South City Mouth

A Parting Shot

2007-05-03T19:02:00.000-07:00

My work here is done.

That's what I've increasingly come to realize. After 107 posts of varying substance and quality, I think the time has come to put an end to this little endeavor. Mainly, I'm just too busy. On top of my regular teaching job, I'm taking six hours of graduate classes and keeping busy in my church. It doesn't look like my schedule is going to change soon, either.

Also, I've come to realize that lacking the time to write well-thought-out, well-researched, well-reasoned posts, I've increasingly resorted to hastily scrawled, sometimes-flimsy entries. At times recently, I think I've bordered on the shrill and strident, something I never intended. As angry as I am about the current state of affairs in America - and I'm pretty damned angry - I always hoped to present a more thoughtful approach. Pointed and blunt, yes. But never loud and obnoxious. The talk radio guys on the Right are so much better at loud and obnoxious that I could never even hope to compete.

Besides, I think I've said what I intended to say. I think you get the point. In case you didn't, let me pound it into you one more time, in a not-so-subtle fashion:

1) Conservatism has been a destructive force in America. Not completely without merit, the conservative movement is destroying (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not) any notion of the common good, fair play, justice and equity.
2) The champions of the conservative movement - the Limbaughs and Hannitys - have cheapened public discourse into an ugly, hateful quagmire of deceit and lies and riven a huge divide across America.
3) George W. Bush will quite possibly go down as the worst president in American history. He got us into this nasty, unwinnable war, and damaged our nation's global esteem. He zealously pursued tax cuts for the wealthiest while ignoring the rest of us. He took us in a matter of four years from a budget surplus to our largest defecit ever. He consistently turns a blind eye to the environment. Never before has a president so actively pursued such a malignant agenda to America. And he and his administration are a bunch of nasty, arrogant bullies, to boot.
4) The middle-class and poor are in big trouble. While the Dow reaches record highs, wages remain stagnant and such necessities as housing, college tuition and healthcare spiral into inaccessibility for so many. Meanwhile, income inequality widens to gaps not seen since the Hoover administration. Yet, the Republicans can only wax gleeful about the booming economy. And to what end? That maybe we middle-class folks won't get laid off this week?
5) Corporate America is out of control. No accountability. No responsibility. CEOs make eight figures while average workers are let go for earning too much money. Customers and consumers are often shortchanged and mistreated. Jobs are shipped overseas. Again, how does this benefit the vast majority of us?
6) The almighty dollar is turning our democracy into an oligarchy. Government increasingly exists only to serve the interest and whim of those with the big contribution checks.
7) The Christian church, the one organization that should give us hope above all others, has largely sold itself out as a cheap political movement. The teachings of Jesus Christ have been mowed down by the rhetoric of Jerry Falwell.
8) The average America is fat, lazy and stupid, uninformed, apathetic and interested in little beyond material goods and pleasure. There's virtually no empathy for others, too little concern over maturity and responsibility, too much focus on having fun and being cool.
9) We're destroying our planet, paving it over and heating it up. And as usual, it's all about making money and pursuing lifestyle.
10) We're engaged in the worst, most-unjust war in our nation's history. President Bush lied to get us into it, bungled it from the beginning and hasn't a clue how to get us out of it. Our nation's esteem has collapsed around the world and we're probably at even greater danger from terrorists.

Pretty dour, I admit. But I won't condescend to you with some crap about morning in America. No, I think we're in some pretty tough times. Our nation has been highjacked by ideological bullies who think the majority of us should bend to their will. And their will is pretty frightening.

But I do have hope. Last November's elections show us that the spell has been broken, that the conservative revolution is dead. To folks on the Right, time stood still in 1968, with Jane Fonda and hippies burning draft cards. The rest of us have moved on and wish to pursue something more constructive than the Nixonian wedge of us vs. them. Maybe, just maybe, Americans are ready to talk about real issues constructively, matters like healthcare and education. Finally there's a fair shot that we can repair this damage wrought over the past six years (and really the past 26 years) and move ahead to better times.

Adios, folks. It's been fun.

Fairness = Communism?

2007-04-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Let's return to my posting of March 29, "A Booming Economy for Some, Perhaps." Clearly, not everyone is outraged that Circuit City would lay off 8.5 percent of its workforce because it was earning too much money. In fact, a frequent reader of this blog called me a communist, employing a right-wing rhetorical tactic better suited for 1954 than for 2007, an ad-hominem desperate conservatives pull out when they can't think of anything more mature or constructive to say.

