zionists has probably already fizzled. An email was sent today by one of the key Zionists that basically shut the door. I have not completely given up and so we will likely meet again next week, but it seems that there is nowhere to go.Hamas was democratically elected. Was isolated and blockaded by Israel with US support. Offered to enter into a coalition with Fateh, which it did not need to do. Stopped firing rockets into Israel for four months, until Israel attacked the Gaza Strip in November. Israel will not recognize Hamas. Arab Summit: Mahmoud Abbas could not go to the Arab Summit in Doha, Qatar, because he did not get permission from Israel in time, but Hamas made it.
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Roy Casagranda wrote:
Below are two links to my lecture on Saturday the 10th.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udqczt149iI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcaQcqE5w0
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Roy Casagranda wrote:
Day 211105 Dead. 5,100 wounded.I have included a map to give people an idea of how big the Gaza Strip is. Austin has a 1,000,000 people. Gaza has 1,500,000. " (Italics mine)

My own thoughts run like this:

One: I am hearing today that the Israelis are pulling out (conditionally) from Gaza, completely coincidentally with the inauguration of Barack Obama. They seem to feel that with G.W. Bush and Condi “I am a shill for the MSM” Rice out of the picture, they have no idea what kind of support or cooperation they will get from the U.S., as their ugly and despicable behavior continues. I find this course of action to be a bald and two-faced cowardly and (pardon the expression) “niggardly” manner of politics which is most inexcusable and reprehensible. I hate to sound crude, but on Jan. 20, Washington D.C. had ten balls and the Israelis seem to have none. If they do not feel that they can get approval to play with their (our) F-16’s, they won’t play at all.

Two: Mr. Engel, of MSNBC.TV, just reported that nearly as soon as the Israeli aggression stopped in Gaza, and the troops withdrew, work began immediately to clean up and re-open the supply tunnels between Egypt and Gaza. Aside from the mention that this will enable Hamas to “re-arm” (firecrackers and smoke bombs?), the report stated that Egyptian vendors and merchants night profit from this endeavor. I think Bart Simpson would simply say ,“Doh”. It sound to me like good old-fashioned capitalism (war profiteering?) which remains a mainstay of American economic policy. Once again, it is OK if we do it, but if someone else does, it is a crime.

Thanks to Prof. Casagranda for whipping me into shape with the corrections. But I still reserve the right to be disgusted, indignant and ashamed of the entire affair. Not to mention much aggrieved by the deaths of those civilians who never fired a rocket at anyone.

Neo-Retrovision

2009-01-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

Or why the Heavens are weeping.

Most alarmingly, the world is now into the third week of mutually escalated and uniformly deplorable genocide in the Gaza strip (or what is left of it). This deadly and insidious game of, “I’ll see your two rockets and raise you a 100 tons of TNT” has reached, exceeded and then exceeded again, all humanely unimaginable levels of wonton death and destruction. The pundits, the correspondents (who can maybe get in and maybe back out), the politicians, the war strategists and the “world leaders” argue, debate, disdain and abstain when it comes to making or offering as any lasting solutions, fruitful ideas or enduring truce proposals. Many on both sides of the conflict are hardened and re-hardened to obdurate positions on the death of the other, and just as many throw up their hands in an act of exasperation and a mental resoluteness about the needless carnage, claiming “historical” precedent, and therefore hopelessness. . I have not heard so many lame-brained excuses for disgusting behavior in my adult life.

Although I referred to this situation “neo” in the title, there is nothing neo about how the world is viewing this hideous conflagration. And “retro” is only a wishful way in which to dismiss the problem and I double-dare you to find anything visionary about any of it.

I just finished watching Bill Moyers (You-Tube, on Salon) speak eloquently (as he always does) about the historical and biblical underpinnings of the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. He quoted the Old Testament, and remarked that the words of Moses, which once stressed, “Thou shalt not kill” had been replaced by the use of phrases designed and selected to create an unseemly enmity between Jews and Caananites. And with all due respect to Mr. Moyers, he has missed a few historical and cultural links, and so have the rest of us. In our Neo-Retrovision of today, we have taken convenient, easy and gap-laden thought paths to understanding the causes beneath what has been taking place.

I have come to this conclusion only after being recently re-educated and also being inadvertently alerted to a revised viewpoint by an unlikely informant. If I had not just been to a lecture that refreshed my memory about early Islamic behavior and then seen Newt Gingrich on “Meet the Press”, I wouldn’t be writing this now. Please do not ask me how I got from early Mohammed to Gingrich. Beats me.

During the middle portion of the first millennium A.D., during the rise and growth of Islam, there was considerable dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. They were (and prompted as much by the Islamists as anyone), to be respectful to and knowledgeable about one another’s respective religious beliefs. According to the history I know, there was at least as much reverence for the “prophet” Jesus as there was for Mohammed and a good deal of Muslim respect (ala Mohammed and his followers) for the history and traditions of Judaism. There was some degree of peace and fraternalism (harmony) during this time, but not many people seem to know this (I went to a “Christian” theological seminary, and most, if not all, of these details were glossed over). Then, on the morning of 9/11 (the ’09 one, not THAT one) I heard Mr. Gingrich sum up the general attitude about the Arab-Israeli conflict by stating, repeatedly, that after nearly every contemporary discussion of the quandary, the uniform response by the Arab world is . “Fine, Let’s just wipe Israel off the map.” Somehow, none of the “conventional wisdom” elements fit together any more. Alas, the mid-east conflict and America’s “war on terror” are close ideological cousins, both afflicted by and with a lack of information and historical perspective. This gives most of us a myopic lens through which to view the world as we think we know it today.

Sometime between the time the Roman Emperor declared Christianity the religion of the realm (the world), the time of the crusades and prior to the 20th century, the Hebrew religion had become eclipsed by Christianity and largely unknown and misunderstood Islamic culture of the middle east. The Catholic Church (I’ll make some people angry, here) came to dominate Europe (n both beneficial and despicable ways), through its’ deft manipulation of money and power, and was then pushed further along after the Protestant reformation. Christianity of course spread to the New World, where “freedom of religion” became an abused freedom to create and propagate right-wing, sectarianism. Morally obtuse groups who have managed to insert God in to the pledge of allegiance and conveniently and almost completely obliterate the original intentions of the founding fathers (that being to keep this from being Christian nation, at all costs). Apparently the costs were ultimately too much for anyone to bear and today Pat Robertson has his own TV show and Bill Graham has been the unofficial protestant pope of the United States for most of the last century. Judaism, on the other hand, settled into a small minority position amongst the religions of the world and existed largely unnoticed, un-nurtured and not of much concern to the world population, in general.

Meanwhile, Islam flourished in the middle-eastern portion of the world, despite the bloody and futile efforts during the Crusades to stamp it out. The Christians regarded the Muslim worshippers as “infidels”, and the Muslims thought likewise of those “Jesus people”. For some period after the end of the crusades, Christianity and Islam settled into a peaceful co-existence, but one nonetheless tainted by mutual suspicion.

Here is what I think happened, and why “neo-retrovision” might be one stilted way in which to look at the mess we have today.

First of all, over some period of time, and I think in large part due to both Catholic and Protestant Christian arrogance, the western world assumed an undeserved and unwarranted superiority in their vision over the other religions of the world, and not just to the exclusiveness of Islam. Why else would Christian churches (and especially those from the US) spend as much energy and money to send missionaries around the world to make converts? (Have you ever read about the Spaniards and the Aztecs, the Spaniards and the Mayans? The Spaniards and the native peoples of the American southwest and California? The priest has long been seen as the soldier of pacification. And for George W, Bush and most Republicans, at least in this century, the terms “Democracy” and “Christianity” have been inter-changeable.). The Crusades set a precedent for all of this. The rapid simultaneous spread of self-granted piety, mixed with financial gain and political power, caused Christianity to rampage it’s way through the Western world and believe itself to be a supreme way of life and thought. It is odd how Christians morphed from turning the other cheek to “My God is better than your God”.

