Hi there, come on in.  No, don't get too close ... I really don't feel good.  Thank you, and I feel worse than I look.  It's one of those stomach flu viruses that pops up now and again when you're an unsuspecting victim.  Translation: turn around and run.

So here I sit alone, feeling like death warmed over but proud that I'm saving the world from further infection.  I work the desk at an oceanfront motel, as many of you know, and it's really freaking busy at this time of the year.  Which means that I meet, greet and warmly welcome lots of folks into the fold every day.  Tonight I am cursing them all - since I don't know which one of the insolent bastards decided to share this with me.  Don't tell my Mom I said bastards.  Please.  When I'm sick I revert to a child and really worry about things like that.

Things like the ashtray under the bed or the bong in the closet.  The ding in the fender and the scratch on the door.  The bonfire my friends and I started that required the assistance of the friendly neighborhood fire department or the upchucking into the porcelain god of parties gone wild.  Mental note - do not say "upchucking".  Excuse me for a moment.

The lights are low, the music is soft and I'm in the ugly blue chair with my feet tucked up underneath me and my arms wrapped around a pillow.  And I'm sick.  I've even had to abandon my cheap Zin for some tea that Wendy left.  It's a comfort, as is the thought that you're all out there feeling wonderful and having fun.  Even though I'm alone, I'm wondering ... what are you doing tonight?

 

Earlier today, third ranking House Republican Mike Pence (Indiana) denounced the Waxman-Markey plan to control CO2 emissions as a "national energy tax" that would accomplish little to mitigate global warming if other nations do not act as well.  Mr. Pence is right on both counts.

A cap on carbon emissions will increase the cost of carbon in accordance with the laws of supply and demand.  This increase will be transmitted to the public - a "tax" if you will.  Equally true, the reduction achievable in U.S. carbon emissions will by itself affect global emissions only slightly, with correspondingly small effects on future warming.

On the other hand, we know that no other nation will commit to major emissions reductions if the U.S. fails to act, and we know that meaningful reductions will require participation by all of the world's important emitters.  This situation exemplifies what Garrett Hardin termed "The Tragedy of the Commons" in the journal Science in 1968.  The title refers to a resource shared by multiple users, each of whom gains by exploiting it fully, even though the resource is despoiled or depleted as a result.  From the selfish perspective of each, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.  That person's individual contribution to the depletion only fractionally reduces the value of the resource, whereas failure to exploit the resource would forfeit all of its value for that same individual.  Hardin illustrated the concept with a hypothetical parcel of land available to multiple herders for cattle grazing.  Each herder benefits from sending as many cows as possible to graze, because each fed cow yields an additional benefit, even if the grass is slightly more depleted by that one addition.  The problem, of course, is that if all herders apply this principle, the grazing land (the "commons") is destroyed, and all suffer.

In the short run, it is in every nation's economic interest to maximize its energy supply, using CO2-emitting fossil fuels to the extent necessary.  Each nation derives substantial benefit from a robust energy sector, but contributes only a modest fraction at most to total global CO2 and the consequent warming.  To forego the energy would entail a major economic sacrifice, while only helping the world slightly, as Mr. Pence reminds us, in the effort to address the global warming threat.

Tragically - I use the word literally to denote impending tragedy - I believe most citizens of this and other nations would be enlightened enough to make the necessary sacrifices for the ultimate common good, were it not for the efforts of the Mike Pences of this world to persuade them that they would be the gullible victims of tax raisers. 

Am I being too pessimistic?  I hope so.  I hope that the denunciations hurled in the service of the fossil fuel industry and its beneficiaries will fail to withstand a vigorous campaign by the President, by most (but not all) Democrats in Congress, by a few conscientious Republicans, and by you and me -"we the people" - to begin to set aright all the despoiling we've inflicted on our atmosphere - our global "commons" - by using it as a global garbage dump over the past 150 years.

The coming months will  be preface to tragedy, or to a happier denouement that comes a few years hence when the curtain falls at the end of the third act.

The Obama administration is continuing to actively pursue the Bush administration's assertion of immunity for those who crafted, approved, and engaged in torture. Yesterday, the Department of Justice and John Yoo were handed a stinging rebuke by Bush appointed Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California.

Read more »

David LETTERMAN's comments and feigned apology about Sarah Palin's daughters: disgustingly chauvinistic

No, this isn't about the differences between boys and girls, heh heh.  If you guys and gals haven't figured the differences out by now, well....

Anyway, this post is about the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.  Man, do they rawk.

My sister on Long Island is a single mom raising a wonderful and smart little girl of eight.  My sister works hard for a living and can't be home with my niece after school although she'd like to be.  So my sister enrolled my niece in the local B&GC.

Can I just say that my niece is excelling there and this program is the best thing ever??  My niece is now playing softball (and rawking it!) and is most especially enjoying the Science Club (she also excels at math, so Obama would be very pleased to know that there's at least one little girl out there who loves math and science the most out of all her classes both at school and at the Club).

My sister is fortunate enough to live in a wealthy area, and her specific B&GC gets some pretty nice donations.  It's my hope that all of them do -- or will.  The Club my niece goes to pays attention to school schedules, and will open early when school closes early.  They also provide bussing from the school to their facility, and summer courses.  A parent's dream come true, truly.

I urge all of you to look up your local B&GC and either enroll your kids in the program, or donate or volunteer.

Cute side story my sister just told me on the phone tonight:  During Science class, my niece's teacher was discussing evolution.  A little boy in the class raised his hand and announced to the teacher, "You are wrong.  My dad says that God created us."  My niece then raised her hand, and turned to the boy and politely said, "I'm sorry, but your father is confusing religion with science."

Eight years old.  Go figure.

Heh heh.....that's my niece.  Damn proud of her, too, I am.  Can you tell?

For a little background on the meaning of "natural born" as it is used in Art. I, Sec. 5, Clause 5, of the U.S Constitution, please click here.

ex animo

davidfarrar

How's about some music, laughter, conversation in real time, and just a whole lotta fun with friends?

Please join us in chat.  We'd love to see you.

Mr. Yoo, as part of a senior administrative group called the War Council, helped to shape Bush administration policy in the war on terrorism, and as deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, wrote many memorandums authorizing harsh treatment. Mr. Yoo had argued that he should be immune from the suit because it was not clearly established that the treatment would be unconstitutional.

Judge White, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, rejected all but one of Mr. Yoo's immunity claims and found that Mr. Padilla "has alleged sufficient facts to satisfy the requirement that Yoo set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights."

New York Times June 13, 2009

I came across this letter purportedly from opposition candidate Mousavi to the people of Iran. The media seem to not have taken notice of it in the post election fog. Reports of his house arrest and the virtual national information lockdown seem to be making it difficult to confirm any of this information.

No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery,
As though we are not miserable enough of ourselves
    but must fetch in more from the next house,
In taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

I heard Barack Obama live, at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC, two years ago.  I was in the Ballroom of the Washington Hilton with a bunch of hardened political junkies, aging hippies, reformers and bloggers, not that these are hardened categories.  Lunch was over: people flowed in from every door until every inch of wall space was occupied.  Persons who need a lot of personal space would not have been happy in the crush.  Obama opened his mouth and started to tell us stories.  No pin would have dared to drop, and if one did, nobody would have paid it any attention.  There were no applause lines, as I recall, and no applause once he launched into the meat of his address.  When he finished, silence for perhaps an eternity, or perhaps 10 seconds.  Who knew?

I thought about entitling this little piece The Rhetoric of Narrative, but I may save that for another entry.  Connectivity through narrative is probably what this is/will be about.  I think feeling connected is very important to our President-I read this in his books and in his speeches.  And I'm risking hubris to muse upon why this is so important to him.  A tentative thesis is that outsider status makes a person either alienated or crave community, and I would suggest that the second alternative is the choice Obama has made.

I think Obama seeks to make both linear (i.e. historical) and lateral connections, and he does this at levels from the personal on outward.  I think I'll hold off on his use of history for a bit, if no one objects, and think more about his forging of community, though the two are interrelated to a point where separating them for discussion's sake doesn't really do justice.  

MHO, Obama is unique among public personages in having ties to so many communities deeply suspicious of each other.  I remember early in the campaign Bozos (mainly white Bozos) wondering if he was black enough.  How does one establish roots of any kind when one lives in so many different places, and when the choice of place is not one's own. It wasn't just the geographic mobility  which was unusual:  it was the age at which it was experienced.  The only comparable experience might be children of the military--yet there's a similarity base to base which makes the constant change a little less disorienting, I think.

A few years ago, the New York Times published a series called Class Matters, and it is still available online.  I use it in a course I teach on Class and Culture in America.  (I'm being even more oblique than usual, but bear with me-or not).  One of the sections which caught the class's interest the most was Day Eight-the "Relo Class"...which told the story of the Link family (ironic name there), at that time of Alpharetta, Georgia.  The narrative was about the endless community hopping which marks the career path of the upwardly mobile...belonging everywhere, belonging nowhere.  The Links had no links.  It turns out that one of my students had lived in Alpharetta-and in six other communities and was currently living in Connecticut.  He was nineteen years old.  I asked him how he liked it.  He hated it.

Barack Obama: of Hawaii-of Kansas-of Indonesia-of Chicago-of California--of Cambridge- of the White Community-of the Black Community-out of Kenya-out of Ireland-attached to the Christian Tradition-attached to the Muslim tradition.  It makes the head spin.  I haven't heard him tell an Irish tale, but everything else appears somewhere in his writings or speeches.  His personal story relies so much on tradition that I catch a special reliance upon and affection for persons a generation or more older than he is.  I resonate with this as the grandson of Swedish immigrants who were geographically mobile but rooted in a settled tradition to a far greater degree than their grandchildren are.  That Washington noon he spoke about a one hundred and two year old woman who came out to see him, and how honored he felt by that.  One of the great themes of the Conference was the beating back of threats to Social Security-one of Josh's great causes.  Obama didn't cite statistics-Tom Harkin and others did that.  Obama told us a story about a magnificent woman of one hundred and two who deserved better of us... of the future senior citizens who would be equally worthy.

One thing I've also noted is that he increasingly uses language of the grandparents generation-or at least language my grandparents would have been comfortable with.  I listened to the Cairo Speech, and out of it the phrase "hateful and ignorant" burrowed direct into my brain.  Perhaps the reason was that I heard that phrase growing up more than once.  What a difference there is between "Axis of Evil" and "hateful and ignorant".  The first could have been written by any six figure Madison Avenue Mogul: the second could have been said by any granny in any of the United States-the language of the slogan is met by the language of the people and bested by it.  

Now my grandmother's racial ideas weren't all that different from those of Obama's grandmother.  But she would never allow us to use the N word in her house.  That was hateful and ignorant.  The Bozo Brethren in Media Land (the Cisterns too) (groan), immediately tried to make this yet another code in replacement of the War of Terror.  But I think they really underestimate Obama's subtlety... "hateful and ignorant" describes a type of human behavior applicable to individuals of any religious or national group.  The killing of Dr. Tiller was "hateful"-Bill O'Reilly's use of "Tiller Baby Killer" was hateful and ignorant.  I expect to hear the President  condemning behavior in granny language again and again.  The slaying at the Holocaust Memorial testifies to the hateful ignorance of radicals on the right.  And so it goes.

And so it goes with me too.  Too many points doth a boring blog make, and I've probably put all but the hardiest to sleep.  One last thing-a teaser to something I expect I'll write about later, and probably get thwacked for when I do.  At the core of connectivity is empathy, about which George Lakoff wrote some interesting words at Huffington Post.  I don't know if anyone else has drawn attention to this, I suspect I'm late to the game.   I was grieved when Obama backed away from this a bit, and I sent a note to Whitehouse.gov to let some minion know that I want empathetic judges.  More empathy, and less irrationality in the penal system--if it ain't broke don't fix it, but if it is broke, fix it quick--like Dickday suggests.

 

There has been much discussion lately over civility. As that great philosopher Glenn Beck said recently:

"When did we get to the place in America to where we can't have disagreements without demonizing each other?"

 

I did a blog on January 11th of this year discussing how we could comply with this pundit's plea; how we could find a way to accomplish this mean feat.  Just to refresh your memories:

 

Jay Rosen told us to draw two concentric circles. Make the inner one 2" in diameter and the out circle 4" in diameter. This is the double circle visual aid to help us understand three levels of debate in this country.
 
1. The inner circle would represent The sphere of consensus(and) is the "motherhood and apple pie" of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree.

 2.  The area between the two circles would be The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space.
 
3. The wacko sphere is that area outside the big circle:  In the sphere of deviance we find "political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.

 So I thought I would give a few good examples of how this dream of civility might work:

 

EVOLUTION

 

So you and your four buddies from the engineering facility at Pentel are having a polite but lively discussion  at the local watering hole. The debate concerns evolution which is the change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though the changes produced in any one generation are small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the organisms. This process can culminate in the emergence of new species.^[1] Indeed, the similarities between organisms suggest that all known species are descended from a common ancestor (or ancestral gene pool) through this process of gradual divergence.^[2]

Then you proceed to discuss the basis of evolution; the genes that are passed on from generation to generation; these produce an organism's inherited traits. These traits vary within populations, with organisms showing heritable differences (variation) in their traits. Evolution itself is the product of two opposing forces: processes that constantly introduce variation, and processes that make variants become more common or rare. New variation arises in two main ways: either from mutations in genes, or from the transfer of genes between populations and between species. In species that reproduce sexually, new combinations of genes are also produced by genetic recombination, which can increase variation between organisms.

Two major mechanisms determine which variants will become more common or rare in a population. One is natural selection, a process that causes helpful traits (those that increase the chance of survival and reproduction) to become more common in a population and causes harmful traits to become more rare. You proceed to discuss genetic drift, an independent process that produces random changes in the frequency of traits in a population. Genetic drift results from the role that chance plays in whether a given trait will be passed on as individuals survive and reproduce. So you proceed to discuss how these random mutations occur in the genomes of organisms. Which naturally brings you to a discussion of  changes in the DNA sequence of a cell's genome and and which causal agent for change is more important, including discussions of radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic chemicals, as well as errors that occur during meiosis or DNA replication.[25][26][27] Frank is sure that there are more environmental reasons for direct changes in the DNA sequences in the living cell and Adam is furious that Frank is missing the entire point of evolution as a process that relies upon millions and millions of years for it to work. Now you are finishing your third beer and Williams from accounting happens to show up bringing his beer from the bar directly to your table. He sits down and begins discuss how we know the world is 6,000 years old and how the fine research of Bishop Usher bears all this out.   What do you do? I mean I already know what you are thinking. How could anyone dispute that the missing link between the Ape and ourselves is NOW SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO ME.   Solution? Well you naturally order tequila shots all around and begin a new discussion:   How about those Mets?   GLOBAL WARMING   You are your buddies are down at the local sports bar a couple hours before the Red Sox meet the Yankees at the new stadium. This is also the time to get into a serious but friendly debate about global warming.   Tom, who works at the local news outlet begins the discussion with the fact that global warming appears to be  the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the last century.[1][A] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century.[1] The IPCC also concludes that natural phenomena such as solar variation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward.[2][3]        Herb, your brother in law adds that increasing global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts.[7] The continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice is expected, with the Arctic region being particularly affected. Other likely effects include shrinkage of the Amazon rainforest and Boreal forests, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions and changes in agricultural yields. And Harry who works as a part timer in the steno pool at the newspaper begins discussing the great sea that is becoming the North Pole and its affect on the North Sea alone. As the discussion continues you notice the bartender has raised the sound on the big screen which is currently turned to CNN. Senator Imhofe: For these reasons I would like to discuss an important body of scientific research that refutes the anthropogenic theory of catastrophic global warming. I believe this research offers compelling proof that human activities have little impact on climate. This research, well documented in the scientific literature, directly challenges the environmental worldview of the media, so they typically don't receive proper attention and discussion. Certain members of the media would rather level personal attacks on scientists who question "accepted" global warming theories than engage on the science. ... Such a policy would induce serious economic harm, especially for low-income and minority populations. Energy suppression, as official government and non-partisan private analyses have amply confirmed, means higher prices for food, medical care, and electricity, as well as massive job losses and drastic reductions in gross domestic product, all the while providing virtually no environmental benefit. In other words: a raw deal for the American people and a crisis for the poor. Now you are thinking, hey, since when did Imhofe ever ever care about the poor and disenfranchised? When did Senator Imhofe ever vote for an increase in the minimum wage, work to free the minorities who are stuck in prison with no hope due to meaningless drug laws, work to see that 47 million people could receive health care and that an even larger number could receive better health care, or vote for anything that ever helped one poor person in his entire political career. Well you are in Texas after all, and the bartender is kind of in charge of the big screen tv and he is a human being and stuff. So rather than taking a life, you pull out your 45, and fire three times into the screen and go over to Herbie's house to watch the game. RACISM IN AMERICA Frederick Douglass We have had several discussions about what I call latent racism. Calm and courteous for the most part. Oh yeah, I would say, if there is no racism today (as Scarborough says because he went to high school with blacks decades ago) why is the unemployment rate twice that for Blacks as it is for whites. Why when you visit places like Georgia have a prison population that is 70% Black?  Not even getting into the fact that Georgia has the third highest prison population per capita in the United States--which makes that fact even worse. As immigrants, historically speaking, African Americans were the only group that DID NOT ASK TO COME HERE. And do we miss the point when we decide to blame the entire friggin problem on the South?  When, at the time that Civil War broke out in this country it was illegal for a free Black man to even be in Illinois? And after examining scores of statistics and arguments for the cause of racist bias in this country, there is are issues concerning how to 'make things right'.  On the right of course there are those who refuse to see a problem at all. Its over for Joe Scarborough. I mean look at Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson (well maybe don't really look hard at Michael Jackson), Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Jordon, and Tiger Woods. There are hundreds of multimillionaires among African Americans and now, of course, we have a Black President of the United States. Game over. God I get angry with those people. Talk about turning your face to the wall. But lets go back again to the arguments here at TPMCafe about these issues. Long blogs and longer comments. Very spirited debates. And then an old face appears on the front page of TPMCafe yesterday. Our old friend Pat Buchanan said: Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity. This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries. One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated "with the base alloy of hypocrisy." First, Sonia Sotomayor was number one in her class at Princeton. So if we were to go back 30 years, Sonia would be one of only thirty people in the entire country who could claim that title. Getting to Yale had nothing to do with her cultural, ethnic or racial background. Nothing. YALE  gets down on its ivy league knees begging for people like this to go to their prestigious law school. They wanted this student in their law school before they even saw her picture and certainly felt good that they beat Harvard Law School to the punch. WHAT IN THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT? One prefers the old bigotry. I had already discussed this unrequited hatred in my post: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/dikkday48yahoocom/ In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92) http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553 In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92) In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89) I already noted Jamison Foser's column in MediaMatters on June 8: http://mediamatters.org/columns/200906080008 In a memo Buchanan wrote while working in the Nixon White House, he dismissed a massacre in which 67 blacks were shot to death by South African police as nothing more than "a few South African whites mistreating a couple of blacks." Concern over the shooting, Buchanan wrote, was "racist and ideological." That's right: Buchanan denounced concern over white South African police officers massacring 67 blacks, rather than the shootings themselves, as "racist. [I]t is difficult to share the wild enthusiasm about the news that Nelson Mandela will be released, that South Africa, too, may soon enjoy the blessings of "majority rule." But, where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this. They did not give the Indians, who were still living a tribal existence, the right to vote us out of North America. When they created the Republic, they restricted the franchise to property-owning males, believing that not every man was qualified to rule, nor every people prepared for self-government. If the past 30 years [of African history] taught us nothing else, it has surely taught us that. First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. What can we conclude here? Well sometimes screw civil discourse.

