Grumblebear, The Ex-Pat Bear

Bye-Bye Blogger

2011-07-25T04:14:00.000-05:00

And away we go . . . .

This blog has moved to http://stuartlaird.com/grumblebear.

Thanks, Blogger, for being a wonderful host.

In Times Like These . . . .

2011-02-01T06:11:00.000-06:00

I am totally fascinated by what ‘s happening in Egypt.

It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in my lifetime, so far, and I can’t leave it alone.

The weather here is gorgeous, and I just have to be outside at least part of the day, but it’s not quite warm enough to take the laptop out onto the street, so I’ve been in and out, grabbing chunks of friendship outside and Egypt while in.

I may do some off and on blogging as it unfolds. In the meantime, watch it yourself here.

You Just Can’t Make Stuff Like This Up

2011-01-04T12:03:00.001-06:00

UPDATE: with the help of friend Marjory, I’ve managed to place Don Tennant within the local community and concluded that it’s 99.9% likely that the following is, in fact, a brilliant parody.

If the following is a parody, it’s absolutely brilliant!

However, it being a Letter to the Editor in the News-Gazette, Champaign’s rabidly-right wing newspaper, ~~I’m inclined to believe that it comes straight from the heart of Mr. Tennant.~~

Out here in the flatlands where the corn grows tall and the mayor of Champaign gets his 15 minutes of national attention by questioning Obama’s citizenship on You Tube, ~~the odds on its veracity are overwhelming~~.

From the Opinions page of The News-Gazette, Champaign, Illinois, January 2, 2011.

(click on image to enlarge – text below)

FROM OUR READERS

Gay issue raises interesting question

As a Korean War combat veteran, Christian and grandfather of 14, I have some thoughts on the issue of homosexuals serving openly in the military.

Just who do those people think they are — these gays and lesbians — you know, the homosexuals of the Bible? Can readers believe that they have the gall, the audacity and the selfish desire to openly serve the country they honor and love by wanting to enlist in the U.S. military?

And, just think, they are demanding the privilege of serving during time of war.

What right or privilege do they think they have to possibly shed their blood, give up their lives or have their bodies torn apart by the weapons of war? Who do they think they are to want to protect their loved ones, friends and neighbors?

This should be an honor reserved only for right-thinking Christians and other straight-minded thinkers. It's only our patriotic blood that deserves to be shed for our country.

Those people seem to think that they should have that privilege and honor. I'd rather lose the war than be protected by the likes of those disgusting sinners. Their blood is tainted and unworthy to be shed for our country. (Oh, but I do love the sinner, it's just his/her sin.)

My Christian friends, we sure have to stick together on this one and make certain that our country is protected only by people like us who live by the words of love and wisdom set forth in our "Good Book." We sure don't want to ask, and we sure don't want them to tell us of their dirty little secret.

DON TENNANT Champaign

What I Know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – Part I

2010-11-26T21:03:00.001-06:00

I have it. That’s the first thing I know about it. Or more accurately, I live with it.

And I’m constantly discovering a new way in which I’m suffering from it—like peeling layers from an onion. But today, I know that suffering from it is strictly optional, and when my denial bubble pops on a new level of my PTSD dysfunction, I’ve got a process that works for letting go of it.

How’s that for a string of psychobabble? I mean every word of it.

PTSD is a strange, scary, subtle critter.
In a strange way, I’m quite lucky. I’m an only child, and when I was three years old, I had a specific event that taught me with profound certainty that my parents not only were not safe, but were potentially dangerous despite their very best intentions. From that moment, I was on my own.

I use the word “lucky” because I’m convinced that an overwhelming majority of Americans born after WWI, or maybe WWII at the very latest, live with and suffer from various degrees and permutations of PTSD, without the slightest clue why they feel that something’s missing or not quite right, no matter how good their lives are otherwise. Their life-long trauma comes from the disparity between the cultural norms of the time and the reality they see around themselves in their everyday lives and relationships—forever begging the eternal question “Has the whole world gone crazy, or is it just me?”

My other double-edged advantage besides having a specific event that gave me a handle on thinking about the whole trauma thing came in the form of my parents themselves.

Don’t get me wrong. My parents were amazing people, but they were products of the times and culture in which they were formed. Mom was from Gibson City/Paxton, Illinois, and Dad grew up in Griggsville. The small town factor alone added at least one full generation to the gap between us. Add to that that they were 40 when I was born, and you have two generations between them and the parents of my peers, and three generations between my parents and me.

We are all formed by the cultural norms or “common wisdom” of our childhood, and when your parents were formed in a reality that is not the normal one generation past, but three generations from the day’s reality, the answer to the “is it them or me?” question is a lot easier to see and believe.

In my lifetime, there has been no period of time when the distance between conventional wisdom and reality has been greater nor more traumatic for a forming human being than the formative years of the baby boomers and generation X. If you don’t get what I’m talking about, here’s an example:

The world in which I was forming was a very progressive world compared to most of the rest of Springfield and 1940s-50s America. My parents and their friends and associates were well educated, enlightened intellectuals who read and traveled and were pacifists and rejected materialism and classism and stood up for civil rights and civil liberties, and were unafraid of the unknown and unfamiliar—and yet, formed by the conventional wisdom of their childhoods, they carried all sorts of erroneous nonsense from their past in their innocent hearts: from a long list of racial stereotypes applicable to all coloreds except their colored friends—and the same for homosexuals and Jews and to a lesser extent women—to another lengthy list of what constituted morality that, although most of them were various forms of atheists and agnostics, drew heavily on the conventional taboos of conventional Christian orthodoxy and dogma. And don’t forget that these peaceniks, including one of the original founders of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, defended our involvement in Vietnam and the domino theory until mid-Nixon! Their hypocrisy was obvious to my young mind, and it seriously pissed me off.

Most of my peers didn’t have even that little bit of affirmation at home to question authority and the tyranny of conventional wisdom to help them process the enormous gap that existed in the 1950s U.S. A. between the way it was spozed to be and reality! Traumatic? You bet your sweet ass! Hippy? Revolution? Question authority? Visualize world peace (or whirled peas)? Inevitable! I think this is why the boomers are the first generation to really begin to get a handle on PTSD and begin to understand how it works and how to live with it comfortably, with a minimum of suffering.

Back to that suffering thing (and PTSD)
I sometimes get a kick out of responding to polls from Harris Online and ERewards. Who doesn’t enjoy telling a stranger what you think about the world? Plus, they give you points which every once in a while can be exchanged for something worth having if somebody gave it to you for free. Also every once in a while, the sponsor of that day’s poll will be a drug company with a new product.

When that happens, the first set of questions after age and gender usually asks you what diseases you “suffer from,” and I always wish there were a place for me to explain that while I live with diabetes and ADD and a tendency toward hypertension and high cholesterol and depression and anxiety, I sure as hell don’t suffer from any of them. This is the 21st Century, and these are all conditions with which a person with a little money and/or insurance can live quite comfortably.

Thanks to a new generation of research and picking away at the whole idea of PTSD, led by the boomers—many of whom themselves live with it, PTSD is also slowly but surely creeping its way onto the list of conditions one can live with quite comfortably and contentedly.

So just what is PTSD?
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of those psycho-medical terms that means exactly what it says. It was first addressed by the modern medical community during WWI when allied soldiers were returning from the horrors of that war with a condition that came to be known as “shell shock.” Today stress is the number one killer in American culture, and post-traumatic stress is a chronic stress that one experiences after an especially powerful or prolonged trauma which at the very least undermines one’s sense of safety, well being, and the ability to trust and/or control one’s own environment.

People with PTSD tend to be intense, hypervigilant, easily startled, perfectionistic, demanding, unforgiving, rigid, anxious, possess a low tolerance for ambiguity, etc., or they may demonstrate an exaggerated opposite of any or all of those characteristics.

They often have varying degrees of tendencies toward at least alcoholism/addiction, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity, and/or a variety of phobias and neuroses. They live with a lurking fear that somewhere deep inside lives the truth that it’s really them against the world and they are somehow inadequate to that challenge.

More to come:
Part II, A Personal Journey About Healing
Part III, Taking the Whole Thing Macro

Let’s Call Bullshit on the “War on Terror”

2010-09-06T07:27:00.001-05:00

George W. Bush’s absurd “War on Terror” (WOT) is arguably the third or second (time will tell) largest scam ever pulled on the American people in the brief history of this wonderful and gigantic nation. It’s time to put a stop to it.

Terror is a powerfully strong fear reaction to sudden, unexpected, life-threatening circumstances—an emotion, in other words.

Terror is what drove America’s wild over-reaction to to the bombing of the World Trade Center and led to the “Patriot Act” and the decimation of the Constitution and civil liberties and the balance of powers—and ultimately is playing a huge role in the falling apart of our System—financial and political.

Some guys from the Middle East stole some planes and provided the event. America, led by cheerleaders from the already-on-the-verge right, provided the terror. In Spades!

How fortunate that this occurred at a time when the previous excuse for the government to take all our tax dollars and give them to the war profiteers, The Cold War, was seriously losing its punch. And wasn’t it cool that good old Uncle Dick, was there to mentor his friend the President and take advantage of his simplistic world view and need to show Daddy, and to guide him into declaring war on an emotion!

Better ‘n the Cold War on account of there’s no foreseeable end. Ever!!! And Cheney and his Warbux cronies declared free champagne and caviar in the Winners’ Circle Clubhouse, and the party’s still going strong.

Back in 2008, candidate Obama sent me a letter in response to my comments about retroactive telecom immunity and presidential abuse of power (he was my Senator) in which he explained that because of the superamazinggeewhiz importance of the WOT to our nation’s security and our children’s futures, we must be careful in reprimanding the excesses of [the obviously deranged] Mr. Bush, that we not tie the hands of a future [fabulously sane and upright Democratic] president—or something very much to that effect.

(That letter, incidentally is the reason I am careful to explain to friends that I did not vote for Obama in 2008. It was only a matter of his name being next to the box the checking of which would be my best bet for voting No Effing Way McCain/Palin!)

And that’s the problem in a nutshell: The President of the United States (and who knows how many members of Congress) believes that sending our young men and women to fight and kill and be killed in a foreign country is an effective way to fight an emotion!

If you want to “fight” terror, Mr. President, here’s how to do it:

Declare the WOT bogus and, as they say, walk the response to it all the way back. That’s “all”, which means absolutely everything from “enemy combatants” because you say so, to the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA—and even governmental use of the word “homeland.” And “back”, which means gone, repealed, dismantled, erased from existence.
Bring the troops home. Now. All of them. Tell the Afghans and Pakistanis and Iraqis that if they’d like our non-military assistance in getting their acts together, we’ll be happy to sit down and explore ways that we can do that, but no assistance will involve the American military participation in combat or in aiding or assisting in combat.
Open a national dialog on the subject of fear. You’re a tremendous communicator. It’s what you’re famous for, so do it. For 65 years, the oligarchy that owns America (the people George Carlin referred to as our Owners) have used fear to reinforce their ownership and keep the money flowing from our hands into their pockets. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how it happened and make an honest appraisal of where we are today as a result of that fear. People fear what they don’t understand. Let’s talk about it until we do understand. And then let’s talk some more about what we can do to to set the country on a path to a real recovery—not just financial (although jobs would be a good place to start), but a recovery of national unity and spirit.
Appoint a nonpartisan, professional-politician-free commission to examine the actions of the Bush administration and arm it with a special prosecutor to pursue prosecutions where applicable. That particular past is one that we cannot afford to turn the page on. Horrible crimes against humanity and against the US Constitution were committed in the name of “national security” and deregulation by the last administration (too many of which are being continued by yours) to simply turn the page and move on. The Bush years presented America with an open wound which cannot be healed by the application of a Band-Aid. It has infected the body politic and it will continue to fester under the surface until either it is excised in the light of day or its poisons take over our national bloodstream—unto death.
Lead. So far, your “economic recovery” has had very little to do with our economic recovery. Wall Street is thriving(?). Main Street, not so much. Candidate Obama had some potentially very worthwhile ideas about turning things around: a national jobs corps, investment in infrastructure, small business investment and support, reinventing mass transit, restoring real regulation to the financial industry, investing heavily in education—mostly ideas that might have provided jobs and opportunities for real people. Unfortunately, we’ll never know whether they would have worked or not, because when candidate Obama became President Obama, the first thing you did was sit down with the Republicans (who, in case you have forgotten, lost the 2008 election, big time) and present your proposals to them. And when they said, “No, we wouldn’t like it if you did that.”, instead of taking names and kicking ass—going on TV and calling them out, saying “America, you elected me to fix this mess. Here are the people who are now standing in the way of doing that. Please replace them with people who are interested in fixing the mess we are in”, you responded to their “No” with an “Oh, OK. What would you like me to do?”

A very incomplete list, to be sure, but I can’t help but believe that it would be a good start on getting our nation back on track.

Feel free to discuss, add your own items to the list, or argue against it in Comments.

Let’s Privatize Social Security Now

2010-09-04T13:31:00.001-05:00

The libertarian right is all for privatizing Social Security and making it optional. On the face of it, it’s an idea I could get behind in a big way.

Of course, when talking about America and Social Security, you’ve got to begin by defining your terms.

In the rest of the world “social security” (capitalized or not) refers to all government programs for the common welfare, from medical care to free public education, to unemployment insurance and retirement pension and all the way through to death benefits.

In the United States, “Social Security” means the self- and employer-funded retirement fund that pays money for Grandma and Gramps to live on, and funds Medicare so they can have at least basic medical care as they age and need it more.

While privatizing using the American definition would undoubtedly please the libertarians no end, I can’t help but think that going with the world definition would send them into (quiet, restrained, lady- and gentleman-like) orgasms of delight.

I say let’s make their wildest dreams come true and privatize the whole thing and make it all optional.

Let’s spin off not just Social Security/Medicare, but also health, education, and welfare into private, not-for-profit cooperatives, governed by a board of directors elected by and responsible to the membership at large and prohibited from making any speculative use of funds. Then let’s make participation optional.

For the time being, the IRS will serve as the the collecting agency for the voluntary taxes paid by those who opt in. We’ll see how that goes. But that will be the only role of any Federal agency in the operation of the coop(s).

Rather than Congress dictating the budget and how the money is spent, those decisions will be made cooperatively, with Anything Really Important (including the “tax” rate) determined by a vote of the membership.

Lots of details to work out, but as I said, on the face of it, it looks damned good to me.

As for those who opt out? Give them a check for what they’ve paid into Social Security to date, minus any benefits they’ve received. Let them make their own decisions regarding providing for themselves and their families. And to remove any punitive aspects from the decision making process, allow anyone outside a coop to buy (back) into it for the equivalent of back taxes. I’m sure that some libertarian entrepreneur will set up a private insurance company to protect against that eventuality.

This plan achieves two very desirable goals: 1) It takes control of essential human services away from a Congress which over the last two years has demonstrated that it’s incapable even of tying its own shoes, and 2) It takes the money to run those services out of the U.S. Treasury, so that when our government ceases to function, there’s at least a chance that those services might continue.

Feel free to discuss. I say we go for it.

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

2010-09-04T09:19:00.001-05:00

UPDATED BELOW

The American Civil War was about a whole lot more than slavery.

While the issue of slavery provided strong motivation for both the North and the South in the war of southern secession, at stake was what kind of nation the United States would be.

The northern industrialists wanted the entire “American” portion of the North American Continent to be one country in which Important Decisions were made for the whole country by one central (Federal) government composed of representatives from each state. (Top Down)

The southern agriculturists wanted independence from America in order to form their own country in which Important Decisions would be made on the local (state) level, with a central government whose authority required a unanimous agreement of all the autonomous Confederate(d) states. (Bottom Up)

Morally, the Good Guys won. Slavery was a horrible institution which will forever be a blot on America’s history. But from a practical point of view, it’s unfortunate that the winners weren’t also the guys who were advocating for a Confederacy.