"Why don't you just pack your bags and move to a country where communism thrives?" the reader wrties.

Have you ever noticed that many right-wingers have taken it upon themselves to decide for the rest of us who is fit to live in America and who isn't? What gives them a unilateral right to decide who is a patriot and who is an America-hater? Have you ever heard a liberal demand of a conservative that he or she should leave the country? "If you right-wingers can't stand religious pluralism, then why don't you move to Iran?" "If you wingnuts are so scornful of economic justice, maybe you'd be happier in El Salvador!" We don't do that because we believe that everyone has the right to express his or her thoughts and dream his or her own vision for America. We might disagree, and we might not always be very polite about it, but never once have I heard a liberal proclaim "America: Love it or leave it."

Then I have to ask, what's so communist about demanding that average Americans who work hard and play by the rules be rewarded with a reasonable standard of living and a minimal safety net and hope for a brighter future? Is it communist to believe that corporations bear some responsibility beyond mere profit or stock price? Shouldn't companies pay employees a fair wage and benefits? Should regular folks not expect, barring hard times for the comany, continued employment and not to be thrown out into the street for making too much money while top execs feed at the hog trough? Are those really such radical demands? I'm sure J.P. Morgan or Jay Gould might have thought so, but what about the average American?

Our frequent reader, while applauding Circuit City for terminating rank-and-file employees because they earn too much, is quite adamant that CEO Phillip Schoonover earns every penny of his multimillion dollar salary (An admission: I inaccurately reported his compensation as $2.17 million. Actually, he earned $4.5 million in 2006). According to Frequent Reader, Schoonover deserves it as he allegedly must "work 80 hour weeks, take tremendous risk, and build businesses that employ other people, strengthen the economy, and pay almost all the taxes." Actually, Schoonover has only been with Circuit City since last June after hopping around from one company to another for several years. I frankly don't see how he's taking any risk, whatsoever, and if he's actually built a company from the ground up himself, I see no record of it. He could run Circuit City into the ground and walk away a millionaire, plus a cushy bonus, I'm sure.

Let's take a look at some more inspirational Horatio Alger types that Frequent Reader no doubt worships for their dedication and risk-taking and see how they did over a four-year period from 2001 to 2005 (Source: MSN.com):

-- Gary Smith. While at the helm at Ciena Corp., stocks lost 93 percent of their value. Smith's compensation: $41 million.

-- Jure Sola. His tenura at Samima-SCI was marked by shares falling 78 percent. Sola's compenstaion: $26.4 million.

-- Scott McNeely. Shareholders at Sun Microsystems lost 76 percent of their investment, but McNeely probably isn't feeling their pain. His compensation: $26 million.

-- Larry Johnston. He drove Albertson's into a shell of its of former self, but don't cry for him. Johnston's compensation: $76.2 million.

-- Peter Dolan. If you bought stocks in Bristol Myers Squibb, you're probably not happy that you lost 48 percent of your investment. But Dolan is pretty happy, I'm sure. His compensation: $41 million.

These certainly are not isolated instances. We recently saw executives at American Airlines celebrate its recent turnaround by awarding themselves $175 million in bonuses, while pilots, flight attendants and other average employees got nothing. The turnaround resulted largely from rank-and-file employees agreeing to pay cuts of 15 to 23 percent.

And I'm a communist for believing that something's wrong here?

Apparently, I'm not the only communist here. Warren Buffett, a notorious Bolshevik, and Standard and Poor, notorious for their desire to redistribute the wealth to the poor and people of color, believe that top execs should make no more than about 15 times the average employee's salary. That would put executive pay in the mid-to-high six figures, not eight or nine figures. We can look at companies where this is the rule, such as Whole Foods, where a salary cap was raised to 19 times the avearge salary. Current top salary is capped there at $608,000. CEO John Mackey, who actually did build up Whold Foods, recently accepted a slaary of one dollar plus benefits, saying he's made plenty of money over the years and he simply enjoys running the company.