We've had lots of discussion lately about health care, which has set my mind to wandering and wondering. As long as we're advocating for health care as a basic human right, shouldn't we be talking about our responsibilities to the system, and defining "rights" as they apply to those depending on the system?

Although health care is not specifically addressed in our founding documents, there are those who think a case can be made that it is. Still others think it is only for those who can afford it.

It seems clear that we here at TPM have elevated health care from a "wouldn't it be nice?" (WIBN) to a "right."  So for the sake of this discussion, let's assume we do have that right.

Additionally, although not a "right" per se, we have food stamps available for those unable to provide food for their families, and many areas offer food banks to further help those in need. (I'll tie this in down the road a piece.)

Now let's throw responsibility into the mix (and this is where the discussion gets a little dicey.)

We've set up the idea that all people have a right to healthcare. That means we will all be paying for everyone else's health care. So what does that include, and where do personal responibilities come in? Or do they?

I think we can all agree that emergency medical care fits in...injuries sustained in automobile accidents, accidents around the home and community etc.  But does it include injuries sustained as a result of participating in "extreme sports?"  Do we now get to pay for all the care involved when you have turned yourself into a quadraplegic? Would people participating in things like this be required to carry insurance policies to cover injuries inherent in these types of activities? Why? Or why not?

I think we can all agree that maternity needs would be covered, but does that mean that everyone can pop out as many kids as they want, and we all have to pay for it? Why? Or why not? And if not, how, in a free society can you stop the unfettered reproduction?

And what about smoking? Would people be required to stop smoking? If not, should the general population be required to pay for health care involved in smoking-related diseases, when CLEARLY this is optional behavior? Why? Or why not?

And what about obesity related diseases? Once our health care is the responsibilty of us all, do we have a social responsibility to maintain a healthy weight? Can we continue to eat and maintain a sedentary lifestyle while others are forced to bear the financial responsibility for our behaviors?

Here's where the food stamps and food banks come in...

If we as a society are going to take responsibility for feeding those who cannot afford to feed themselves, do we not have an obligation to feed them responsibly?  Should we be allowing food stamps to be used for buying Cheetos and Oreos and Coke? A friend recently posed the question "How come so many poor people are fat?" Well, I can tell you why. They are malnourished. It's not necessarily that they are eating too much (although that is true in some cases.) They have been forced to live off the dollar menu at fast food restaurants because it is cheaper than buying real food. Or they eat crap food because it provides comfort or they never learned how to eat a healthy balance diet.

What if when you signed up for food stamps, you had to take a few hour course in nutrition? Or how about if instead of getting dollar amounts of food stamps, someone, somewhere figured out how much food it took to sustain a family of (?) and you got certificates for so many bags of frozen vegetables and so many packages of (hold my nose and say it) meat and so many pounds of fresh fruit...no more government subsidies of twinkies (I mean, are twinkies a "right" or a WIBN?)

What if we started donating healthy food to food banks instead of crap food? I almost passed out when I saw a grossly overweight woman walking out of a food bank (to which I was delivering a bunch of cases of canned foods like soup and vegetables and bags of roasted almonds) with 3 huge bags of Oreos and a bunch of crap snack foods. Empty calories are not a good idea...they may keep people alive, but surely they deserve better than that!

So what do you think, people? What are our rights and responsibilities? Or should this all be unconditional, allowing any and all of us to abuse the golden goose until we've killed her?  

It appears to be a quick decision made Friday:

Obama Pledges $73 Million for Zimbabwe's People 
By Kent Klein
White House
Voice of America, 12 June 2009
 
President Barack Obama is promising $73 Million in U.S. aid to the people of Zimbabwe. The president made the pledge Friday, after meeting with Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in the Oval Office. 

President Obama says the U.S. assistance will go directly to the people of Zimbabwe because Washington believes that President Robert Mugabe does not always act in the interest of Zimbabwe's people.

But after meeting with Prime Minister Tsvangirai, Mr. Obama told reporters there is reason for hope.

"I, obviously, have extraordinary admiration for the courage, the tenacity that the prime minister has shown in navigating through some very difficult political times in Zimbabwe," he said....

contrast that with this report the day before:

US Seeks Ways to 'Appropriately' Support Zimbabwe Government - Clinton 
By Blessing Zulu & Patience Rusere
Washington
Voice of America, 11 June 2009
 
Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai met Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who in comments to reporters before their conversation appeared to add some nuance to the well-established American position that Washington will not directly fund the operations of the Harare government without seeing broad and deep reforms.

Mr. Tsvangirai is scheduled to meet Friday with President Barack Obama.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said early this week that no major aid could be expected until the Harare government as a whole institutes significant reforms on human rights and the rule of law, and ends harassment of political and civic activists, seemingly underscoring the humanitarian-only aid policy that has been in place for months....

See also New York Times'  Zimbabwe Divisions Pose a Quandary for the West, of June 12, by Celia W. Dugger,

and  Urging Freedoms, Obama Chides Zimbabwe Leader, of June 13, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg. 

 

Unconfirmed reports out of Iran say former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has resigned as chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, which arbitrates disputes between the religious leadership (Council of Guardians) and the Majlis or parliament.

Rafsanjani also chairs the Assembly of Experts, and it's not clear if he will retain that position. That is the group that elects (and conceivably can remove) the religious Supreme Leader -- currently Ali Khamenei. If he keeps that post, it could set up an interesting dynamic.

Rafsanjani had solidly backed defeated presidential candidate Mir Hosein Mousavi, and was personally attacked for that by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There are two possible interpretations of his (alleged) resignation: either it's a protest against Khamenei's acceptance of the disputed election result, or it's Khamenei and Ahmadinejad forcing him out to nip any protests in the bud. Or a little of both.

Either way, Iran could be losing a powerful pragmatist (though conservative) voice. Not a good sign.

                               Showdown at Lowdown Pass   Zoom

So why  this showdown over health insurance, and why now . Remember the Dot Com bubble? Recall the housing bubble? Big health insurance is in a bubble too and pushing at the edges of it. Over the last few years  insurance fell into the hands of Wall Street and there, like the dot com and housing markets ,it became inflated with hot gas. When true value, which is a solid thing, becomes controlled by speculators on Wall Street , it is partially  vaporized from a solid thing to a volatile gas as new ways to increase profits are invented. When these bubbles burst the noxious  gas evaporates leaving the shrunken prune of what was once the true value of the product ,which is worth much less now.So let us diagnose the Big Health Insurance balloon, what is its value, should we leave it alone?

 Since this is long post I would ask that you please read it through first to keep the train of thought unbroken, and then go back to the links afterwards.

The Confessions Of an Insurance Hitman :

Hitman Lee Einer  As  described in SICKO, describing what happens once a claim is filled to the insurance company :

 "This is the point at which the insurer will go after you "like it's a murder case." They will contact every medical provider they believe treated you, and will request medical records. They will contact every pharmacy which you are believed to have used, and request their records. They will go into your health history as far back as five years before you applied for coverage.If they find anything -- ANYTHING -- which they determine that you did not fully disclose, and which could conceivably have been captured by the questions on your application, they have you."

"You're not slipping through the cracks. Somebody made that crack and swept you towards it. And the intent is to maximize profits."  Hitman

 
 

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You will probably be "Happy" with your current private health insurance until you REALLY need it, say for a transplant. When they tell you it is experimental treatment and therfore not covered what are you going to do then?
See, in the Private arena, the doctor that just decided that the transplant you need to stay alive was experimental just got a big "bonus" check for saving the insurance company money. Does this at all sound fair. And imagine if insurers didn't siphon off money to send to their shareholders how much LESS health.... wait for it... CARE would be.

Want proof?... I thought so.

Perhaps the best way to make this point is to try this experiment. Take your phone number then drop your area code and replace it with a Canadian area code. Then call that number and ask the person that answers how they feel about their health care. Now it doesn't always work the first time because sometimes a kid answers or its a business and the operator isn't comfortable taking up an employer's time to wax eloquent about the Canadian National Health Program. It might take a few dials but, please, just give it a try until you get a home and and adult, hell, I'll even provide the area codes for Canada.

    Canadian Area Codes  403,780,250,604,778,204,506,709,902,905,289,519,226,705,613,807,416,647, 902,438, 514, 418,819,306,403,

Ask a few questions like how much their co-pay is, what the out of pocket maximum is each year, or their lifetime limits, how much they pay for prescriptions, etc... THEN report it back here under this post if we get enough I'll keep reposting this entry with the results of YOUR calls.

Please if you are honestly concerned about a National Health Plan try this and find out how a real National Health Plan is viewed by those living with it.

Then think about this: recently Canadians voted for the most important Canadian of All Time and the winner was Kiefer Sutherland Grandfather, yep Jack Baur's grandpa! AND ALL BECAUSE HE WAS THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CANADIAN NATIONAL HEALTHCARE PROGRAM!

One more thing to consider, does anyone really think it is a good idea to take 30% of HealthCARE dollars and not spend them on HealthCARE? That is what those soul eating bastards called PRIVATE Health Insurance Companies are doing this very day.

I KNOW Reforming Healthcare will be expensive, I freely acknowledge that, but the cost of no REAL reform is way more expensive... especially if you or someone in your family is one of those people that need one of those "experimental" treatments to keep from dying. And until someone can convince me that only spending 70% of healthcare dollars on actual HEALTH CARE is the right thing to do... well... lets just say... I hope those Soul Eating Bastards called Heath Insurance Companies are denied ANY experimental "treatment", like all that federal money they are getting as I type this!

Please post your experiences here and I'll keep the post up as long as I can.

A  leaked report  written by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) and  dated February 2009 provides background on the modern militia movement.  I suspect rank and file militia members are fearful people who do not have any confidence in themselves and who are easily led by people who want to hold power over other.  That being said I'll take my amateur shrink hat off now and let you come to your own conclusions. 

 

I have summarized part of the report below, but recommend you read the entire 7 pages if the subject concerns you. It fleshes out the bulleted information provided here. 

 

The militia movement began in the 1980s and reached its peak in 1996. 

1980s

Factors contributing to the movements:

• Loss of over 11 million jobs
• Loss of 75% of small and medium family farms
• Gains by women and minorities in the 60s and 70s probably hurt white male egos
• Increased immigration and loss of employment
• Sense of defeat in Vietnam
• Rise of paramilitary culture

 

Conspiracy theories arose at the center of which was the fear of a New World Order (NWO), a global government which would exploit working men ; UN troops were thought to be in the U.S. in support of the NWO.  Many of the groups were anti-Semitic believing that Jews controlled the monetary system and the entertainment industry.

 

1990s

Factors contributing to the movements:

• Ruby Ridge standoff
• Branch Davidian standoff
• Brady Bill

 

The movement did not disappear in the 2000s, but apparently it was less active.  The movement is reemerging now because of high unemployment, the cost of living, and the election of the first African American president. (Personally, I suspect President Obama's election is the primary factor)

 

Additional factors feeding the movement:

• Ammunition Accountability Act
• Anticipation of the economic collapse of the U.S. government  (They are disturbed by Igor Panarin's view  of what happens to the U.S.  following the collapse)  Heads up Quinn!  Canada gets a big chunk.
• Possible Constitutional Conventions (Con Con)
• North American Union/NAFTA highway
• Fear of Universal Service program
• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID )

 

Militia member  see themselves as:

• Christian
• White nationalists
•  Sovereign Citizens
• Militantly anti-abortionist
• Tax resistors

 

The Missouri  report continues with notes about their training, organization, and symbols.   Some on the right are claiming the report smears Ron Paul, people who display bumper stickers, own gold... so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

In the wake of the Tiller shooting, and the Holocaust memorial killing, I'm seeing a recurring meme coming from the right. It seems to be getting mainstream legs. I also think it just may be an aspect -- perhaps subconsciously -- of the resurgence of the right in recent decades.

Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck, the Red State site, etc.

Their claim that Nazism, Fascism and Hitler all come from the left.

In a sense, this gets them off the hook. In their minds, anyway.

When (and where) I was growing up, it was a rare person indeed  who openly called themselves a righty. The sting and taint of Hitler, Nazism, Fascism and WWII were still too apparent. I think people were embarrassed to openly say they were on the same side of the political spectrum.

So, what to do? Completely alter the meaning of well-established terms. Turn things on their heads. Up is down. Left is right. Night is day, etc.

Some knew better, but pushed the meme anyway, and their ignorant supporters were more than willing to follow. What a burden lifted from their shoulders!! No more Hitler, Nazism or Fascism to deal with!! They could be proud and loud once again, and push their reactionary agenda without bringing up ugly ghosts!

Go to just about any blog with a thread that hooks into this, and you'll find large numbers of righties pushing this lie. They can't support it, but they push it. About the only thing they have to go on, of course, is the name.

But what's in a name? There have been hundreds of political parties, if not thousands, in modern times that include terms they have no business including. Totalitarian parties that have "democratic" in their party name, or "people's" or "freedom", etc. Remember Orwell and Newspeak? 

Our Congress passes bills all the time with titles that are just about in direct opposition to the content of those bills. Variations on the theme of "Clear Skies Initiative".

But since "socialist" is in the name the Nazis decided to use, that's enough "evidence" for the right.

Problem is, Hitler and the Nazis, in speech after speech, law after law, deed after deed, went after socialists, liberals and communists with a vengeance. They attacked them, imprisoned them, exiled or killed them. They were adamantly against the left and everything it stood for, and said so repeatedly. They despised the left. Anyone who thinks that name is proof needs to dig deeper. They need to google for quotes by Hitler and those who worked for him. They need to read history about the Third Reich and how it actually operated.

They should also think about other historical facts. Like how leftists from around the world flocked to Spain to fight the Fascists there. Franco and Mussolini were allies of Hitler. Hitler often stated his admiration for Mussolini and his Fascist movement.

Also: Workers never controlled the means of production in Germany. Hitler went after union workers, syndicalists with a vengeance. Capitalism thrived in Germany under Hitler. He imported --  by force, coercion and lies -- millions of foreign workers to help German industry prosper and grow. Treated them like hell. But the big industrialist took major profits and kept them,

Germany under Hitler was the opposite of a "worker's paradise".

America seems to be in the midst of more crazy talk than in the past, and it's been mainstreamed. Progressives need to be aware of this and counter it with facts, evidence, and confidence.

Quick review of Google News indicates we're in the handbasket, sooo... which way is hell?

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On Friday, Robert and Joan Roman filed claims of $8.7 million and $2.7 million, respectively, in the Madoff bankruptcy case, according to PACER records. Joan Alpern Roman is Ruth Madoff's only sibling.  

The $11.4 million probably includes profits earned and the amount of any money redeemed in prior years was not disclosed.

Some of Joan Roman's claim may represent the money she inherited from her parents which ABC News claimed was about $1 million. I don't know what her husband did for a living.   

The Romans have three daughters who also had Madoff accounts, according to the BMIS customer list but they apparently chose not to file claims at this time. I was told that one of the daughters has had her house up for sale since December so their losses may have been significant.

The Romans may have gone public with their claims to put to rest any suspicion that they were not Madoff victims.     

Coincidentally, the New York Times has an article today about Ruth Madoff, "The Loneliest Woman In New York." No word on how close Ruth and Joan are these days.

Note: The Romans appear to be avid croquet players, according to this article about the 2008 Mar A Lago Doubles Invitational.  

With the shift from "stuff" to "intellectual property" we are seeing a new type of law emerge. It started with changes to the traditional copyright concept, first by extending it to things other than the written word and then by lengthening its duration beyond what anyone had originally contemplated.

In addition the control of copyrighted material has been extended, notwithstanding the existence of the concept of fair use. Snippets of music that appear in other's music must now be cleared for use and paid for. Even images of things in public spaces, like skyscrapers, are demanding payment if the image features in a movie.

Right now we are in the midst of what may turn out to be an epic battle between publishers, authors and Google over the use of technically copyrighted material, but where the holder can no longer be found. These are called "orphan" works and Google wants to sell access to them, even though they don't have any rights, just because they took the time to digitize them. The also want an exclusive right to offer this service. This is an entirely new concept, privatizing something in the public domain.

I want to discuss a different aspect of the "ownership" issue. That is where the object itself is unique, such as a painting or sculpture. Ordinarily once such an item is sold the artist loses all rights to it. Some have made agreements concerning subsequent display of the item for commercial purposes (such as in a book). In other words they want to control the "content", but not the item itself.

A more interesting issue is what happens to the work when the original buyer choses to resell it? Typically, for a well-known artist, the price obtained may be much higher than the original buyer paid. The gain in value goes to the owner, not to the artist.

I'd like to propose a formal change to this concept of "ownership". In any future sales the artist gets a certain percentage of the gains realized. Why shouldn't the creator benefit from his work the same as an author? If a book suddenly becomes popular after it is published, the author benefits from the royalties from the additional sale.

I would extend this right to share in the gain indefinitely into the future, even after the original artist is dead. Collectors buy antiquities that are the cultural heritage of the society they come from, but the society doesn't benefit. Many times these are sold illegally so only the thieves make any money from the transaction. Several countries are now demanding that museums return items obtained under such questionable circumstances, especially those obtained during the heyday of colonialism.

In my scheme, when there is no direct line to the original artist, the royalty from the resale would go to a fund that is used to promote the arts and/or conserve other historical artifacts.