The story of America since that war—and particularly since WWII—has made it abundantly clear that the federal, top down, republic of Jefferson et al does not scale up well—certainly not to its current size, and most likely not even to the original thirteen states over time.

There are bunches o’ natural factors that determine the optimum number of people and the size of the geographic area that can be united behind a government empowered to make Important Decisions. In growing to fill all the available land mass, the USA has defiantly flown in the face of those natural laws, to the point where continuation in its present form is no longer sustainable.

As we watch America follow the same path of denial as the former Soviet Union, falling apart from the inside out, let’s remember that it’s within our power to stop it anytime we can amass the public will to do so.

It is within the power of the people to call a Constitutional Convention and start again from scratch. It’s scary to contemplate, but it might be the only way to avert the bloodshed that’s otherwise inevitable.

Are we adult enough yet as a culture to do that before the country falls apart completely? Time will tell.

For more information on the movement to call for Constitutional Convention, see http://www.callaconvention.org/, and read Lawrence Lessig’s “A Call for a Constitutional Convention” in Huffington Post.

UPDATE: See also http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/neoprogressives_b_704715.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=090310&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureMore#, and although I’m no huge fan of the Coffee Party http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/blog/entry/coffee-party-national-convention/. And finally, thanks to reader Bill Walker for providing this link in comments: http://www.foavc.org

Death Watch

2010-08-31T11:01:00.001-05:00

From today’s Think Progress email:

A new Newsweek poll has found that a majority of Republicans believe President Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." Only 33 percent of Republicans said the "allegation" was "probably not true," while 38 percent said it was probably true and 14 percent said it was "definitely true."

And the death watch continues . . . .

Superstition and stuff

2010-08-20T08:52:00.001-05:00

I’m always thinking, and seldom focusing (ADD), but there’s been a theme to my recent ponderings having to do with the underlying differences between agnostics and true believers—beyond their obvious tolerance and intolerance of ambiguity.

In the process it occurred to me that the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is founded on the conviction that there is indeed a supernatural being which created the universe and which—at least insofar as its relationship with the human race is concerned—is an unmitigated asshole.

The supernaturalists talk a lot about their faith, but if faith is the absence of fear, I’ve gotta wonder where the greater faith lies: with those who are convinced that there is a god who’s an asshole, or those who are betting that if there is indeed a god, she/he/it is not an asshole?

Just sayin’ . . . .

This Sucks

2010-08-01T20:23:00.001-05:00

This past week, our bickering children in Washington failed to pass either the “Disclose Act” or the incredibly popular plan to aid the multitude of emergency response workers and volunteers who are now experiencing devastating health problems as a result of their rescue work in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Posturing for power and control is more important to our “government” than solving problems.

I suppose that even the collapse of America has a bright side. If we don’t bring down the whole human race with us in the process, perhaps the survivors will finally have learned that unbridled capitalism (“The Market” to Republicans and libertarians) is a fine social model for animal life in the jungle, but it sucks for human beings.

The ability to reason and form social contracts that elevate the quality of life for all of us (the common good) is kinda what distinguishes humans from other animals.

The doing of this by a society or culture is more or less what we’re talking about when we use the word “civilization.”

We judge the success and quality of a civilization or culture on how successful they’ve been in forming these social contracts and raising the quality of life for all.

So in a crisis where it is absolutely essential that America repair our social contract, why are so many working so hard to obstruct the repair and even dismantle it?

How about if all the progressives in both political parties were to join Bernie Sanders in the Social Democrats and leave the other two parties to the corporatists who run them. They have proven themselves to be totally irrelevant, and yet they still have the keys and are sitting in the driver’s seat. Time for an alternative.

Random Thoughts

2010-05-28T19:29:00.003-05:00

Long time without writing. It’s been a busy year, much of it spent in political shock overload — when I wasn’t hiding out from the nastiness of the Illinois winter on the beach on the Costa del Sol.

In the course of my dual hiding-out (from winter and from the feckless misadventures of President Milquetoast): (in no particular order)

Spain is a mess
Any interest in buying a vacation (or full-time) home on the Costa del Sol? For years Málaga has been my get-away Happy Place: home away from home where I could disappear into the happy-go-lucky world of mañana; smiling faces; gorgeous señores and señoritas. And an over-all sense of well being.

Today, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lovely place to spend a few months. It’s an absolute delight to spend time with my loved ones there, and Málaga has more hours of sunshine per year than anywhere else in Europe and in the winter time, almost always the warmest temperatures. But the loveliness of it all is having a more difficult time masking the growing despair that’s eating away at the happy facade with the passing of very day.

Spain, on paper, has always looked ‘bad’ economically, with higher unemployment rates and lower per-capita incomes than its northern siblings. But Spain on paper and Spain in real life are two very different kinds of creatures. There are scores of reasons, but these two stand out in my mind:

Spain has a ginormous black economy
and a fierce spirit of personal autonomy

The proud and noble European tradition of tax evasion is practiced the most artfully in the Mediterranean states, and in none more enthusiastically than in Southern Spain. In transactions where there is some form of ‘strict’ government oversight (retail sales, home sales, professional services, etc.) 30% of the transaction amount is expected to disappear from the table. No ‘strict’ oversight? Report just enough to justify your having an income. No oversight at all? Straight to the mattress!

And I’m not kidding about the mattresses: I was in Spain in 2002 when the Euro replaced the peseta. At that time, I could have bought my apartment for around 10,000,000 pesetas: a king’s ransom in Spain, but only around $52,000 in U.S. money. But all that changed with the Euro. Spaniards had one year in which to spend all of their cash on hand. After that, the only thing to do with peseta currency was to take it to the bank and exchange it for euros. And, of course, all currency exchanges are reported to the government.

Solution? Empty out the mattress and buy real estate! Literally trillions of pesetas (billions of dollars) were pulled from under floorboards and out of trunks in the attic and poured into the real estate market. Between January of 2002 and the middle of 2007 when the market topped out, the ‘value’ of my apartment skyrocketed from $52,000 to ~$400,000. Today, I’d be very lucky to get what I paid back out of it, and even that is probably impossible right now.

But anyway, that’s the power of the Spanish mattress! And along with the black cash flow, there’s the black employment flow that’s every bit as big is its dark cash brother.

So any official stats regarding income and employment are grossly skewed by virtue of perhaps as much as 50-60% of the economy being extra-legal. Then, the government cooks the books further by paying the unemployed to attend school (already free) and counting them as ‘students.’

All of which is by way of saying that in a fairly decent economy, those ‘depressing’ numbers on paper don’t have much to do with the quality of life to your average working Andalucían, whose economy directly or indirectly relies upon tourism.

When I left there at the end of March, the official unemployment rate was somewhere around 23%. Economists outside the government estimated the real rate as being somewhere between 50 and 60%. And the tourists ain’t coming. Whoops.

Undesirable elements
I recently discovered that I had gotten one of my most favoritest quotations in the world WRONG. For years, Emma Goldman’s “The most dangerous element in any society is ignorance” has rotated in and out of my email .sig file. Turns out she actually called ignorance the most violent element. Thank you anonymous driver of the mom-mobille in the Springer Center parking lot whose (correct) bumper sticker inspired me to look it up.

My much-loved maternal grandmother was a Tribune-reading matron from Ford County who had the whole world divided into elements — desirable and un- (mostly un-). Dad (from Griggsville) had a little bit of this, too, but not nearly as much as Mom, whose family had pretensions.

I grew up hearing about elements: rough, dangerous, disruptive, violent, puerile, corrupting, and of course, the all-encompassing yet somehow superlative ‘undesirable’ sneered with a chin-slide implying a status lower than pond scum. I can’t say I ever did more than shrug off the whole idea of elementizing the world (the better to control it?) until I realized somewhere around middle school that the only sane behavior open to me was to become an Undesirable Element. (Not that my behavior was particularly sane!)

A good 20 years before Question Authority became a t-shirt slogan, I made Question Conventional Wisdom my life’s cause, and as a result was irreversibly imprinted with how absurd is the all too common human tendency when uncomfortable to label the source of our discomfort as somehow undesirable and dismissing it out of hand. Rather, of course, than dealing with it in an honorable way.

So when I first spied Emma’s ignorance quote, I grabbed onto it and took it to my heart. I still can’t figure out either where I copied it from or whether it was incorrect there or I miscopied it. but the beauty of Goldman’s statement is that whether you declare the element to be most violent or most dangerous or most corrupting or costly or disruptive or destructive…ignorance still fits the bill!

Odds and Ends from Evernote

2009-09-07T17:11:00.001-05:00

It’s a lazy day, and I’ve spent part of the afternoon cleaning up my Evernote files. If I don’t do this occasionally, so much stuff accumulates that it becomes self-defeating. Even doing it every couple of months, there are always a fair number of “What the hell was I thinking”s. Here are some of the items I saved to blog about later:

On April 20, I clipped this gem from Steve Bennen writing in The Washington Monthly:

What I find odd, though, is the underlying message. Leading Republicans make it sound as if America's stature is so fragile, it is easily weakened by casual courtesies at an international forum. President Obama, in contrast, acts as if America's stature is strong, and can withstand a handshake with a foreign head of state. Since when does the GOP find it useful to promote the idea of American weakness? [Steve Bennen]

May 13, brought this whole post from Bernard Chazelle

Our Awesomeness in Numbers

from A Tiny Revolution by Jonathan Schwarz

By: Bernard Chazelle

The OECD report is out. Like a pack of hungry wallabies, the media pounced immediately on the only item worth reporting: the French eat and sleep longer hours than anyone, and yet they're among the thinnest. The Americans work the longest hours, spend half as much time eating as the French, and they're the fattest! No wonder everybody hates the French. Oh, and something the wallabies missed. The French (like most Europeans) are now taller than the Americans. No doubt the nativists will blame short immigrants, except that science has conclusively debunked that myth. Americans are shrinking (in height, not width) because of poor diet and lousy prenatal/infant care.

If you prefer, you can quit reading right here, and surf on to other sites that will tell you how the US is number 1 in all sorts of important things, like arms sales; bank transactions; billionaires; etc. GDP is high, too, and by the measures of classical economics, we're not doing too bad.

The difference with the OECD report is that it gives you numbers that actually matter to living human beings. You may choose to be shocked, shocked that such things happen in our advanced society. But when a rule has more exceptions than instances in which it holds, it's helpful to change the rule. Once you think that we live in a third-world plutocracy, then all of a sudden everything begins to make sense.

Also, after you read and weep, ask yourself why the only item that made the headlines was about the sleeping habits of the French. Maybe the French always sleep but the American propaganda machine surely never does.

Here are the US rankings out of the 30 OECD countries (1 is best; 30 is worst -- worst as in Somalia-like). The names of the countries even more Somalian than the US appear in parens.

Infant Deaths: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey).

Life Expectancy: 24 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Czech & Slovak Republics).

Health Expenditures: 1 out of 30.

Poverty Rates: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey).

Child Poverty: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Poland).

Income Inequality: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Portugal).

Obesity: 30 out of 30.

Incarceration: 30 out of 30.

Work Hours (ranked in ascending order): 30 out of 30.

Height (women): 25 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Portugal, Japan).

Height (men): 24 out of 30 (Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Korea, Japan).

OECD countries: Turkey, Mexico, Poland, USA, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, Luxemburg, Australia, Netherlands, Slovakia, Korea, Czech Republic, UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, Iceland, France, Austria, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.

— Bernard Chazelle

June 10, I saved my own verbose but prescient response to the primary defeat of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia:

Being a flatlander out here in the flyover part of Illinois, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know enough about the the situation in Virginia to have any sense of what this means to Virginians, but boy, howdy! let me tell you how pleased I am to see McAuliffe knocked out of there. I only hope that it ends up to be, finally, a stake through the heart of his political career. But part of what's most seriously wrong about the guy also makes it highly unlikely that it will be: he's too well connected to power.

Our obstacles to making the best choices are no longer matters of Democrats vs Republicans. The Republicans have taken care of that one all by themselves. However, one of The Bear's First Principals of Conflict states that in an intense prolonged conflict, the likelihood that the complete, sudden collapse of one of the parties will trigger the subsequent collapse of the the 'victor' party is directly proportional to the length and intensity of the conflict.

In other words, since the Republican party's response to their electoral repudiation last fall has been to become a laughing-stock, there's a very real danger of the Democrats doing the same.

If you listen to America (and I most certainly don't mean the polls), you'll hear that it's not a good idea to rush to judgment on what voters were saying when they threw out the Republicans. I mean, who are you going to vote for when your choices are between an OK but probably not thrilling Democrat and a member of the Clown Party who, if an incumbent, was likely lurking somewhere near the helm cheering as the captain sailed the ship over Niagara. Saying 'No more!' to Republican insanity is not the same as saying 'Yes, please!' to not-a-Republican, whoever s/he may be, and "May I have more, please.'

So the Democrats won. Why is nothing meaningful happening? Well, if you go back to The Bear's Principles, you'll see that in group conflict, there's always an element of what the Bear calls 'group identity ambiguity', somehow proportional to the degree of singularity of purpose that brings the group together in the first place. In simple English, there are always a certain number of folks who are in the wrong group.

As long as both sides are healthy and going at it tooth & nail, this isn't anything that can't be worked out over time. Allegiances change, people drift to the more appropriate group, others are exposed as frauds and shunned by the group, and some try to operate outside of the groups. But when the opposition group is suddenly removed from the scene, watch out! And that's where we are today in our Nation.

As often happens when the bad guys are put away, today's Democratic Party is discovering that it doesn't stand for much of anything in the absence of opposition. McAuliffe, the Clintons, the whole DLC thing represent Corporate America (with varying degrees of 'social responsibility' sensibilities, as long as it doesn't exceed corporate policy on charitable giving). They do not represent what I think America voted for last fall, and I am delighted to see my judgment ratified by the voters of Virginia.

On August 20, ‘CanSoc’ wrote this is the comments section of a Salon article on the health care debate:

Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Present, speaking about the children that cling to him: "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both; but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom for men, unless the writing be erased." Or at least doom for an equitable healthcare system, along with an equitable society, in the US.

And finally, in today’s column, Andy Tobias links to this depressing article by John Mauldin. Sadly, I’ve gotta say it’s a must read.

Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler

2009-08-19T13:17:00.001-05:00

My sentiments exactly!

Oh, Would You Just Put A Sock In It, Barrack?

2009-06-15T20:23:00.001-05:00

Our President is on the teevee commenting on the violence in Iraq following the election. Telling us Americans should be disturbed when they see a government using violence against a group of people peaceably gathered to express their dissatisfaction with the government.

Where the fluck were you, Mr. Obama, when our government was doing just that in St. Paul last August? Or should we only be disturbed when the government that’s violently stifling dissent is some pre-demonized Them.

You, sir, are such a pathetic disappointment!

OMG

2009-06-12T20:20:00.001-05:00

Olberman is eulogizing Tim Russert on ‘Countdown’ on the eve of the one-year anniversary of his death, and I’m sitting here trying to control my gag reflex.

According to absolutely everybody, Tim Russert, popular NBC political reporter and host of the venerable Sunday morning talking-heads spectacle ‘Meet the Press,’ was the nicest guy who ever walked the earth. I have no argument with that. We all feel and say that kind of stuff when someone we’re very fond of suddenly checks out, and if they could just leave it at that, I wouldn’t be fighting a gag.