Let me back up and remind you that during this time, while Christians were wont to ignore Muslims, Judaism grew less influential, less noticeable, less visible and easy to ignore.

But also during the years following the crusades, Muslims were having an understandably difficult time forgetting that they had been regarded as savages and infidels, that their one true prophet had been repeatedly maligned, and their homelands ravaged, raped and robbed of the their treasures and their history. An enmity against the western, “Christian” world was apparent, inevitable and growing. Both of these great world forces of faith had become irreversibly hostile and bigoted toward one another…and almost without any significant input from the Jews themselves. The two most optimistic and formerly peace-imbued faiths of the known world had come to hate and despise one another.

The two large sacks, each containing one of the two largest sets of religious tenets in the world, had been picked up and shaken violently, then dumped out on the plane of human existence. In so doing, the essential messages of harmony had been exchanged for violent discord.

Then along came (not necessarily in order of appearance): U.S. Manifest Destiny(Imperialism), oil, Hitler, oil, The Holocaust, oil, WWII, oil, 1948 and the Exodus, The United Nations, oil, Aramco, Israel, modern politics, world-wide monetary expansionism, oil, modern warfare technology, oil and post-war, oil-burdened guilt. And of course, the re-emergence of Judaism as a focal point for world views and fundamental religious intolerance. It seems that everyone needs some one or some thing to dislike. Intensely.

Yes. I know this is humongously overly simplistic: so is right-wing, findamentalist Christian thought and sectarian Islamic hate rhetoric. Get over it.

Once the United States got the complete hang of the notion that it (mysteriously) had the God-given, politically democratic and financial might and right to rule the world, it almost simultaneously realized that this dominance was not possible without oil. Then it was realized that the world’s greatest reserves of oil were in places like Saudi Arabia. Nothing so geographically inconvenient like that had ever stopped the U.S. before, and would not have, either, except that centuries of abject treatment of Muslims had made them suspicious and wary, and Hitler had declared that all Jews (no matter how inconsequential) were the scourge of the earth. While that psychopathic ideologic perversion gripped much of Europe, the U.S identified two apparent realities: First, the U.S. could not (if it were indeed as sanctimonious as it claimed) let the Jews of the world be exterminated, and second, the U.S. could never lay claim to all of that oil in Saudi Arabia if Hitler got control of the world, with or without Jews. Clearly this could not be allowed to go on.

To make a long story short, the U.S. rallied and won the world war, Hitler ( and Mussolini and the those unscrupulous Japanese) were defeated (until we needed Italian silk suits and Toyotas), the war was ended, the United Nations was formed and the Jews who had escaped the Nazis and the camps were given the state of Israel. Israel was seen as the West’s foot in the door to middle east oil, Aramco was formed to blend the English language and farsi and progress was on the march. Somehow, however, everyone missed the inevitable trouble that would be caused by arbitrarily placing the State of Israel smack in the middle of Palestine. Oops.

I know I am leaving out the intermediate and ongoing wars between Israel and it’s neighbors, the Shaw of Iran and his overthrow, the wars in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan and SDI and Osama Bin Laden and the Bushes and the Saudis and 9/11, but there is only so much I can write about in one article.

The State of Israel, however, by default, and as a result of all of this, became the step-child and surrogate bully (adopted their own version of Imperialism) for the U.S. in the middle east. In subsequent years, the Israelis have benefitted (?), year after year, from generous monetary support and a steady supply of the best armaments and weaponry the west could ill-afford to give it. As a consequence, virtually all of the enmity between Christians and Muslims was transferred to an enmity between Jews and Muslims, which was all complicated and exacerbated by plunking the Jews down in land appropriated from the Palestinians without so much as a “Thank you very much”. Sadly, the arrogance of eminent domain and entitlement (an American tradition:Imperialism) has been completely absorbed and put into play by the Jewish state. When those counterproductive ideologies from the Muslims and now the comtemporary Jewish state are combined, you have the Gaza strip. Viola’! Meanwhile. Americans really, really wish that gasoline would stay at around $1.50/gal and there is a new kid of the block named “Opec”. Oh boy.

So I think we have this largely wrong. The Muslims are justifiable angry (to a certain extent) because the Christians have been trying to shoot their camels, urinate in their couscous, appropriate their land and swipe their olive oil and oil for as far back as anyone can remember, and their extremist elements have taken up the arms available to them from the modern world, in protest. The Israelis have been given (and happily, it seems, taken up) the mantle of non-Christian, un-Christ-like, Christian omnipresence and chosen to impose themselves on the Palestinians, using western firepower. In their extremism, they are acting like southern Baptists with shotguns. And almost everyone (including the right reverend Bill Moyers) and chosen to blame it all on Deuteronomy. Hogwash.

This Neo-Retrovision is wrong in its perception and reasoning. When I was a trainer/teacher, I used to talk to my students about the meaning of the word “rapport”. It comes from a Greek word meaning to “re-establish harmony”. Not in a very long while have I felt the need to communicate this message so clearly as I do right now. Our glimpse back at history, circa 350—500 A.D., tell us that there was sufficiently amicable relations between two major groups of monotheists for peaceful coexistence (harmony), and war and oil, oil and war, racism, bigotry an shallow thinking have disrupted it and transferred the animosity from culture to culture with deleterious results. The world is doing a poor job, just now of “re-establishing harmony”.

The Muslims need to reign in their extremists and go back and re-read the portions of the Koran that instruct them to be merciful, peaceful understanding and (pardon the expression)’ Christlike”. The Israelis need to stop acting like Missouri Synod Lutherans with a Torah chip on their shoulders and stop being the de- facto surrogate bullies for the unfounded hatred of Islam borne by Americans. And the Americans need to stop putting them in that position and giving them F-16 fighter-bombers. In what other country I the world could you have a lobbying group like AIPAC? In the end, I think we must fault, at least in part, ferocious, pious American Christian anti-Muslim sentiments for fostering Israeli aggression.

I have concluded (you can think as you want to) that this no longer has so much to do with biblical wars and rumors of wars (I used to think that), but rather much more with modern idolatries, a lust for oil and absurdly inappropriate moral high grounds which have, in turn, been also inappropriately purloined by Arabs, Christians and Jews alike. Allah, God and Yahweh must all be chagrined.

"God" News

2009-01-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

Or God "knows"...take your pick. Here we go!

"Best-selling 'God' author faces plagiarism claim".
www.msnbc.com/id/28538509/

I thought all of these "god" writer people were born knowing that God had already written and read everything (Intelligent Design?), but apparently they are not beneath stealing from one another to sell books. Shocking.

"For Eastern Orthodox, gas crisis means chilly Christmas".
www.msnbc.com/id/28515983/

For most people in the US, we look forward to a white Christmas. But it seems that Russian energy moguls are not content unless Jesus freezes his little swathed ass off. Praise the Lord and pass the gasline.

"Fighting resumes In GAZA after truce for aid." Both sides mull cease fire plan; three hour pause for humanitarian supplies ends."
www.msnbc.com/id/28404637/

"What God hath wrought, let all men put asunder? " There will be a slight pause for food, water and penicillin before we resume pounding the living crap out of you, you filthy heathens." Is this the pause that refreshes?

This just in:
Obama announces the appointment of a "Waste Czar". A Chief Performance Officer. The pres-elect says his pre-election campaign promised more change, but that the way things are (not) going, we need "more change than that."
www.msnbc.com/id/28538966

I am not certain I like the idea of a government official (should be Czarina, anyway?) to oversee or manage waste. There is a company here called "Waste Management" and all they do is haul mountains of trash to the land fill, down the road. Maybe waste eliminator? Or "terminator"? Maybe we need Arnold? Maybe it should the Office of "Waist" Management. Then she could logically talk about tightening our fiscal belts and reducing our pork intake?