The system wouldn't be perfect, but music rights are collected by groups such as ASCAP and BMI and doled out according to a sampling scheme. Small private sales wouldn't be tracked, but the bigger sales go through auction houses or other public sales and keeping track wold be simple. Such places already keep databases of who owned various items and how much they have sold for over the years. Thus, those items which bring in the most money would be included in the plan. If a private seller avoided the scheme and then the person he sold it to later wanted to sell it at an auction, the lack of proof that the royalty had been paid could be used to collect the prior missed amount.

Artists should profit from their work, whenever anyone else does, it seems only fair. If they hadn't created it to start with there would be nothing to sell.

We laugh about it sometimes. Those of us who live in the State of New York, particularly, perhaps, those of us who have worked for it, or work on legislative issues, have watched as what passes for a government has drifted downward over so many years and it is so easy to joke about it, and there appears to be so little we can do about it, that we just laugh. And, as Gail Collins brilliantly wrote this week, there is quite a bit of comedic material there.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDV1jsPlKD8&feature=player_embedded

Bill O'Reilly takes Joan Walsh from Salon.com on about late term abortions and the brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller who was well known for providing those types of abortions that were LEGAL.

O'Reilly began his interview trying to convince his audience that Walsh should some how be demonized for her 'abortion beliefs'.  That was not the subject that O'Reilly supposedly had brought Mrs. Walsh onto his show discuss.  The reason was to discuss why she felt that Mr. O'Reilly had help to cause the death of Dr. Tiller by insighting violence on his nightly show by constantly accusing Dr. Tiller of being a "BABY KILLER".

Joan Walsh on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC June 10, 2009:

When Bill O'Reilly goes on TV every night and calls Dr. Tiller a baby killer and a Nazi and a Mengele, and shows where he works, why do we put up with that?  Why is that entertainment in our culture? It's demonizing a private citizen for doing a lawful job?  Why are people doing that? Why is that acceptable? I would like to see a debate about that.

Like I said, O'Reilly was trying to 'change the subject' into making Joan a demon for her beliefs.  Bill ignored the REAL question for the interview -- Is demonizing a private citizen for doing a lawful job -- for entertainment -- RIGHT?

There are people out there in the entertainment world, such as O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh that attack the man/woman personally instead of the issue at hand.  This should STOP!

Watch the video and see if you agree with my assessment.

First of all, let me set one thing straight.  I personally would never abort a fetus unless I felt it would be better off not coming to full term for either health reasons or for reasons to be experienced once born.  I'm pro-choice however.  I believe it is up to the woman carrying the fetus.  I don't believe it is up to the doctor or the father to decide.  It is the woman's body this embryonic stem cell is located in, not theirs. 

If the procedure is legal, than if the mother wants to abort the fetus -- before the third trimester -- then the doctor, he/she, should be forced to provide that procedure.

Just as if any man wanted to use Viagra, any person calling themselves a doctor or pharmacist, should be forced to provide that medicine.  I'd feel the same way if marijuana were ever made legal, any doctor or pharmacist should be forced to provide that medicine.

The current law allows for fetuses to be abort up to the third trimester:

Roe v. Wade held that a mother may abort her pregnancy for any reason, up until the "point at which the fetus becomes viable.'" The Court defined viable as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.

While the law is clear, I personally wish it could be changed.

Why do I believe all abortions at the third month (12 weeks) or more should be regulated or controlled? Because of the following reasons - The fetus now looks like a human being and has almost developed into a viable human being:

At the end of 3 months:

• Fetus is 2 1/2 to 3 inches long
• Weight is about 1/2 to 1 ounce
• Nails start to develop and earlobes are formed
• Fetus develops recognizable form
• Arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet and toes are fully formed
• Eyes are almost fully developed
• By this stage, a fetus has developed most of his/her organs and tissues
• Fetal heart rate can be heard at 10 weeks with a special Doppler instrument

At the end of 4 months:

• Fetus is 6 1/2 to 7 inches long
• Weight is about 6 to 7 ounces
• Fetus is developing reflexes such as sucking and swallowing. Fetus may begin sucking his/her thumb
• Tooth buds are developing
• Sweat glands are forming on palms and soles
• Fingers and toes are well defined
• Sex is identifiable
• Skin is bright pink, transparent and covered with soft, downy hair
• Although recognizably human in appearance, the baby would not be able to survive outside the mother's body

At the end of 7 months:

• Fetus is 14 to 16 inches long
• Weight is about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 pounds
• Taste buds have developed
• Fat layers are forming
• Organs are maturing
• Skin is still wrinkled and red
• If born at this time, he/she will be considered a premature baby and require special care

I'm on far too many e-mail lists, but I can't bring myself to take myself off of any.  It's rather like being unable to put down a boring book because I'm afraid the next chapter will get interesting, or leaving  the pub before closing, figuring that the interesting stuff will happen as soon as I leave.  (This was a problem visiting  New Orleans, where closing time is a myth).

Anyhow.  I got a message from Chris Dodd's Organization  today:

We have now put forward landmark legislation to reform the nation's health care system, and I need your help.

The first step is to get input from as many people as possible all over the country. I want you to have your chance to speak out.

I made a comment about this kind of involvement on someone's blog, and I'm going to speak out as soon as I finish this.  And of course I'm going to argue for government insured health care for all.  I'm also going to send the page to the people on my e-mail list.

Click here to add your voice.

I suppose to hope that this e-mail on health care goes viral is too big a groaner to tolerate.  I apologize in advance.

The acrid smoke had barely cleared the Manhattan skyline when the facists who composed the American government began tightening the screws that would replace The Rule of Law with The Rule of the Unitarity Executive.

Not that the Executive acted alone. A Republican legislature passed the USAPATRIOT Act with full cooperation from its Democratic lackeys. Then it passed the Military Commissions Act. Then, as the Cheney Administration accelerated its campaign of political repression, a Democratic Congress voted to indemnify the corporate partners of the usurpers. In the meantime, habeas corpus was fatally wounded and personal privacy faded while government secrecy bloomed in darkness.

The current administration stands firmly in support of the new American political paradigm. Even its token gesture of closing the torture camp in Cuba shows signs of falling by the wayside. When this happens, President Obama will express his unhappiness, but he will do so with a smile on his face.

Most sadly, the whole anti-civil-liberties program has been accomplished with the active and overwhelming support of its victims. The American public, the modern counterparts of the Tories during the Revolution, loves the fact that people can be thrown in jail for life without charges -- provided of course that the prisoners' names have a Middle-Eastern sound to them. The people whose homes can now be broken into by government agents on a whim and without a writ are pleased to accept torture as an "effective" means of gathering information. They are happy to have their phones tapped, to have their protests restricted to the ironically-labed "free-speech zones," to have their "safety" enhanced through the process of exiling their fellow American citizens.

Fear of tiny groups of extremists is the factor that drives this seizure of power from the people and to the already-powerful. Fear is carefully nutured and tended by those who benefit from the power transfer, of course, but that is no excuse. The people need to put aside their fear and require their government to safeguard their ability to be politically free. But we are soft now, and unwilling to require our public "servants" to safeguard anything but our cozy, little, meaningless lives, our iPhones, and our 56-inch HDTVs.

If one needs a an amplifier to hear the sound of liberty's death-knell in the once-proud United States of America, one needs only listen to the stridency of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives right here on one of the most liberal and progressive blogs in the world. These defenders of freedom are in full voice pleading at the top of their lungs for their guardians to protect them by further eroding the right to free speech in America. "Make the right-winger talk shows stop being mean," they snivel. "Make the 'hate-speech' go away." Liberals. Ha! Progressives? Only in America.

The Bill of Rights is Dead. It died of neglect. Long live the Unitary Executive.

I have seen ads for Medco and others I can't remember right now. How is this happening?

Oh... and does anyone else find it a little creepy having Indiana Jones peering over your shoulder?

That's it for now... I'm just trying to stay involved.

THANKS to all, for the good wishes and good karma sent my way over the past few weeks, and again sorry for weak participation here on TPM.

Here we go again with the military crossing over into the domestic realm where in theory they are prohibited from having this direct involvement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

This is a theme adopted during the Bush presidency that has remained unchallenged and I can't for the life of me understand for one minute how such a conflict can arise and be allowed to flourish. This confirms the complete breakdown of our fundamental freedoms. Once upon a time it was inconceiveable to even suggest the U.S. military be a major participant in domestic security. Where the lead role in this is being handed more and more to the military I am quite certain it has everything to do with the completely wrongheaded influence of the defense industry. This is purely money vs our constitution and money is winning hands down. Which, by any measure, is the core element of so much of what is wrong with this country. It just cannot be emphasized enough or understated how screwed up this is.

I was going to tell Obama how I really feel but instead I wrote this.

 

You haven't really fixed a thing in the banking and finance industry.

Gas prices keep rising even though demand is way down.

Single payer health care is looking like a loser.

You said you would fix this kind of crap. Looks like you are a liar just like every other politician. And just like all the rest you are giving Americans a screwing. Big business is shafting us at every turn just like always and you are sitting there with your thumb up your ass.

The asshole before you told congress what legislation he would and wouldn't accept. And when congress didn't deliver he just made a stupid signing statement. And now you just cave to lobbyists and don't even make an effort to hold congresses and big business feet to the fire.

Fuck You Mr President. I didn't vote for Bush and I hated what he did to this country but right or wrong at least he had some balls.

 

Shawna Forde, leader of Minutemen American Defense, is one of three individuals arrested June 12 by sheriff's detectives in Pima County, Arizona, for the murder of a Mexican American man and his nine-year-old daughter.

Based in Washington State, Forde's group is one of several border militia groups nationwide that refer to themselves as "Minutemen," including also the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, of which Forde is also a former leader. Profiles on Forde and her anti-immigrant activities are available from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

According to authorities, Forde and her two accomplices, Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola, broke into the home of Raul Flores and his family in Arivaca AZ on May 30th, apparently in the commission of a robbery. The invaders reportedly shot all three members of the Flores family who were present at the time, killing the father and daughter and leaving the mother wounded. While Bush is the suspected gunman in the shootings, investigators say Forde was the mastermind of the operation. Nine-year-old murder victim Brisenia Flores is pictured here from the local Green Valley News:

Forde is listed as the National Executive Director of Minuteman American Defense on the group's website, and the Arizona Daily Star reports that Bush, nicknamed "Gunny," is the group's Operations Director. The three are charged with two counts of first-degree murder in addition to burglary and aggravated assault charges.The Minuteman American Defense website and blog contains numerous photos of Forde and friends at Minuteman and "Tea Party" events, including an Apr. 15 event in Phoenix at which Forde's favorite protest sign was one reading "Stop the Obama-Nation of America." The site also includes descriptions of immigrants as violent criminals, drug addicts, and "Subhuman Mexicans." Here is a photo of Forde in full border vigilante gear from the Anti-Defamation League:

Forde's mother tells the Everett WA Herald that she was not surprised to hear of her daughter's arrest since she had previously talked of staging home invasions: "She sat here and said that she was going to start a group where they went down and start taking things away from the Mexican mafia...," Forde's mother recalled, "...She was going to kick in their doors and take away the money and the drugs." Forde's mother also says that her daughter called her a few hours after the shootings May 30 and reported that she was taking refuge in a "safe house" in Arivaca: "I'm in hiding," Forde told her mother, "You won't believe what is going down here.... The mafia, they are kicking down doors and they are shooting people and they are looking for me."

Pima County sheriff's lieutenant Michael O'Connor told the local Sahuarita Sun that the killings were an "assassination," and said the killers were also looking for Flores' other daughter, who was not at home at time of the killings. Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, meanwhile, said that Forde as "at best a pyschopath" (KOLD, KOMO, KVOA, Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com

Here's a chunk of the letter Michael Savage wrote to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (he didn't even address Brown by name. He addressed his as "The Prime Minister," and "Dear Prime Minister"), asking to have his name removed from the list of people banned from entering the United Kingdom:

As you will understand, I was shocked to find my name listed with known murderers and terrorists. Shocked because in my 15-year radio career, I have never advocated violence, nor have my words ever led to violence.

Really.

This is a transcription of a Savage radio broadcast by Savage, courtesy of The Young Turks:

Now I'm going to say something now and I won't say it ever again on my program, perhaps. There are a group of people try to drive me out of the radio business. They are working around the clock with lies and hate. They are the true haters, they are the neo nazis of our time. I doubt that they will succeed, they haven't damaged me at all. I haven't lost one iota, not one station or one advertiser. But they're slurring me.

If they should succeed in damaging my career, if they should succeed in driving me away from radio; I'm going to ask you to go on to Michael Savage .com and have your name put on to a master directory for me.

I will release their names and addresses at that time.

I will release their names and addresses to you and I will disappear from public life. But I can guarantee you that what goes around comes around and that's all I'm going to say right now. If you haven't gotten it yet, get it I'm more powerful than you are you little hateful nothings. You call yourself this for that and that for this. You say you represent groups, you represent nobody but the perverts that you hang around with and I'm warning you if you try to damage me any further with lies, be aware of something:

That which you stoke shall come to burn you, the ashes of the fireplace will come and burn your own house down.

Be very careful, you are living in incendiary times. You can't just throw things at people and walk away thinking that you had a little fun. I warn you; I'm gonna warn you again, if you harm me and I pray that no harm comes to you, but I can't guarantee that it won't.

That, my friends, is a threat and a call to his listeners to go after whoever he thought might be wanting to drive him off the air

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Sorry about that long title, just trying to make a point.

The answer to "Do you want the government rationing healthcare?" 

As Opposed to who? If you are talking about the government taking the place of those doctors that the insurance companies pay BONUSES to, to deny coverage. If it is the government taking the place of those assholes, then the answer is not just Yes, but... FUCK YES.

It has become apparent to me that Democrats have lost their nerve.

I will pay the primary filing fee for the first person to take on a democrat, IN A PRIMARY, that refuses to vote for a PUBLIC OPTION IN THE HEALTHCARE REFORM BILL!!!

Sorry for my feeble attempts of late, I have been flat on my back.

Yesterday I was honored to be on a call with America's leading mayors and the US Conference of Mayors to talk about a huge problem affecting cities from coast to coast: the foreclosure crisis.

I've been talking about how a family is losing their home every 13 seconds for awhile now and the recent failure by Congress to enact bankruptcy reform to protect homeowners because of industry pressure was a real blow to stopping that clock.

But the failure in Washington isn't going to stand in the way of ACORN's push to address the crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown and teaming up with some of the leading mayors in the United States is a major way we're moving forward to help families stay in their homes.

Read more »

Carol Anne: "They're here..." - Poltergeist, 1982

I wrote in a May 23rd blog; Framing The Health Care Debate:

Democratic strategist Paul Begala has written a brilliant point-by-point rebuttal of GOP consultant Frank Luntz's widely circulated strategy memo on health care.  

Begala urges Democrats to push back hard against "Republican Orwellian rhetoric."  He has written a blueprint for us all to help win one of the most important debates of our lifetime.

Well, it's here. 

On Wednesday, Republicans armed with their Luntz Special 45 Caliber Talking Points descended on to the OK Corral of the United States Senate only to be met by freshman Oregon Democrat, Jeff Merkley, armed to the rhetorical teeth. 

Brandishing a thin set of papers, Merkley called out, Luntz, and the Republicans, point-by-point, deception-by-deception: (Video below)

Now, you may think that I'm raising this document before you, this -- this plan for how to kill health care, and that maybe it doesn't have any bearing on the real debate, but it absolutely does. These talking points are being echoed in this very chamber in order to kill health care.

Here we go. Frank Luntz's memo, that's his memo on how to kill health care, came out in April. It says - talking point number five - "Health denial care horror stories in Canada and other countires do resonate, but you have to humanize them. You notice we recommend the phrase 'government takeover' rather than 'government run' or 'government control.'" Why? Because government takeover sounds even scarier.

So what did we hear in the chamber from our minority leader just recently? I quote - "Americans are concerned about a government takeover of health care and for good reason." And it goes on. So recognize that that is a point that's coming from a document about how to kill health care, not a responsible debate about the plan we have in front of us.

Knowing a political slobberknocker when they see one, Senate Democratic leadership attacked Luntz at their weekly press conference, Thursday, "mocking Republicans for taking their health care advice from the man Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) repeatedly dubbed "Dr. Frank I. Luntz."":  (Ryan Grim; Dems' Bogeyman Luntz Schooled Reid, Other Dems On Messaging)

"What we're hearing from the Republican leadership on the floor of the Senate is vaguely familiar. Dr. Frank I. Luntz issued this plan," said Durbin, waving a copy of a memo that Luntz wrote several months ago, outlining rhetorical tactics to oppose health care reform.

Durbin highlighted arguments made by Republican leadership: "They tell horror stories about health care stories in other countries. That would be Dr. Frank Luntz's talking point number five." And on he went, referring over and over to the talking points outlined in the Luntz memo.

Grim goes on to describe how Senate Democrats had been previously exposed to Luntz's "mendacious methods:"

Luntz himself had briefed them at a Democratic retreat earlier this year. His co-panelist: Paul Begala.

Since that January retreat, he has also briefed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) personally, a Reid aide confirmed. The message to the leader and to the Senate Democratic caucus was the same: Words matter.

By calling out Luntz the Democrats may have found a way to take the offensive in what is gearing up to be a very insalubrious health care debate.  By framing the debate around the Luntz/Republican talking points they could position the Republicans as to who, and what they are, the friends of big health businesses, and the party of, "No, no, no."

One can only hope the Democrats take the attack on the Luntz/Republican talking points to cable news and the Sunday chat shows.  This loyal liberal is sick and tired of having rhetorical sand kicked in his face.  It would be nice if Democrats showed some political cajones. 

Word to Democrats, we got your back.  "Barack is in the White House."

To the Madison City Council:

White supremacy is alive and well in Madison, Wisconsin, but you just don't get it.