But all this crap about what a fine reporter he was is more than I can handle. Tim Russert was a horrible reporter and a literal icon for what is wrong with corporate media today. His ‘Meet the Press’ was an uncritical platform for the Bush administration to make its case to the country without fear of criticism or fact checking of even their most absurd and obviously false assertions. His famous interview with Cheney in the leadup to the unprovoked invasion of Iraq is the most shameful moment in modern American journalism.

So let’s pause and fondly remember Tim the nice guy and super dad, and let’s skip all the bullshit about what a fine reporter he was, eh?

Virginia Says ‘No’ To Corporate Democrat McAuliffe

2009-06-10T16:57:00.001-05:00

Last night, the tubes were full of the news that a relative unknown, Creigh (pronounced ‘Cree’—I woud have guessed ‘Cray’) Deeds had won the Virginia Gubernatorial Primary. The headlines ran the gamut, from “Deeds Wins Primary,” to “Mr. Deeds One Step Closer to Going To Richmond,” to my favorite, “Anybody but McAuliffe.”

Being a flatlander out here in the flyover part of Illinois, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know enough about the the situation in Virginia to have any sense of what this means to Virginians, but Boy, howdy! let me tell you how pleased I am to see McAuliffe knocked out of there. I only hope that it turns out to be a stake through the heart of his political career. But I think he’s too well connected to power for that—a big part of what's most seriously wrong about the guy.

Our obstacles to making the best choices are no longer matters of Democrats vs. Republicans. The Republicans have taken care of that one all by themselves. However, one of The Bear's First Principals of Conflict states that in an intense prolonged conflict, the likelihood that the complete, sudden collapse of one of the parties will trigger the subsequent collapse of the the 'victor' party is directly proportional to the length and intensity of the conflict.

In other words, since the Republican party's response to their electoral repudiation last fall has been to become a laughing-stock, there's a very real danger of the Democrats doing exactly the same.

It's not a good idea to rush to judgment on what voters were saying when they threw out the Republicans last fall. I mean, who are you going to vote for when your choices are between an OK but probably not thrilling Democrat and a member of the Clown Party who, if incumbent, was likely lurking somewhere near the helm, cheering as the captain sailed the ship over Niagra. Saying 'No more!' to Republican insanity is not the same as saying 'Yes, please!' to not-a-Republican, whoever s/he may be, and "May I have more, please.'

So the Democrats won. Why is nothing meaningful happening? Well, if you go back to The Bear's Principles, you'll see that in group conflict, there's always an element of what the Bear calls 'group identity ambiguity', somehow proportional to the degree of singularity of purpose that brings the group together in the first place. In simple English, there are always a certain number of folks who are in the wrong group.

As long as both sides are healthy and going at it tooth & nail, this isn't anything that can't be worked out over time. Allegiances change, people drift to the more appropriate group, others are exposed as frauds and shunned by the group, and some try to operate outside of the groups. But when the opposition group is suddenly removed from the scene, watch out! And that's where we are today in our Nation.

As often happens when the bad guys are put away, today's Democratic Party is discovering that it doesn't stand for much of anything in the absence of opposition. McAuliffe, the Clintons, the whole DLC thing represent Corporate America (with varying degrees of 'social responsibility' sensibilities permitted, as long as they don’t exceed corporate policy on charitable giving). They do not represent what I think America voted for last fall, and I am delighted to see my judgment ratified by the voters of Virginia. (Thus, the dancing bears.)

Brave Sir Robin Blue-Dog

2009-06-09T23:42:00.002-05:00

Thank you Eli at FDL for renewing our acquaintance with this wonderful Python clip. The timing was perfect for my semi-depressed frame of mind. (Time to lay off the news for a while I think.) I may just have to find a torrent for a whole Monty Python movie. I had completely forgotten how much fun it is, and it's gotta be cheaper than Prozac.

But the real fun is in the post that goes with it, in which Eli lays bare the manner in which the Blue-Dog Dems are beating a very brave retreat on the “public option” aspect of healthcare reform. Please read and enjoy The Courage of the Conservadems at Firedog Lake. And may the gods and godesses of delight and absurdity continue to entertain Eli for eternity.

More Random Thoughts (cont.)

2009-06-09T22:57:00.001-05:00

Public campaign financing, anyone?

I’ve been reading a lot of posts and hearing and seeing a lot of discussions in the media recently along these lines: The 2008 elections were an overwhelming repudiation of the Republican party and the principles for which it stands. Americans stood up last November and literally shouted “No more!” to Republicanism, wars of choice, and corporate control of the government. So, if the good guys won so big (and they did!), why aren’t any of the big changes happening? Why are Obama and Congress tippy-toeing around on things like universal health care and saving people’s homes and nationalizing and breaking up the banks as if the other guys still had the power and we can only accomplish that which has bipartisan support?

I think the answer is pretty obvious: The “other guys” do still have all the power and bipartisanship has nothing to do with it. Whether the officeholders call themselves Republicans or Democrats, with a few wonderful exceptions, the corporate interests still own our government. And they’ll continue to own it until Americans demand that our political campaigns by financed by public money, and only by public money.

An overwhelming percentage of Americans (I’ve seen polls ranging from 56% all the way up to a whopping 87%) want the country to change to a European-style, single-payer public health system. But does single-payer have a chance in hell of even being seriously considered? Not on your life! Nor is it likely to be, as long as the health profiteers put billions and billions of dollars annually into the reelection coffers of our nation’s congresscritters. Ditto the banks. Ditto Wall Street (whatever that means).

As long as it costs more than the GNP of a mid-sized country to be elected to public office, and as long as corporate interests are permitted to give game-changing sums to political candidates, we’re never going to have a government that’s interested in the needs of the working people they’re supposed to be looking out for.

With the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination, we’ve been seeing Obama on teevee a lot talking about how important it was in the selection process to pick a candidate from the most highly qualified whose decisions reflected a philosophy of standing up for the little guy against the forces of the big and powerful. I guess that’s only for judges, eh?

Before the election, I responded to several polls about what should be the highest priority for the new administration with “None of the above: Restore the constitutional balance of powers and roll back the whole unconstitutional ‘unitary presidency’ idea.” After seeing what’s rolled out in the four months since Obama took office, I have a new answer for those pollsters: Stop the corporate stranglehold on the American government. Support public campaign financing now!

Credo, please leave me alone!

Seems like a day doesn’t go by when I don’t receive something from the Working Assets cell phone subsidiary, Credo. They want me to switch my mobile service from AT&T to their politically correct correct Credo brand. Today’s message came via snail mail in an appeal that compared Credo to AT&T and Verizon. Did you know that AT&T and Verizon both support war, laugh about global warming, favor criminalizing abortion, oppose campaign finance reform, and are opposed to free speech? Not a word about call or network quality.

There are three reasons why Credo isn’t for me:

There are only two carriers whose very best phones receive a marginally acceptable signal in all the rooms of my ancient brick apartment, and Credo (Sprint) ain’t one of them.
I spend 4 to 6 months of most years either at home in Spain or traveling elsewhere in Europe or Asia. If I want to own one telephone with all my contacts and data and bookmarks and calendar and personal junk in it, it needs to operate on a GSM network, since they don’t (for the most part) use the U.S. CDMA standard that Sprint—Credo’s actual network provider—uses. I’m stuck with AT&T or T-Mobile.
The whole credo thing is about 90% hype.

Credo Mobile is not a telephone company. It’s a mobile phone service reseller for Sprint, a company that’s no more ‘progressive’ than AT&T or Verizon (or any of the others). If Credo had added a ‘Sprint’ column to the comparison chart they sent me today, it would have been just as dirty as the others.

If consumers ever looked beyond the shiny surface of crap like this, they’d realize that the more important message here is that the profits in the telecommunications industry are so obscenely huge that a reseller like Credo Mobile—a company that doesn’t own one stick of real telecommunications equipment—can afford to buy somebody else’s product and turn around and not only sell it to me at a competitive price, but also give me a $450 phone for $60, and give me $200 to buy out my AT&T contract and make generous contributions to good causes (they’re Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate contributor), and spam me by email and snail mail several times a week, and earn a decent return for their investors.

I grew up in Springfield, IL, one of the few municipalities left in the country that still has municipally owned and operated public utilities. Springfield’s progressive Republican fathers, led by the amazing V.Y. Dallman, saw the wisdom of municipally-owned public utilities and oversaw the creation of City Water Light and Power Company, and still in 2009, Springfield has OK water and electricity (about all anybody can claim these days), and the lowest electric rates in the country. It’s one of the few places where it’s actually less expensive to heat your home with electricity than with natural gas.

A mobile phone provider that did that for its users would have my business in a second. Until you do that, Credo, please lose my addresses.

And finally

One last thought on congregational animal names: I was tickled to learn that the correct name for a congregation of bears is a sloth—further evidence that I am, indeed, a member in good standing of the bear family.

More Random Thoughts (incomplete)

2009-06-08T00:52:00.001-05:00

Naming the beast

I’d been trying to come up with a clever name for collectively referring to the Bush insiders (Bushco) without hitting on anything that stood out, when it occurred to me that there are some really wonderful names in the world of wildlife for groups of the the same kind of animal (‘herd’, ‘flock’, etc.). Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a delightfully ironic or comical name for a group of some disgusting and/or deceitful/mean/nasty wild critter, like a “slither” of shitsnakes or something? (noi to my herptophile friends)

Looking for a place to start, I turned to one of my favorite wildlife sources of info-for-idiots, the US Geological Survey web site, where I learned that in educated-speak the generic word for groups of the same animal is ‘congregation.’ So let’s see if we can’t come up with a good animal avatar for the congregation of Bush insiders whose shenanigans brought our country to a point where the jury is still out on whether it will survive in recognizable form.

Right away, I discovered that if I’m going for a name that includes the whole gaggle, the project is harder than I thought it was gonna be. I started by excluding all the names that were too generic: most people are turned off by snakes, but there’s no punch in the name “nest” by itself. The “Bush nest”? Meh.

Then the task was to find the ones that were generic enough: A shiver (of sharks) evokes a delicious image of Chaney and his fellow dark warriors, and while a shrewdness (of apes) takes irony into uncharted territory when applied to Bush himself and his equally clueless department heads who loaded up our federal bureaucracy with ignorant, incompetent Liberty University graduates, where’s the animal family whose name both evokes the right kind of image and is general enough to include both the slick operators and the bumbling ideologues.

I love the idea of an obstinacy (of buffalo), but the animal has zero ick factor. On the other hand, I kind of like the (biblical) ass for political metaphor, but the Bush Pace just doesn’t do anything. A cowardice of curs is good, but nowhere near destructive enough. I like the idea of a bloat of something, but the animal it names is the noble hippopotamus, capable of violence when provoked but otherwise pretty mellow fellows.

My favorites so far are a cackle (of hyenas), a sounder (of swine), and a crash (of rhinos). A deceit is tempting but I don’t have any idea what a lapwing is about. Also attractive but either inappropriate or too obscure are an unkindness (of ravens), a murder (of crows—too obvious?), and a prickle (of porcupines).

But I think if I had to pick the official Grumblebear nickname for the Bush insiders right this very minute, I’d go to the creepy place and start referring to them as the Bush Intrusion.

“Intrusion” just kind of sums up the whole Bush nightmare, and in the animal world when you’re talking about an intrusion of something, you’re referring to an intrusion of cockroaches.

I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Rather than insulting our friends in the animal world, maybe we should be throwing around candidates for an original name for a congregation of Bushies. An ignorance of Bushies? A failure of Bushies? An arrogance . . ? Wait, I’ve got it! A frathouse of Bushies. I think one of the rules for naming congregations is to try to stick to one-word names, but it’s damned difficult to come up with one word that even begins to express the soulless, venal, depraved, corrupt malignancy of George W. Bush’s presidential team.

Cast your vote or offer your own suggestions in comments.

The Ugly Truth

2009-05-23T02:03:00.001-05:00

Sometimes my brain does some really weird stuff—especially right now while I’m coming off my antidepressant—but tonight it threw me a strange curve ball:

I serve on the steering committee of the local ACLU chapter, and it’s ‘that time of year’ at the ACLU when our representative to the state board has the unenviable job of hitting up the local major donors for some extra bucks. It’s a job I’ve done quite a few times over the years, and for me, it’s the only really unpleasant part of representing the chapter to ‘Chicago.’

This evening, our current rep sent the committee members some information about the most recent meeting of the state board, and mentioned that he’d soon be contacting each of us individually to do the squeeze. I hit reply and kind of went on autopilot, as I sometimes do when firing off a polite reply-type note, and explained that my finances were screwy and I wasn’t going to be able to make a pledge this year, but that for now and the foreseeable future, the ACLU was my first priority for both any extra pennies I found in the sofa and whatever time and energy I can come up with for the cause. And then I said “. . . Obama is many times more dangerous [to civil liberties] than BushCo ever could have been.”

Holy shit! Did I write that? Where’d that come from? Do I really think that?

To which the answers are – indeed, yes, I’ll explain, and sadly, yes.

For me and many like me in the civil liberties community, the single most important issue in the 2008 presidential election wasn’t the war or the economy or immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the government in illegal spying on innocent American citizens or even the torture memos. For us, aside from wresting control of the country from the hands of an apparently completely insane Republican Party, the 2008 election was about restoring the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

Since taking office, Obama’s record has been mixed. But Bush left one hell of a mess, and Obama is a constitutional scholar fer krissake, and surely when the dust settles, he’ll get this stuff sorted out. Or at least, that was my illusion until Thursday’s speech on Gitmo in which he introduced the concept of “Prolonged Detention.” I think Rachael Maddow said it best:

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that this level of rape of logic and of the United States Constitution is not something an inarticulate, bumbling fratboy with ADHD could pull off without the absurdity being so obvious that even Aunt Martha’s cat Puddin was scratching its head there at the end. A constitutional law professor, on the other hand . . . .

Odds & Ends

2009-05-04T16:16:00.001-05:00

100 Years of The Progressive
I'm just back from a wonderful weekend in Madison, WI, celebrating 100 years of The Progressive magazine. It was everything I expected and more. How's this for a lineup? Howard Zinn, Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Amy Goodman, Delores Huerta, Naomi Klein, Jim Hightower, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Katha Pollitt, John Nichols, Bob McChesney, Will Durst, and Robert Redford. And the whole thing was held together by the unassuming miracle worker Matt Rothschild, Progressive editor. Extended thoughts (and pics) on the conference later this week. For now, I'll just say that it was a great weekend with wonderful people, and I came away from it with my spiritual tanks refilled to the brim and my physical energy supply running on empty—just the way they should be after a good weekend house party.

Stuff I learned on the trip (unrelated to the conference content)

First of all, I learned that my much-loved new do-everything smartphone has a seriously crappy camera. The shot on the left is John Nichols. Nice, huh? Better ones of Zinn and Redford, but not very. Next time I take the Nikon.

Then there were the roads. Somebody please tell Pat Quinn that when Illinois gets that extra highway money from the stimulus, he needs to make sure not one penny gets diverted to anything but repairing our interstate highways! There are holes in I-39 between Bloomington and Rockford you could lose a Mini Cooper in, and there are no signs, no orange cones, no warnings—just gigantic holes in the pavement, and you're on your own, thank you very much.

My Prius is not my Saab. And that’s a subject for another diary or two (one on stupid things about the Prius, and one on the auto industry).

There are crazy people and assholes on the left as well as the right. The right has no monopoly on this one. The most obnoxious were the single-issue folks who used public discussion time to push their agenda, regardless of the topic. But for me the most annoying were the self-absorbed (and they're at every conference) who spent the entire presentation time formulating their clever little statement, totally missing that the speaker(s) had just spent 20 minutes either supporting the point in great detail or blowing it out of the water.