Then Harry called:

An email from Give 'em Hell, Harry. "Yesterday was a terrific day to be a Democrat". Seated seven new Senators (screw Roland Burris). But we have a slumping economy. OK. Got that part. Then down at the bottom:
Contribute

These miserable jerks just don't get it, do they?

The Three Witches

2009-01-06T23:03:00.000-08:00

For a very long time now, I have lamented, railed against, screamed about and been oftentimes completely incensed by the (almost impossible to ignore) fact that the United States of America has been and is being run by gray-haired, old men, in expensive suits (Barack Obama excepted, although I hear the gray hair thing is already started.). Bill Clinton and George W, Bush, our two most recent top dogs, didn’t start out their tenures with gray hair, but would you look at them now! Wow!

A note, here: I have seen countless portraits and portrayals of the founding fathers; Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams; (old guys?), almost always wearing one of those silly gray or white powdered wigs they carried over from England. It could have been that there was some intent to set a standard for future hair styles of the members of the legislative branch, but somehow I don’t think so. Of course, the first group to give their King George the boot also tried to make it clear that ours was NOT to be a Christian nation, but we have screwed that up, as well. So who the hell knows?

As for the “old” part of the description, I give you the likes of Strom Thousand-Year-Old-Egg Thurmond, Jumpin’ Joe Biden, Give ‘em Hell Harry Reid and Ted The-Bridge-to-Nowhere Stevens. These guys are but just a few of the current standard bearers of the coiffes which are salt-and-pepper hair to gray to barely there. But I know the Capitol building has a whole raft of “guys”, not many years on the junior side, just waiting to take up their places as the aging keepers of the public trust. (I also believe that there are more walkers and wheelchairs parked outside the doors of the Senate chambers than any of us imagine).

The expensive suit observation is partially speculative, but during the vice-presidential debates (with all due respect to Sarah Palin and Nieman-Marcus) and Democratic nomination acceptance speech celebrations (somebody finally bought Barack a new tie), Joe Biden’s threads hardly looked like they came off the rack at the J.C.Penney store in Dover, DE or Scranton. And I don’ think you will find Ted Kennedy or Barney Frank picking up their wardrobes at the thrift shops in their local home environs. (I don’t recall seeing any thrift stores on Martha’s Vineyard…although I vacation there often, as I am certain you do…but I’m sure Martha must have some old grape-stained dresses lying around somewhere).

However…

(You’ve been wondering where the three witches come in, haven’t you?)

Now come the three women of the epoxy-snit. I say this because they seem to be glued together in a permanent state of whining and hormonal minstrel misery. Who are these women, you ask? Why, I give you the Pugilist and Pecuniary Barbara Boxer, the Indignant Feisty Feinstein and the Nasal Nancy Pelosi. As a trio of malcontents, they have trumped my contempt, disdain and disavowal of the gray-haired old men, as they stand together and stir the cauldron of Washington politics, like characters from a modern day MacBeth. They appear, all too often, as a boil on the complexion of the political landscape, and seem intent on stirring up toil and trouble. They are a triad of dis-chord in the nearly atonal harmony of the rakes regress across the business of Capitol Hill. They just piss me off.

I think it all began

Sometime during the latter part of the recent election cycle. For some seemingly inexplicable reason, I began to perceive all women as relentless, nasal, gold-digging, petulant opportunists, and I knew I couldn’t blame it all on the Governor of Alaska. As I recall, there was not a lot of Fein-steining going on, but Boxer and Pelosi had set several repugnant practices into motion. I have no proof that the three of them actually sat and plotted out this attack on the general populace, but they may well have. It did (and does) seem like a concerted effort, a sort of gender-based maliciousness.

Please bear in mind that two important and indomitable movements were afoot at that time: the first was of course the all-out campaign by the Democrats, liberals and the progressives to sweep all manner of Republicans (especially that Shrub fellow) from office. Doing that would require heroic amounts of effort and mountains of cash. Nearer the end of the cycle, we were beset by the Paulson-Bernanke-October-Wall Street surprise: we had all been robbed and would starve to death any moment, only Congress and the Treasury could save us, the sky was falling while hell was freezing over and we were all going to freaking die in the next 11 minutes. Other than that, everything was fine. Except…

Almost as nicely formatted as a country-western female duo from Nashville, Boxer and Pelosi both attempted to take and steal the national stage. The only elements missing were tin cups and twangy guitars. While on the one hand, I was receiving emails, almost daily, from Boxer, asking for cash (in our national time of dire straits) for some of her projects that were absolute musts if she were to save the world, poor people and medical aid programs in CA (hell, I don’t even live in CA), Pelosi was front and center before the press cameras, warbling about what “she” would and would not let Congress do or not do to save the financial futures of America. Boxer (thankfully) remained largely invisible, save her picture and plaintive messages in the emails, but these belied her expensive suits and carefully coiffed hair (remember the old guys?). Meanwhile, Pelosi was highly visible (and shrill), standing up next to ( and trying, it seemed, to be on top of) Harry Reid, making pronouncements about how powerful she was while acting like this was all monopoly money, playing both politics and her side of the sad song record on the jukebox she shared with Boxer. She always looked gaunt, but she always had a nice suit and her hair looked fabulous (remember the old guys?) Later on, Boxer stopped asking for cash (because the Dems had won) and Pelosi settled in to a more complacent demeanor after she and the Congress let Paulson slip $85B to AIG. Talk about hiding the salami.

I was beginning to get over this (these two women had almost turned me against women) until Obama’s team leaked out the news that Leon Panetta had been selected to run the CIA. Feinstein went as indignantly ballistic as a Sec. of Defense, and threw a linguistic plate of matzo balls against the walls of the intelligence committee hearing room:

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/01/05/1732447.aspx

Then we got this:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/06/panetta-feinstein-rockefeller/

Some time later, the Obama camp apologized for the leak, saying they had fully intended to consult Feinstein before hand, but, as Rumsfeld might say, “Stuff happens”. (I am quite certain that Feinstein would have said “s$#@ happens, but it would not go well with her suit. Besides, it is hard to say “s@#^” and sound whiny and California at the same time).

I had a grandmother like Feinstein once. Even now I can hear, “Well, I declare!”, and “Well, nobody asked me before they did that!”, and, “That was very inconsiderate and I don’t appreciate it one bit”. I always wanted to say to my grandmother (as we would say today), “Get over it”. I should like to say the same to Ms. Feinstein. And I saw her picture today. She was not hiding her displeasure, but she had on really nice clothes and her hair looked great, too. (Old guys, again)

And so it seems that I must back down somewhat, from my disdain and disappointment when it comes to my views about “gray-haired old men in expensive suits” running the country. I must, it seems, temper that ire with the added knowledge of the activities of the female contingent (at least as regards this trio) whom equal gender opportunities hath wrought. Perhaps you can cage a chauvinistic leopard but you can’t change his (my) spots.

I was reminded today of the movie, “The Witches of Eastwick”. Those ladies were fun until they decided to join forces and go after Jack Nicholson with a vengeance. I don’t know what “aspirational horizons” Boxer, Feinstein and Pelosi have their eyes on for the next four years, but they are all living together in the same cottage on Capitol Hill, and if I were Michelle, I’d watch my Barack.

Life Goes On In Texas.

As Then Economy Turns (Bad)

2009-01-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

Dr. Reich is at it again, and rightly so. I recommend his blog today, 1/6/09.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

Here is what I told him (he of course listens closely to me):

My concern is this: you have stressed repeatedly that the question is not whether the government will do too much or too little, and that 'too little" will be a big mistake, a waste of time. The problem is, that while that all makes perfect sense, we do not have economists and people looking out for the good of the country making these decisions: we have politicians.

The stink and discussion for the last 24 hours has revolved around what has come (to some) as a surprise that the Obama stimulus package will include a 40% portion devoted to tax cuts rather than cash infusions. Lefties are horrified and righties are gloating. Republicans have already vowed to assail, contort, delay and hamper all efforts to get a package signed unless they have their way and the Obama folks seem to be working toward a compromise which will be only a luke-warm solution which fails to do enough. I.e., it will do "too little" but the politicians will be happy because their side "won".