    Remember when those rich guys from the auto plants flew to Washington in private jets with their hands out for public money. It was too late but they promised to come to the next meeting in gas upped Pintos and collapsible Corvairs.  But the public kept saying they just don't get it. Then there were rumors of luxurious private parties and lavish Vegas gambling jaunts. Once again, the public said, they just don't get it.
    Well, it looks like you sitting there in your, made in china chairs, and  just don't get it. When you drive around town, who do you see working. When you drive past a street?  did you notice not one black man is on that crew? When you walk though a road construction site paid for with tax incremental financing of federal dollars, who do you see working? You do not see a black man working.  When you see a building construction paid for by federal tax dollars  at one of ten sites on campus, who do you see working? When you see a private company using tax dollars to buy land and build buildings, you don't see a black man working on the project or in the building working after its completed.
    When you deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the power to enforce the hiring of black men, you just don't get it do you?  Seventy percent of the black middle class works for the government. Yet, you just don't see the nepotism that takes place in private business. Sure, Findorf, Vogel, Staff Electric, Forward Electric have a right to hire qualified personnel, but when qualified black men are continually turned away from advertised jobs; you just don't see the pattern of discrimination; you don't hear the cries for empathy, you don't speak out against apathy. You just don't get it.
    You just don't get how a small business owner or a company that receives public funds could reject a qualified black man. You just don't get it, do you. You just don't get how a company could do business with the city for 20 years and never find a qualified black man to hire. You, like me, should walk though the hollowed halls of city, county and state government offices with the published list of empty seats reserved for blacks that human resources can never find. This list of missing black employees has grown longer, not shorter over the last 20 years.
    You don't get how the city has been lying to blacks about seriously understanding how a black man could apply for a open position and not get hired.  Because if you did you would see how the streets of our city are being built by the brothers, classmates, drinking buddies, hunting friends, uncles, sisters, and cousins of company owners who would willingly pay a small fine and still not ever hire black men to work on a federally funded project.
    I'm sure some of you heard about the white women who claimed two burly black men kidnapped her and stole her child. As intelligent representatives of the city, you may ask yourself how could anyone come up with such a cock and bull story.  But the fact of the matter is, this is not the first time that a city's police department has been mislead to believe that black men were the perpetrators of a car jacking or other violent crime. But this is the first time the police did not do a massive roundup of black men as the usual suspects based on racist ideology.  Police fought against this built-in bias against black men and correctly assumed that over 70 percent of crimes where a black man was a perpetrator was a race conscious lie. This woman assumed no one would question her despicable beliefs. What do you do or say when your friend, relative, neighbor, co-worker spouts sardonic hatred? Empirical research shows that most whites are congenial about racism and its effects upon society.
    A company recently decided to search for police records of black applicants. To the surprise of the human relations department, none of the black applicants had police records. Previously, the director had assumed that all blacks have criminal records so why even accept applications from black applicants. You too, have denied the truth of institutional racism that denies a black man a right to work in order to support his family, his community, and his city.  You see the truth, but you can't handle it, do you dismiss it.
By denying the civil rights office this power you just don't get it. You are complacent about the pre-conceived notions of black men that each of you have consciously or unconsciously inherited from family, friends, and co-workers. These biased insinuations handed down from generation to generation are endemic of people who deny the holocaust and deny 400 years of slavery.
    It is disingenuous to think 400 years of institutionalized scientifically applied slavery, Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, job discrimination, health care discrimination, and education inequity is going to be fixed in 60 years by businesses rolling over and volunteering to be good Christians. The fact that over 51 percent of local businesses are small businesses does not preclude the fact that some are working on city projects funded by federal funds. Funds that by law should help employ the generations of unemployed black men in Madison. The predetermined criminal record of a black man is because 3 out of 4 black men have had encounters with police.  Police stopping men who are driving while black is a national phenomenon that people just don't get. Racism is a disease and the cure is the law. Trickle down policies predicting that employers will follow their conscious works, if only the employer has a moral conscious.
    You cannot be blind, deaf, and silent about the factual systematic incarceration of black men by police, judges, probation officers, parole boards, jail guards, and juries purposely and publicly display their disdain for black men. This tool of right wing recruitment is cannon fodder for extremism mayhem. This includes denying DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the right to enforce rules that protect all Americans from their ignorant anti-Semitic racist prophesies.
    To deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS power is the height of irresponsibility to the Madison citizenry. As politicians, you must know that the current social and economic traumas will unleash the venom of violent extremists. Your pretzel logic to deny this power is unconstitutional. The past few decades has only seen a token increase in the hiring of blacks in government and in private business. Research about a local manufacturing plant tells me how management attends seminars about how to legally not hire blacks without being sued for racial discrimination. Your ultimate obligation is to insure that city, county, state, federal governments, and private businesses do not hide behind a sea of judicial hyperbole that prolongs the anxiety of the black man waiting in the wings to be hired. Is it true what I read about how landlords who are found guilty of housing discrimination can secretly pay a fine and continue to discriminate?  My deep throat tells me city officials are in cahoots with private businesses and human resource staffs who intentionally violent national laws that prohibit all forms of racial discrimination and nepotism.  But as your hiring records show and newspapers have revealed, nepotism plays a role in who is hired; and since no blacks are hired though the back door we can assume that friends and relatives who look like the people in power are quickly hired into these hate circles that share the same racist views. You have not adequately monitored the negative rhetoric that keeps blacks from these jobs, this same stereotyped rhetoric that gets blacks intentionally fired when employers are forced to obey the affirmative action laws that is your civic responsibility to carry out. How do you reconcile the blatant truth of spitefulness and hatefulness that keeps blacks from feeding their families, from paying taxes, from being a citizen in a democracy?
    By not giving DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS absolute power, you are undermining the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and the sacrifice of Rosa Parks. Society allowed the lynching of Emmett Till and the gassing of Anne Frank. Do you represent blacks in society or do you represent businesses who find you a racist compatriot? Are you helping to tie the noose and turning on the gas or just another anonymous liberal hypocrite of freedom and liberty, who watch as the smoke plumes from the gas chambers disappear from your sight and mind. 
    It is disconcerting to know a white politician got the black vote because he likes gospel music, Tiger Woods, and chit'lins.  The silent protests of institutional racism in Dane County by 100 black men of Madison is synonymous with temperance minstrel music. Where is the voice of the Urban League as its new building goes up, where is the voice of the NAACP, the voice of NOW, PETA and other liberal women and men who hold siege to liberalism in Madison. Black men are invisible until the news comes on.  Even a fleeting association with blacks reveals that white resentment is a racist derangement; a dismal attitude attached to mainstream society. There are 10,000 hate groups on line.  Nine hundred and twenty-six white supremacy websites get nearly 10,000 hits a day to celebrate the silent genocide of the black male and Negro/Jew.  Isolated incidents of racism are uniformly destructive but you just don't get it. White supremacy is alive and well in government or why else would it take 60 years and more to resolve what is overt racism and what is courteous impertinence. Both are motivated by the politics of fear and loathing. But you still don't get it.
    This is a struggle between good and evil. You can no longer increase the police budget without seeing the repercussions of decreasing the funding of youth activities that show society does care about them. You must see the liaison between increasing jail space and the increasing education gap. Don't you think black mothers also want their new born sons to have the skills necessary to work on a road crew, to sit in that office cubicle, to finance a loan? Nativity is no longer an excuse when you see no black men at your dinner table, as your co-worker or in your church pews. Some suggest that blacks and Jews should just get over it, but they just don't get it. Racism is a mandate that is consciously or unconsciously supported by your inattention to the truth that the same people deny the Holocaust happened; people also deny that lynching, raping, castrating, and dismembering black men was an instant holiday for white people. (Recently a judge dropped charges against two white men for dragging a black men behind a truck until he was dismembered because there was no usable evidence and black witnesses were afraid to come forward.But you just don't get it.)People deny that prison factory towns are dependent upon the courts to keep the townspeople employed; the probation officer regurgitating inmates also keeps his job and the local police are counterfeiting evidence with propaganda that hides the lowering crime rate. 
    What are your principles?  What is your strategy to right 400 years of scientifically applied racism that kept black men from owning rural farmland, owning their own business, or working like any other man alongside any other man? Well, let me say that I'm disappointed in the intelligence of the council and I'm not going to stand by and watch ignorant selflessness keep black men unemployed. You can join me in the fight against this ingrained evil or you can take the consequences of a retaliatory government.
    The transparency of the Obama administration dictates efficiency. Federal funded projects in the city of Madison can come under the scrutiny of everyday citizens. To emphasize the continued racist hiring policies of private and public contractors, I have enlisted volunteers to apply for jobs with organizations receiving federal funding. As you know, the publication of projects using federal funds allows me to research past and current federally funded projects that historically physically/mentally abuse, while under utilizing, under employing, and under paying black employees.
    Researchers have been assigned to video record working areas for visually accompaniment of DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS/EEO records. Public resources that reveal the number of years and failed attempts at hiring and retaining black men are also available at public and private institutions. I am in direct correspondence with Sharon D. Eller, Director of Civil Rights for the Department of the Interior and Mary N. Whigham Jones, Deputy Director, Departmental Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Transportation, who will be constantly updated about hiring and firing policies of public and private entities who use American Recovery and Reinvestment of 2009 funds. 
    I have social contacts with representatives from the following agencies who report one common unapproved consistency; the unemployed black male:

    * Schools and homeless school liaisons;
    * Workforce centers;
    * employment counselors (welfare to work programs);
    * Property managers, landlord groups, and tenants' associations;
    * Housing courts and legal aid agencies;
    * County veterans' services offices and other veterans' services offices;
    * Multifamily housing associations;
    * Discharge planning departments at jails, prisons, and mental health, chemical dependency, and other institutions;
    * Probation offices;
    * Domestic violence service providers;
    * Food shelves and soup kitchens;
    * The faith community;
    * Housing authorities;
    * Family support centers;
    * Police;
    * Child welfare agencies;
    * Head Start and Early Head Start; and
    * Consumer Advocate Groups.

    The unemployment rate in the black community is twice as high as the general citizenry  because of temporary employment and those who are so disillusioned by the continuum of subtle racism that they no longer look for work. Linking black people with jobs funded by the economic stimulus package will address their other needs and defy the hopelessness, depression, and gloominess that helplessly accompany sustained poverty.
    This is a patriotic mission that begins when I applied for three jobs offered by DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS. I contacted the contractors with a formal application, a resume, and a cover letter. With no forth coming reply I telephoned and left messages. When it was clearly obvious that procrastination of their reply was meant to discourage me, I contacted the DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS office and was told while private contractors doing city work were supposed to hire black employees, they could not enforce the rules and contractors simply ignored the rules because they knew a penalty if any would be slight and hidden from public scrutiny.
    If you think I am frustrated, you are the pompous liberal jerk everyone says you are. I am disillusioned that the prophecies of our Jeffersonian democracy have almost soured by 36 years of bitter Brownshirt behavior towards blacks that was sanctioned by Democrats and well meaning Republicans.   Because of the new King of the hill, I do believe that messages of inclusiveness will be welcome by this cabinet. But unless someone takes responsibility to insure that tests are multi-intelligent; that police do not stereotype perpetrators, and that city governments spend federal money according to the Constitution and the by-laws of the tax-stimulus package, I guess it will be moi' looking over your shoulder for continued proof of your infidelity to humanity. Because three years ago I wrote and commented on the discrepancy in hiring policies by city contractors, but you failed to see the decades long pattern. You just don't get it.
    If you wish to receive copies of testimonials sent to dept of interior and dept of transportation, please contact a local social service agency listed above.  Because reporting discrimination reports are binded by time constraints, technical jargon, and job loss retaliation that dissuades victims from filing discrimination reports, I cannot promise victims will allow the release of their names to local officials. Nevertheless, you will not torpedo Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity programs on my watch. Obama has received hundreds of death threats, black Americans have experienced thousands upon thousands of hate crime; are these individual acts a coincidence or unorganized conspiracy?  Pro-business does not mean anti-black, otherwise you would of insisted that business tax write-offs include obeying federal hiring policies when using federal funds.(I refer you to the Home Security Report on Domestic Surveillance)

Some of us water our horse at the same trough, but you have made the waters murky with your proposal to stand against evil.. If you look closely upon the waves of change, you will see the image of Emmett Till looking up at you from his open coffin with a truth, that all black men still experience Jim Crow in the 21st Century.  If you open the book of Anne Frank, you will smell survival filling the air with or without your consensus. 

They can dish it, but they can't take it!

Prodded on by super-sensitive drama queen Sarah Palin, conservatives are gunning for Dave Letterman.

That's right. They'll defend their leading cheerleader, Rush Limbaugh, oracle of conservative ideals.

And whenever he make mysognistic comments or hateful rhetoric (basically, any day of the week), then he is excused as being an "entertainer".

But when the jokes are pointed at them ... UH-OH! They can't take a joke!

John McCain is not out defending his buddy Dave and, as well, where were the right-wing joke police when Lettermen had a segment about Sonia Sotamayor where he played on Latino stereotypes?

Ohh.... right ... the faux outrage is ALWAYS with a political purpose for Republicans ...

It can be anyone in the House or Senate. Someone you can absolutely count on when it comes to fighting for your interests on health care. Or energy and the environment. 

If you can't name anyone, then why did you vote for them?

Politics and Media News Headlines 6/12//09

White House

Obama in Green Bay: Broke no new ground; said Medicare/Medicaid on course to breaking Federal budget (by jawbone at Corrente)
Alas, the speech is the usual Obama points about health insurance reform: His list of reasons for change lead inexorably to single payer, but he just can't do it. Won't do it. Would be "disruptive."... Obama begins by discussing socialized medicine and, after a few sentences, says that single payer is not socialized medicine. Then he repeats his lament that since we have a different system in place, it's impossible to go with single payer. Altho' he has said in his answer that Medicare is an example of single payer!

COWARDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Democrats hint compromise to win Senate health care deal (McClatchy)
Senate Democrats are offering to scrap a controversial government-sponsored health insurance provision in an effort to win more than a dozen moderate and conservative Republican votes to extend health care coverage to nearly 46 million uninsured Americans.

Should Health Care Reform Be Bipartisan? (by Ezra Klein, Washington Post)
Are 10 Republican votes worth lowering the subsidies from 400 percent of poverty to 300 percent of poverty and leaving out, say, eight million Americans? Are five Republican votes worth leaving out eight million Americans? Two Republican votes? It would be nice if someone published a table or something.

Co-op Health Plan Emerging as a Senate Option (by Robert Pear at The Caucus, New York Times)
Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee ... said Thursday that the public plan could take the form of an insurance cooperative, owned and operated for the benefit of its members. "I am inclined, and I think the committee is inclined, toward a co-op," Mr. Baucus said. "It's not going to be public, we won't call it public, but it will be tough enough to keep insurance companies' feet to the fire," Mr. Baucus said of the co-op.
Isn't that what Blue Cross and Blue Shield were supposed to be? Look how well that worked out.

"Strong public option" = "peace in our time" (by vastleft at Corrente)
Once you accept the "public option" frame, it's "goodnight, nurse!" for real health-insurance reform. It's only happening about everywhere in the liberal blogosphere. OTOH, maybe a compromise with the Blue Dogs, Republicans, and death-by-spreadsheet crowd will work out just fine. It would be irresponsible not to equivocate.

Going Postal: Reid's New Defense of Public Health Care (The Note, ABC News, thanks to Alegre)
"I'm confident both private companies and the option of public plan can live in harmony," Reid said on the Senate floor [Thursday]. "When you send a birthday present to a relative to -- say I want to send something to one of my children in Nevada, the products that I choose can be sent by FedEx, UPS, DHL, or the United States Postal Service... The Postal Service may not be perfect, but the public option is there, and the private companies, FedEx, UPS, know they cannot rip you off or [be] slacking on their service," Reid said.

Health Care Overhaul Opponents Use Selective Stats (All Things Considered, NPR)
It's become one of the most commonly cited statistics by opponents of the health overhaul being put together by Democrats in Congress: Creating a new government-run public health insurance plan would result in 119 million people losing their private insurance... The point of the study was to show that the number of people who would eventually join a government-sponsored public insurance plan would vary -- dramatically -- depending on how that plan is designed... For example, Sheils says, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York "has a plan which would require the public program to pay private payer rates -- the same rates that other private insurers have to pay -- and under that scenario we get only between 10 and 12 million people dropping private coverage."

Good Gravy. Grassley calls Schumer's plan "obnoxious" (by Alegre)
At least Nancy Pelosi is standing up for the public option.  She's taken a head-count and told HuffPo that she won't have the votes to pass a reform bill unless it includes a public option.  She also said that Conrad's compromise (a system of co-ops) won't be enough.  It's got to include a public option or no deal. Meanwhile Grassley continues to be the mouthpiece for the party of NO when it comes to health care reform:  "No public option, no employee mandate to either provide insurance or pay a penalty, and nothing that leads to rationing of health care."  If you stick to Grassley's criteria here we won't have ANY changes to our current (and messed up) system.  

Well I've got news for Grassley... we've already got rationing.  With nearly 50 million Americans living without access to health care services, I defy him to show us how anything they could do in Congress could make things worse than they already are.

Click here for more politics and media news headlines.

Carolyn Kay                      
MakeThemAccountable.com

With the overwhelming response of Congress to pass the US tobacco regulation bill, it gets me thinking: "What won't they regulate?"

So many things are done "for the children", so it comes as no surprise to me that the tobacco bill talks about banning even more ads that are targeting school children. What? When? And Where? I have never seen an advertisement that when I looked at it I said, "Screw my lungs and health, that is awesome!". (Where is Tony Hawk when you need him?)

But thanks to Congress' increasing distance from reality, we now will have FDA regulated cigarettes.

"Tobacco is such a serious and compelling public health problem, and we really do feel by being able to regulate tobacco and tobacco products we can reduce the burden of disease and help promote stronger smoking cessation efforts," Hamburg told reporters.

So you need this bill so you can then stop people from smoking? How about drinking? How about eating fatty steaks? In the US 936,923 people died in 2001 from Major Cardiovascular Diseases. Seems like the next "save me" bill that we need.

The facts are these:

• To non-smokers, like myself, smoking is annoying.
• Smoking is dangerous to your health and increases risks
• Smoking is a turn off to a lot of people, decreasing your chances of relationships

But at the end of the day, smoking is the SMOKERS choice. They know it is dangerous, they know it can be addictive, they know it can eventually kill them. But you know what I do when I am confronted with a smoker? I move! I cross the street, I don't eat at that restaurant, I don't frequent that bar. And I support establishments that have non-smoking policies BY THEIR OWN CHOICE.*

A year or so back, President Bush vetoed a bill to tax cigarettes and give the money to children's insurance. This was another overstep of Congresses boundaries taxing a "bad" thing and giving it to a "good" thing. I supported President Bush's veto. Obama has expanded this program.

"Critics like Siegel said the bill did not go far enough.

Lawmakers could have banned nicotine as well as popular mint-flavored menthol cigarettes, raised the legal age to buy tobacco products from 18 to 21 and restricted sales to certain stores, much like alcohol, Siegel said." (emphasis mine)

I'm sick and tired of government's implied duty to save me from myself.