There is sadness in seeing movement heroes from one's own salad days suffering the physical deterioration of age. Howard Zinn, 24 years my senior, will be 87 on his next birthday, and it shows. But, oh, the mind! If I were 1/10 as sharp at 63 as Zinn at 87, I'd still be grateful for the intelligence boost.

Replacing David Souter
They say that Team Obama has been thinking about a replacement for Souter since even before the primaries. Obama, himself, has been quoted as saying that Souter is an example of the kind of Justice he would like to appoint. Me? Not so much. Souter certainly has been better than we expected when he was appointed, but he's sure not my idea of the kind of forward-thinking progressive that I'd be looking for to help restore what Rehnquist and Roberts and the Scalia-Thomas ideology have done to the SCOTUS. I'm prepared to be disappointed by the appointment. But I'm also aware of the long history of ideological surprises that have followed Supreme Court appointments. What progressive Senator gleefully would have voted to approve nominee Earl Warren in 1963? We'll see.

Torture and Spying on Americans: A Real Republican Opportunity

2009-04-22T18:49:00.005-05:00

I grew up in a family of Democrats in a very Republican neighborhood. For all of my life with my parents, I remember my mother going to the polls every election to be an election judge because there were only two families in our precinct who were democrats.

In thinking about politics today, what seems most significant in my memories from that era is that our Republican neighbors were people pretty much like us. We shared very similar ideals, although we disagreed somewhat on the ways to achieve them. Our relationships with our neighbors were downright friendly. The most notable Republican leaders in Illinois were for the most part intelligent, honorable, highly respected people - people like Ev Dirksen* and Chuck Percy and Bill Stratton. Everybody liked Ike, and nobody liked Nixon.

I like to think that those top Republican leaders of that time would have been absolutely horrified if they had learned that the American government had been conducting a clandestine torture program and regularly and widely reading the mail of American citizens without warrants. And had the Administration then dilly-dallied around about a thorough investigation of the torture and spying the people who planned and authorized it, there are a number of them who would have risen in Congress and not sat back down until a thorough investigation was begun.

Today, a friend who has contacts in some key congressional offices on both sides of the aisle reports that Obama's recent endorsement of the Nuremberg Defense for the people who carried out the torture sparked a nearly unprecedented amount of constituent support for the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute whenever appropriate.

One of the Republican staffers reportedly told our friend that her boss especially had been impressed by the "quality" of the communications -- meaning that he was hearing from a lot of old-line conservatives whom he considered the soul of his constituency.

I don't know if there's a Republican of that old principled party left in American Politics, but if there is, the Obama Administration's mishandling of the whole war crimes issue has presented them with a wonderful opportunity to stand up and demand a special prosecutor, and thus begin the process of returning their party to some level of credibility.

While this whole pile of post-Bush detritus is loaded with political implications, the issue at hand is one of criminality, not politics, and the first principled Republican to stand up and demand an investigation wins. (and I think, wins big)

*Yes, I know Ev Dirksen was a horrible hawk on Vietnam. That makes him wrong, not dishonorable. And yes, I'm aware that the CIA and State Department were committing horrible attrocities in Central- and South America on our behalf during that same time I'm so nostalgic for. Different times.

Oh, Really?

2009-04-19T18:57:00.002-05:00

Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.

O'Reilly: I Take FULL Credit For Spain Backing Off Torture Prosecutions

2009-04-17T18:21:00.003-05:00

Think Progress has a great article on this video here

I highly recommend you read the T-P article.

For me, the funny part was his claim that the unemployment rate in Spain is nearing 19%! Anybody who claims to know the unemployment rate in Spain is either a liar or delusional. There’s a huge black economy in Spain (some say as large as- and some say larger than the white one), and a whole lot of people earn their livings off the books.

I have a home there (where I sat out most of the Cheney/Bush years) and I can assure you there’s no question that the Spanish economy is in serious trouble, but that is equally true in France & GB, and to a somewhat lesser extent in the rest of the EU countries.

When I was in grade school in the 50s, we learned that one of the really evil things about the Soviet Union was that they locked up dissidents in mental institutions. Too bad they ruined that for us, ’cause from what I can see, most of what’s left of the right sure belong in one!

Tea Bags, etc.

2009-04-16T17:19:00.001-05:00

Today's News-Gazette reports that several hundred people attended the tea party in West Side Park yesterday. The featured speaker was some ex-marine from Bellville who according to the story quoted every wingnut talking point Fox News has spouted in the last 3 months.

Some thoughts: These people don't seem to understand that the taxes they were protesting this tax day were were for 2008, when George W. Bush was president and set the budget and the tax rates (with congressional rubber-stamp approval). On April 15, 2010, they'll be filing their first "Obama" taxes, and all but a couple of them will be paying less taxes than this year, thanks to Obama having presented us with the biggest middle class tax reduction in the history of America. Commenter "mattstan" on the N-G website said it very well: "We obviously need to increase taxes. This 'movement' is pretty stark evidence of our failing education system."

But my favorite comment of the day was made by a reader who signs himself "BillD":

I have no problem protesting the way taxes are spent. I do have a problem with the way these protests are being organized and characterized. These "tea parties" are being pushed by partisan interest groups and sold through FoxNews and talk radio. The whole thing about "taxing those who make it to give to those who don't" is a load of crap. Most of our tax dollars go to corporate welfare and bailing out bigshots. Money is being sucked out of this country from the top. Check out the "L-curve" if you don't believe that. The only thing working in this country is the "divide and conquer" strategy employed by the left vs. right crowd. The sooner we all get on the same page, the better. I just don't know when the News Gazette is going to get on the side of people and off the side of moneyed interests.

Good question, Bill. No, the demonstration was not about taxes, although that was their proffered excuse. What it was was an opportunity to bash Obama. I love the way the corporations manipulate the least educated, most poorly informed members of the working class to do their dirty work for them!

More Random Grumblings

2009-04-06T19:17:00.000-05:00

What Obama Doesn't See
Back in mid-March, I wrote this piece on what Obama saw that Hillary didn't, and promised a followup posting on what he doesn't see and what that might mean for the future. I am now so over the idea that I have any idea what Obama might see or not see.

Back sometime in the '70s, I read a novel the "message" of which left a lasting impression. I don't remember its title, and I've just discovered I don't remember its author either. I would have sworn it was by Paul Theroux, but I think that was because it was about railroads, since I can't find anything in his bibliography that comes even close to the story I'm thinking of.

In any case, the story line goes something like this: Guy invents time machine. Guy wants to be JPMorgan-rich. Guy travels back in time to before locomotive was invented with detailed plans for locomotive and enough gold to kick off development of first transcontenental railway. Meyhem ensues. As I recall, it was a decent read, and the lesson learned has stayed with me: There can't be a railroad until it's time for there to be a railroad.

In other words, change is a process and because of the interconnectedness of "it all," simple knowledge of a different (better?) way is insufficient without everything else being "ready" for the new way. Bearing this in mind, and having watched Obawan in action over the last few weeks, I'm now convinced I have no idea what he gets and doesn't get; sees and doesn't see.

My criticism of him has to do with my wanting him to go a whole lot farther than he seems willing to go in almost every program he's proposed. What's keeping my mouth closed about it most of the time is that I'm pretty certain that what I want him to be doing pretty much falls into the category of trains whose time hasn't come yet. Still, I do think he's being overly cautious, but we're coming off 8 years of no caution whatsoever, so Mr O can't be blamed for taking things very slowly.

Other Random Stuff
MSNBC rolled out its third player, Ed Schultz, in its nightly left-leaning trifecta of Olberman, Maddow and now Schultz. Schultz comes to MSNBC from talk radio and brings with him everything I hate about talk radio. If tonight was an example, he does it well, and while I'm not a part of his target audience, he's a welcome voice to MSNBC lineup.

Why do we call it "Adult Language?" And while we're at it, what about "Adult Content?" I'm an adult, and while I play host to an inner potty-mouth on a par with the very best, there's nothing particularly adult about him. He, along with everyone else who's titilated by "dirty" language and necked bodies, is every inch an adolescent and the only times the adult me lets him out is to add his shock value to the discussion. (He's also my resident expert at verbal shorthand when I'm feeling lazy and impatient.) Maybe I'm overly sensitive to this because I live on two continents and regularly see BBC programs first on the BBC and then on BBC America with all it's beeps and screen-fuzzying, but please America, it's time for us all to grow up!

Things About Me
The other day, I was filling out a registration form for a web site, and it got me thinking in lists. Here are some that I came up with that pleased me:

Some labels I wear with pride: Fundamentalist Civil Libertarian, Socialist, Progressive, Agnostic, Communitarian, Gay Rights Activist, and Realist

Some other labels I've worn with minimal embarrassment at various times and with varying degrees of success and accuracy: Son, Grandson, Student, Teacher, ADHD Patient, Friend, Enemy, Hippy, Auto Mechanic, Clerk, Secretary, Alcoholic, Paralegal, Radio Announcer, Journalist, Editor, Author, Educator (see "Teacher" + gravitas), Counselor, Mediator, Programmer, Boss, Employee, Landlord, Tenant, Victim, Perpetrator, Leader, Follower, Stage Manager, Director (theater, corporate, & charitable), Musician, Guru (lol), Author.

Some unarguable rules in my playground: 1) The U.S. Constitution means exactly what it says. No exceptions. 2) Each consenting adult being free to marry the consenting adult member of the opposite sex of their choice does not satisfy the equal protection requirements of the first section of the 14th Amendment. Each consenting adult being free to marry the consenting adult they love does. 3) "The Bible says . . ." is not a valid argument for any purpose. Neither are tradition, historical precedence, conventional practice, nor any other appeal to authority unless it has a firm constitutional foundation.

Not bad for a start, eh?

My apartment in Spain raised $4,200 for the Campus YMCA at its annual dinner and auction Friday night. One of the things that's been bugging me about the recession is that I've had to cut way back on my little efforts at philanthropy. Being able to do something like this with an asset that's just sitting there doing nothing feels really good!!!

Travel plans are in the works. I had been keeping the latter part of April and all of May open, hoping I'd get over to Spain for a few weeks this Spring. Now that I know that's not going to happen, I'm playing with plans for a road trip here in the states. For sure, I'm dropping down to Atlanta to meet the newest Snook once John's had time to recover from his little adventure. I'd like to visit the newest Klugs, too, but that's a lot of miles. We'll see.

Random Grumblings

2009-03-25T18:03:00.001-05:00

With all of the incredible tech bargains out there right now, I've caught myself wishing I needed something. Fortunately, the lack of ready cash has kept me from discovering a new "need."

When am I going to learn that the shortest distance to Menard's or Home Depot does not include making a stop at Lowes to learn that what I need 1) is out of stock and 2) if it were in stock, would have been priced 125% to 150% higher than other stores. Like that annoying haiclub guy on TV, I'm both a shareholder and a customer, so it disappoints me doubly when the empty bin represents both the most economical alternative for its item class and the most popular and therefore would be selling like hotcakes if the bin weren't empty. Their shareholder reports are full of complex ~~spin~~ explanations of why their business sucks right now, but I can't help but think that fixing their stock-flow system would probably be a giant step in the right direction.

Why do people call realists "cynics?" Or are we just usually both? Is there a causal relationship in there somewhere? Inquiring bears need to know.

Obama's Press Conference
I don't know if Obama is going to fix things or make them worse, and I think anybody who says they do know is either delusional or lying, But there's one thing about our president that's undeniable: the man could sell wood-stoves in hell! I know that I'm not in his target audience, but even I came away from it with my spirits lifted. It wasn't anything he said, but it is just so incredibly reassuring and refreshing to have a guy living in the White House who's articulate, brilliantly intelligent, and can think on his feet, that even my cynical ol' bear self can't help but feel better after seeing him bat the hostile questions from Fox news right out of the park.

Every time I saw Bush on TV, I couldn't help but think "There goes a guy for whom finding his own way home from the outhouse in the dark describes the outer edge of his intellectual capacity."

Updates on some previous posts
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about our wonderful media watchdogs that progressed into a Bear's Brief History of the 2008 Election and ended with a teaser for a continuation on those thoughts. It's still coming. It's in there. But I'm currently hooked on the political soap opera in Washington, and it seems like at the end of every day's adventures, current events have caused my thoughts to morph a little. I hope I'm not unconsciously waiting for the story to end before I post my next chapter. Ha!

In that same line, about a month ago I wrote about a personal project I was working on that sounded like it all was about to burst into flower. It's coming along, but . . . (see preceding paragraph) I got some good tips about hosts and have picked one and registered. Thanks for your help. As for blossoms, when there's something to read there, I'll post a link here and you can take a look if you want.

Media Matters and the Importance of Reality (A brief history)

2009-03-14T03:02:00.004-05:00

Addendum added (see below)
It's only March 13, yet we already have a pretty sure QOTM winner. The provisional designation goes to Paul Krugman, as quoted in an article by Jamison Poser sent out in a Media Matters email.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

And if Poser's quote of Krugman is my favorite so far, his own introductory paragraph to the same article is the current leader for Simile of the Month:

For weeks, the news media have been buzzing about earmarks in the recently signed omnibus spending bill. We've been told over and over that the bill is "loaded," "filled," and "stuffed" with earmarks. Since earmarks made up less than 2 percent of the bill's total spending, this is a little like saying Alaska is "filled" with people.

Way to go Jamison. Great double-bagger! And while I've got your attention, I want to tell you folks over there at MM how much I appreciate the work you do and how important I think it is. You guys have been a nearly lone voice in the wilderness for so long, and you're consistently the best documented and most thoroughly detailed of the voices out there.

My own belief in people (even the ones who live in America) includes a fairly non-cynical section that is pretty sure that when people in a democracy (albeit a corporate-democracy) begin to understand the enormity of the disconnect between the realities of the world around them and the fantasy world the corporate press has had them living in for - let's face it - all of their lives, they'll do the right thing. They'll find themselves a reality leader and throw out the fantasy leaders and demand that their government become a reality government which makes decisions that benefit the people first and not the corporations.

Thanks to MM and friends (greatly aided by the Fratmeister ~~nearly~~ driving daddy's car off the cliff) the American people see the enormity of the disconnect more clearly every day. They've picked their reality leader. They've thrown out the Fantasy Leader, all of his cohorts and/or puppeteers, and a good-sized chunk of his most obvious enablers in Congress. More to come.

Obama has some very significant limitations, but he is the best that we could do. His own view of reality, although uniquely clear for a member of the corporate political class, is limited by tunnel vision. He sees the parts of reality that he sees (however he got there - I have no idea). So, although he is dedicated to do the right thing, he can see only a part of it, and understands neither the full scope of the need for change nor how far that change has to go in a direction very different from the one we've been on until now.

. . . . .

The best that we could do? Yes.
As the candidates for president lined up, Americans loved John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Other candidates had their followers and their detractors, but America loved John and Hillary.

While the media were amazed by there being so much support for Obama in the early primaries, Americans who had their eyes open to reality weren't surprised in the least. We saw that Hillary, while well intentioned, was still living in the fantasy paradigm. She believed that the old system of corporate government had merely been mismanaged by the Bush years and had become "ill". Her proposed policies were designed to restore proper management and thus "heal" the system back to its former, proper functionality.

On the other hand, Obama has a world view that sees very large, very important parts of reality. His campaign preached the message that what he saw didn't need to be fixed; it needed to be changed! Replaced by something that really worked. This is what he meant when he talked about "change you can believe in" -- not merely tweaking the "system", but stopping it and replacing it with something that works.

Hillary Clinton warned us that Bush's abandoned car had been left dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and assured us that she would be a responsible driver and back it up the road until it was on solid ground again.