You are preaching to the choir, Dr., but the choir is still paying the salaries of the politicians,and they have the purse strings and the check book. Unless this paradigm is altered, you and Krugman, et.al, are pissing into the wind.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2009-01-04T18:54:00.001-08:00

What good is a blog if you can't let your mouth run-over, occasionally?

This is Not Fun

This recurrent dream
Keeps playing again
And again
A peek-a-boo
Déjà view
About a part
Of life’s past
Particulars
That I wish had not been
A part of mine.

Particularly when they keep
Coming and going
And calling at Will
E. Nilly’s own proscribed time.
This can make a long sleep
Not worth
being had
And ruin completely
A short nap,
Cats or know.

There is always a holy
Of some grail of sorts
Or
A grail of some holy sort
Needing to be sought after,
Cleansed, found, rehabbed, delivered
Or
Retrieved
Or
Just plain nabbed, grabbed quickly
For
Redemption or salvation
Or
Kept from immolation, ordination
Interpretation, induction or inauguration.

But in the end
There is never resolution
Or
Absolution and I wake
Tired and confused.
Perhaps proseletyzed.

Always there is somewhere
Where I must get to
To pick up
Or
Deliver what I do not
Know as gospel
Or have as any
Tangible evidence of the quest
In question,
Any glimpse of what
I am in search of
(get your own damn preposition;
This one is mine).

After an Order has been given,
In the name of my father
The Sun or some Holy
Grail ghost sonuvabitch
Who talked me into
This,.
I then find to run
My errant errands
That there are always
Two cars,
One mine, the other
Something other than mine.
I leave the one
And take the other
Only to misplace it,
Myself and my way
Along the way
Along with all the keys
To both.
(If you have never been stranded
In a dream, I don’t recommend it.)

I have learned
That these are the keys
To my kingdom
But they always land
On a dirty floor
before
They open
Any door.

On one trip I drove an Audi
That had been fitted
For James Bond
And the scenery I passed
Exploded all along the way.
The last was black Saab
Turbo, of course
Another spirit-packed
Power-horse that got
Misplaced like the others,
In a sub-terranean dungeon

Which was really
A garage with many exits,
All of them
Old wooden doors
With writs tacked on them
That none of the keys
would open,
And then I then remember
That the view would be
Made fine all over
Again
If I could make my way
Back
To the other car-
The one less flashy-
That I’d left
Full of books
That I’d not read
Yet
Back
In the university parking lot.

But I can’t
And I’ve just dropped
The keys
To the menacingly black turbo
Down a drain grate
In the garage dungeon floor
And
It is cold and damp
In here
Where
I am all alone
And
I hate cars now
And
Unread books.

Every time I dream
This dream I learn
Again
I have learned so little.

Then this voice says
“Just shut up and give me
The fucking keys.
This time I’ll drive.”

News Flash! Real Thinking Found NOT To Be Dead!

2009-01-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Just before real writing, and the inclusive nature of the circumspect thought which it requires, was about fall from the precipice of our extremely temporal, sensationalistic and immensely dissatisfying existence, this comes along.

I never read The New Republic, and would never had seen this, if it were not for David Brooks in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02brooks.html?th&emc=th

“The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam — to achieve a decisive and final break with history — has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past — in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities — has a way of lingering around.”

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a559152f-70db-4183-8a8e-ed818ce6df7c

Happy New Year(s).

Woe is Me..And the Bombs Bursted in Air

2008-12-28T21:01:00.000-08:00

I can’t decide what's worse, my crippled communications status (my TV died) or the lack of immediately incendiary political news. I am really glad that “yes we did”, but now what?

With no television, I cannot watch Christ Matthews yell and spit at his guests or Rachel Maddow crucify Rick Warren (again). The shortage of political firewood (Blago is asleep, Obama is in Hawaii) since Sarah Palin went away makes it tough, because no one wants to hear about the mundane realties of urban hunger or listen to another “expert” tell us why our economic conundrum sucks. But life must go on. And one more re-hash about why some Wall Street CEO thinks he deserves his multi-million dollar bonus and I will vomit. But anyway…

The economy: Today (12/28) the NYT had a new op ed from Paul Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/) in which he quotes and defends his use of the phrase:”niggling nabobs”. He essentially concludes that if you listen to all of the experts, you will, sooner or later, come to the conclusion that “nobody knows nuthin’ “. In the same newspaper, Thomas Friedman speaks up (Op-Ed Columnist: Win, Win, Win, Win, Win ... ) and while I think he makes some good points about the (needed) gas tax hikes, I have heard dissenting remarks from others who think he has got much of it wrong. You decide. All I know is I don’t “know nuthin’ “ except that somebody ran off with all the money.

I got this in an email from NOWAR (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/) this afternoon:

Hello, all. Over the weekend Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians and wounded at least 900 more with F-16 jets and Apache helicopters supplied by the United States. Anger at this assault has ignited spontaneous demonstrations in many cities, including Austin, where a protest called by UT's Palestine Solidarity Committee will take place at 5 p.m. on Monday, December 29 in front of the State Capital (11th and Congress). To read more about the ongoing crisis in Gaza, the complicity of the United States, and the broader historical context visit http://electronicintifada.net

The home pages of MSNBC.com and the BBC have been covering this firestorm and violence all day as well.

I am baffled about who to blame and why. Condi Rice and the Israeli Foreign Minister say the whole thing is the fault of Hamas for pitching rockets over the walls into Israel after breaking a truce. Hamas says it should be expected, since Israel won’t allow humanitarian food stuffs and medical supplies into Gaza. So Israel retaliates against the rockets with several hundred tons of bombs and kills at least 300 people right out of the box. The word “overkill” comes to mind.

However, I think this is all an environmental problem. Or rather a problem of environmental disruption. Perhaps we keep forgetting to remember that Palestinians and Israelis were both once nomadic desert warriors. They shared the sand, the sun, camels and brutality. Their morality was determined largely by desert survival. As the centuries progressed, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and (eventually) arrogant Protestant democracy got mixed in there and now these two camps live in artificial walled cities. They still hate one another for a thousand thousand wrong and bigoted, short-sighted reasons and religious tenets, but their environments have been altered to maximize the terror they can inflict upon one another. They are now walled-in and have much better and more lethal weapons to use against each other (perhaps if they were forced to hack one another to bits with scimitars and hurl camel dung back and forth at each other things would slow down). . There is nothing new in their brutality: they brought it with them from the desert. They are just much more efficient in how they can go about slaughtering one another in this new environment. It is very much akin to the economic “experts” Krugman decries: “Nobody knows nuthin”.” And nobody wants to be confused by the facts. Pardon my use of the phrase, but when it comes to the use of logic, it appears that both sides can only say, “God forbid”.

The Mid-east has high-powered explosives; Wall Street has loan default/debit/credit swaps covered by a TARP. In either case, the result is dead bodies and rubble. If there were a website for all of this, it would be called "Screwup.disorg/".

ThinkProgress.org is having great fun (as are the readers) with the fact that it looks like the Bush “libery” will be a “white elephant”. It seems that many of the restrictive directives that Bush has issued will prevent many of the materials that should be in a presidential library from actually being there, making it largely an empty building. But that is to be expected as we endure the attempts by the administration to make “valedictory” (say what?) speeches and to rush to artificially create W’s “legacy”. You can read about the legacy efforts anywhere you might care to look, but I can create only this one dominant image:

A legacy, something that one leaves behind, trailing after him/her following their time in the leadership limelight, should be at least somewhat noble and awe inspiring. But when I close my eyes, all I see is W leaving a stall in the men’s room, with a long trail of toilet paper, dangling from the back of his pants, following him down the hall. And he has made it clear he has no intention of looking back. So be it.