Nobody said everybody in America should earn the exact same salary. Nobody said that corporations are obligated to maintain fat payrolls it cannot afford. Right-wingers who charge that people say such things merely want to dismiss us with a little juvenile name-calling into a ridiculous margin. I refuse to let them place me there, as convenient as it might be for them. Instead, I'll firmly speak loudly and demand that corporations pay employees fairly and provide them with standard benefits like affordable health care.

Is that really so communist? If so, then the free market is in big trouble.

Yes to gun rights. No to gun nuts.

2007-04-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

Thank God I live in St. Louis. We have the '06 World Series champions, Budweiser, a big arch, toasted ravioli, the nation's highest crime rate and Nelly.

Now our latest edition to this already distinguished list of honors is this year's NRA convention, taking place as I blog. For the past couple of weeks, I've been treated on the way into work with a billboard on I-44 touting the convetion and its "acres of guns." Imagine that. Acres of guns, no doubt transforming the America's Center downtown into a veritable shrine to the Second Amendment. With this armada of law-abiding patriots visiting the Gateway City, the criminals don't have a chance. I bet we'll only be the third or fourth most dangerous city in America next year.

Sarcasm aside, you may be surprised to know I'm really not a hardcore gun-control advocate, beyond reasonable checks on gun ownership. On some level I do believe America would be a far better place without all these guns. But in the end, I can't turn my back on the Constitution, which clearly states that you and I have the right to own a gun (I don't buy that gun control lobby rationalization of the first clause about militias negating gun rights). Beyond that, millions of Americans perhaps legitimately believe they need a gun to protect themselves. Personally, I feel secure without a gun, but who am I to say no one else have one? And without a doubt, the battle over guns is a done deal, and the gun rights advocates have come out on top. As a result, most Democrats have wisely chosen to walk away from this battle and move on to others they have a better chance of winning. In fact, many Democrats are actively courting the gun lobby, which I find a questionable endeavor.

So does that mean I salute the NRA as a noble and worthy defender of all that's right with America? No way. I have about as much love for the NRA as B from D has for the ACLU. Just because I support the right to own guns in no way equates with support for a bunch of extremist gun nuts. I'm sure there are some very nice people who belong to the NRA, who haven't really considered what their membership dues are supporting. We're talking about an organization who squarely defends every white supremecist redneck residing in a fortified compound and every inner-city gang-banger who believes in his right to spray his neighborhood with automatic gunfire.

The NRA has been a true foe of assault weapons bans. These folks think the Second Amendment allows anyone to own a rapid-fire, military-style assault weapon. I suppose next they'll push for the right to carry a rocket launcher. They resent that business owners have the right to ban guns from their private property (So much for a belief in property rights), and they hate that schools, hospitals and churches also routinely maintain themselves as gun-free zones. They also staunchly defend manufacturers of cheapo guns directly and intentionally marketed toward inner-city thugs. They can't stand the idea of background checks, that the public might benefit from gun dealers making sure they're not selling to felons. And they're lobbying hard to repeal the doctrine that one must attempt to withdraw first when under attack, that firing in self-defense is only to be used as a last resort.

In addition to these highly questionable positions, the NRA has been keeping an enemies list of groups who have dared speak out against their goals. They include such dangerous left-wing zealots as the United Methodist Church, YWCA, and American Medical Association, as well as the St. Louis Rams and Kansas City Royals.

How many average Americans, who otherwise believe that law-abiding citizens should own and carry guns if they choose, would really sign on to the NRA's extremist agenda? Most mature adults with a basic understanding of eighth-grade civics undertand that no right spelled out in the Constitution is absolute, that each comes with limits. Surely, you know that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not protected under the First Amendment. That eminent domain is an explicit exception to property rights. God knows that folks on the Right enthusiastically support limits on due process during this war on terrorism. Yet, there must be some magic to the Second Amendment, that makes it the single provision in the Bill of Rights lacking even the slightest check, or so the NRA thinks. Do you believe that? I don't believe most Americans do.