Obama on the other hand assured his supporters that they weren't the only ones who could see that the car had gone a lot farther than close to the edge; that in fact the front wheels had gone over the edge, the car was teetering in a delicate balance and was in danger of falling, and that it was going to take a mighty big tow truck to drag it back onto solid ground. He said that there were parts of the car that had been so badly broken by Bush's joyride that they had to be completely redesigned and replaced before it could be driven forward to any kind of safety.

As events unfolded and the collapse became more obvious every day, more and more independently-minded voters were not only waking up to the fact that we'd been living in a fantasy world, but realizing that Obama was talking about leading us out of it.

While America still loved Hillary, the bank failures and rapid decline of the economy and her responses to them, made the differences between Clinton's vision and Obama's painfully obvious. The moment that the number of independents who realized the unfixability of the old way and that Obama was the only candidate who was not only talking about it but also proposing different-direction solutions reached a majority, his election became inevitable.

In all of this, Media Matters and their fellow reality based truth-speakers played the most important roll, tiredlesly calling out the liars and distorters of the truth again and again and again. Kudos folks. Thank you and keep up the good work.

Next time: What Obama doesn't see and some speculation about why and what the consequences might be.

Addendum
Mike Kernagis points out in a private comment that the context of "They've thrown out the Fantasy Leader, all of his cohorts and/or puppeteers, and . . . . " is far from clear. I agree. The preceding paragraph is a no-frills statement of what I believe happens in a democracy when the people wake up. The next (which contains that sentence) is meant to be nothing more than a macro illustration of how recent events in this country relate to the premise of the preceding paragraph.

Real life political change in a democracy (just like the rest of real life) is a process that moves at a rate that for the most part is determined by the degree to which the majority of the voting electorate is aware of the dysfunctionality of the status quo. So, of course, what actually happened in the 2008 elections fell far short what the people thought they were doing - consistent with their still limited awareness of the dysfunction of the system. It's the first step in a truly different direction, and as its consequences roll out, the shortfall will become obvious, and various corrections will be tried out until the ones that work are in place. That's how change happens in a peaceful transition from idiological to practical government in a democracy - a process of evolution, not a switch we can just throw and make everything different at once.

Rachael Maddow at the ACLU of Wisconsin's 2009 Bill of Rights Celebration

2009-03-12T16:40:00.001-05:00

The ACLU of Wisconsin was kind enough to make available (in three parts) the entirety of Rachael Maddow's address to their annual meeting in February. The introduction ends and Rachael takes the stage about 3 minutes into the first clip.

(Please note that by playing this clip You Tube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see You Tube’s privacy statement on their website and Google’s privacy statement on theirs to learn more.)

D.L. Hughley: Frank Schaeffer Author of Crazy for God on What's Left of the GOP

2009-03-09T17:09:00.002-05:00

This seems to be turning into You Tube day here at Grumblebear, but this clip of Frank Schaeffer on D.L. Hughley (one of the few watchable programs left on what has become of CNN) is worth the space and time.

h/t Ben Cohen at The Daily Banter

Samsung SSD Awesomeness

2009-03-09T16:50:00.002-05:00

Ok, this clip is promotional material from Samsung, and nobody I know could afford a setup like this at the current price of SSDs. Never mind all that. Watch and be amazed!
h/t Gizmodo

Announccing an Arrival

2009-03-09T02:04:00.000-05:00

Meet Ms. Mary Jane Klug

Congratulations, guys!

Announcing a Project

2009-01-29T17:26:00.329-06:00

New stuff is happening in my life almost faster than I can process it, and I'm Taking Action to help myself with that. I'm starting two new blogs and asking for your help to keep me going (no $ involved). I've got two things that I've got to get out; one as in "out of my system" and the other as in "out and into the world." I'm going to try to pull off the process without coming off like any of the following:

a pompous asshole
an out-of-control crank
a disaffected scholar with a wacky pet theory
that red-faced old man with the cardboard sign covered with multi-colored, hand-scribbled lines from the Bible who used to hang out around the Illinois state house in Springfield.
Donald Duck

Here's what's going on:

I've been going through some of what the Chinese call Interesting Times in my interior life. As I wrote to a younger friend the other day, at 62 I've reached a point where I no longer have the stamina to continue to ignore the pain and the grief that I've carried around all my life about what was done to me as a child and the grief I feel about the loss of the entire life I didn't live as a result of it.

At the same time, and on a totally different subject, I've got what I think is a really important "message" that I'm going to try to write about (with your help) as clearly and concisely as I can say it -- to the point that it actually becomes a publishable book (or something). Wow, "message" is a heavy word. Very portentous. But the message itself isn't. The message itself is incredibly simple; so simple that in the history of mankind it's been universally ignored by nearly everyone except "crazy people."

We're at a point in the world, and in America specifically, where if we continue to ignore this simple fact, we have the ability to screw this poochie to a point beyond repair. There really are two Americas* and they exist in very different realities, and between those realities exist critical irreconcilable differences.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's a paragraph from the foreword to the book. First I'll expose the simple reality, and then I'll explain how to use it to save the world (starting with America). But this post is about revealing the project(s), the difficulties that stand in my way of pulling the whole thing off, and the kinds of things I'd like you to do to help me do that if you're interested in coming along for a crazy ride.

Mechanics

I'm not going to try to do all that in this space. The Grumblebear is going to keep grumbling and posting occasional current stuff here. To facilitate The Project, I'm going to start two new blogs: one that will be a mix of dumping the shit about my childhood trauma and how it's impacted my entire life and also some writings about the process of writing the second blog. Most of the readers here are personal friends and many have similarly screwed up family backgrounds. You're invited/encouraged to participate in this blog (working name: Blog P1). I'm pretty sure parts of my story (both my autobiographical shit and the part about writing the book) will resonate with parts of yours, and if that happens, please join in. The second blog (Blog P2) will be the book itself in working-draft form and your participation via the comments section there would be equally welcome.

Help!

Something you can do right now to help is to share any information/experience you've got about a good place to host this stuff. I'm looking for a space with tools a whole lot less basic than what I've been able to figure out on Blogger -- or at least any of the blogger templates I've been able to find. I've got a blog tool on my personal web site and I'll fool around with it a little bit and also dig a little deeper into blogger while I'm waiting for feedback in comments or email. When I've got the right host and/or template, I'll post the URLs here.

I don't intend to go into a big deal about my ADD in this post, but I've written a bit about how it trips me up elsewhere on this blog, and ADD is the reason I'm asking for your help. I've learned to accomplish stuff in spite of the roadblocks it throws up, and an essential part of what's necessary for me to do that is interaction with friends (or friendly strangers). So if any of this sounds like it might be interesting to be a part of (or you just love me enough to give it a try) I'd be honored to have you along for the ride. I promise you can get off the wagon at any time, but I can't promise to return you to where you started. ;-)

(More when the blog sites are up.)

Best 'Shaving Cream' Also the Least Expensive

2009-01-27T15:07:00.033-06:00

For whatever reason, I'm one of those guys who can't shave with an electric shaver. I've tried them all, and they all tear my face to shreds, with little red spots all over (especially on my neck) quickly followed by so many zitts that you'd think I was the world's oldest adolescent. I've got a really tough beard that grows at bizarre angles to my face and skin that's so tender that a mere touch leaves a mark that lasts for hours. Gotta love those Celtic genes, eh?

For years, I've been using a manual razor and shaving in the shower, which softens my beard even more. A few weeks ago, I was out of my favorite shave cream (Edge for sensative skin) and desperately needed to knock the whiskers off my face. Being an inventive sort, I grabbed a bottle of hair conditioner someone had left behind (I've got nothing to condition) and slathered it on my face. All I can say is 'WOW!'

Plain old generic (store brand, in this case) hair conditioner gave me the smoothest shave I've ever had and left my skin feeling like a million bucks. Who knew? An 88-cent (for 32 oz) bottle of generic hair conditioner beat the hell out of the $3.50 (for 8 oz) shaving cream!

I can't certify that this stuff works as well for non-shower shavers, but I'll bet it does.

Why I Hate O'Brien Auto Park

2009-01-26T17:05:00.003-06:00

When I moved 'permanently' to Spain, I sold my wonderful old 1999 Saab 9-5 Sportswagon to a friend. After all, why should I keep a car in the states and pay for insurance, parking and keeping it maintained? I was living elsewhere, and if I needed a car for the month or so I was here, I could rent one for a whole lot less than the cost of insurance alone.

Last spring, when I knew I was coming back to the states to live (and gas was around $4/gal), I researched the current market and decided on a Toyota Prius. As time for the move drew closer, I began hunting for one somewhere near my home on the internet. What I discovered was that a) there were none available for immediate delivery and b) the wait for delivery would be somewhere between 3 and 6 months!

In desperation, I called an old friend who's a manager at the local megadealer that handles Toyota in the Champaign-Urbana area: O'Brien Auto Park. He had one (and only one) available for sale, and although it wasn't a color or a feature package that I wanted, I arranged to buy it over the phone from Spain.

The color wasn't all that important. I've lived with other white cars before and survived. It pissed me off to pay an extra $2500 for features I didn't want--the most expensive of which was Toyota's absolutely worthless navigation system. (Incidentally, features that I didn't know I wanted until I had them turned out to be the proximity entry/ignition system and the premium sound system which apparently is the only way to get built in bluetooth for my mobile phone--standard equipment in the EU where hand-held mobile usage has been illegal for several years. The other worthless feature that cost quite a bit is Toyota 'automatic' climate control, which is anything but.)

I say I called Pat Hos in desperation because although I've bought cars from Pat (and the wonderful Jim Stephens) several times before, my experiences with the O'Brien service department is an entirely different story, and the idea of laying down $28,000+ for a new car that (due to the hybrid technology) was going to be tied to O'Brien for service made my skin crawl.

I totally love my Prius. It performs as advertised and then some. Until this weekend, it's been faultlessly reliable and I've even learned the work-arounds on the climate control (things my Saab took care of automatically that have to be adjusted manually on the Toyota 'automatic' system). The navigation system continues to baffle, but a $300 Garmin dash unit will take care of that next time I venture into unfamiliar territory. And until this weekend, I haven't had to deal with O'Brien service.

Sunday afternoon, I went out to make a run to Lowe's and found the car totally dead. No power anywhere. A quick jump, however, and Steve and I were rolling again. The hybrid battery system reported 'full' and the car performed beautifully on the engine or the battery. At Lowes, it wouldn't go again. A jump and it's fine back to home. Today, it's dead again, and I call O'Brien's service and tell the woman what's happening. She asks when I can bring it in. I tell her I can't bring it in because it's dead (Steve, the designated jumper was at work.). She tells me she can give the number of a tow service. I tell her I'll call AAA, and thank her for the wonderful Warranty service. (If this had been my Saab, they'd have had somebody out to start it within 20 minutes.)

So I drive the car out to O'Brien, follow the signs to the Service Department, park the car and turn it off to go inside. Whoops! This is the service department for everything except Toyota, which is 100+ yards away. The car is dead again, so I trek the distance (14 degrees outside) and am met by a chirpy service 'consultant' to whom I tell my story. He sends me back to the car (on foot) with a 'porter' to get the VIN and mileage (inaccessible since it's all digital and digital is dead along with everything else). We trek back and chirpy Douglas tells me to sit down and wait while they figure out what's wrong with it. I ask him if Pat or Jim is on the premises (wanting to vent to a friendly face) and he tells me he couldn't tell me that.

I trek another 100 yards or so to another building where Pat and Jim do their stuff (and where Pat is the boss) and recount my adventures to Pat, who drops his jaw, gets on the phone to the big-boss-in-the-sky to bitch about the lack of 'service', and gets me a Camry to drive while they screw with my car. An hour later, I get a call from chirpy Douglas telling me they've charged the battery and everything seems to be fine. When I arrive in person, he can offer no explanation of why the battery would be dead other than the cold.

On reflection, I'm willing to allow that for weeks I haven't driven the car further than to the grocery store and maybe hadn't run it enough to charge the battery fully, and that the cold weather is certainly a contributing factor, but for the thing to be totally dead, I'm still dubious about there not being something else wrong. Chirpy Douglas assures me their diagnostic computers say not. OK, we'll see. I'm certainly willing for everything to be OK now, and I'll make a point of taking it on the road for a charge-up in weeks where it goes no farther than the grocery store.

On the other hand, O'Brien's service department gets an F- for the way they handled this, from my initial call for help to Chirpy Douglas's "I wouldn't be able to tell you that" response to my question about whether Pat Hos and/or Jim Stephens was on the premises.

This is not the way to run a business that depends on customer goodwill--or it certainly wouldn't be if it were my business.

Reaction to the Burris Appointment

2009-01-10T16:01:00.005-06:00

Mencken famously noted that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." As I recall, at the time he was writing about the advertising industry, but current events confirm its general applicability. Or maybe it's not intelligence but ignorance that's the problem.

The ignorance of the American public regarding our history and our government and how it operates has been thoroughly documented, and no better proof can be Found in today's headlines than the reactions to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill the senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama.

I'm a huge fan of exploring all of the different shades of gray, but in this case there is no gray there. There is absolutely nothing to discuss, other than that Blago ought to have done the right thing and stepped aside to let Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn make the appointment. Period. The end.

The U.S. constitution requires that when a senate seat becomes vacant between elections, the governor of that state must appoint a replacement*. Until Blagojevich is impeached by the House (accomplished!) and tried and convicted by the Senate, he is the Governor of Illinois. End of discussion.

As for the Senate declining to seat Burris, this question has also been asked and answered by the seminal decision rendered by the Supreme Court in the 1969 case of Powell v. McCormack. Harry Reid should know better!

Blagojevich is an incompetent, immature, unstable, unpopular failure of a governor. His popularity ratings were in the low teens before the federal indictment--the Illinois version of George W. Bush, but without W's "charm." I think it's highly likely that he'll be found guilty of any number of criminal acts when his case finally gets to court (if Federal Prosecutor Fitzgerald's early leaking of the indictment didn't screw the pooch for the prosecution). And, the standards for an impeachment trial being being different from and less stringent than for a criminal trial, there's no question in my mind that he'll be removed from office by the Illinois Senate.

But none of that has happened yet. In the meantime, like it or not, Rod Blagojevich is still the Governor of Illinois and still required to appoint a successor to Senator Obama, and the Senate is still required to seat his appointee.

UPDATE: As several friends have pointed out, actually the Constitution prescribes a special election to fill Senate vacancies unless the state has passed a law allowing for appointment by the Governor, which Illinois has. The statement should have read "The U.S. constitution and Illinois law require that . . . ." Sorry for the sloppy writing.

Gideon Levy on the Israeli Invasion of Gaza

2009-01-10T15:30:00.003-06:00

Haaretz reporter and editorial board member Gideon Levy, a strong critic of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular had this to say in today's paper:

This war, perhaps more than its predecessors, is exposing the true deep veins of Israeli society. Racism and hatred are rearing their heads, as is the impulse for revenge and the thirst for blood. The "inclination of the commander" in the Israel Defense Forces is now "to kill as many as possible," as the military correspondents on television describe it. And even if the reference is to Hamas fighters, this inclination is still chilling.
The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as "exercising caution": the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn't raising any questions, as if we've decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement[SIC] of our inherent racism.

Read the whole commentary. I think you'll also find the comments interesting. Also good comments where Levy's piece is cross posted at Common Dreams.
(h/t: MKB)

Bush The Liberator

2009-01-10T14:55:00.002-06:00

Olberman has this commentary on the Bush legacy:

My favorite Bush quote from the whole thing:

And for those who claim that we're "teaching to test," Unh hunh. We're teaching a child to read so he or she can pass the test!

And Americans "elected" this moron not once, but twice!

(h/t: Jenifer C.)