The related not-very-new news today was that both Condi Rice and Laura Bush gave separate TV interviews and defended the Bush leadership record. Condi gave him an A+ (she must be smoking crack) and Laura Bush said , “history will tell”. It sure will. So be it. And I hope he will be “it” soon, so can all tag him and run away. There is sad irony in the fact that at the end of W’s “reign” his two most prominent Sunday morning apologists are two women, both devoid of a sense of the real world and devoted to perpetrating lies.

“Hi. My name is Dick Cheney, and I’m here to help you”. That is written on the toilet paper. The stuff legacies are made of.

We are but three days from a new year. In the absence of a television, I am rummaging through my CD collection for entertainment. I have just heard singer/songwriter Steve Goodman go on with great eloquence about the fact that, no matter how bad or gruesome or awful that which has gone before us has been, every year on Jan 1 we get the chance to begin anew. And country singer Gretchen Wilson just warbled that she was “one Bud wiser than I was a minute ago.” Perhaps in three days we will all acknowledge Steve’s admonishment to begin anew and be like Gretchen, “one Bud Wiser”.

I don’t know if that will keep any bombs from bursting over head in Gaza, make our economic experts any smarter or keep money out of he hands of some Wall Street tycoon. , but it might be a start. It would certainly be better than “nobody knows nuthin” and “one Bud wiser” would be better than none. Of course, things could get worse, but “God forbid”.

Happy New Year.

Life Goes on in Texas.

Re-Cycling When We Shouldn't

2008-12-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich had an interesting blog posting on Christmas eve:

(http://robertreich.blogspot.com/).

“The Debate to Come over Wall Street, Autos, and Everything Else: Cyclical or Structural?”

The crux of the post is summarized in the last lines:

---whether the economic crisis we're experiencing is basically cyclical (in which case, nothing really needs to change over the long term, after the economy gets back on track) or structural (in which case, many aspects of our economy and society will needs to change permanently).

Above these lines, Reich talks about the basic contradiction which exists in the thinking of the old-time Wall Streeters, that this economic mess we are in is “cyclical”, that soon things will be back to normal (in effect, telling the public…you me and us… to “get over it”) and the more radical thinking that says this nightmare is “structural” and cannot be counted upon. That is what he referring to in that quote above, about matters that will need “to change permanently”.
Reich is being immensely politic and enormously polite. As long as the financial powers that be can continue to convince us that this is an acceptable “cyclical” condition, they can maintain the stranglehold on the world’s money supply. It should be abundantly clear to almost everyone right now that the “structure’ of how we have been managing and mismanaging our money does not work any more. And it needs to be changed. And will make every mogul in the history of money manipulation and how wealth is accumulated damned unhappy.

Here is where I see a great irony posed by this (now worldwide) economic disaster and the natural resource stewardship we talk about so often today. If we accept the proposition that we should stand back and allow the existing monetary structure (and its’ practices) to “cycle over” again, as it done so often in the past, we will be “re-cycling” NOT a resource but a bad and deleterious habit. To put it even more succinctly, when I bemoaned this paradoxical dilemma to a good friend last night, she reminded of one of our favorite syllogisms (attributed to Einstein): Insanity is when you keep doing the same things you have always done and expect to get different results. Duh.

At that point I began to look at the existing monetary infrastructure that we have in play as a piece of the fabric of our society. S cloth, we have used it, worn it, laundered it, dry-cleaned it, heaped praise upon it and re-used it, soiled it, re-laundered it and used it again. And after every use and re-use, it has become thinner and more difficult to maintain. And the majority of the world’s wealth has continued to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people at the top of the economic (pardon the terminology) “pyramid”. We have, in effect, “re-cycled” the very financial structure which does the least to provide for those who move the stones that build the pyramid. I am reminded of slaves in ancient Egypt and the Pharos who wore the golden adornments. And Henry Paulson does sort of remind me of Yule Brenner and AIG certainly has the festivity angle down cold.

Now before anyone jumps all over me for advocating of “spreading the wealth” and short-changing Joe the Plumber, or hyping Karl Marx, urging a revitalization of hippie communes or taking out the “fascist pigs” of high finance, I have to say that I am far more inclined to maintain the more measured “Reichean” overview and to think about this somewhat logically.
The system we have in place, the “structure’ as Reich refers to it in this recent post, is broken. The TARP sins that have been committed in the name of bail-out and the ugly and counter-productive results of those sins should be obvious to everyone. $350B has already been “thrown at” the banks, and virtually none of it has spurred the economy or stopped the foreclosure debacle. The AP reported that financial institutions have refused to account for how they allocated and spent at least $1.6B of that money. Sec. Paulson is now talking about dispersing the next $350B and no one seems to know what for. Jobless rates are skyrocketing on a monthly basis, and the generally held opinion is that the big real estate, medical groups and others will be close on the heels of Detroit for bail-out money. Meanwhile Chrysler has halted all production for at last 30 days, GM has closed the last of its plants that produce SUVs and word on the street is that General Electric is in as much trouble and General Motors. I don’t see how anyone can that what we have been doing financially for the last two decades has been for the “good of the many”, but has rather (and most recently and obscenely) been for the greater good of the “the few”. I wish someone would explain to me (and to everyone else) the contorted logic that promotes multi-million dollar year-end bonuses for Wall Street execs, only because “things could have been worse” without their leadership? Is someone daft?

No one disputes our need to recycle. We need to recycle wood, paper, plastic, water and virtually every natural resource at our disposal if we are to survive, as a world of bipeds, into the coming centuries. But the one central feature of our existence that we DO NOT need to recycle is the way we have come to handle and manage money and accumulate wealth.
There are some who believe this current phase will “cycle through” and there will indeed be a recovery. But any hope of another “re-cycle” beyond that is very doubtful. We may have washed this cloth, re-cycled this fabric, so often that it is simply “used up” and we need a new one. You can choose to get on this bandwagon or choose insanity. Your call.

A Pot Pourri of Pot Porridge Cold

2008-12-23T12:05:00.000-08:00

How times have changed. Who would have ever thought that we (I) would be jumping up every morning to read the blogs, op eds and the columns of economists, before anything else? I have become, in these troubled times, a disciple of Paul Krugman (Krugman.blog.NYTimes.com/) and Robert Reich (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/). Krugman is busy every day, now (http://www.alternet.org/workplace/114804/krugman%3A_we%27re_in_for_a_year_of_%27economic_hell%27/) , and yesterday it was announced that he has started talking to the Obama economic team. Reich, now labeled as Clintonista, still speaks in plain English and makes common enough sense. How quickly, since the housing bubble burst and we were blackmailed and cajoled into giving Wall Street countless billions of dollars, that we have discounted and ignored Greenspan, Henry Paulson and the Wall Streeters we held in such high esteem for so long (Mammoth chunks of our economy are in ruins, and Greenspan recently told a congressional review board, basically, “Oops”.).

What these guys knew and when they knew it will be something we will be angry about for many years, and perhaps even generations. And I find “oops” a patheticly ineffective defense.

In these times I am also drawn to the words of writers like Noam Chomsky (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky). He is masquerading as a linguist, but speaks quiet volumes about philosophy, sociology and cultural phenomena. His words are well reasoned and measured, always carefully exposing (but with little room for argument) both sides of every coin. He does this on issues like the world-wide economy, war and rumors of war, racism and regional poverty. Read Chomsky and you will understand genocide like never before.

And if you do not think that times have changed, if you have watched the tele on Sunday morning at any time in the last several weeks, you will have noted that even the noted George F. Will has changed his tone. He has made nice remarks about Democrats, Barack Obama and gays. I can watch him now without being tempted to throw my coffee cup (or my shoes) at the TV screen. I will continue to conjecture that, as the political landscape evolved into brighter and brighter hues of blue, his wife has withheld sexual favors until he cleaned up his rhetoric. Hell hath over-frozen, as Sir Will might say.