The NRA speaks
From the pro-gun control NRAleaders.com website

Ted Nugent
NRA board member and has-been rock star whose career peaked around 1978

"I'm a fun guy, not a sexist or a racist. I use the word nigger a lot because I hang around with a lot of niggers."
-Detroit Free Press Magazine

"Toxic c---. This bitch is nothing but a two-bit whore for Fidel Castro."
-speaking on Hillary Clinton. Westworld Newspaper

Kayne Robinson
NRA President

"If we win, we'll have a president where we work out of (his) office. "
- On prospects of George W. Bush winning presidency, closed meeting of NRA leaders, 2000

Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo.
NRA Board Member

"My sons are 25 and 30. They are blond-haired and blue-eyed. One amendment today said we could not sell guns to anybody under drug treatment. So, does that mean if you go into a black community, you cannot sell a gun to any black person, or does that mean because my..."
-Cubin's comments were interrupted at that point by Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) who demanded that her words be stricken from the record as inappropriate.

Jeff Cooper
NRA Board Member, Guns & Ammo Editor-at-Large and Columnist

"The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."
- Guns & Ammo

"Already a couple of the faithful have sent in checks for a foundation memorial to the innocents who perished at the hands of the ninja at Waco. ... I have been criticized by referring to our federal masked men as "ninja" … Let us reflect upon the fact that a man who covers his face shows reason to be ashamed of what he is doing. A man who takes it upon himself to shed blood while concealing his identity is a revolting perversion of the warrior ethic. It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view."
-Cooper's Commentaries (self-published newsletter)

"It is certainly difficult to render a calm and compassionate view of our current system of justice. After a legal friend of ours had his car trashed on the street, apparently just for kicks, he suggested that the proper solution to our inner city problem might be the mass drowning of street punks. Every month in a different big city we should sew up a thousand of them in a huge sack and dump it into the Mississippi. Such ideas may appear fanciful, but the decent people of this country are increasingly driven against the wall. ... While the federal ninja drive around in their black uniforms and face masks, we note that they never seem to bother the street gangs."
-Cooper's Commentaries

Paul Blackman
NRA Head Researcher

" In fact, studies of homicide victims -- especially the increasing number of younger ones -- suggest they are frequently criminals themselves and/or drug addicts or users. It is quite possible that their deaths, in terms of economic consequences to society, are net gains."
From "The Federal Factoid Factory on Firearms and Violence: A Review of CDC Research and Policies."

Leroy Pyle
Former NRA Board Member

"That ugly cackler. She pulls her husband around like a pulltoy on a string. My friends and I say that if that ever happened to one of us and our wife did that, somebody would slip into the house one night and slit her throat."
-On gun-control advocate Sarah Brady, husband of Reagan assassination attempt survivor James Brady. Quoted in "Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control"

John Lott
Pro-gun advocate and researcher

"Allowing teachers and other law-abiding adults to carry concealed handguns in schools would not only make it easier to stop shootings in progress, it could also help deter shootings from ever occurring."
- The Wall Street Journal

Charlton Heston
Former NRA President

"Mainstream America is counting on you to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time and resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it is a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other... I find my blood pressure rising when Clinton's cultural shock troops participate in gay-rights fundraisers but boycott gun-rights fundraisers and then claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved."
-Speech to Free Congress Foundation

David Duke
Avowed White Supremicist and 1992 Republican Presidential Candidate

"I was astounded to read these courageous remarks by Charlton Heston. I am thankful to hear a man with such high esteem say essentially the same things for which I have been reviled by the liberal media. His words should be reproduced and put into the hands of every American."
-Responding to Heston's speech

The Resurrection of Newt

2007-03-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

He's not even announced he'll run yet. Just the same, folks on the Right are practically tripping and falling over each other to see who'll be the first to cast a presidential ballot for Newt Gingrich.

It's amazing to me that Gingrich, who left office under a cloud of shame in 1998, presumably never to be heard from again, has been resurrected as the next great hope to revitalize a moribund Reagan Revolution. I've watched this coming slowly, year by year. It started sometime around 2000 when he began cautiously rearing his head on the Sunday morning talk circuit. Apparently he was feeling his oats enough by Sept. 12, 2001, to boldly ascribe blame for the previous days' events on President Clinton, who had already been out of office nine months. Since then, he's become a fixture on the punditry circuit. His reinvention has been complete, it appears, as he poses as some sort of wise elder statesman, not the repugnant and foul ideologue who as speaker of the House ruled our nation as a twisted prime minister.

Since the Right, ever a crew of revisionists, seems to once again be reinventing history to suit its political agenda and get its man into the White House, let's revisit Newt's salad days, circa 1992-1998, and recall what sort of man he was in his prime and what we could expect from him as president.