Armed Security Guards

2009-01-01T21:29:00.003-06:00

There's a disturbing story by Linda Milazzo at AlterNet relating her near-fatal encounter with an armed Brinks guard at her local Albertson's store in California. She nearly bumped into the guard as she was on her way into the store as he was coming out with his gun in his hand, pointing approximately stomach-height at whatever and whoever happened to be in its line of sight.

California law allows licensed security guards to carry their weapons unholstered only in high-risk situations, and even then the gun must be pointed at the ground in the absence of immediate armed threat.

The comments section is at least as unsettling as the story itself. I had no idea there were so many libertarian assholes out there. Yes, the majority of the commenters were as outraged as the author by the behavior of the guard and the indifference of the Albertson's manager to her complaint. But there were also plenty like this:

You obviously weren't looking where you were going. Just because you live in some tony suburb of L.A. doesn't mean you're immune to danger, in fact I wonder when the truly poor will start amassing in the neighborhoods of the truly wealthy instead of slaughtering each other. It's L.A., for crying out loud.

or this gem titled "Come On"

Oh gosh, someone pointed a gun at you! Oh heavens! Not that! You must have PTSD! How awful! Sue them! Sue! Sue! Sue!

I don't patronize businesses that employ armed guards. And I make a point of telling the manager why: Any business that believes that its money is more important than my life is not for me.

I'd never thought about this issue until Menard's (a midwest based version of Lowes or Home Depot) opened its first store in my town.

They had two armed guards in the store and another on the exit gate from their lumber yard. I didn't think a whole lot about it until I purchased some stuff that I had to drive into the lumber yard to load into my back seat.

When I got to the gate to exit, the guard stepped out of his booth, checked my receipt and looked at the merchandise in the back seat. Fine so far. Then, he asked me to open my trunk. I refused, and the SOB put his hand on the butt of his gun! I told him that if he removed the gun from the holster I was going to call 911 (cellphone in hand).

He backed down on the gun, but he refused to open the gate until I opened the trunk, and I refused to open the trunk. We sat there for about 10 minutes with cars and trucks lined up behind me honking their horns.

Eventually a minor manager came out, and I explained Illinois law to him. The gate was opened (but not the trunk) and I drove to the front of the store, parked, and went inside where I explained to the general manager that I would never shop there again and why.

I'd like to say that I've never been back, but it's not true. Since friends have told me that the armed guards were removed, I've popped in for the occasional sale item or when there was something I couldn't find elsewhere.* On the other hand, I made my point with the manager, and who knows? Maybe my bitching about it contributed to Menard's deciding to remove the armed guards from their stupid "home" store.

Since that experience, when I see an armed guard in a store, I find the manager, explain that I don't do business with companies that believe their money is more important than my life, and leave.

Call me a crank, but the odds on there being random flying bullets in a place where there's already an armed guard is one hell of a lot greater than when there isn't, and it's not a risk I care to take for myself or my family.
- - - - - - -
*My little town, Champaign, Illinois, has got to be one of the most frustrating mid-sized towns in the world to buy building supplies. Our Home Depot is too small to be useful, and our Lowe's is so badly managed that half the time they're not only out of the item I'm looking for, but it can take as long as three or four months for it to come back into stock. (We also have the world's worst Target store -- for the same reason).

Transition / Transformation (odds & ends)

2008-11-26T05:38:00.000-06:00

I've been absent from this space since the end of September. In the interim, the election has finally finished. The lesser of two evils has prevailed. There is a sense of cautious hope in the land. We have a president-elect who talks about the "good war" in Afghanistan and throws around the Republican-created term "War on Terror" with alarming ease, but on the plus side seems to be living in the real world, believes in the Constitution, values competence over political loyalty and appears to make policy based on practical reality -- characteristics sadly missing for at least the last 8 years.

My excuse for my silence here is "Technical Difficulties." I've been back in Spain since Oct 2, and my internet connection didn't get connected until a few days ago.

But the truth is that I haven't written anything here because I didn't know what to say. I wanted to write something about Barack Obama during the lead-up to the national election, but the more I watched Team Obama in operation, the weaker my enthusiasm for his candidacy became -- to the point where when I finally cast my vote on September 29th, I found myself voting almost exclusively for Not-McCain-Palin, with the name of the Democratic candidate largely incidental to my decision.

I'm back here in Spain for another few weeks, then it's back to Champaign for the holidays with family and friends. Before I return, I wanted to jot down some quick observations about the Spanish take on America in these interesting times. I may even flesh some of them out over the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, here they are, in no particular order.

Europeans are totally baffled by the American electoral process. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Europeans are baffled by America. Period. But the Bush fiasco has drawn more international attention to the 2008 elections than any American political campaign in memory, and has left observers scratching their heads. From the length of time involved in the primary contests to the incredible sums of money involved to the fact that the person who gets the most votes isn't necessarily the winner, foreign observers have been watching and wondering if this isn't a hell of a way to run a democracy.
Among those who have actually been paying attention to the candidates and positions, there is incredulity that the results weren't more like 90/10 or 85/15. They viewed McCain as a threat to the future of the world and were totally befuddled by the selection of Sarah Palin.
The European press seems to be paying more attention to the American auto industry than to any other aspect of the financial meltdown. Perhaps this has something to do with GM and Ford both being major players in the European auto market?

There are others, but those are the main points. Stay tuned for more on these and other odds and ends I've picked up in Spain during the 2008 American elections.

Required Viewing

2008-09-29T16:15:00.000-05:00

If you watch no other clip before the election, watch this one:

John McCain's ads are LIES. Here's the video proof.

2008-09-12T20:47:00.001-05:00

Do They Really Want To Go There?

2008-09-06T21:18:00.000-05:00

Before calling it a day, I just had to post this:

In an absolutely brilliant post at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg (mentioned in the previous post) offers a devastating comparison of the presidential qualifications of governors as opposed to community organizers!

Click on the title of this post or click here to go see it. I guarantee you'll love it.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself

2008-09-06T19:24:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about the roll fear plays in American life and culture. I've been wanting to write about it, but haven't had quite the right angle I wanted until I came across two posts from two of my favorite bloggers that got me going on it:

The first was by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. (Click on her name to see the whole article.) In a posting titled "Oh Please" she quoted the great genius Senator James Inhofe as saying "Regardless of what polls show, Inhofe said, voters will have to ask themselves a question once they get behind the curtain in the voting booth on Election Day.

"Do you really want to have a guy as commander in chief of this country when you can question whether or not he really loves his country?" he asked.

"That's the big question." (...)
She closes with this: "You'd think the voters of Oklahoma might get tired of having their Senator insult their intelligence. I hope so."

The problem is that it's the voters of Oklahoma (and it's not just OK, either) who insult their own intelligence by electing people like this time after time. And, personally, I don't think intelligence has that much to do with it.

After thinking about it for a bit, this is more or less what I wrote in the comments section of her post:
As it happens, I used to own some (worthless, inherited) farm land in northwest Oklahoma, and I know lots of wonderful, otherwise intelligent people out there who think very much like Inhofe when it comes to politics.

The thing that they have in common, and Inhofe articulates so stupefyingly, is an extreme form of xenophobia - in effing spades!

Fear of the unfamiliar. Fear of anything different from us and the way things have always been. Fear of the new and untried.

When you're hanging on by a thread - and huge numbers of rural Oklahomans have been just barely doing that for all their lives - any kind of change is terrifying. You've just barely got a handle on the life you know; you're acutely aware every day that with one slip you're down the tubes. If anything happens to change that life, you might not know how to deal with it, and zoop! there you go.

It doesn't matter that the change promises to do away with your very need for the thread with things like a functional economy - one that includes you, even - and a social security (small esses) system that will provide for your needs while you're gearing up to participate in that economy. All you know is your thread and holding on to it. What happens if you can't master the new ways? Or, more likely, what happens if the new way turns out to be an illusion, only now they've taken away your thread?

Oklahoma isn't the only place where ~~decades~~ centuries of economic uncertainty have left folks feeling this way - just perhaps the most prominent in our minds, thanks to the big, articulate mouth of their most prominent Senator.

West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the central and southern parts of my own state, Illinois, the rural South, and anywhere else where life has always been marginally viable have always been full of folks just hanging on by a thread. That's why they're full of nutcase religionists and send people like Inhofe to be their voices to speak to the great big outside world.

The second article, and the one that clarified my thoughts and got me moving to post something of my own on the matter, was by the brilliant, articulate Chris Bowers at Open Left, a web site that if it isn't already, ought to be daily reading for any progressive who still thinks there might be a chance to heal and take back America.

In an article titled How Far Should Obama Be Ahead? Chris ponders the causes for the statistical variances between the polls that ask how many Americans favor what are basically Obama's policy positions (~70%, based on their anti-Bush polling numbers, or ~53% based on the 2006 elections) and how many people plan to vote for Obama over McCain (~48% Obama vs ~43% for McCain).

Again, after some consideration I posted my thoughts, and because I'm a lazy bastard, all I've done is cut and paste them here (with a tiny bit of editing, 'cause who can't be more clear after having had time to think a bit more?) Here's what I said:The limits of statistics
Chris: You and Paul [Rosenberg] are two of the most gifted statistical analysts the left has, and I can't say often enough how grateful (despite some of the shit I've occasionally given Paul) I am for your work for the progressive cause, but there are limits to how far statistical thinking can take us.

Sadly, rationality plays too small a part in deciding national elections. For as long as I can remember (and I'm in my 60s) elections, and especially presidential elections, have been determined by emotional, rather than rational responses to the candidates.

You can take all the polls you want that say that umpty percent of Americans agree with Obama on the issues, but you absolutely can't extrapolate that percentage into votes for the guy.

When a pollster asks "Who are you going to vote for?", what (s)he's really asking is who do you feel the most comfortable voting for? Who do you "like" the best? And in America, that can be distilled down further to "Which candidate scares you the least?"

Despite which fiscal/social/security policy they favor, for a good one-half of this nation, when it comes to politics their controlling emotion is fear - fear in the form of xenophobia: fear of the unfamiliar, the different, the new, the untried - fear of anybody or any thing not like us - not like the way it's always been.

That is the simple, obvious, and irrefutable explanation for the differences between the policy and election polls. Fear makes otherwise intelligent people vote against their own stated objectives time and time again.

FDR could have been talking about current times for the Democratic party and the progressive movement when he observed that "the only thing we have to fear is fear, itself." And until we recognize the fear in the electorate, and find "healing" ways of addressing it, we're going to be doomed to more and more years of GWB-type government, no matter what the polls say about universal health care or the economy or anything else, because the Republicans understand that fear.

The Republicans have absolutely no interest in healing the fear. They've mastered the art of irritating it and keeping it raw and using it to manipulate the electorate with bogus issues like "patriotism" and flag pins and gay marriage and other "scary" stuff.

Until progressives can stop ridiculing and complaining about the comments people make out of fear and start addressing the fear-based community with compassion, and understanding them as otherwise intelligent fellow humans who have been brutally and callously manipulated into an irrational state where they vote against their own best interests, all of our efforts are doomed to accomplishing nothing more than reinforcing their fears and their fear-based voting patterns further.

More on this subject in future posts - perhaps even before the weekend is over. I want to talk about some of the other ways that fear in general and xenophobia in particular impact our culture and maybe even offer up some thoughts on how to begin working to heal it.

Exclusive Footage From the Republican National Convention

2008-09-02T18:33:00.002-05:00

h/t the always wonderful Joshua

The Most Spine-Chilling McCain Video You Will Ever See

2008-09-01T18:19:00.001-05:00

Blackwater and Iraq

2008-07-23T19:52:00.000-05:00

The AP published a story on Monday, based on interviews with top Blackwater executives, reporting that the soldiers-for-hire company is considering going out of the security business.

That seems extremely unlikely to me, but it got me thinking about what this company that never does anything without a reason might be up to. Here's what occurred to me as a possible interpretation:

The U.N. mandate that makes the U.S. invasion and continued occupation of Iraq "legitimate" in terms of international law, if in no other, expires at the end of the year.

For months, the Iraqi parliament and U.S. negotiators have been working to try to hammer out an agreement or contract between the two governments for what happens at the end of that time -- a document that "legitimizes" continued U.S. presence there. (For anyone who's been following the story of that negotiation, Maliki's public statement about timed withdrawal of U.S. forces was very old news, indeed.)

After much posturing by both the Suni and Shiite members, including walkouts and threats of disbanding parliament and throwing the whole country back into the chaos that preceded the Iraqi election, it appears that there are two items which both major Iraqi factions agree are non-negotiable: 1) the timed (subject to conditions "on the ground") withdrawal of U.S. troops, and 2) under absolutely no circumstances will there be amnesty for actions (atrocities) committed by private contractors in Iraq.

The parliament and the U.S. are still miles apart on reaching a final agreement, and in fact may not, presenting an even more interesting set of circumstances for the U.S. administration, but it now appears clear that the two items above are set in stone from the Iraqi point of view.

If I were Blackwater and I knew that, I'd be making noises about getting out of the security business, too. I'd be setting the stage for telling the DOD that business considerations make it impossible for us to continue in that line of business; sorry, but the contract's canceled; here's a little of your money back; thanks for the good time -- and airlifting my guys out of there in the dark of night before they're all rounded up in some kind of war crimes proceeding.

No one (except Bushco) is more hated by the Iraqi people than the Blackwater mercenaries, and now that the end of the occupation appears near, they want their pound of flesh! And while I'd rather give them Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, et. al., (and I'd throw in Wm Kristol and some of the other neocon cheerleaders for free), it's hard to find fault with their sentiments.

Much has been said about where U.S. troops would be without Blackwater, and it's possible that the out-of-business noise is a threat to Bushco to harden U.S. dedication to an agreement that includes Blackwater amnesty.

Or not. Everything I've suggested here may be nothing more than me farting in the bathtub, but it seemed worth throwing the suggestion out there.

All in your head

2008-07-19T15:12:00.001-05:00

Pass it on!

Happy Fourth of July

2008-07-04T17:44:00.001-05:00

The Government Versus The American People

2008-06-27T18:35:00.004-05:00

U.S. News reports today on the apparently random seizing of laptops and cameras (and loose memory cards) by U.S. customs agents.As John Amato writes at Crooks & Liars:

A controversial customs practice creates a legal backlash:
Returning from a brief vacation to Germany in February, Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Agents searched Hogan’s luggage and then popped an unexpected question: Was he carrying any digital media cards or drives in his pockets? “Then they told me that they were impounding my laptop,” says Hogan, a freelance investigative reporter whose recent stories have ranged from the origins of the Iraq war to the impact of money in presidential politics.Shaken by the encounter, Hogan says he left the airport and examined his bags, finding that the agents had also removed and inspected the memory card from his digital camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use that machine for work or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information,” he said. When customs offered to return the machine nearly two weeks later, Hogan told them to ship it to his lawyer…read on
I don’t know why, but I thought of this movie as I read the article: “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming. (h/t Mike Finnegan)

This is just one more example of the inexcusable excesses our customs agents perpetrate every day on American citizens. Here's the excerpt from the original article that I think represents most clearly the attitude that has permeated our government:

Now, businesses and other organizations are pushing back, Congress is investigating, and lawsuits have been filed challenging how the program selects travelers for inspection. The ninth circuit ruling was the result of more than 20 lawsuits involving electronics seized from travelers who were nearly all of Muslim, Middle Eastern, or South Asian descent.

Citing the lawsuits, customs officials decline to say how many computers, storage drives, cellphones, and BlackBerrys they have confiscated or what happens to them afterward. Officials declined to testify at a recent Senate hearing, although they wrote in a prepared statement that officers "have the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public." (emphasis mine)

If the Customs folks were a corporation or a private individual, this position would at least make sense.