And “The times, they are a changin’ “ is also evident when, as recently as a decade ago, blind political and judicial fury would have been unleashed, willy-nilly, against Cheney-like evil-doers, at the slightest provocation or opportunity. But yesterday, Joe Biden set out to quash any such rashness: When asked what the new administration might do about prosecuting Bush-era “criminals”, he cautioned that they should “look forward, not backwards”. I do not know if it the holiday spirit driving this, but (even though I don’t agree), there is something to be said for making an effort to avoid unnecessary ugliness when everything is already ugly in the extreme. And time wounds all heels. In this case I hope it incarcerates them.

And just to keep some spice in the rum-punch bowl, not only has Rachel Maddow leapt suddenly to stardom, from the almost nothingness of Air America, she publicly went on record for excoriating the President-elect about Rick Warren. Whilst I was cheering that, I read this: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/114756/. Times can change when both public opinion and pecuniary considerations make one stop and think about how truly dear one’s religious convictions really are. I raise you one bah and see you two humbugs.

While you are at it, you might like to read this, as well: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/will_the_warren_risk_be_worth.html

Meanwhile, the more (recent) times change, the more they remain the same. Mostly I am referring to the recent exposures of the exploits of Mr. Madoff . Here is a nice Christmas story: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/114782/. While Rachel was leaping to prominence, Madoff was bringing people to the point of leaping from tall buildings, and it wasn’t because he convinced them they were Superman. And Madoff preyed on charities and non-profits. And people think I am mean. Frankly, I don’t quite know how that list (above) was kept down to ten.

The only Times which seem not be changing appreciably are the New York ones. They reported that the big change today in world-wide business was that for the first time since 1938 (?), Toyota will post a loss in earnings: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/business/23auto.html?th&emc=th.. Meanwhile, we have just agreed to fork over many billions of dollars to GM and Chrysler, whose accountants arose from some deep slumber a few weeks ago and predicted an early death for both, without some form of financial life support. This raises a few questions:

Right now, almost everyone can conjure up a picture of Mr. Scrooge, hunkered over his desk, green eye-shade in place, meticulously going over every last penny in his ledger (he was an accountant…that is what they do), grumbling about where the money isn’t. Or where the money went, like to pay the salary of that miserable Bob whats-his-name with the sick kid. He KNEW where his money came from, where it was and where it went. And he knew what to expect. Mostly. But comes now GM, Chrysler, Wall Street and (everyone predicts) soon the real estate industry, state governments, hospitals, and hula hoop manufacturers, claiming that the rumor of their demise (apologies to Mark Twain) are not rumors at all. So we act surprised and pretend to believe that that the bean-counting, Scrooge-like accountants involved in all of this did not see it coming? Are we daft? This year’s mistletoe overhead has been an overhead of phony finance that cannot be sustained. Kissing is risky a business this year.

Then we have this, from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/22/AR2008122202479.html?wpisrc=newsletter, like this is any freaking surprise. Asia has been riding on our coattails of conspicuous consumption for years and someone is supposed to be shocked? This might clear up a few things and give you some ideas: http://www.alternet.org/environment/111954/.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Crawford, nobody is really thinking about anything much at all, except perhaps when to announce the pardons for Cheney that he has been shamelessly politicking for in the press, for days now. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/114774/.

Back at the Fed Spa in DC, Paulson seems to want to emulate Santa Claus and is itching to give away the remaining $350B to Wall Street before the Obama gang can get their hands on it. The AP reported, in the course of things, that something like at least $1.6B of the first batch went to pay out bonuses and perks and most of the rest is unaccounted for….and Citi Corp is still flying a fleet of 9 (nine) private jets. Which brings me back to the accountants and their green eye-shades.

For the life of me ( and apparently the lives of many others), I have no idea where these number crunchers have been hiding. They are supposed to tell us about calamities like this before they happen. You would think, that with all of the financial wizards we claim to have, who make far more money than you or I do, someone could tell us HONESTLY about debacles like Enron (hell, their accounting firm couldn’t account for themselves) , Worldcom, and Lehman Bros. And now Gov. Schwarzenegger says CA is facing a $42B shortfall. And of course a large part of this is because we have had large hedge funds run by hedge-hogs, who evidently come out only at night, to undercut the financial shrubbery of America while we sleep ( we must have the curfew on Madoff all wrong: he cannot come OUT at night.) Another government f#@kup.

I must be missing something, here. Oh, yes: It’s my money. Yours too.

I don’t know why I am doing this. I am supposed to be full of good cheer. I think I will go insert one of those old fashioned VCR cassette tapes into my old-fashioned machine, and play back Bill Murray’s “Scrooged” for some laughs. I can watch it on my non-HD TV while I drink some very-fattening eggnog and eat sugar cookies.

Well SHIT FIRE! I just got a holiday greeting email from Michelle Obama! It asked me to donate to a local food bank or send a care package. What kind of silly non-neo-con compassionate conservative crap is that? I can’t just ditch eight years of conditioning in a flash. Food banks! Bah! Let then eat chocolate truffles! Care Packages! Humbug! Who cares? I’ve just gotten real comfortable being miserable, and I wish everyone would do the same and leave me alone: Hell, it’s Christmas. Show some sympathy.

A Holiday Medley of Maladies

2008-12-19T13:53:00.000-08:00

‘Twas the Friday before Christmas, and I fear that my Grinch status is in peril if I do not act quickly and slide down this chimney. Here are a few of my favorite things (at least this morning):

For openers, I received two emails yesterday, one each from congressional members Wexler and Boxer. Both were announcing their respective year-end efforts to push for good and beneficial humanitarian causes and to thwart those that were not (like last-minute Presidential pardons). While I applaud these efforts and their enthusiasm (their holiday spirit?), they have their heads up their yuletide asses. I only say this because, beneath the verbiage and grandiose claims of “good will towards men”, they were both asking for money. Donations. Cash. Moolah. Green stuff. Dough. As congressional leaders and keepers of the faith, I would have thought they both might have some sensitivity to and recognition of the fact that both the country and the economy being in the dumper. Talk about bad timing. Every other news story, every TV special report of the un-joys of Christmas, remind us that I (we, us) DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE ANY JOBS. I would have also thought that this reality might just enter a little bit into their thinking before they went out onto the street corner with their tin cups. But no, this did not happen. Instead, they demonstrated Grinch-like gall and asked those who have nothing to give more. This is very odd, since I believe that those who are doing the asking have plenty, already. ‘Tis a malady, for sure.

Then, in drawing my next breath, after the firestorm of indignation and hellfire that erupted about Obama asking Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, I read this morning (Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/114018/) that conservatives are unhappy about this situation as well. I proceeded to write this to my friend, Ron:

In what I am viewing as a confirmation of my continuing theory that radical polarization will rip this country to shreds:
Did you see the story in Alternet this morning, about conservatives being pissed off, about Warren and the invocation prayer invitation, BECAUSE HE ACCEPTED THE INVITATION?

Shit fire, man. Obama hands them a golden goose and they run over it with a freaking truck. I am dumbstruck (almost).

To which, Ron responded, thusly:

“Neither side in the culture war wants peace; each wants total destruction of the other”.

“T’was the eve before inauguration, and apparently not a virtue nor good will towards men was stirring here, either. The Grinchification of spirituality. Can someone arise, to “see what the hell is the matter?”

Moving right along, the President decided, at the very last moment, to become the (almost) compassionate conservative he promised to be eight years ago: he has offered a package of candy canes to the US auto industry. $17.4B is earmarked, the bulk of it to be given to GM and Chrysler now (Ford is still boycotting Santa Claus), in order to keep them alive until early next year, and the rest to be doled out in the very early spring, if the economic environment for dinosaurs has not improved by then. This action pretends to override and ameliorate the rancor and rebellious nature of the congress. That elfin bunch recently told Detroit to take a hike (not a plane), despite almost overwhelming public opinion, to the contrary. The congress gave Detroit several lumps of coal; W decided to play Old Saint Nick and brought some fruit cake and eggnog. Detroit, at least for the next few weeks, will gain some weight and get drunk (like Wall St),.