Well smokers, enjoy your shitty light cigarettes or go online and find some real Mexican brand cigarettes. At least until they finish regulating the internet.

*Side note:
Government should have no ability to regulate private businesses to stop allowing patrons to smoke in their establishments. Also, the government should have no ability to force a private business to make patrons do anything. It is up to the business owner and that is all. In a public/government owned building or situation, by all means.

If you want to see a change, then give tax benefits to business that allow a completely non-smoking environment.

Folks the forecast for the next few weeks is that we have a huge shit storm coming with the final weeks of deals and debate on health care. Money is controlling the Senate and money is winning! When necessary, please plan to take cover as the shit storm hits with bullshit stories about the deals and contributions grabbing from us the option for a public plan. Do not fail to trace the money back to each Senator and watch how they vote and what spin they put on it. I urge all of you to be agressive and fight for the only real chance we have to take health care out of the hands of corrupt insurance companies and put it into our hands and doctors we are being treated by. I am approaching retirement in the next few years and I am committing myself to dog each one of these bastards that throws a public plan choice out of the mix and do all I can to get back at these so called public servants that will sell us out!

I recently slogged through the Senate Armed Services Committee report: "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody". One of the big difficulties I had was the thing kept doing time warps.  Suddenly, it jumped from 2005 back to 2002 on a totally different subject.  It makes it kind of hard to get a whole feeling for what happened when.

So I started keeping some notes, and one thing led to another and it has expanded into a bit of a time line.  Most of the key events mentioned in the report (and a bunch of minutiae) are listed in basically chronological order.

Notes:

• The time line is primarily based on the SASC report. Just for fun, I've been rolling in additional information over the last week; so that's where the other stuff came from.
  
  
• This evolved from personal notes, so some may still be in a bit of shorthand - especially the use of names without titles.
   
• Some of the unknown dates [??] have likely been nailed down by other sources, the dates here are gleaned directly from the reports.
  
  
• Mostly the list has been cleaned up to the point of being sensical, but is still kind of rough there are likely typos and a few unfathomable entries. Also, some of the notes were taken before I started keeping track of page numbers and not all those entries have been nailed back down (usually have a ?? page number). If any major cleanup issues pop up, I'll try to update.
  
  
• Links to the reports used in the time line are at the bottom of the post.

I use it sort of as a reader's companion and it makes the report a bit more useful (and is a pretty good frame of reference for other reports as well).  And I even figured out how to put the insanely long part after a jump! :-)

Read more »

To all at TPM. I'm asking you to leave bullet points and arguments as to why Americans should have a single payer tax funded health care payment option similar to Medicaid for everyone. I know this has been covered else where but I'm writing a letter and mailing it this weekend and would like help in making my argument effective. So, give me all you got in small increments of course. Just asking for a coherent way to say it to a congress critter, so they get the message.

Isn't it reassuring that we have a real AG who cares about justice and seeks to redress the abuses of the past 8 years .. as long as he's helping rethuglicans.

I found this post on Genocide for Jesus by Emproph.

One of the failures of the US auto industry is that it by and large ceded the small/entry car market to imports because the profit margin didn't justify the cost and trouble of producing a good small car.

As Iranians go to the polls to elect a president, American neoconservatives are openly rooting not for moderate reform candidate and former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi but for anti-U.S. hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is an obvious sign both of the neocons' preference for conflict over peace between the U.S. and Iran and of the generally bankrupt state of conservatism in America, reduced now to banking on failure for the Obama administration (see Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow).

Should the reformist Mousavi win the Iranian election and become president, it would likely signal a new and more positive direction for U.S.-Iranian relations as well as providing support for the "Obama Doctrine" of engagement with Iran and other adversaries. Such a development would at the same time undercut the neocon attitude of hostility and suspicion toward Iran, as well as undercutting the right-wing Israeli government's aggressive stance toward Iran. Indeed right-wingers in Israel like those in America appear to see nothing good for themselves in any warming of relations between the U.S. and Iran, as observed by M.J. Rosenberg at TPM and Yaakov Katz at the Jerusalem Post.

The unpleasant fellow you see pictured here is Daniel Pipes of the right-wing Middle East Forum, a raging neocon who said in a speech this week at the Heritage Foundation that he would vote for Ahmadinejad if he were allowed to vote in Iran (video). The American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin likewise told Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review that it could be better for Ahmadinejad to win, because a Mousavi win might give Obama the impression that diplomacy was working. Painting Iran as inherently and hopelessly evil, Rubin said of the Iranian election that "should someone more soft-spoken and less defiant -- someone like former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi -- win, it would be easier for Obama to believe that Iran really was figuratively unclenching a fist when, in fact, it had it had its other hand hidden under its cloak, grasping a dagger."

Without so openly rooting for Ahmadinejad, other neocons are playing down the significance of a possible Mousavi victory, obviously worried that a shift in power will signal a fresh start for U.S.-Iranian relations that could leave American and Israeli hawks out in the cold. The same right-wing pundits who constantly point out Ahmadinejad's bad behavior as reasons to confront Iran now argue that it doesn't matter who the president of Iran is. Martin Peretz wrote at the New New Republic: "We've known for a long time that elected leaders do not carry the weight of those who have been anointed." Ilan Berman likewise wrote at the American Spectator: "Whoever ends up becoming president will have little real power -- and even less influence over Iran's geostrategic direction."

The prospect of peace in the Greater Middle East must give sociopaths like these nightmares the rest of us could scarcely imagine.

Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com

From Empty Wheel:

"Here's how Whitehouse described the questions they're asking in his Senate speech the other day. "I see three issues we need to grapple with. The first is the torture itself: What did Americans do? In what conditions of humanity and hygiene were the techniques applied? With what intensity and duration? Are our preconceptions about what was done based on the sanitized descriptions of techniques justified? Or was the actuality far worse?

Were the carefully described predicates for the torture techniques and the limitations on their use followed in practice? Or did the torture exceed the predicates and bounds of the Office of Legal Counsel opinions?"

I've wanted to point out something, for a long time, about Republican rhetoric concerned with regulation. I think this gives me a leverage point.

Sadly, it looks like even the Democrats have adopted the Republican Party line:

We can look at torture (NB: torture is simply formalized sadism) as a behavior that can be regulated; as behavior that can be controlled.

If the thing is described in detail; specifying when this must occur; and in what proportion; and how it must be combined with this, but not that; and so on...then it, by virtue of these regulations, becomes something other than torture; and so, becomes (via rhetorical legerdemain) enhanced interrogation.

That set of rules, procedures, and prescriptions are the essence of regulation...the fundamental directives of a Torture Bureaucracy.

Yet they decry regulation of health care; tobacco; almost anything, in fact; and certainly, the regulation of our common economy as suboptimal, undesirable, even harmful.

Yet they know how to regulate and formalize sadism.

Also implied here is that they or their designated agents know how to control the Americans who apply the formalized sadism.

This is a Torture Bureacracy. Make no mistake about that.

  Interesting how some of the fiercest defenders of the ruthless efficiency of free markets are suddenly less enthusiastic when it comes to car dealers in their states or districts. Decades worth of bumbling, stumbling, piss-poor management on the part of GM and Chrysler could not in the end withstand the ravages of the economic meltdown. The free market wreaked its vengeance on poor performers.

 

Now, though, when the "invisible hand" hits close to home with the car companies closing dealerships on a massive scale, some republican senators and house members are raising a stink. But wait. How can they suggest that the government has any role in an economic decision a car company makes?

 

Isn't that...horrors! Socialism?

Cross-posted at River Twice Research.

President Obama's speech in Cairo last week as well as the candid and heated debates in Iran during its contentious presidential election provide yet another opportunity to revisit the sterile images of Islam that dominate the discussion both in the West and throughout the Muslim world as well. That discussion is framed by Muslim terrorists or extremists on the one hand squaring off against secular but resentful populations on the other. That is one facet of a kaleidoscope, a potent one but in no way the only one.

If there's any doubt on that score, a new documentary focusing on the career of Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour should dispel it utterly. "I Bring What I Love" is an elegiac, beautiful film, years in the making, and it will start playing in New York this week and then in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Like all documentaries, it will be dwarfed by the summer blockbusters that surround it, but this film deserves an audience.

Read more »

Yesterday, The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve wondered:

"How many more murderous rampages by enraged rightists--whether executed or merely in the planning stage--are we going to have to endure before the traditional media is willing to acknowledge and address the obvious?  How many people are going to die, and how highly placed will the victims have to be, before someone connects the dots and starts calling out the ever more violent, hateful and apocalyptic rhetoric of the likes of Coulter, Malkin, O'Reilly, Hannity and Savage as bearing some responsibility for creating this climate of insanity? "

I'm not certain if we're beginning to see the MSM arouse from its recession-induced navel gazing, but I did find some hopeful signs that at least some quarters are becoming atuned to the ugly reality that is the temperament of current American politics. First, there's this AP story that notes the correspondence between the Holocaust Museum shooting and the upswing in activity among fanatic right wing extremist groups. Second, another AP piece shows that at least the folks in Connecticut are getting serious about bloggers who are inciting violence: apparently Hal Turner has a history of telling folks who read his blog who should live and who should die. Interestingly, he apparently wanted CT Catholics to do the CT legislators in.

I'm wondering if these two pieces are indications that long overdue attention to the dangerous extreme right will finally be pulled out of the deep, dark recesses of the MSM's consciousness, or OTOH they're just temporary blips on the radar. I haven't enough clairvoyance to be able to say for sure, but here's what I'm going to do nonetheless: I'm finally going to make use of RSS technology to follow the CT story to its conclusion. I have no faith in today's media to be able to stay focused on critical issues like these and provide the kind of coverage that shines the bright light of scrutiny needed to keep these very dangerous atavists at bay. Like NCSteve, I hope to be proven wrong.

I heard these words for the first time in 1972, long after the Chicago Democratic Convention. Always liked this song. Beautiful.

So your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing?

In a land that's known as 'Freedom'
How can such a thing be fair?
Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring?

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It's starting (If you believe in justice)
It's starting (If you believe in freedom)
To get better

Little did I know that, after an iTunes download, this song would rivet me once again, in ripe old middle age. And the Obama-Chicago connection is eerie, too...

Barry might be just a little too young to really get this song in his gut.

Parsing:
To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components:
To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn't parse what you just said

Hopefully people will be able to parse what I say as I start a little series in which I attempt to relate Barack Obama's rhetorical style backwards to his life experiences and forwards to his widespread public appeal.  Today's installment is by means of an introduction and a plug for a website useful to anyone interested in Oratory and Rhetoric.  American Rhetoric is one of my favorite websites.  I direct my students there all the time.  Not only does it have tools for understanding rhetorical techniques: it also has a bank of over five thousand speeches of all types for study and analysis.  Among those are over 25 examples of Barack Obama addresses, most of them with both text and real audio.  All his major addresses since the Democratic Convention of 2004 are here, as well as many less known examples of discourse in a number of different situations.

I believe that one ought to both listen and read a speech whenever possible.  In some ways the written word is a sorry substitute for the spoken word, or so Cicero, whom I quote more often than I should, leads me to believe.  People who follow my blog from time to time notice a kind of Victorianism which I hope is not just an affectation.  I like to use italics and boldface type.  Underlines, too.  Ctrl I, Ctrl B and Ctrl U are very familiar with my gentle carresses.  I do this to indicate the stresses one would hear if my blather approached them through their ears and not through their eyes.  A few of the senior set here may remember one of my favorite Pogo Characters, PT Bridgeport.


Bridgeport the barker bear spoke in balloons adorned with elaborate and exuberant fonts of all types.  Everything was an emphasis..no two emphases alike.  A bit over the top, PT-a bit over the top.

Yet, as I tell my students meaning is simple sentences is concealed behind emphasis, and this meaning either must be revealed by context or orthography if the author is to control the meaning contained and avoid unwanted ambiguity.
    Bring me the blue pen on the table suggests what?
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (and don't give it to someone else in the room)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (I'm not interested in the black, red, or green one)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (not the pencil or crayola, silly, the blue pen).
    Bring me the blue pen on the table. (Not the one on the counter, or the one in your pocket)

Stupid little example, I know, I know.  But listening to the speaker's emphasis can nail down meaning which might be missed otherwise. 

The text can differ from the delivery in other ways, as well.  For example, the words gonna and wanna don't appear in the written text of many of the speeches delivered.  Going to and want to, on the other hand are prominent.  Obama swings effortlessly from the gonna/wanna camp to the going to/want to camp, and back again.  I lay this up to consciousness of his audience, and to an awareness that Americans don't much appreciate being talked down to by "pointy-headed intellectuals".  Probably Adlai Stevenson's greatest campaign blunder was is reflected in this anecdote:  A supporter once called out, "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" And Adlai Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority."  Thinking this was one thing: saying it was quite another matter.  Using popular idiom increases one's popularity, as long as it isn't forced or mannered. 

As an aside (I'm allowed one per post), most of the elite misunderstood the import of Obama's bad bowling badly.  They laughed at him...not noting how happy he was to laugh at himself, and how willingly the folks in the alley were to laugh with him.  No one in politics can afford to seem better than every one else at everything.  (I thing some of the reporters might actually find bowling fun if they weren't so afraid of betraying their class by appearing ridiculous in public).

So, as I meander through some of Obama's life experiences and some of his rhetorical arsenal, I'm going to speculate about how they connect.  Nobody has suggested he learned his effectiveness at public speaking school, so he must have cobbled it together from things he learned elsewhere.  I have no doubt I'll be spanked when I'm wrong.  But I hope any one who reads my next few posts will have some fun on the way.

Anti-abortionist extremist Randall Terry now blames Obama for his extremist compatriots coming off the rails. He wants Obama to take the blame for the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the security guard at the Washington Holocaust Museum.

When was personal responsibility abandoned by the right wing conservatives? Seems like with some conservatives, ring-wing principles fall prey to relativism, which, of course, is a bad word in conservative circles.

Seems like with some conservatives, liberal who commit crimes are responsible for their actions, period; conservatives who kill are not. When non-conservatives ask why young Muslims are joining Al Qaeda and taking up arms against the US, conservatives consider those questions of no consequence. Understanding the enemy isn't important. When conservatives take up arms and kill other Americans, then it becomes important to search for the reason why. Obama is their reason.

Sometimes I think the whole world is one big prison yard

Some of us are criminals

The other of us are guards

bob dylan

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer had an interesting life. They say he wrote Crime and Punishment in seven days. The 19^th century Russian mob was evidently a little frustrated with him over some gambling debts, and he had to work fast. Earlier in his life he had run into problems with the real Russian mob headed by the Tsar. 

 

It seems that the Russian intelligentsia was into penny newspapers in the middle of the 19^th century, much like many Americans.  Young Fyodor was not that happy with the forces that be and was involved in distributing these flyers in an attempt to organize a new wave, so to speak.

 

Well the Tsar and his minions did not like this 'new wave' and Fyodor found himself in the midst of a round-up.  As he stood on the gallows waiting for the trap to open sending him to his death with a rope around his neck, he and his compadres were given a pardon.

 

Needless to say this stuck in Dostoevsky's mind for  the rest of his life and he includes the incident in another of his great books: The Idiot.  The main character in that novel was granted executive clemency at the last minute in a similar manner as the writer.

 

Yesterday, one of my favorite Senators, Jim Webb wrote:

America's criminal justice system is broken.

How broken? The numbers are stark:

• The United States has 5% of the world's population, yet possesses 25% of the world's prison population;

• More than 2.38 million Americans are now in prison, and another 5 million remain on probation or parole. That amounts to 1 in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release;

• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980, up from 41,000 to 500,000 in 2008; and

• 60% of offenders are arrested for non-violent offensives--many driven by mental illness or drug addiction.

Numbers only tell part of the story.

I hit this issue once every week or so, in my most inimitable fashion, but here is a man who has real power and knows how to write a hell of a lot better than a dufus in his pajamas. He takes four sentences to sum up my main argument that this issue must be addressed. And it must be addressed now.

When I was a college kid I was blown away by two instances of totalitarianism.

The first instance of course involved Nazi Germany and the internment camps. Six million Jews and six million other human beings (consisting of Catholics, Gypsies, mentally ill, mentally retarded....) were exterminated.

The second instance involved Stalinist Russia which had its own dalliance in extermination but which also incarcerated some ten million people in the Gulags. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote much about this horrible prison system including his The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The numbers just astounded me along with the living conditions of these Soviet prisoners. The death rate was astounding.

But times have changed.  And now we, the richest country in the world and supposedly the freest, have the largest prison population. To reach 25% of the numbers reached by Soviet Russian sickens me.

Oh, but these are American Prisons, not gulags.  Well that is a subject of another blog, but I just would like to underline that two and a half million people are not sitting around and playing tennis and watching cable tv.

And as I like to point out we have more prisoners than Red China (remember that term before Murdoch and the other fascist corporate pigs started making money over there?). Now it turns out that China has a federal type system that roughly approximates our federal, state and local governments. So figures vary a little. But suffice it to say that China has an equivalent number of prisoners BUT THEY HAVE FOUR TIMES OUR POPULATION. AND CHINA IS A TOTALITARIAN STATE.

How did we end up in this situation?  Well there are many reasons.

First, as the Senator points out, the incarceration of felons involved in non-violent drug crimes escalated from 40,000 to 500,000 thousand since the War On Drugs program was initiated. So according to Webb's figures a little over 20% of our prison population are their because of drug usage and some dealing. No one I ever knew who had a drug habit, did not also deal a little in order to keep in stock as they say. So this is not the entire reason behind our huge incarceration rate but it is a substantial contributing cause.

When the cable channels run out of reality show reruns along with the reruns of their dramas and sitcoms they air those reality cop shows. It always slays me when the date on the video say 9/18/1998 but who cares?  I saw one last night where the police stop four boys for some traffic infraction, frisk everyone of them, note an odor of maryjane emanating from the automobile and begin the search of the car.

Oh, well heres a large catch of marijuana exclaims the officer.  It's a baggie half full of weed. All the while the background is a Jamaican jingo playing; Bad Boys.

I feel safer, don't you?

Webb adds:

While heavily focused on non-violent offenders, law enforcement has been distracted from pursuing the approximately one million gang members and drug cartels besieging our cities, often engaging in unprecedented levels of violence. Gangs in some areas commit 80% of the crimes and are heavily involved in drug distribution and other violent activities. This disturbing trend affects every community in the United States.