Abraham Lincoln, revered by Democrats and Republicans alike, used these words to close his famous Gettysburg Address: "...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"

So if the government's (theoretically) ours, what's our interest in their refusing to answer a question about how frequently seizure occurs and the disposition of the seized items, whether there are pending lawsuits or not.

If nothing else, the incident clearly demonstrates how far we have come, from a government of the people, by the people, for the people, to the Cheny-Bush America where we now have the government versus the people.

O'Reilly In One Minute

2008-06-24T17:54:00.001-05:00

George Carlin, 1937 - 2008 RIP

2008-06-23T19:15:00.003-05:00

One of America's most brilliant and articulate social commentators, George Carlin, is dead at the tender age of 71. I'll miss him a lot.

Here's one of my favorite Carlin clips in which he riffs on America's war on Iraq:

(h/t Publius)

How I Learned Political Cynicism

2008-06-21T15:34:00.007-05:00

In the summer of 1963, my best friend Chris and I were attending summer school at Springfield HS in Illinois to pick up some extra credit for graduation the following spring. (I took typing, one of the few things I learned in high school that actually turned out to be useful for the rest of my life.)

Chris's dad "knew somebody" in the state legislature and arranged for us to be "honorary pages" in the House of Representatives for a week, and for that week, after class we'd trot down to the nearby State House, clip on our badges, and earn a few bucks sitting on the pages' bench and running errands for various Democratic representatives.

The Dem's bench was in the front of the Illinois House chamber, right next to the desk of a rep from Chicago named Mike _______. I'm not being coy here, I simply have no idea what his last name was. I'm not sure I knew even then. Mike was the pages' buddy, tipped generously, and used us for everything from getting him a cocktail to picking up his laundry. But the thing that we all liked most about him was that he spent a fair amount of time away from his desk, and if he was going to be away for a vote, one of us lucky pages would get to sit in his chair and vote for him!

At that time, the Illinois House used an electro-mechanical voting system manufactured by the American Totalizator Company. Voting required flipping the electrical switch that sat on each member's desk to the right for "yea" or the left for "nay". Representatives who actually cared about a bill but were going to be away for the vote could vote by pressing the switch in the desired direction and sticking a toothpick in it to hold it there until the machine was turned on to record the vote. Giant "tote boards" with each rep's name and a red and green light were on the wall at the front of the house, Dems on one side and Republicans on the other.

Before Mike would leave the floor, his instructions to the lucky page always went something like this: "Watch the Democratic tote board, and when nearly everybody has voted, vote me with the majority. If the vote is pretty evenly divided, look at the Republican tote board and vote me with the minority. If their vote is evenly divided, don't do anything."

Ah, sweet! Democracy in action! Whenever I catch myself foolishly wondering how so many horribly stupid laws get passed, I remember Mike and the 1963 Illinois State Legislature, and my mind switches back into reality mode.

FISA Rage

2008-06-20T13:50:00.005-05:00

I'm so angry with Barack Obama right now that if the alternatives weren't so horrible, I wouldn't vote for the sob. Obama is the Man in the Democratic party at the moment, and he could have stopped Steny Hoyer's FISA capitulation bill dead in its tracks if he had an ounce of political courage. Watch this:

The House passed this abomination this afternoon.

The New U.S. Border Patrol

2008-06-12T16:45:00.004-05:00

My wonderful friend, Harry Hilton, sent me this photo. Finally, a solution to our nation's immigration problem!

I'm Voting Republican

2008-06-12T16:26:00.002-05:00

It's all beginning to make sense now.

Learn more about the film here.

Senate Hearings Interrupted | American News Project

2008-06-12T16:13:00.002-05:00

On two consecutive days, hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee were suspended when Republicans invoked the rarely used "two hour rule" that states no hearing can run more than two hours.

ANP cameras were covering both hearings as part of ongoing stories and were able to capture the latest moves in the political chess match both parties are currently waging on Capitol Hill.

The $300 Billion Betrayal

2008-06-11T23:15:00.004-05:00

The folks at American News Project have put together this report on waste in Pentagon procurement programs under the Bush administration:

Yes, that's right, they said that cost overruns under Bush are four times what they were under Clinton.

John Cusack Gives the Bush-McCain Challenge - 30 sec version

2008-06-11T16:58:00.001-05:00

Powerful TV spot from Cusack and Move On.

Bill Moyers: 'Journalism in Profound Crisis' (Video) | MediaCulture | AlterNet

2008-06-07T18:34:00.001-05:00

Bill Moyers addressed the National Conference for Media Reform today. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth a watch.

Chris Hedges: Iraq War Now About Murder

2008-06-05T03:40:00.006-05:00

As noted in the comments section of the post I'm about to refer you to, "[Chris] Hedges is the preeminent voice of the anti-war movement. His writings on the wars of our time will be the record that historians teach from generations from now. His speech at Rockford College in 2003 was one of the few acts of heroism and strength and truth spoken to power as the world went insane."

What Hedges has to say is, as another comment pointed out, nothing that human beings haven't known for thousands of years. But Hedges has a gift for outrage that we all need a good shot of now and then. If the rest of the book is like the excerpt, Hedges and Al-Arian have delivered.

Hedges piece in Salon originally appeared on TomDispatch.com and has been adapted from the newly released book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, which Chris Hedges coauthored with Laila Al-Arian. Here's a taste:

June 5, 2008 | Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity-producing situations." Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.
Read more . . . .

Or better yet, read the book. I'm planning on it, myself.

Froomkin On Significance Of McClellan's Revelations

2008-06-02T15:07:00.006-05:00

WaPo's Dan Froomkin points out that despite the flawed nature of the messenger, Scott McClellan's revelations are a vindication of critics of the Bush administration:

But the significance of McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now. Among them:
* That Bush and his top aides manipulated the country into embarking upon an unnecessary war on false pretenses;
* That Bush is an incurious man, happily protected from dissenting views inside the White House's bubble of self-delusion;

* That Karl Rove's huge influence on the Bush White House erased any distinction between policy and politics, so governing became about achieving partisan goals, not the common good;

* That Vice President Cheney manipulates the levers of power;

* That all those people who denied White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity were either lying or had been lied to;

* That the mainstream media were complicit enablers of the Bush White House and that its members didn't understand how badly they were being played.

By coming back again and again to the CIA leak story, McClellan also validates a key theme of the Bush critique: That the Plame case was a microcosm of much that was wrong with the way the Bush White House did business.

Read the whole post here.

Reform The DNC!

2008-05-31T17:19:00.005-05:00

Mark Benjamin posts some interesting observations about the protests outside today's DNC rules committee meeting at Salon's War Room. (If you haven't been paying attention, the RC is meeting to figure out what to do about Florida and Michigan.)

Apparently, contrary to what the cable news is telling us, Hillary is not what most of the protests are about.

"We are here because we want every vote counted," said Wesley Taylor, who traveled by bus from Coral Springs, Florida to air his bad feelings. Taylor, who voted for John Edwards in the primary, served 14 years in the Army, including service in Bosnia. "I didn’t fight not to have my vote counted," he said.

"It is not democracy," complained Debbie Kubiak, 52, who traveled from Buffalo, N.Y. "It is worse than what they did back in 2000."

This sad state of affairs is nothing more nor less than our beloved DLC/DNC conducting business as usual. That Hillary represents this part of the Democratic party is why I can't support her. (Which is NHNT.)

They just don't get how dysfunctional the system has become. They talk about being "reality-based" to score cheap points off the ridiculous wing of the Republican party, but have no idea how much of their own realities they're blind to. As the 12-steppers like to say, denial is a great deal more than a river in Egypt.

The American political system no longer works. That's a huge statement. With the right company and setting, I can see talking about it on the front porch into the wee hours without ever getting beyond the meaning of "works." For now, I'm stating it as a given.

Hillary has no idea. She and her DLC/DNC pals believe in the system and believe that it can be repaired with a tweak here and a tweak there. And today's protests outside the rules committee meeting is an excellent example of what their finest efforts have wrought.

If we're ever going to create a progressive government that actually reflects the values we've been taught America was founded on, we've got to reform our party to reflect those same values. Beginning with dumping all of the present party leadership who place retaining their power above solving the problems of the day.

This is one of the reasons why I love Paul Rosenberg at Open Left and OL's Bush Dog Project. If you're not familiar with the Project, here's a good place to start: Matt Stoller's "What is a Blue Dog Democrat? And if you're not familiar with Paul's writing, here's the perfect place to start: There Is No 'They' Here

Enjoy!
,

David Sirota on Colbert

2008-05-30T14:33:00.006-05:00

Our friend David Sirota was on "The Colbert Report" last night, hyping his new book, The Uprising

Way to go, David!

Rove Playbook?

2008-05-30T13:23:00.005-05:00

Well, no. But this ~1950 educational film is eerily familiar

via Ralph Bernardo at disinformation.

The War Prayer

2008-05-27T14:16:00.003-05:00

Mark Twain has always been my favorite philosopher, and his short story "The War Prayer", my favorite.

During the Vietnam War, I quoted it extensively and even did readings of it at anti-war gatherings. It is one of the most powerful statements against war and jingoism ever written, and it is as relevant today as it ever has been.

Now, thanks to the internet, Twain's magnificent work (relatively unknown before) is enjoying a much wider popularity than ever before, with a number of sites and pages dedicated to it. The newest of these, thewarprayer.com, put together by our friend Markos Kounalakis at the Washington Monthly is quite amazing:

(h/t Mike Finnigan at C&L)

Here's Kevin Drum's intro to the film from WM:

In 1904, disgusted by the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War, Mark Twain wrote a short anti-war prose poem called "The War Prayer." His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously:
None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.
"The War Prayer" was eventually published after World War I, when its message was more in tune with the times. Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, who was affected by Twain's words when he covered the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, made "The War Prayer" into a short video for release last Memorial Day, and today we're reprising it. It features stunning illustrations by Akis Dimitrakopoulos and is narrated by Peter Coyote, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Erik Bauersfeld.

What To Do With Your Bush Rebate Check

2008-05-22T22:28:00.005-05:00

Mr. Bush's solution to America's economic woes is a "bonus" rebate check, which we're all supposed to spend and thus stimulate the economy, creating more jobs and more opportunities so we can all live Happily Ever After and Mr. Bush will go down in history as The Man Who Saved America. Or something like that.

Here's one person's solution of how to put that money to better use:

You can follow Kenevan's example here.

Back In The U. S. of A.

2008-05-20T20:28:00.004-05:00

Well, there's no mistaking it. I'm back in the US, getting my anti-depressant medication adjusted, and my head back in the world.

The actual trip was a breeze, and the dog arrived in Chicago no worse for the wear. The trip down from Chicago to Champaign was a stark reminder of how incredibly flat Illinois is. No sea, either.

I've done nothing much since I got back except sleep. I got the things I absolutely had to do taken care of while I was still buzzing from the energy of the trip (I had made the mistake of not completely finishing my packing before I enjoyed a couple of "good-bye" get-togethers with friends.), and then I collapsed and have pretty much stayed that way.

If you've never enjoyed the experience of full-blown clinical depression, I hope you never do. I see the shrink on Thursday, and with a little luck will begin feeling better again not too long thereafter.

Besides the flatness, another thing that has blown me away is that nobody seems to realize the Democratic primary's been over since last month. As far as my Spanish friends know, it was over a long time before that. But not many of them are paying much attention. The general attitude is that Bush has really screwed up America, and that he's out of there come next January when Mr. Obama will begin the long, hard job of trying to put things back together again. It is unimaginable to them that anything else could happen. They see little difference between Bush and McCain. They think Hillary would be an improvement, but they see her as being too enmeshed with the system and the ways of thinking that got us into the mess we're in.

I think they're pretty astute in appraising the candidates, but I'm afraid they don't realize how little a role this kind of logic plays in American elections. We'll see.

"The Science of Sexuality"

2008-04-26T07:37:00.004-05:00

Greta Christina has an interesting, if somewhat pointless, post on science and sexuality over at Alternet.

When I first came out into the gay community, one of the most common party lines going around was, "Gay parents aren't any more likely to have gay kids than straight parents." Some of the big political battles being fought at the time had to do with gay parenting, and the community was trying to reassure/ convince the straight world that it was "safe" for gay people to have and raise kids, that our kids wouldn't be any more likely to be gay than anyone else's. (Of course, many of us personally thought, "So what if our kids turn out gay? There's nothing wrong with being gay, so why does it matter?" But we knew the straight world didn't feel that way. Hence, the line.) --Read more

As I responded in the comments section on Alternet: I have a few ideas myself about what causes sexuality, but I don't know, and personally, I hope they never do find out for sure. Because the minute they do, the battles will begin afresh over what to do with that information.

If there is a significant genetic factor that can be detected in utero, should a woman carrying an unwanted "queer" fetus be allowed/encouraged to have an abortion?

If it turns out to be primarily a "choice," does that make anti-gay sentiment and activities more socially acceptable?

If it turns out to be primarily genetic, will the haters feel any more compassion for queers as a result?

The whole discussion begs the even more important Big Question: What difference does it make?

I can't see one that matters much. What does matter is that all Americans be treated exactly the same, both under the law and in the larger society as well, regardless of sexual orientation or anything else.

If knowing the "answer" to the causes of sexuality contributes anything toward that end, I don't begrudge the money and energy spent finding it. But personally, I doubt it, and believe that both could be better spent.

Whether I'm queer because I chose to be, or because of genes I carry, I expect to be treated the same as anyone else.

Anything else is un-American.

Larry King Promotes Day of Silence

2008-04-24T17:12:00.004-05:00

Today is the National Day of Silence, a day when hundreds of thousands of students across America pledge to be silent for the day, representing the silence forced upon their lesbian, gay, or transgendered friends by the rampant homophobia and hectoring on the majority of school campuses. Below is a statement from Larry King:

(h/t HRC Back Story)

Why Conservatives Are Always Wrong

2008-04-24T09:01:00.002-05:00

Jefferson Smith has posted a wonderful piece entitled "Why Conservatives Are Always Wrong" that should be required reading at least once a week for every human being on earth. Please read the whole thing and pass it on to everybody you can think of.

Suppose you had a friend you had known for many years, one who was very opinionated, who always seemed absolutely certain about everything, and yet who was always turning out to be wrong. He got you to buy stock in Enron and swore it would just keep on rising. He bet on the Yankees to sweep the Red Sox in ’04. He said mobile phones were just a fad . . .

O'Reilly/Fox Homophobia

2008-04-14T13:21:00.000-05:00

"Neutral Sexual Orientation Employment Policy"

2008-03-20T16:28:00.005-05:00

I may be on to something here that the whole rest of the civilized world already knew, but I was mildly blown away when a quick skim of the proxy statement for a company I own a few shares of stock in turned up the following:

ITEM 9—STOCKHOLDER PROPOSAL REGARDING A
NEUTRAL SEXUAL ORIENTATION EMPLOYMENT POLICY
Resolution
Whereas, our company seeks to hire the most qualified person and has never had a policy discriminating against any person, or groups of persons, for any reason.

Whereas, it would be inappropriate and possibly illegal to ask a job applicant or employee about their sexual interests, inclinations and activities.

Whereas, it is similarly inappropriate and legally problematic for employees to discuss personal sexual matters while on the job.

Whereas, unlike the issues of race, age, gender and certain physical disabilities, it would be impossible to discern a person’s sexual orientation from their appearance.

Whereas, unless an employee chooses to talk about their sexual interests or activities while working, the issue of sexual orientation is, essentially, moot.

Whereas, according to the website of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender political organization, “an inclusive non-discrimination policy (one that refers to sexual orientation) is a key facet of the rationale for extending domestic partner benefits.” The HRC adds, “Establishing a benefits policy that includes your company’s gay and lesbian employees is a logical outgrowth of your company’s own non-discrimination policy. . . .”