My guess is this:

Despite the conditions, purse strings, regulations, compliances and complicated governances that the bridge loans promise to entail, Detroit will be very sick again by March. Congress said (wisely or unwisely), “You cannot have this phunny money because you were bad”, and King George has shaken his big belly and said ,”Yes you can!”. It is a gesture of fond farewell to a huge segment of American industry which is eating mostly ginger-bread crumbs for Christmas this year. For eight long years W has de-regulated and diversified and privatized and turned a blind eye to the ever-growing woes of the nations’ economy, and now he has placed a small package beneath the Charlie Brown spindly holiday tree, in the hopes that his legacy soon will be there. Kris Kringle has tried, in the last fleeting moments, to iron out a krinkle, but, in the end, as he drives out of sight, this may well be just a blip in the auto drama of plight.

A note here: on 12/18, the DOW closed DOWN over 200 points. 30 minutes after the bail-out announcement on 12/19, the DOW rallied and went up almost 100 and is holding for now. Somebody liked what they found under the tree this morning. Maybe, between the bailout cash and the coal given out by the congress, Detroit can belch some smoke in the next few weeks. Oh wait: Chrysler is already closed down. I think we just closed the barn door after the reindeer got out.

But this just in: Just to remind us that compassionate conservatism has a very limited purview, W just signed last minute regulation (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/bushs-parting-shot-underm_b_152336.html) that says “health care workers can deny patients vital health care information and services” if it is against their religious beliefs. Apparently this reg applies all the way down to the guy or gal who mops the hospital floor. So much for that “save the world” legacy stuff. Some awful stuff dances in W’s head, while we are so snug, in our safe, little beds.

As for who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, nobody seems to have this one figured out, especially when it comes to the remaining $350B TARP and what will happen to it. Never mind, for a second, that no one is really sure what happened to the first $350B (bankers and their coffers got stocking-stuffed, brokers got their bonuses, Madoff ran away with the dish and the spoon, hedge funds got re-hedged and AIG partied real good…twice), Paulson has now said that the feds are ready to think about spending the next pile of loot (phunny money). Once again, no one seems to be able to account for who gets this money, where it goes or who gets to spend it. A federal official confessed just yesterday that the complete lack of controls, oversight and accountability for the wad of cash already evaporated was deplorable and that the resultant effect on the mortgage and forclosure crisis was negligible and “a bust”.

There are many who say that before we all dance around the Christmas tree or have visions of sugar plums or wait to hear the sound of reindeer on the roof, we should realize that Greenspan, Paulson, et.al., have let the roof fall in around us by playing with the phunny money as if it were monopoly money. Greedy credit/fault/swap/buy-back/loan guarantees that were hedged on our bets that tomorrow would be fine have left a large deposit of soot at the base of the fireplace and the stockings are all soiled with care.

We have put away the picket signs that say, “The End is Near” until perhaps Jan.2, but they should be right back out again, shortly. It is a good thing that our money says, “In God We Trust”, because we sure as hell can’t trust anyone else. What’s in YOUR wallet?

The big “ish-shoe”: Several news sources report that the Olympic Iraqi shoe-thrower has been jailed and beaten and may have a broken arm. He has made an appeal to Maliki for a pardon and to be exempted from a multi-year jail sentence for behaving badly in the presence of a world leader. Disregarding the fact, for a moment, that there were no world leaders present for this escapade, the brouhaha seems a bit extreme. And it certainly does not warrant a jail term. People throw their weight around all the time and don’t go to jail, so what is the big deal with a couple of size 10 loafers? I know people who throw their shoes around all the time, leave them in great piles and don’t even line them up nicely, but I don’t see them being hauled off in paddy wagons, beat up or incarcerated: we should get our priorities in order, here. And how come Santa gets to wear those shiny, patent leather boots, anyway?

However, there is a contingent of (admittedly conspiracy-minded) individuals who have suggested that this entire event was staged. They have conjectured that it was a publicity stunt. They ask questions like, “How did this guy get into such a secure venue with bogus credentials?”; “How did he get in with such loose-fitting shoes?”; ”Why was the President so well-prepared to duck and cover?”; “How did this perpetrator manage to get off TWO well thrown projectiles before being stopped?”. Many believe he was not the “sole” participant in this melodrama. You might think that this is stretching the truth, but both “world leaders” needed all the press they could get, and after the cover-ups surrounding events like 9/11 and Katrina reactions, I would not put this past the Bush administration for a minute. And I think it is safe to say that the thrower is being thrown to the wolves, and certainly not in the spirit of Christmas. “And out from his cell, there arose such a clatter”: he is banging his tin cup up against the cell bars.

Speaking of Katrina, and I really hate to bring this up at the holidays, but there comes this story:

“After Katrina, it was literally open season on Black folks”

A new report in The Nation documents what many have claimed for years -- for some Black New Orleanians the threat of being killed by White vigilantes in Katrina's aftermath became a bigger threat than the storm itself.
After the storm, White vigilantes roamed Algiers Point shooting and, according to their own accounts, killing Black men at will-- with no threat of a police response. For the last three years, the shootings and the police force's role in them have been an open secret to many New Orleanians. To date, no one has been charged with a crime and law enforcement officials have refused to investigate.
The facts are finally seeing the light of day. Now we must demand action. Given Louisiana's horrible record when it comes to criminal justice and Black folks, it's the only path to justice.
You can help. Join us in calling on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a full investigation of these crimes and any police cover-up. It takes only a moment to add your voice and to invite your friends and family to do the same:
http://www.colorofchange.org/nation/?id=1683-466342
In the two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the media created a climate of fear with trumped-up stories of Black lawlessness. Meanwhile, an armed group of White vigilantes took over the Algiers Point neighborhood in New Orleans and mercilessly hunted down Black people. "It was great!" said one vigilante. "It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."
The Nation's article tells the story of Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, and Chris Collins -- a group of friends who were attacked by shotgun-wielding White men as they entered Algiers Point on September 1, 2005. As they tried to escape, Herrington recalls, their attackers shouted, "Get him! Get that nigger!" He managed to get away. Alexander and Collins were told that they would be allowed to live on the condition that they told other Black folks not to come to Algiers Point. Herrington, shot in the neck, barely survived.
And there's the story of Henry Glover, who didn't survive after being shot by an unknown assailant. 2 Glover's brother flagged down a stranger for help, and the two men brought Glover to a police station. But instead of receiving aid, they were beaten by officers while Henry Glover bled to death in the back seat of the stranger's car. A police officer drove off in the car soon afterward. Both Glover's body and the car were found burnt to cinders a week later. It took DNA analysis to identify the body.
Then there's the story of White militiamen who tried to drive their Black neighbors from their homes. Reggie Bell, who lived just two blocks down the street from the vigilantes' ringleader, was told at gunpoint, "We don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot." Later, another group of armed White men confronted him at his home, asking, "Whatcha still doing around here? We don't want you around here. You gotta go."
These are only a few of the stories of Black folks who were accosted in Algiers Point, and you can read more in The Nation. But unless you speak out, we may never learn the full extent of the violence. Journalists have encountered a wall of silence on the part of the authorities. The coroner had to be sued to turn over autopsy records. When he finally complied, the records were incomplete, with files on several suspicious deaths suddenly empty. The New Orleans police and the District Attorney repeatedly refused to talk to journalists about Algiers Point. And according to journalist A.C. Thompson, "the city has in nearly every case refused to investigate or prosecute people for assaults and murders committed in the wake of the storm."
The Nation's article is important, but it's just a start. For more than three years now, these racist criminals have by their own admission gotten away with murder, while officials in New Orleans have systematically evaded any kind of accountability. We have to demand it.
Please join us in calling on state and federal officials to investigate these brutal attacks and the conduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement agencies, and please ask your friends and family to do the same.
1. "Katrina's Hidden Race War," The Nation, 12-18-2008
http://www.colorofchange.org/link/?id=1683-466342&cat=nation&link=1
2. "Body of Evidence," The Nation, 12-18-2008
http://www.colorofchange.org/link/?id=1683-466342&cat=nation&link=2

Now, if you can read your way through these stories, without becoming ill, your stomach is stronger than mine. My guess is that a large majority of white Americans have no clue that, in the aftermath of Katrina, instead of putting out the welcome mat or milk and cookies (like we do for Santa), southern whites laid out shotguns and went after blacks, thinking they were shooting fish in a barrel and no one would care. I know we just elected a black President, but anyone who believes for a moment that racism is dead and/or dying in America had better wake up and smell the cocoa by his Christmas greenery and mistletoe.