In a previous blog I noted that something around 10,000 deaths by gun fire can be attributed to gang activity. Gangs and gang violence should be examined in another post, but if there are a million men involved in violent gangs in this country, how many innocent people live in fear every single day in this country?

Senator Webb goes on to discuss the violence and misery of our prisoners, the immense problems facing those who are released and a program he is working on with Senator Leahy to look into this mess.

The goal of this legislation is nothing less than a complete restructuring of the criminal justice system in the United States. Only an outside commission, properly structured and charged, can bring us complete findings necessary to do so.

Fixing our system will require us to reexamine who goes to prison, for how long and how we address the long-term consequences of their incarceration. Our failure to address these problems cuts against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-jim-webb/why-we-must-reform-our-cr_b_214130.html

I started this post with a discussion of Fyodor for a reason.

I find it fascinating that every Thanksgiving our Commander  in Chief pardons a turkey.

I also find it fascinating that in a land where we incarcerate 2.5 million people at any one time, a couple hundred pardons might be issued--usually granted to a few members of the upper crust of society.

Carter presented an older version of the 'pardon' and its use by the ruler of a country. He actually 'pardoned' tens of thousands of citizens in on felled swoop. Oh we can get into the niceties of pardon, commutation of sentences and amnesty or even look into probation.

But Jimmy Carter's amnesty just said:  Look the Vietnam War is over. Let us really put it behind us. Let us begin anew.  Everyone in prison at the time for draft related offenses and everyone involved in draft related offenses were freed from prison and freed from further prosecution.

Back in 1969 I was in college and having filled out the proper draft form, I was exempt from military service.  My draft number that year was 9.  In 1970 my draft number was 309.  I was sick and tired of being in the running so to speak. So in 1970, even though I was a member of the Honors Society, I just declined to fill in the form requesting the exemption. That activated my number. However, later that year I was working in the college library and picked up a paper and discovered that the Selective Service System had reached 270 AND IT WAS ONLY SEPTEMBER. HA!!!  A week later Nixon let me off the hook by stopping at that number for the year. Phew as they say.

But I guess the real story was that in 1969 me and my buddies were sitting in my basement. We were all drunker than skunks and I got into an argument over the draft with someone who never even served in the armed forces.  I pulled out my draft card. Now there was the draft card and attached to it was some receipt thingy. So thinking I was clever, I pulled off the receipt and burned it right there and then.

Of course I woke up in the morning with a tremendous hangover and discovered to my dismay that I had indeed burned my draft card. Hahahahahahahha That was a federal offense.

I was never prosecuted. I mean, who would know?

Kids like me were hiding in Canada or living 'underground'. I even knew one guy who just presented himself to the authorities and served six months along with thousands upon thousands of others.

President Carter did not just pull this idea out of his ass. There is a long history in Europe of tyrannical rulers granting thousands of pardons on certain feast days and such. They did it for several reasons. One was that the Church liked the idea. Another reason was that THEY NEEDED TO CLEAN OUT THEIR PRISONS FROM TIME TO TIME.

Another great example of the pardon, more specifically the reprieve occurred in Illinois:

All prisoners in the US state of Illinois awaiting execution have had their death sentences commuted in 2003:

Governor George Ryan, a Republican who leaves office on Monday, told 156 inmates on death row that they no longer face dying by lethal injection. The unprecedented move, the most radical since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976, is likely to spark a furious debate across the US.

"I'm going to sleep well tonight knowing that I made the right decision," said Governor Ryan.

"Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," he said.

On Friday, Governor Ryan pardoned four death row inmates convicted of murder, all of whom said that confessions were beaten out of them by police in Chicago.

Leroy Orange, one of the men pardoned, was at Northwestern University Law School to hear Governor Ryan announce the blanket commutation of death sentences in the state.

Mr Orange, who had spent 19 years in prison after being convicted of fatal stabbings, spoke of his relief at being released.

"A lot of pressure was lifted from me that I didn't realise was on me." http://www.ccadp.org/news-ryan2003.htm

I would really like to see a real, concrete use of the pardon as a tool to clean out our prisons. Why not figure out a way to release at least a quarter of our prisoners?

Written by Pamela Merrit for RHRealityCheck.org - News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

When Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced that he intended to step down from the bench at the end of this year's Supreme Court term, there was a brief pause, a collective gathering in of air, followed by a frenzy of speculation that did not end until President Obama announced his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as nominee. During the days of guesswork and anticipation that preceded Obama's nomination of Sotomayor, political odds-makers seemed to favor the selection of a woman, with most pundits leaning toward a woman of color, to replace Justice Souter. Everyone was on pins and needles, and who could blame us? During the 2008 elections, the that the next President would most likely have the opportunity to nominate more than one Supreme Court justice and shape the political climate of the court for decades to come was one of the key areas of concern.

Pro-choice groups hoped for a nominee with a judicial record supporting a woman's right to choose. Anti-choice groups busily combed through the records of likely nominees looking for ammunition to block a pro-choice nominee. And everyone seemed to agree that the big issue on the table during the nomination process was going to be abortion.

So, when President Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor many people were surprised to see the nominee's own race and gender, not her position on abortion, emerge as the key battleground issues.

I was not surprised, nor do I think the emergence of race and gender as issues during this pre-confirmation period means that abortion is off the table. To the contrary, abortion is one of the issues being debated by proxy. Charges that reverse racism and sexism might have an impact on Judge Sotomayor's decision making ability are really charges that she might decide cases concerning abortion rights, discrimination, and immigration rights differently than conservatives would like.

America did not miraculously become a post-racial society with the election of our first President of color and the storm over Judge Sotomayor's nomination is just one example of that. The issue at hand is not whether Sotomayor's claim that a "wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life" translates into her being unable to rule without prejudice in favor of people of color. A review of Sotomayor's judicial record shows that she does not reflexively favor any group. In 96 race-related cases, she rejected discrimination claims by an approximate margin of 8 to 1.

The issue is also not whether Sotomayor's views on the role of gender in judicial matters--interpreted for the most part through that claim about what a "wise" Latina woman would do--will somehow translate into her ruling in favor of women and reproductive choice regardless of the merits of individual cases. As Jill Filipovic explores in her piece Fair and Balanced: Weighing Sotomayor's Opinions, "Sotomayor's only major abortion-related case was Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush - and her conclusion isn't going to warm the hearts of reproductive rights activists." The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy lost that case, which allowed the Global Gag Rule to remain in place until President Obama took office. Sotomayor has also ruled in favor of anti-abortion protestors in not one but two civil rights cases.

Jeremy Levitt, in a piece in the Orlando Sentinel (Sotomayor: Race-baiting and the unpatriotic right), asserts that Sotomayor has forwarded the basic premise that the gender, national origin and personal experiences impact a judge's decisions. Levitt, Associate Dean for International Programs and a distinguished professor of international law at Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando, questions whether that assertion is really a "novel revelation" and he flat out rejects the idea that making that assertion is a public display of racism.

Despite Sotomayor's judicial record on race-related discrimination cases, she has been charged with the task of putting Republican Senators at ease and calming their fears that a wise Latina woman would rule with her heritage and gender in mind rather than the law. So even with pro-choice organizations seeking clarification and assurances from the White House that Sotomayor will uphold Roe and protect reproductive rights, Judge Sotomayor is being painted as a pro-choice liberal activist judge by conservative groups and bloggers.

That's because the overt questioning of Sotomayor's ability to judge fairly because she is a Latina has little to do with her judicial record. Conservative opponents of Judge Sotomayor's nomination fear that she will shift once appointed to the bench, much like they believe Justice Souter did, and they have latched on to her "wise Latina woman" statements as evidence that she is likely to shift toward the left. Another liberal justice on the Supreme Court would do more than maintain the status quo; it would make the next nomination a potential game changer and we should have no doubt that the game being played is over a woman's right to choose.

Judge Sotomayor now faces opposition that appears to agree with her premise that gender, national origin and personal experiences impact a judge's decisions. Conservatives not only validate the premise of her statement through their insistence that judges be "strict constructionists" with clear ties to the Republican party, they also validate it through their over the top condemnation of Sotomayor's assertion that a wise Latina woman would make different decisions that a white man. Beneath the surface is their acceptance that Judge Sotomayor is right; that a woman of color, empowered through the richness of her heritage, would reach a different decision than a white man. They ought to know, since they bet on that logic proving true with both so-called "strict constructionist" conservative judges they welcomed onto the Supreme Court during the Bush Administration. During the pre-confirmation period for Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, pro-choice activists mounted opposition because we knew that one person's stare decisis is another person's debatable precedent. Now conservatives opposing Judge Sotomayor are demonstrating that they know that one person's "better conclusion" is another person's judicial nightmare.

How can David Letterman apologize to the family of Willow Palin in a manner befitting the circumstances?

While I don't agree with the Palins that Letterman's joke was aimed at Willow Palin--I'm certain that the target was Bristol who is now of legal age--but it was a clumsy attempt at humor and the writers should probably steer away from Bristol, as well. But, the Palins have never been ones to ease up on the feigned outrage if they can find some benefit to themselves or their party. So, David probably should apologize and I think I see a way that not only expresses his remorse but also turns this unfortunate incident around and ends up with a positive and productive outcome.

Consider the following. According to the 2005 statistics gathered by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence:

• · The Alaska rape rate is 2.5 times the national average.
• · Child sexual assault in Alaska is almost six times the national average.
• · Alaska has the highest rate per capita of men murdering women.
• · Almost 30% of Alaskans were not able to access victim services or encourage others to do so because there were no services available in their area at the time.

I would encourage David Letterman to contribute a large sum to the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (http://www.andvsa.org). Here is ANDVSA's info:

   The Network is a non-profit membership organization that is composed of 21 programs across Alaska. The 21 programs provide victim services for domestic violence and sexual assault, offender services, and crisis intervention services. The Network exists to promote communication and information sharing between programs across the state and to expose and eliminate interpersonal violence in the lives of Alaskan victims.

When Obama engages in acts of international diplomacy, he tries to communicate in a way that is diplomatic. 

And that is unAmerican.

As a group, they are the pop culture equivalent of necrotic carrion beetles, crawling with insectile determination from one infected open wound in the American psyche to another. The wounds include fear of race, fear of foreigners, fear of sexuality, fear of difference, hysterical religious fundamentalism, violent nationalism, and paranoia. They lay their eggs in the infected abrasion, then scuttle away. When the eggs hatch, disgorging rage and discontent, they start counting money.

Michael Rowe on the Pop Culture hate mongers, "Death at the Museum and the Degradation of the American Dialogue", Huffington Post, June 11, 2009

There have been mutterings for years about the insidious effects the constant barrage of hate talk has on the unhinged fringe. One day's look at the internet, one day's listen to the radio, a few hours of Fox News prime time is all one needs in order to get the full picture. Hate sells. That's the bottom line.

Never mind that it corrodes our National psyche and sends the loonies to near-orgasm. . .it's fun! The people who are out there on the front lines selling hate--Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Savage, Coulter, Hannity, et al--are enjoying the hell out of the impact their carefully choreographed and mostly disingenuous rantings have on an increasing number of followers.

And their followers slurp up every spurting syllable, as if from God's lips. . .

Janet Napolitano tried to warn us in a Homeland Security memo entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment", but was so severely shot down she ended up having to apologize for it!

I wish she wouldn't have done that. I wish the White House had backed her up and let it ride. We cave to extremists at our own peril--which is exactly what her own memo warned us about.

Eugene Robinson writes about it today:

For days, some conservative commentators tried mightily to paint the memo as an underhanded attempt by the Obama administration to smear its honorable critics by equating "right-wing" with "terrorism." It made no difference to these loudmouths that the number of hate groups around the country has increased by more than 50 percent since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It didn't matter that the memo was backed up by solid intelligence and analysis. For these infotainers, the point isn't to illuminate a subject with light but to blast it with heat.

And it wasn't just the Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world who pretended to be outraged. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accused the administration of trying "to segment out Americans who dissent from this administration, to segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration, and labeling them as terrorists." Steele seems to have decided that telling the truth isn't nearly as important as the high-temperature exercise known as "firing up the base."

The thing is, though, that words have consequences.

There's profit for the pundits, and perhaps personal advantage for some politicians, in calling President Obama a "socialist" and calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "racist Latina" and claiming that Democrats want to "take away your guns" -- in creating and nurturing a sense of grievance among those inclined to be aggrieved. But what about those who might not understand that it's all just political theater?

Paul Krugman writes about it today, as well:

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven't directly incited violence, despite Bill O'Reilly's declarations that "some" called Dr. Tiller "Tiller the Baby Killer," that he had "blood on his hands," and that he was a "guy operating a death mill." But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

This set the crew at "Morning Joe" off on such a tangent, they were practically foaming at the mouth (and it wasn't Starbuck's froth). Suddenly Krugman, that past Morning Joe guest, that great American hero, that deserved Nobel Prize winner, was nothing more than a Left Wing toadie. The gushing is over.

It's an odd state we're in when supposedly reasonable, responsible, intelligent adults defend extremism from any quarter. And yet we see it all the time. We declare the First Amendment as our arbiter. Free speech, as long as nobody dies. Free speech, above all else.

Adam Liptak wrote a piece in Wednesday's NYT called "Hate Speech or Free Speech? What Much of West bans is Protected in U.S." In it, he talks about how much stricter Hate Speech laws are in Canada and other civilized countries:

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean's magazine, the nation's leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their "dignity, feelings and self respect."

Oh. My. God. Can you imagine the battle royal in this country if we came up with something similar? Wouldn't those hideously hateful entertainers have a field day with that one?? Here's more:

Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Well, who cares? We hate all those countries, anyway. What do they know? They're not the Greatest Country in the World.

So which one of us is going to be the first to admit that it's time to cast a new look at our First Amendment rights? What does it really mean? Are there absolutely no limits? The fomentors have gone way beyond "sticks and stones". They not only revel in the attention it brings, they're addicted to it.

There are millions of people who take to heart every seriously off-base utterance from the Right Wing extremist "entertainers", and the number of incidents caused by their acting-out is only going to increase--unless we as a society stop allowing hate speech to masquerade as amusement.

Even little children understand how hurtful words can be. We teach them not to lie or to slander. We would never condone in children the kind of language we protect in adults.

And the irony to me is that--those adults we're in the business of protecting? They're not worth it.

Ramona

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices here)

Well, I'm a father with two daughters, both of them trained as journalists at the University of North Carolina.  I encouraged them in the pursuit of that adventuresome profession; I did not hold them back in any way from attaining education and proficiency. 

At the first press conerence for each, Bush's answers were spoken at 7th grade level, Obama's at a 10th grade level.

Each full transcript was copied into separate Word documents. After doing that,   the introductions by both men were deleted (since those are largely or fully scripted).  Then  all reporter questions were deleted from the transcripts. What's left is the answers that each president offered, off-the-cuff and unscripted, to all questions. 

Different legislative tracks intersect at several points -- cost, control, consumer needs, care-giver interests and collegiality. Republicans are almost universally skeptical. Democrats are very divided about health care reform between liberals and moderates. How fast the legislation can move through Congress depends on how fast the committees can complete their work. President Obama wants a vote in the Senate by August. The President now active in the debate using the town hall as his forum. So far the American Medical Association is opposed to a public option. And it is fairly apparent that a single payer plan is out of the question.

"The health care industry has a huge stake in reform" opines J.P. Green of the Democratic Strategist: "They will fight the public option, but they know that some form of expanded government health coverage is inevitable." To quote Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown, "The public insurance option remains the single biggest obstacle to a bipartisan bill, snarling the parties - and wings within each party - in a debate over the power of government, the role of the free market and the need to cover the uninsured."

A big part of the division in the Senate is associated with the so-called "public plan." Senators in the cross-hairs of several active advocacy groups include Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Kent Conrad of North Dakota. Other moderates with whom groups must contend are Evan Bayh of Indiana, John Tester of Montana, Tom Carper of Delaware, along with Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

Floor strategies in the Senate are not yet settled. The reconciliation process, needing just 51 votes is still on the table. Two senators, Kennedy and Byrd, are absent due to illness, and the Minnesota seat is still empty. Senator Chris Dodd is acting in a leadership role for Senator Ted Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has, quoting Politico:

. . . released a 615-page bill, but details on the most contentious issues, such as the public insurance option and the employer mandate, were left out for now . . . The bill calls for insurance market reforms, a prohibition on insurers' denying coverage to sick people, a mandate on individuals to own coverage and the creation of marketplaces where people can compare and buy coverage.

In the U.S. House of Representatives -- According to Patrick O'Connor and Chris Frates of Politico, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's top aides have prepared a joint memo indicating the unity of their leadership positions. To quote:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are double-teaming powerful chairmen and rank-and-file members to save health care reform from a repeat of the Democratic Party infighting that helped kill it in 1994.

. . . Pelosi and Hoyer urged Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) to heed the concerns of moderate Democrats.

. . . Waxman, Miller and Rangel -- along with their respective aides -- are trying to draft legislation in concert with each other so their committees will take up the same bill later this summer.

In the House, moderates include Blue Dog Democrats, constraining any public health plan option, and members of the New Democratic Coalition. Again, the public option provides a variety of sticking points for them including cost, Medicare rules. Rep. John Dingell of Michigan is a respected leader who has "offered a universal health care bill every year since he came ot Congress in 1955," the authors reported. To quote:

Toward the end of Tuesday's caucus meeting, he rose on his crutches and told the audience that this measure has the promise of becoming a legacy like Social Security -- a program his father helped create in the 1930s.

As he closed, he told members they should have the courage to move forward, eliciting a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats. Pelosi announced Tuesday that the bill will bear Dingell's name.

. . . House Democrats expect to introduce actual legislation next week, Waxman and others said Tuesday. The preliminary goal is to move legislation out of the committees by the Fourth of July and then clear the House by the August recess, setting up a fall showdown with the Senate over a final bill.

Health Care Reform will happen this year, in my opinion. The train has already left the station. In fact change is already happening. The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is now the law of the land. Health Information Technology reform is being funded by the President's Stimulus monies. And the President will soon sign the bill to mandate tobacco regulation by the FDA. If all of us work hard, a new era can emerge. But it could also easily get derailed. It is going to be an interesting ride.

References:

• "Can Health Overhaul Heal the Economy," by Alex Wayne of Congressional Quarterly (6/3/09).


• "Axelrod Fuels Democratic Message Machine for Health Care Overhaul," by Drew Armstrong of Congressional Quarterly (5/13/09).
  

See also Behind the Links, for further info on this subject.

Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics health care reform obama congress U.S. Senate U.S. House

 

Now that a guy has opened fire at the Holocaust Museum killing a security guard and another guy has killed an abortion doctor, one must wonder whether this is a sign of things to come. The latter says yes, it is, and he knows so.

The man accused of killing a high-profile abortion doctor said from his jail cell Sunday that similar violence was planned across the nation for as long as the procedure remained legal. When asked whether his statement was referring to another shooting, Roeder refused to elaborate. It was not clear whether Roeder knew of any impending violence. Law enforcement authorities said they did not know whether the threat was credible.

Maybe I'm crazy, but shouldn't we, as Americans, do everything in our power to keep the homeland safe. Dick Cheney says so:

From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans. It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so. Nor are terrorists or those who see them as victims exactly the best judges of America's moral standards, one way or the other.

Plus, according to the Bybee memo, it isn't really torture:

The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view, inflict "severe pain and suffering". Even if one were to parse the stature more "finely" to attempt to treat suffering as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

So we can waterboard terrorists who we think may have information on future attacks, but we can't waterboard terrorists who openly admits knowledge of future attacks? Either waterboarding is a legal tool when used to keep the country safe from attack or it isn't.

At the very least can't we deprive Roeder and Von Brunn of sleep and rations? Maybe send them to Gitmo because our prisons can't handle them?

 

Hi there, come on in.  Another long and exhausting day full of vitriol, heartbreak and angst.  At least if you watched the news or spent much time on-line.  If you were lucky enough to explore the rest of what life has to offer perhaps you were able to manage a smile.  Find yourself a seat somewhere while I get you whatever you need.  Like it?  It is soothing, I agree.  Perhaps not a perfect fit for everyone, but sometimes gentle music can lead to peaceful thoughts ... and the immeasurably important deep breath.  Before you get settled, add something to the queue for the evening - a song or two or a favorite movie, your choice.  As always.

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I've been trying out different blogs because Firefox quit playing nicely with my Opera account - and I found when trying Livejournal that it could be more convenient to try another format. These were 'lost' in Firefox because it kept crashing until I got the tabs under control. I'm also trying Taboo to save into and try to cut RAM load.

Pakistan plan to attack Taliban haven promises wider war

ex animo
davidfarrar

It's hard being a Red Sox fan.

Not that it's not fun, mind you. Especially in the middle of sweeping a third series from the Yankees. Ortiz is hitting, the pitching is good, the Manny move worked out "wicked awesome," Bay and Pedroia are terrific- I could go on and on. And coming back in the eighth inning! Sweet!

But that's why it's hard. No one remembers that it's not supposed to be this way.

See, this is New England. Rock-ribbed. Dour. Tight-lipped. "You can't get there from here" people. Here in New Hampshire the state gem is granite. The state vine is poison ivy. The state bird is flipped in traffic.

It goes way back. Pilgrims and Puritans came here to be able to have less fun than others were having in "Merrie Olde England"- and they succeeded. OK, the Pilgrims first landed at Provincetown, on Cape Cod, but it was December. Ever been in P'town in December and you're not gay? no fun. So after agreeing in the Mayflower Compact that they would democratically enforce the no fun rules, they got back into the ship, even though they were out of beer, and went to Plymouth to survive and make a living.

Doing what? Well, fishing- catching cod in icy waters using hand-cutting nets, then salting the fish (and their hands) to create a culinary delicacy that goes "thunk" when you throw it into the pan. They ate it and they liked it. It suited them. If a people are known by their food, and you think Parisian crepes and Italian spumoni, think Boston brown bread. Boston baked beans. (baked beans on Saturday night, six hours of church on Sunday- you think that was coincidental?) 

Or they farmed. In New England. (Remember "Granite State"?) The only thing tougher than the land were the trees that grew from it and the (not NY) Yankees who cut them down. It took 200 years to clear the land; those stone walls are where the farmer said "Screw it- that's far enough." ("Egad- that sufficeth.")

Then they invented (OK, stole) the Industrial Revolution. They let the stone walls slip back into the woods and moved off the cleared land into the new "slums" so they could work in "factories" and get paid "shit". A lot of them stayed behind to raise "sheep," an animal so dumb that if it does what you told it to do, it's because you guessed right. (And not nearly as good company as some would have you think.)

We were a mixed society. Immigrants came and stayed, welcomed by riots and exploitation, and they liked it. Oh, a lot said "This sucks- what's out West?" and sought an easier life in coal mines and on the Plains. But the ones who stayed were a sturdier breed. They bought the New England Creed- "Life is to be endured."

That's why, for oh, God so long, the Red Sox were the perfect New England team. They were to be endured. Their history is full of "to be endured."

They won the World Series in 1918; OK, but what were Bostonians doing in the street that very day? Dying of Spanish Flu,  and a lot of people died as a result of the Red Sox attracting that crowd. Not many victorious teams can make that claim.

And then the Curse. Babe goes to New York,  "No, No Nannette" goes to Broadway, and Boston goes to pot. But we all know the story. 

The Jews were the Chosen People who wandered for forty years; Red Sox fans weren't Chosen- they were Singled Out, and were lost for four score and six. They were the Duchy of Grand Fenwick to New York's New York.

And the losses! It wasn't just losing- it was losing with style. Winning ("tying for") the pennant but losing a playoff in '48 was the "high point" between by dad seeing the 1918 team and me meeting Don Buddin and Bob "he-runs-like-there's-a-safe-on-his-back" Tillman, who was once thrown out at first on a liner to right. 

Rally caps? Please. The rallying cry in the Dark Years was to grab the empty seats on either side of you and bang them. The venders sold bread; the drink was vinegar; the Green Monster was envy.

Then success began to come- almost. Victory for the Sox was used as a masochistic tool to amplify the pain. 

1967- "The Impossible Dream": win the pennant by sitting in the clubhouse watching two other teams lose more than you, go to the World Series, trail 3 games to 1, then come roaming back to be able to lose game 7.

1975- The Sox win game 6- "The Greatest Game ever Played" on Fisk's home run, just to blow the lead in game 7 in the NINTH INNING! (sorry)

1978- Come roaring back in the last week to tie the Yankees (after blowing a 14-game lead) to force the Yankees into a playoff. Bucky F---ing Dent.  (BUCKY DENT???)

1986- The Game 6 collapse, Bill Buckner, when we were ONE STRIKE AWAY!!! (sorry.)

2003- He left Pedro in??!!?? Aaron Boone in extra innings. (AARON BOONE???) And what game? Game 7. What opponent? Yankees.

But then the Sun came out. 2004. Pennant. Series. Victory. (In my case the curse lasted just a bit longer; as Damon was hitting the Grand Slam against the Yankees I got a call that a favorite student was hit by a bus [she's fine, but I haven't completely forgiven her.])

2007. Pennant. Series. Victory.

And tonight the Sox take a ninth straight game from the Yankees.

All that's left of the Way It's Supposed to Be are the seats at Fenway.

It's hard being a Red Sox fan.

But it's fun! (knock on wood.)

Maybe it was the way many seniors were burned by Medicare Part D, but AARP, the 40 million-member senior association that threw its power behind Part D, isn't coming out for any of the leading or trailing health care reform proposals this go-round.

AARP has joined other centrist groups* in the Divided We Fail campaign that calls for a bipartisan solution and states that "all Americans should have access to affordable, quality health care, including prescription drugs, and that these costs should not unfairly burden future generations."

Those sound like safe talking points. Just the kind that will ensure a repeat of the "reform" that gave us Medicare D.

As Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) reflected in a 2006 editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine: "The current problems with Medicare Part D are largely the direct result of the undemocratic way in which the plan was authored and passed. The final legislation, heavily influenced by drug-company and health insurance lobbyists, focused mainly on the needs of those industries instead of those of the seniors it should serve."

The absence of discussion on non-profit, single-payer health care came up recently on AARP's online member forum.

Some AARP members are cynical about AARP's non-advocacy stance during the current health care debate. There's a suggestion that they've been sold out. Wrote one, "AARP's income from royalties (amounts paid by insurers to allow them to use the AARP name in their advertising) is $498 million or twice the amount paid for membership fees.  Royalties represent 43% of the $1.168 billion total revenue."

Another suggested that AARP is attempting to kill President Obama's proposal for a public insurance option by requesting that Congress include long-term care in the health care bill, an expensive provision that would make it even less palatable to the hostages on Capitol Hill. "Then to have the gall to ask for donations when they get a half a billion in royalties from insurers," he or she added.

AARP's official "demands":

• Narrowing the Medicare Part D 'Donut Hole.' In 2007, 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries fell into the donut hole, a coverage gap that left them responsible for their entire drug costs on top of their Medicare Part D premium. The donut hole is expanding as the rising costs of drugs outpace inflation.
• Approval of safe and affordable generic biologic drugs
• Give the Secretary of Health and Human Services authority to negotiate drug prices for Medicare
• Allow importation of lower cost drugs
  

In short, AARP leadership supports adding more band-aids to an already mummified health care system. Not much of a legacy to leave the children.

 * I am confused by SEIU's membership in Divided We Fail.

                                                    My Obama

                                    Full view click here > Zoom

The right wing blitz against president Obama though completely made of straw and mud is soaking into the minds of the unknowing, here is a sampling of todays news stories:

These are the top 3 read stories today at the Washington Times:

• #1 BOLTON: Obama continues Bush's 2nd term -- badly (libel)
•  #2 EXCLUSIVE: Voight calls Obama 'good actor' (slander)
  
• #3 GAFFNEY: America's first Muslim president? (vilification)

• GREEN BAY, Wisconsin -- There was a rare sight along the motorcade route as President Obama arrived here Thursday to talk about health care: a protest.In what was perhaps a surprising sight for a president accustomed to an enthusiastic embrace wherever he goes, Mr. Obama was greeted by several hundred protesters who, judging by their signs, oppose his economic policies and efforts at overhauling the nation's health care system. Some of the signs read: "No Health Care," while others read "No Socialism" and still more declared, "Taxed Enough Yet?" ( New York Times Thursday, June 11, 2009)
  

•  4 reasons why Obama's health plan is no bargain (CNN.Money.com)

(sorry, I wont help their click ratio by linking to them)

There  is an all out blitz in the media and on the web to discredit  Obama in the minds of the American people. This debate over public health care is going to be hard fought by big money who has interests in private insurance, so we will hear some nasty stuff for sure. I used just two search terms ,Obama's sucesses and Obama's promises and the result was several dozen  links, 90% of which were attacks against President Obama. I was really getting depressed and began to ask myself  "if all these people are against him, how did we ever get him elected?"  As I was wondering I found and read the following which reminded me why we elected barrack Obama.

 From Long Island Business News, Debate Room ,Kremer (Opinion Piece): Thu June 11

 "He's sharp.He's vague.He's articulate.He's unpredictable.He is as cool as a cucumber.He's got tremendous popularity among the general public. He is confusing to the Democrats and the Republicans. He's Barack Obama, and that speaks for itself
 (read the whole thing here) >Kremer

  We cant sit back, let him do all the work,and  take all the abuse.Never have we had a president who tried so hard to keep his promises,who was so diligent in his service to us.He could just as easily ride his popularity and sit back and relax as others have done before him,but he doesn't. He keeps getting up every morning and going to  work for us. So when you get angry with him and really frustrated just consider there was no better choice we could have made when we elected him, not in this country or any other, we were right in choosing him, so lets help  "My Obama " out.> Health Care Now (what you can do)

Today I stumbled across a post from Amanda Hess at the DC alt-weekly Washington City Paper that takes on the Huffington Post for its sexist entertainment section.

The money line:
"People--even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people--will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that's a big part of the Huffington Post's model."

Arianna did an interview a little while ago where she mentioned that more than half of the site's traffic comes from non-political stories, a figure I was a little surprised to hear - perhaps because I personally don't really go to HuffPo for entertainment news, or at least I didn't that much before (normally, if I was in the mood for celebrity gossip or similar 'news,' I'd check out ONTD or Best Week Ever or even, ack, Perez Hilton). Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I realize that most of my clicks at HuffPo nowadays are related to entertainment, and I never visit those celeb gossip sites anymore (also a factor: I know most of the day's political news anyway - and much more in depth, may I say - given how closely I read TPM everyday). Is it HuffPo that's changed, or me, or a combination of the two?

The point being - sex sells, we all know it, the Huffington Post certainly knows it, and I'm a progressive guilty of clicking on some of those shameful links. That's not to say I don't shake my head at the headlines and nature of it as I do it - the focus and amount of the coverage has alarmed me as of late - and Hess's post and other writings certainly give me pause. She has other good stuff, including "sexism on a liberal website is still sexism" and "Huffington Post continues nipple parade."

An interesting sidenote to all this: someone at HuffPo read Hess's posts and decided to scold the Washington City Paper for linking to their site (!), though Arianna asserts it wasn't really scolding. The hullabaloo even caught the attention of David Carr at the New York Times, prompting him to post "HuffPo gets huffy over parody," where the term 'peekabo sexism' comes from. I think it describes it well, and though Carr focused more on the exchanges that went on between the two websites, my hope is that more traffic is driven to the sexism write-ups - if they get a tenth of the traffic that Rihanna's nipple slips get, we could have some good meta media discussion instead.

Commentary published this month in "Nature Reports Climate Change" confronts us with an almost apocalyptic vision of a future shaped by our unwillingness to make current sacrifices to avert future disaster.  The article by Rogelj et al, "Halfway To Copenhagen, No Way To 2C" (http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0907/full/climate.2009.57.html) dispassionately compares what the global community is undertaking to reduce carbon emissions with what most of climate science judges the minimum necessary to limit global temperature increases to less than 2 C above pre-Industrial values.  The Commentary by itself does not depict the consequences of failure, but the deaths, devastation, and impoverishment that failure would inflict on us are well spelled out elsewhere within the science literature.

Illustrating the gap between what is needed and what is underway is the estimate that the 2 C goal requires industrialized nations to reduce carbon emiissions 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.  In contrast, Waxman-Markey, the U.S. answer wending its way through Congress, finds itself facing fierce opposition for proposing the far less ambitious goal of a 17 percent reduction below 2005 levels - themselves well above the 1990 values. Compared with the status quo, the attempt is noble; compared with the demand nature is imposing on us, it is almost cowardly, with none of the disrepute deserved by the bill's authors themselves.

In the brief week or so since I began posting here, I've noted a commendable focus on the extraordinarily critical issue of universal health care.  I mean no disparagement of that effort, which I hope remains strong, but for perspective, I will suggest that even that issue is dwarfed in eventual importance by the threat to all civilization from unmitigated climate change driven by anthropogenic activities - fossil fuel consumption and deforestation.  I believe those familiar with the science literature will recognize this perspective as one shared by a large majority of scientists familiar with the evidence.  Two years ago, the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists, an organization created explicitly to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear holocaust, and featuring an illustrious membership that includes many Nobel laureates, departed from its most fundamental tradition.  Until then, the nuclear danger was its exclusive raison d'etre.  At that time, however, it made the unprecedented choice to elevate climate change to an equal status as a global threat. 

None of this would matter if we were impotent to address climate change.  The technological capacity exists, but it is the political will that still lags alarmingly behind.  My hope here is that some readers will aid in the process of closing the gap.  We need, I believe, to remind our representatives that Waxman-Markey is only a first step, and not even a minimally adequate one, but still valuable as a start.  We also need to support other Administration efforts, including those already begun, such as enhanced CAFE standards, action to upgrade the electricity grid, and vigorous financial support for alternative energy development and conservation initiatives.

And we should live our own lives concordant with the demands we make on all others - to conserve, and utilize alternatives to fossil fuel energy whenever feasible within our means.  We might also take to heart an answer given recently at a museum (if I recall) that asked visitors what action they recommended each person take to address the global warming danger.  Some said, "use solar panels", others recommended " turn off electric appliances when unused", or "buy a hybrid car".  The museum, however, decided that the best answer was provided by one respondent in the form of a single word - "Vote".

All that and more, I expect.  How much more?

Winston Churchill, who had a talent for capturing the essence of an idea, once remarked about circumstances of great danger and urgency with the following advice:

"It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required."

 

 

 

 

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Politics and Media News Headlines 6/11//09

The Rise of Right-Wing Violence (by Pareene at Gawker)

When the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning of potential violence by "right-wing extremists," the right-wingers of the internet were enraged. Then some right-wing extremists started killing people. Three--three!--political shootings by right-wing extremists does actually make a trend, mostly because it's not accidental that the crazies are turning violent now. Right-wing domestic terror, weirdly, spikes when the right-wing media step up the intensity and violence of their rhetoric--which they happen to do when Democrats are in charge...

What happens is Scott Roeder, the Kansas resident who murdered Dr. George Tiller at church because he was an anti-abortion fanatic with ties to, hey, a right-wing extremist group. There was Jim Adkisson, who shot up a Unitarian church, killing two, because he hated liberals and gays. And now there is the White Supremacist who just shot up the goddamn Holocaust Museum. He is, of course, named "James Von Brunn," and he is 89 years old! And, obviously, he writes crazy things, on the internet. He is also a World War II vet? For the Allies! [Emphasis added.]

James W. Von Brunn's anti-Semitic screed (by Mark Benjamin, Salon)
The alleged Holocaust Museum shooter published a book called "Kill the Best Gentiles." Read selections here.

How Many Crazed Gunmen Is it Going to Take? (Truthdig)
President Obama said in response "we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism." Sure, but how about getting a little vigilant against guns? The alleged shooter served six years in prison after showing up at a Federal Reserve meeting with a sawed-off shotgun among other weapons, but he obviously had no trouble rearming.
To stop the discussion from going in that direction, then, what kind of creativity can we expect from the right wing? See the following stories to get an idea.

On Fox, Jim Lacamp says Obama admin's "class warfare" helps set "the stage for social unrest" (County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Fox News hosts "terror expert Bob Newman" to discuss Holocaust Museum shooting (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
[Wednesday], Neil Cavuto hosted Bob Newman -- a Colorado radio host who Cavuto presented as a "terror expert" -- to discuss the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. During the segment, Newman raised questions about whether President Obama's recent visit to a concentration camp or his statement about Israeli settlements were factors in the shooting... Cavuto didn't say anything else about Newman's background, so here are a couple highlights from his radio show, The Gunny Bob Show. Newman called for all Muslim immigrants to the U.S. "to be required by law to wear a GPS tracking bracelet at all times"... Newman said of "terrorist-hugging" Obama: "What are you gonna do, Obama, come to Denver and try ... to whip my white ass?"