Whereas, domestic partner benefit policies pay employee benefits based on the employee engaging in unmarried, homosexual relations. These relations have been condemned by the major traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam for a thousand years or more.

Whereas, the Armed Forces of the United States is one of the largest and most diverse organizations in the world. They protect the security of us all while adhering to a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” regarding sexual interests.

Whereas, our company does not discriminate against tobacco users when they apply for a job even though they are not protected by any employment clause. It also does not pay tobacco users special benefits based on their engaging in this personally risky behavior.

Whereas, those who engage in homosexual sex are at a significantly higher risk for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Whereas, marriage between heterosexuals has been protected and encouraged by a wide range of societies, cultures and faiths for ages.

Resolved: the shareholders request that Wells Fargo form a committee to explore ways to formulate an equal employment opportunity policy which complies with all federal, state and local regulations but does not make reference to any matters related to sexual interests, activities or orientation.

Supporting Statement
While the legal institution of marriage between a man and a woman should be protected, the
sexual interests, inclinations and activities of all employees should be a private matter, not a corporate
concern.

Position of the Board of Directors
The Board of Directors recommends a vote AGAINST this proposal, which is identified as Item 9 on the proxy card, for the following reasons:
The Company believes diversity is fundamental to its success; and
Opposing discrimination in all forms is one of the ways the Company makes its commitment to diversity a reality.
The Company believes that welcoming all people and opposing discrimination in all its forms, including discrimination based on sexual orientation, represents a commitment to fairness that Americans support. This belief is how we conduct our business successfully. Diversity is part of the Company’s “Vision and Values,” which makes it clear that we want to “respect differences among team members, customers and communities—earning mutual trust by supporting our corporate values for diversity, taking advantage of different perspectives, supporting the diversity of our team members, customers and communities, and leveraging diversity as a competitive advantage.”

The Company seeks to recruit and retain outstanding team members who reflect the diversity of a highly competitive marketplace. We do not publicly support or endorse any particular creed or lifestyle. We simply strive to build a culture in which all people are accepted and individual differences are respected among our team members, and we intend to continue our commitment to support the diversity of all our team members and customers.

Accordingly, the Board of Directors recommends that you vote AGAINST this proposal.

The statements and arguments are familiar. We've been hearing them from Fallwell and Dobson and Robertson and Wildmon and Hagee and company for over 30 years in one form or another. They're tired, and they're untrue, and not even the dwindling number of followers those folks puts much store in them any more.

No, the surprise was that this item was included in a statement from the Wells Fargo corporation, a pioneer and stalwart supporter not only of workplace diversity but a proud corporate sponsor of any number of lesbian and gay sporting events and other activities.

The proxy statement doesn't say which shareholder(s) submitted the proposal (I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I'm lazy.), but my guess is that somebody like Don Wildmon at the "American Family Association" or James Dobson from "Focus on the Family" has bought themselves a share of Wells Fargo stock.

Their efforts are laughable, and the resolution won't receive enough votes to justify the ink to print it or the time spent responding to it. It's both revelatory of the American culture and somehow bizarrely personally reassuring to me that these guys are still able to make a buck out of this issue in 2008.

Amen

2008-02-16T17:12:00.001-06:00

fake christians
by luvnews

Olberman: Bush = Fascism

2008-02-15T09:18:00.004-06:00

This is absolutely brilliant:

I first suggested it was time to rehabilitate "fascism" in this post back in November. It's good to have one's more 'outrageous' thoughts affirmed by the King of Progressive Outrage.

Irrelevant But Amazing Video

2008-02-13T08:39:00.004-06:00

I received this video clip from Natasha McDonald in today's mail. It's an amusing way to entertain yourself for a few minutes. Watch especially for the impossible ending.

Take This War Charge Off My Bill

2008-02-12T19:59:00.000-06:00

I'm just back from 10 days in Malta, shivering and watching my first live snooker tournament. I plan to scribble a little about the experience when the coherent part of my brain catches up with my body. In the meantime, enjoy this: h/t Brave New Films

Justice Coming for "Justice"

2008-01-25T15:53:00.000-06:00

For those of us wondering whether the Bush administration's abuse of the justice department for political ends would ever lead to any consequences for the abusers involved, this just in from Harpers Scott Horton: A Political Prosecution Goes Under the Microscope.

Priceless: Olberman on who else but Billy O'

2008-01-15T21:06:00.000-06:00

This is eight minutes of MSNBC's Keith Olberman at his very finest:

No Comment Required

2008-01-08T19:05:00.000-06:00

THE Press Solution

2007-12-22T08:35:00.000-06:00

One of my gifts, as a person living with ADD is that every so often, I have to turn off the outside world for a while, and just do nothing. That's where I've been for the last few weeks.

When I get like that, it often takes something a little special to get me off my ass and back into my version of a "productive" mode. This time around, it was an email from Media Matters for America, announcing the publication of their list of candidates for the worst (best?, most effective?) media misinformation of 2007.

While the list mostly features the standup comics of the right --Billy O', Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson (whose senile irrelevance becomes increasingly embarrassing to watch with each news cycle) and that ilk-- there's some of the usual genuinely scary stuff in there, too. It's a good read.

All in all, it's been an interesting year in the news biz, and I like to think that if I stand back far enough there's a lot that's happened this year that gives this tired old hippie a fresh shot of optimism that the herd is starting to wake up. And even more encouraging, they are not even slightly amused at where it is that they find themselves. -- But that's another session at the keyboard.

Today, I'm writing to announce that I have THE solution to the self-inflicted crisis our traditional media has landed itself in*.

Actually, I've had it since the autumn of 2001, but nobody implemented it then, when it might have prevented an awful lot of the mess our country is in, and its time quickly passed. Now, the herd is waking up, and once again we're at a point where just one major publisher with sufficient moxie (and resources) could start the ball rolling on a wonderful project the could contribute enormously to shortening and easing the pain of our nation's recovery.

Here's what I would have done in the fall of 2001 if I were Arthur Sulzberger, Jr: I would have ordered the creation of a new front-page feature in all the Times newspapers called "Reality Check." Then, I would have networked with all my buddies in the publishing business to participate in the project. I even would have syndicated the feature and offered it absolutely free to any publication that wanted to carry it.

The job of the newly-created Reality Editor would be to commission a major nationwide poll (weekly? bi-weekly?) on the most important recent news events, measuring how accurately the public perception of these events coincides with what actually happened. The results of this poll, along with clarifying links and resultant correspondence (accompanied by further clarifying links when necessary) would be published prominently daily until the next poll is conducted.

I can see something like this spreading to a point where it's carried in nearly every fairly responsible publication in the country.

I can see it sparking all sorts of discussion and perhaps opening some minds along the way.

My home in America is in a mid-sized university town -- home to the University of Illinois. The publisher of the local rag and I have difficulty agreeing on the day of the week, let alone anything political, but he is (as, I suspect, are the majority of his brethren) a man with a great love of the constitution, and I can see even the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette signing onto a project like this if it were done properly.

This is something that our traditional press ought to have been doing all along --who knows what it might have prevented?
How many Americans still believe that Sadam Husein had something to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?
How different might that number be if our traditional media had been doing their job from the get-go?

And, now, with the herd waking up, is a great time for something like Reality Check to really catch on. The right-wing noise machine is losing its effectiveness (as witness a good half the MM list being devoted to the comedians of the right), and a bold publisher (I recommend Time Magazine as a penance for their recent Joe Klein FISA fiasco.) could seize the opportunity and use a feature like this to keep the difference between the neocon spin machine and the real world fresh in its minds.

----------
*the increasingly large distance between reportage and what's actually happening in the real world, created by the tendency of the press to take and publish pronouncements from the current administration and their pals on the Right at face value.

It's Time For America To Rehabilitate the Term "Fascism"

2007-11-15T06:55:00.000-06:00

If the Bush administration should be credited with having perfectly succeeded in any way, it ought to be in having elevated the word "fascism" from the realms of hyperbole to the level of respectability in common usage.

In his farewell contribution to Salon, pundit Sidney Blumenthal offers a chilling statement of the enormity of just what exactly is at stake in the 2008 presidential election. You can read the entire article here*, and I recommend that you do. The following excerpts are from the section in which he describes the current Republican view of the presidency.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of his policies, [Bush] has startlingly succeeded in reshaping the executive into an unaccountable imperial presidency. And Bush's presidency is now accepted as the only acceptable version for major Republican candidates who aspire to succeed him. All of them have pledged to extend its arbitrary powers. Their embrace of the imperial presidency makes the 2008 election a turning point in constitutional government.
- - - - -
Two models of the presidency are at odds, one whose founding father was George Washington, the other whose founding father was Richard Nixon.
- - - - -
The imperial president must by definition be an infallible leader. Only he can determine what is a mistake because he is infallible. Stephen Bradbury, the acting director of OLC in the Justice Department who wrote secret memos justifying the torture policy in 2005, defined this Bush doctrine in congressional testimony in 2006: "The president is always right."
- - - - -
Every executive policy does not exist on its own merit but as part of an overarching plan to establish an executive who rules by fiat. Enforcing these policies is intended to break down resistance to aggrandizing unaccountable power for the presidency. Warrantless domestic surveillance is a case in point.
- - - - -
Torture is the linchpin of the new Republican argument on presidential power. Abuse of detainees is the metaphor for beguiling the public into supporting abuse of the presidency. The sadomasochistic ecstasy of torture and the thrill of vengeance are the ultimate appeal of the party of torture. . . . This novel form of government, never before installed in the U.S., despite precursors from Nixon's planned seizure of powers, is being cemented into place so that its penetrability and removal will become extraordinarily difficult. Those who undertake the task of rebuilding the structure will be vulnerable to harsh political attacks as unpatriotic and subversive.

There is a word for all this: Fascism. I kept waiting for it from Blumenthal, but alas . . . .

And that's the problem.

In America, there is an often unspoken taboo on its use, perhaps based on our belief that fascism is the antithesis of All Things American. In the history of the web, calling someone a fascist or accusing them of advocating fascism generally has meant the end of that thread of discussion -- it being clear that the discussion had degenerated into nothing more than hyperbolic name-calling.

I'm afraid that when many Americans think of fascism, they tend to think in terms only of actualized fascist states: Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, etc., not recognizing that fascism is first of all, a philosophy, from which a full blown fascist state will grow when a sufficient percentage of the populace become sufficiently scared.

The danger of allowing this taboo to prevail in the reality-based world of 2007-08 America is that it prevents Americans from discussing fascism when the real thing comes along. And it has come along. Just listen to the leading Republican candidates. They sound more like they're running for the post of Generalisimo of a fascist state than for President of the United States. Their presidential debates are reminiscent of the old Saturday Night Live skit "Quien es mas macho?" Unfortunately, in the real world, this kind of stuff is anything but funny.

Here in Europe, we use the word "fascism" freely . . . and - generally - responsibly and accurately. Fascism exists. Its practitioners and advocates are organized, use the term "fascist" shamelessly, and run candidates in local and national elections -- some of whom are actually elected.

My friends and neighbors here in Spain have clear memories of the Franco days, and any discussion with them of American politics today inevitably leads to frightening comparisons.

It's high time for Americans to start talking that way, too.

*Subscription or viewing of a brief commercial required

Home Again

2007-11-06T14:41:00.000-06:00

Well, here it is, Tuesday, and I have spent the last week getting ready to return home and then making the trip. I returned via Madrid for the first time since the Madrid airport was under construction and a nightmare to traverse. I am happy to report that the "new" Madrid airport may be the nicest and easiest airport in Europe.

My little dog is thrilled to see me. I brought him new toys from the United States, and he has already picked out his favorite and is carrying it around everywhere he goes. But it seems that the most important thing to him at the moment is that Daddy's Home!

And now, it's time to sleep. I'll be back in this space some more tomorrow, and will get going on the Serious Stuff as soon as my head catches up with my body.

Wednesday Notes

2007-11-01T01:27:00.000-05:00

I leave the U.S. for Spain on Monday, and I spent the day today running around town, taking care of odds and ends that need to be dealt with before I head for home. I don't expect to be writing much here before I go. I did have one brainstorm that I want to throw out for someone more enterprising than I.

I was driving along this afternoon, doing my errands, when I pulled up behind a car with a Giuliani '08 bumper sticker on its back window and it occurred to me that somebody needs to print up some stickers that say

I've learned absolutely nothing in the last 7 years.

for progressives to stick on any car with a Republican candidate's bumper sticker on it. I'll be the first to order a couple of dozen of them.

Studs Terkel on Amnesty for Telecoms

2007-10-29T21:32:00.000-05:00

If you have not had an opportunity to read this morning's New York Times op-ed by Chicago writer and oral historian Studs Terkel, you can find it here. Terkel is the ACLU of Illinois' lead plaintiff in the case against AT&T challenging telecom companies collaboration with the government in listening to telephone calls, reading emails and gathering customers personal records without a judicial order.

That case, along with numerous other similar cases from around the country, has been consolidated in federal court in San Francisco. Terkel's piece provides a terrific historical perspective for the current debate over legalizing massive data collection by the executive branch.

What We Call The News

2007-10-28T14:57:00.001-05:00

The folks over at JibJab have put together a nice commentary on the state of the media in America.

My thanks to Josh Rorhscheib for suggesting the link. Sorry I didn't make it out to DC this trip.

Quote of the Day

2007-10-28T13:04:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald has a wonderful response to Fred Hiatt's pathetic plea in today's Washington Post for amnesty for the telecoms who helped Bush break the law by warrentless tapping of the phones of American citizens. The last paragraph of his post sums it all up for me:

The real point, of course, is that corporations -- just as is true for ordinary citizens and small companies -- can dramatically reduce their chances of being subjected to long, protracted litigation by obeying the law. Hiatt's rationale -- it's so unfair to make these poor corporations endure the costs of litigation -- would "justify" granting general amnesty to corporations for all illegal behavior, i.e., it would eviscerate the rule of law. We want there to be a price to pay when private actors violate the law. But the "price" which AT&T, Verizon and others are paying from "litigation costs" is so miniscule that to cite it as a reason to give amnesty is either incredibly ignorant or purposefully dishonest.

The Mobilization That Wasn't

2007-10-27T16:43:00.000-05:00

I'm in the United States for six weeks, visiting friends and taking care of some business, and getting caught up on life in the US from right here on the ground. I'm near the end of week five at the moment, and I can tell you it's been an eye-opening experience. I'll share some of my observations in the next few days, but here's one thing for right now:

For those who don't believe that the mainstream media in America are culpable in Mr Bush's nasty little war, here's a message: Believe it!

If Americans were shown the same feed of CNN that we see in Europe (from Sky via Great Britain), things in this country would be a whole lot different today! And that's just CNN. If it were the BBC, we would be having a revolution. Speaking of which . . .

Did you know that there were demonstrations against the war on Iraq all over the United States today? You sure wouldn't if you depended on the news networks for information, although CNN did tell us (as late as 4 p.m. CDT) that United for Peace and Justice was organizing demonstrations for today. No coverage whatsoever of the tens and hundreds of thousands of Americans who were in the streets with chants and placards telling the current occupant and their congresscritters that they wanted the illegal occupation of Iraq to stop -- Now!

Incredible! But you're probably used to it.

Anyway, that was a digression from what I meant to write today. I mostly just wanted to say "hello" and welcome you to this blog. I've found a lot to be depressed about on this visit, but I've also seen a lot of things that make me think that things are looking up. I'll write more about both over the coming weeks. I return home to Spain on the 5th of November, and from there I'll continue to comment on events in America as seen from a distance.

Your comments or questions appreciated and welcome.