My friend Ron has said (and I mostly agree) that the “wheels are coming off the wagon” of the American economy and culture. A few days ago I was wandering through a holiday bazaar, full of the wares of craftspeople and home-based manufacturers, trying to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of what I was seeing. In truth, most of what was for sale was nothing that anybody really needed, and also probably true was the fact that people were spending money they didn’t have. It may have been a microcosm of Hank Paulson spending the fed money on Wall St., without a care for tomorrow. Who knows?

And I think someone pulled the plug on the Detroit Christmas tree lights and the tinsel fell off: The DOW just closed for the day, DOWN, 26, at 8579. I hope our white Christmas is not a white-wash.

And to all a good night.

Life goes on in Texas.

Public Prayer , Public Outcry

2008-12-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

Since I am somewhat of an expert, when it comes to knee jerk reactions, I felt the need to have one of a reciprocal nature,when I read this article by Sarah Posner.

A Bigot, Anti-Choice Pastor Picked for Obama's Inauguration

By Sarah Posner, TheNation.com. Posted December 18, 2008.

http://www.alternet.org/election08/113772/?cID=1085622#c1085622

I have been watching coverage of this morning's press conference with the Pres-elect. Predictably, the press questions and the MSM follow-up punditry have placed the Warren story over and above any other noteworthy announcements about appointments and nominations for high government posts. What dolts we are.

First of all, I am vehement in my beliefs (as are many others here) about the separation of church and state. I don't know why(logically speaking) we need either an invocation or a benediction at a highly secular ceremony. Just performing those at all, by anyone, is cow-towing to the Christian masses who maintain the misguided (and emotional) sense of religion that pervades America. This was never supposed to be a "Christian nation" in the first place, and we have managed to contort that vision horrifically.

Be that as it may (too little, too late, too bad), Obama said that he had previously been asked to speak at Warren's church, despite his beliefs that are quite contrary to Warrens', and he was, in the spirit of "bringing America together", offering Warren a similiar oportunity. Personally, I think Warren has all the exposure anyone should have and do not relish him getting any more free PR.

However, I applaud Obama for exhibiting tolerance and showing some degree of deference to the religious right in sharing the platform in this manner. The really good news is that about an hour after it is all over, we will have forgotten what Warren said, anyway, and we can move on. As strongly as I object to injecting prayer into this event in any fashion, I really don't see that it is worth getting our liberal and progressive panties in a bunch over. Jesus Christ! (pardon the expression) The economy is in the tank and Bush is almost gone! Pray about those!

OOPS! Celebrity Status!

2008-12-17T10:14:00.000-08:00

Is America's political 'nobility' undemocratic?
Kennedys, Bushes, Rockefellers demonstrate genetic popularity and power

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28257519/

If you will read this article, you might get a sense of the frustration I hear from others about how our “democratic” government is growing increasingly “un-democratic”. Like Robin Leach’s show, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, our government is becoming a celebrity haven and a “good ole’ boys (and girl's) club”. Our politicians have long since stopped asking what they might do for their country, but what the country might do for them. They worry more about spotlights and footlights than they do about fixing stoplights and closing tax loopholes. They would rather be television stars and headline grabbers than work as soldiers in the trenches of everyday life and spend any energy combating the woes of poverty and inequality. Busting a union for ideological sensationalism is more important than busting a drug cartel. Getting face time on Meet the Press and receiving a celebrity endorsement is more important than face time on the street with Joe the Real Plumber or taking a stand against wanton government waste that takes funds away from entitlement programs for the poor and/or unemployed.

If you consider only the fact that the RNC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothing, hair stylings and make-up for Sarah Palin, it tells us about how easily Americans are distracted by the glamorousness, flash and pizzazz of runway status. Politicos are learning what India’s Bollywood learned years ago: get something on the silver screen with name-brand recognition and nice clothes and it will sell…and turn a profit.

We have come to elect “leaders” for their spectacular smiles and familial ties rather than for talent, insight, and leadership abilities, or for any sense for philanthropy. Bush wants to manufacture a legacy for Jeb, Nancy Reagan wanted to be the Queen of the United States (until we just said no to both her and her drug slogans), we have an entire cadre of “Clintonistas” and now we have Caroline Kennedy, about to be named (crowned?) the Princess of New York, the belle of the Ball and perhaps next contender for Female Ruler of the Universe. We have gone from, “Here I am. I’m qualified to represent you, elect me, please”, to “Hi there! I am a famous son, daughter, nephew or cousin of a noble member of an aristocratic American clan that comes from old money (and I’d like to be a movie star), so vote for me and you will get goosebumps when I speak to Fox News”. Sick. Disturbing. Disheartening. Disgusting.

The humorist Andy Borowitz gave it this spin, this morning:

Caroline Kennedy Asks to be Time’s Person of the Year, Places Phone Call to Magazine’s Editor

Caroline Kennedy would like to be considered Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2009 and has let the magazine's editor know of her interest in the honor, aides to Ms. Kennedy confirmed today.While some observers considered Ms. Kennedy's bid to be premature, especially since 2009 has not officially begun, aides to the New York senatorial aspirant said that it reflected her view that 2009 will be a very big year for her."I think Caroline's calling Time magazine and asking to be put on the cover shows just what a tireless worker she is," said cousin Kerry Kennedy. "When she really wants something, she's not afraid to roll up her sleeves and make a phone call."Her cousin said that having witnessed Caroline's work ethic, she has no doubt that she is deserving of Time's highest honor: "I can't tell you how many times she's gotten the wrong number, been put on hold, or had calls dropped altogether."In addition to the Person of the Year honors, Kerry Kennedy said that Caroline had also expressed an interest in next year's Nobel Peace Prize."That's a call she hasn't made yet," Ms. Kennedy said. "She has to figure out the time difference in Oslo."

Silly of course, and nonsensical, but frighteningly too close to the reality of American politics.

I suggest that our next election cycle feature on the names of people we have never heard of before: No Bushes, no shrubs, No Clintons or “istas”, no Reagans or Rockefellers, no Goldmans and no Sachs. No Wall Streeters or Fleet Streeters, and no first cousins twice removed of Billy Bob whoever he is. Not even any Washingtons or Jeffersons, or any Hillary William Jeffersons. Enough.

We need to elect some people who speak FOR us and not in spite of us. We need to elect people who will be eager to serve instead of be served. We need to elect people that are in for the duration and not the adoration. Let’s skip the Edward’s haircuts and the Biden suits and the Charlton Heston bravado and elect John Jones Smith. Let’s elect Maggie Elizabeth Everyman or Elmer Foxworthy instead of Nigel Newsworthy. Let’s elect someone like me, with bad teeth and a crooked smile (no, not that Cheney smirk).

It is time to elect the guy next door, the guy nobody has ever heard of, but the guy (or gal) who is pissed off about potholes and poobahs, doesn’t have a secret stash of oil money in an account off-shore, only has one old car that needs new tires and does not own three houses on a synthetic beachfront in Arizona, funded by beer money.

Old money does not automatically impart new wisdom. Leadership is not genetic. Genealogies do not guarantee insight. Nomenclature does not ensure noble behavior. Those who governed once before does not mean that this one can govern now. Photogenic affability does not promise pervasive ingenuity. Being smartly dressed does not necessarily portend making smart decisions. The current normal business has become abnormal showbusiness and the forecasted new normal aristocracy is most likely old hat. We need some new hats.