Newsmax.com publishes column, "Obama Breeds Climate of Hate Against Jews," linking Obama to Holocaust Museum shooting (County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Right-Wingers Blame Left-Wingers and Muslims for Holocaust Museum Shooting (by The Cajun Boy at Gawker)
First off, Beck went on his show [Wednesday night] and performed perhaps the most stunning feat of pulling one out of the old anus in the history of stunning pulling one out of the ole anus feats. Beck, with a straight face mind you, looked into the camera and said that America as it stands today is a "boiling pot" fueled by extremists groups like Al Qaeda and 9/11 truthers who are sowing the seeds of extremism and hatred in this country. Then, still with a straight face, Beck also warned his viewers that more violence is likely to come in the future, that "more nutjobs are going to coming out of the woodwork now," that all of this is part of the "perfect storm" he's been trying to warn everyone about, a "perfect storm" which will result in a "witchhunt" that will focus on two groups of people. Can you guess who they might be?

Jews and--Conservatives!

IT HAPPENED LAST TIME: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
By "last time," we mean the last time we had a Democrat president. As you may recall, that president was Bill Clinton--and crazy stories spread far and wide about his intolerable ways. The liberal world ran off and hid in the woods--and, to all intents and purposes, the "mainstream press corps" didn't exist. And sure enough! By September 1994, a man name Frank Corder decided to act. This incident largely went down the memory hole, like most misconduct directed at Clinton... Were unbalanced people driven to act by all the crazy talk about Clinton? Are unbalanced people being so moved by Obama's rise today? By crazy and semi-crazy talk about him?...

Is it time for the mainstream press to come to terms with America's underworld discourse? For decades, the mainstream press has tended to avoid the cauldron of craziness bubbling beneath the surface of our public discussions. In the 1990s, the insider press was closely involved with the spread of crazy talk about Clinton, then Gore. Today, the insider press is much less interested in spewing wild tales about Obama. But the mainstream press corps loves to avoid all such difficult, unpleasant regions. Isn't it time to report it out straight? There are crazy areas of our discourse, in which people are encouraged to believe crazy things. Yes, we know: Powerful people are sometimes involved in these wild promulgations. But isn't it time to report it out straight: That there's lunacy inside our discourse?

The worm turns and turns... (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
From Joan Walsh in today's Salon... "...[I]t's hard not to think about the extreme right-wing rhetoric, especially about Barack Obama, and whether it could conceivably lead to more right-wing violence." What about the tons of hate-talk offered by the pro-Obama forces during the campaign? What about the transformation of Kos, D.U., AmericaBlog and TPM into festering cesspools of cyber-rage? What about the death-threats? Apparently, that genre of extremist rhetoric does not trouble Joan Walsh.

Click here for more politics and media news headlines.

Carolyn Kay                      
MakeThemAccountable.com

Looking absolutely smashing in string bikini, there she goes, ladies and gentlemen - Carrie Prejean, late Miss California, driven by catcalls (and some bust-out catty calls) up the Via Dolorosa of Political Correctness.

Did anyone notice, in her firing yesterday, that nary a soul in media bothered to get her reaction until about 24 hours of news cycle had elapsed? Is that fair? She's on "Larry King" tonight - so does the delay indicate he had exclusive embargo on what will likely be a tearful self-exoneration? Or was Ms. Prejean's vituperative foes given first shot at framing the story?

And what's with the constant references to her STRIPPED! of her title? How about "relieved" of the title? Cashiered. What? Not enough chop-licking subliminal stimulation? Who's writing news copy these days? The Mitchell Brothers? 

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I was traveling the other day and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that had one of the cable news stations on their TV.  The sound was turned off.  A headline kept appearing before me as I ate:

 Accused Rapist critically beaten.  Was the vigilantes' attack justified?

With the TV's sound off, I never learned the details of the case.   I confess that I understand the sentiment of vigilantism in the case of rape.  What struck me as bizarre, was having a news network proffer the possibility that a vigilante attack on an accused felon might in any way be justified.  They didn't say 'understandable', instead moving beyond hyperbole to the definitive 'justified'.  My first thought was that the question presupposes guilt.  Additionally, the suggestion of such an attack being justified tacitly implies the judicial system in the US has malfunctioned in some fundamental way, and in this case, the resort to illegal justice might serve some legitimate purpose.  If that's true, then please hold in check any judgments on Mexico and its' tribulations with the drug cartels.  If justice is being thwarted in our legal system, then we should be addressing our own failure to successfully prosecute the 'known' criminals in our midst.  If the truth be told, framing the discussion in terms of support for vigilante justice is specious.  It is a manipulation of the audience marinated in sensationalism which networks routinely offer as the sauce du jour, to wet our appetite for stories that should have been relegated to the page 4 of some regional newspaper.  This 'appetite for their 'special sauce' is in actuality, the lizard brain,  underlying our conscious mind, demanding spilled blood for the horrific act of rape as well as stimulating other primitive, unreasoned responses from homo sapiens, which may have played a role in our past biological success, but which has no place in a society founded on the rule of law.  The media execs who chose to frame this story in terms of public support for vigilantism are manipulating their audience's primitive instincts in order to to 'gin up' interest in the already thin content of the 24 hour news cycle, (on what I can only hope was a slow news day). 

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I just came across this post by Brad Johnson on ThinkProgress.  It outlines a particularly brainless passage from the GOP American Energy Act.  

Californians Against Hate have twice had their representatives go by the Princeton, New Jersey offices of the National Organization for Marriage to get copies of NOM’s IRS 990 reports, to no avail.

NOM is required by federal law to have these available for public view. FWIW, in addition to having reps drop by, two certified letters have already been sent to the NOM office from CAH:

To no avail.

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After reading staylenc's Truckin' it brought forth so many memories of my travels to and from many places in California. My first California road trip started east of the Mississippi River and concluded in Los Angeles. It was four days long and I couldn't wait to see that sign with poppies on it that said, "Welcome to California." The trip allowed me to get a better understanding and scope of the land mass that we call the United States. Texas and everything west of it is so massive that it took up most of the trip. If I wasn't limited by time I would have spent more of the trip in New Mexico and at the Grand Canyon. I had commitments in Los Angeles so I did the best I could do under the the circumstances.

Once I settled into living in Los Angeles, I wanted to explore the state of California. I knew that California had some of the most diverse terrain in the world and I wanted to see as much of I as I could possibly see.  After only eight months in Los Angeles , I became enamored with the idea of driving up to San Francisco. I planned and plotted the trip up U.S. 101 but I wish I had done it during the daylight hours. It always excites my sense of curiosity to travel unfamiliar landscapes. Because I took this trip at night, the landscape, the terrain and California's history remained a mystery for a few more years.  Little did I know that U.S.101 is part and parcel of El Camio Real. The Royal Way or Road is the passage built by the Spanish to thwart the movement south by the Russians. The passage cuts the coastal ranges of California from it's vast central valley.

Along the El Camino Real, California history takes shape in the form of missions and presidos. They stretch to cover nearly two-thirds of the curvaceous but sometimes flat lands of California. The first mission, San Diego de Acala (1769) is/was one of two permanent and initial settlements by Spain in Alta California. The first military outpost was El Presido de San Carlos de Monterey (1768). This military output was founded at the same time that Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo in Carmel. A year after Carmel's Mission was built, Mission San Gabriel Archangel was founded. It is just north of Los Angeles and east of Pasadena. Mission San Antonio de Padua was also built during 1771 in one of the most rural parts of Monterey Country. The completion of San Antonio marked the second mission in Monterey county. Only within the past three years have I visited San Antonio which is north of the city of Paso Robles.  San Antonio is far off U.S. 101 on Jolon Road in the valley of the oaks. I tried to go to this Mission once but I thought misread the directions as I drove right by it. On the second try I found the entrance. It sits on a U..S Military base near the Santa Lucia range that separates coast from the Salinas Valley . One of the next trips I constantly dream about includes a ride to San Antonio so that I can see the landscape as I ascend Ferguson-Nacimento Road which drops somewhere into the middle of Big Sur. I want to try this route because I want to return the portal to the Sun and sea at Pfeiffer Beach.

Farther south on U.S. 101, San Luis Obispo de Tolosa appeared on the Spanish map of California in 1772. The bishop and prince of Missions is roughly half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I remember the first time driving over the Gavoita Pass just north of Santa Barbara in the middle of night and then up and over the Cuesta grade just north of SLO. I had no idea that San Luis Obispo, known for its Nine Sisters, was otherwise so hilly and those Sisters sweep out to a gorgeous blue-green Pacific ocean.

Highway 101 is a beautiful drive in California because it shares asphalt at several junctures with the mythical Pacific Coast Highway or the 1. Just north of the Cuesta grade on 101, PCH 1 splits--Highway 46 is the connector-- off and becomes the essential California road trip and the way to see Big Sur (PCH 1/US.101 also cross the Golden Gate Bridge on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula). The first enclaves north of Highway 46 include Cambria and San Simeon, home of Hearst Castle. Farther north  there is a place along the Pacific Coast Highway called Big Sur but Big Sur is much more than a place on a map. It is almost everything I could imagine about the rugged topography of California. It is "Relax Honey, you are in Big Sur." Again I missed this scenic place the first drive north because I didn't drive specifically on the 1.  Even though I missed it the first time, it is one of my favorite drives. I always say that I will never drive it until I actually get in car to do it and then I remember that "Relax, Honey" sign. I never saw that sign until someone actually said "Relax, Honey." There is something seductive about the Santa Lucia Range, the small ribbon of road clinging to the cliffs, the forested landscape and the surf crashing the jagged edges of California that makes Big Sur, Big Sur. 

Driving the Pacific Coast Highway takes patience. Driving up or down U.S. 101 takes stamina. It seems like everything north of Paso Robles on U.S.101 is mostly flat. El Camino Real was probably chosen just because it sits between the Santa Lucia Range, the Los Padres National Forest on the west and the range in what seems like the very center of the state that forms the vast central valley of California. Perhaps it is best to describe this area as the southern most portion of the Salinas Valley. John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath takes place somewhere in this area. Methinks Steinbeck was saying, in a subtle way that Monterey is dangerously and seductively beautiful. Somewhere in the middle of this fertile valley along the El Camino Highway is Mission San Miguel. The first time ( a couple of years ago) that I visited this Mission, I could not believe that I passed it so many times on trips I made up and down 101. It probably ranks near the top of list as one of most overlooked of the twenty-one missions. I find the landscape quite unique because of its locale. I didn't know cacti could grow as far north as San Miguel? The days can be extremely warm--warm by a  foggy San Francisco summer standard-- but the nights, unless there is cloud cover, can seem like a night on the the frozen tundra. San Miguel established in 1797, sits so inconspicuously next to 101 that I had to use a map to find it. It is known as the Mission of El Camino Real or the Highway.


San Juan Bautista in San Benito County ( central California) and San Fernando Rey de Espana in Southern California were founded the same year as San Miguel. There however are several more Missions along El Camino Real that were established well before these three Missions. San Buenaventura (Ventura), San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco, Santa Clara (at San Jose), Santa Cruz and Nuestra Senora de la Soledad are the ones that share this distinction. Four are in the north and two in the south. Oddly enough there is a Mission San Jose (other than Santa Clara in San Jose proper) that sits on land in Fremont, California just north and east of the city of San Jose. I can't say that I remember seeing San Buenaventura along 101 on that faithful voyage to San Francisco. The same can be said about Santa Clara and the Mission at Soledad.  Nevertheless I have had the pleasure of visiting all six within the last two years. San Juan Bautista is the only Mission I remember because I saw a campanario during my first trip to Northern California. Even though I remember this, It is difficult to remember which Mission I visited first, San Juan Capistrano in Southern Californa or Mission Dolores in San Francisco? They both rank at the top when it comes to the number of visits I have made to the Missions. San Juan Capistrano is probably my favorite Mission because it smells (the flowers) so good.

There were a few Missions that didn't receive my attention until I realized that I had almost seen them all. Once I passed an arbitrary number on the visit all the California Missions scale  I had to see them all.  Santa Barbara, the Queen of Missions, was first on my list about three years ago. After visiting Santa Barbara I decided that I would complete the twenty-one Missions on-the-trail-list by adopting a strategy to see as many Missions in one area with one trip. There is too much territory to cover otherwise. The first time I applied this strategy is when I visited San Buenaventura, Santa Ynes and La Purisma in one fell swoop. Incidentally,  La Purisma is the only Mission that the state of California operates as a working Mission and state park. I was almost finished the must-see-all the Missions-list. Before visiting the southern most Missions, San Luis Rey, San Diego San Fernando and San Gabriel--I wanted them to be last--, I made sure to drive north of San Francisco on 101 to visit the Missions at Sonoma and San Rafael.

I thought the only Missions left on my check list were those in the southern part of the state. I was wrong and I don't know how I could forget Santa Cruz? I don't know how I could forget the Holy Cross Mission because I am frequently in Santa Cruz admiring the Boardwalk, the Natural Bridges and the surfers along West Cliff drive. Before I topped off my list of twenty-one Missions, I made an excuse to visit San Cruz and the Mission of Hard Luck. It is probably the smallest Mission among what remains of these historical buildings.

If there is a beginning there is most certainly and end. The beginning of the California Mission trail starts in San Diego. It took two days to see the four remaining Missions on my to-see list in Southern California. It takes careful planning to navigate the great expanse of Los Angeles. Even the most carefully crafted plans will change due to the enormous number of freeways and cars in the megalopolis of the west coast. Traffic tossed a wrench my plans. I drove from south western Los Angeles to San Gabriel just east of Pasadena. Before I even arrived in Los Angeles I studied maps and traffic patterns to find the least restrictive route. I also made sure I had plan to get from San Gabriel to San Fernando in the least amount of time. I sorely under estimated the traffic because I nearly missed the opportunity to see San Fernando. I had forty-five minutes to acquaint myself with the Mission of the Valley.  I left the grounds just before they locked the gates and walked across the street to the park with orange trees. It seems like this was orange grove at one time. 

The following day, only two Missions left. A few miles north of the beginning of the trial I was was near the end of my to-see list. San Luis Rey de Francia reminds me most of buildings I've seen pictures of in Spain. The adobe stands out against the blue Southern California skies. The replica like the original Mission is extremely large. The palm trees stand proudly in front  and sometimes dance as the hot dry air the blows across the landscape. It is amazing how the bougainvillea cling to the adobe walls and provide an attractive contrast to the whiteness of the walls which relfect the powerful Sun.

Ah San Diego! I really had a tough time finding this Mission. It is stuck between the freeway and Qualcomm Stadium. Again I studied the map to try to fine the easiest way to the Mother of all Alta California Missions. The map doesn't do justice to actually getting there. But when I did get there I was extremely happy because this was last on my-must-see-list. I wanted to kiss the ground becuase it only took fifteen or so years of doing this to get this is point. San Diego's front portico is just like most of the Missions in the system. I found the lavender in the front garden extremely pleasing to the eye as I tried to size up the tall campanario. From the pictures I had seen, I thought all of San Diego de Acala was on flat ground but it sits up on a hill just above the road. Like all of the Missions, San Diego de Acala has a chapel, a garden and a story. I walked in and found the living quarters of Junipero Serra. All I can tell you for sure is that he was short man with huge ambitions. It would take someone like him to establish a good number of the Missions in California because the terrain is rugged and diverse. I can't imagine walking from San Diego to Monterey as J. Serra did when he established the first Missions in San Diego and Carmel and the first Presido in Monterey for the crown of Spain.

P.S. I topped the whole trip off with a revisit to San Juan Capistrano's Mission just north of San Luis Rey.  And it still smells good!

P.P.S. Somewhere in the middle of all these trips I re-discovered that California has roads that come and go east and west. Yosemite was first the place I went east of that great central valley of California. And finally two years ago, I made my first trip to Death Valley. It's a long drive from San Francisco.

Cross posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog

By Erin Ferns

Although there are other election reforms - good and bad - that deserve the spotlight, voter ID remains a hot button issue for legislators and the media, primarily in Southern states. These battles are drawing as much attention for their political divisiveness as for the unfair burden they put on voters.

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(Crossposted at The Whole Delivery)  

On the Floor of the Senate last night, he gave a long speech that totally refuted Cheney's lies and most of the conventional narrative on the subject.  "I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information Ive been able to gain access to, the story-line that we have been led to believe, the story about waterboarding that we have been sold, is false in every one of its dimensions..." 

He began by citing historical times in war that the United States did not resort to torture, that we always held true to our principles.

He laid out testimony he has heard about the successful interrogation of Abu Zabayda, and contrasted it with the utter lack of usable information from the cruel and inhumane torture sessions done by the Contract Interrogators, and told how much further their inhumane methods went than even the DOJ had signed off on.  He blasted the DOJ for ignoring the opinions from various counsels who asserted the illegality of the program, and bemoaned the fact that it is only the Executive Branch that is able to de-classify the documents that could once and for all provide us with the true history of this ugliness that has lost the United States so much credibility and goodwill in the world.  One could assume there is plenty he has heard or read that he is not at liberty to share.

It is a barnburner of a speech; he tries very hard to speak calmly and rationally, but in a few spots you can hear his closely held rage.

Many of us are waiting to see which documents or photos will be enough to tip the Obama administration into ordering investigations by the DOJ.  Sheldon just gave us some hope. 

The ever-diligent Emptywheel at firedoglake put up the link; apparently it was a bit of a job to get cspan to put up the video...here is her link; the second full speech played for me, not the first.  Thank you, Marcy.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com

Apparently the CIA's own Inspector General's report from that era (2004?) is to be released June 19.  I'm sure it will be a pip.

p.s. If anyone could help me in the comments section about the method for pasting in a link, I would appreciate it.  This is all new to me, and the help menu hasn't helped, and the design, preferences, and tools dropdown menus are all dark.  Anyway, thanks in advance. 

 

 

 

Under pressure from the private medical industry Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has flip-flopped on the public health care option she once supported. In a letter to Health Care for America Now (HCAN) dated April 11, 2009, Landrieu clearly stated her support for a public insurance option. This week, however, Landrieu withdrew her support for the public option, saying "I don't think it's the right way to go."

Landrieu's reversal on the public option can only be the result of pressure from the medical industry, including the American Medical Association (AMA), insurance, and pharmaceutical interests dedicated to keeping health care in for-profit hands. As the Huffington Post observes based on figures from the Center for Responsive Politics, Landrieu has collected a career total of $1,668,693 in campaign contributions from private health insurance and health care interests. This total includes $607