* By his own admission, Newt is an adulterer and an incredibly hypocritical one at that. At the very same time he was leading impeachment proceedings agains President Clinton for lying about Monica Lewinsky, Newt was having an affair with his very own bimbo. That's old news from a few weeks ago. But it turns out that Newt is a serial adulterer not much different from Clinton. You can read all the salacious details here and here.

* We've heard the one about Newt presenting his first wife, Jackie, while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery. The spinmeisters on the Right have insisted with great desperation that this never happened, but I'll just quote Jackie herself: "He walked out in the spring of 1980.... By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said, 'Daddy is downstairs. Could he come up?' When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from my surgery." Gingrich doesn't exactly deny, he just says he doesn't remember that. Not only that, but Jackie had to take Newt to court to get him to pay his fair share of household bills. These days Newt is on wife No. 3, a former Congressional aide, 20 years his junior, with whom he was having an affair during his marriage to wife No. 2.

* Newt, who led the charge against Democratic sleaze in 1994, spoke piously while mired in his own ick. Have we forgotten Newt's $4.5 million book deal with Harper Collins? The book publisher in question, which paid him the exhorbitant amount in 1994, was owned by Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing owner of the right-wing Fox and FoxNews channels. As coincidence has it, Murdoch also was facing some licensing issues at the time and was needing a little help from his friends in Congress.

* Then there was the GOPAC scandal. GOPAC was a political action committee that worked behind the scenes in a complex organization that Tom Delay would no doubt envy, designed to funnel taxpayers money into political organizations. For example, there was his charitable group designed to pay ghetto kids to read books, which actually was used to funnel contributions to his operatives. This was the last straw in a series of ethical breaches for which Newt was forced to resign from his speakership in 1998. How soon we forget all this.

* You remember the House banking scandal, don't you? Blame for that largely fell on Democrats (with a lot of justification), leading to their 1994 demise. What you may have forgotten or not even have known in the first place is that Newt bounced 22 checks himself.

Let's put aside this illusion once and for all that ideologues on the Right really care much about ethics and morality. This is all about power and an agenda in which questionable ends justify rotten means, and Newt Gingrich is just the latest example.

A booming economy for some, perhaps

2007-03-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

We read in this morning's New York Times that the income gap become rich and poor continues to widen exponentially. Collectively, the top 300,000 income earners in our country earned as much in 2005 as those residing in the bottom 150 million. The analysis concludes that on average, the top group earned 440 times as much as the bottom group. Also those top earners' incomes rose about 9 percent, on average, or an increase of $139,000. Meanwhile, those at the "bottom," which includes much of the middle class, saw their incomes drop an average .6 percent or $172.

Meanwhile, we hear that Circuit City will lay off 3,400 workers, about 8.5 percent of its workforce, and replace them immediately with lower paid serfs. Those same laid-off workers are invited, however, to apply for these new lower-paid positions. These workers' were earning "well above the market-based salary range for their role," a company official said. Apparently, the $2,17 million in compensation that Circuit City CEO Philip J. Schoonover earns, according to Forbes.com, is just and fair.

To steal from Bob Dole, "Where's the outrage?"

The moral facade further crumbles

2007-03-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

A big thanks goes out to Newt Gingrich and James Dobson, who further reminded us this week that the Right is concerned about family values and Christian uprightness only when such highminded standards are applied to the likes of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Applied to their only favorite sons, conservatives are surprisingly flexible and situational in their sense of morality and ethics.

Exhibit A is Newt Gingrich's admission this week that he was cheating on his wife, even while leading the charge to prosecute President Clinton for lying about his own marital infidelity. But of course, it's not hypocrisy, Newt insists. This time it's different. "The President of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting judge," Gingrich said, showing a lack of any remorse or self-awareness.

Indeed, Gingrich's interview with James Dobson on the evangelist/psychologist's "Focus on the Family" radio show apparently was a celebration of the swell guy that is Newt Gingrich. The website of Focus on the Family, which ironically champions healthy families and marriages, seemed to have no problem with Gingrich's infidelity. Oh sure, Dobson disapproves of such carrying on, but as I looked at the site's home page crowing about this interview, it was clear that Dobson and his group were quite forgiving and saw Gingrich as sufficiently repentant of his sins and still worthy of a run for the White House. In fact, the broadcast in which Gingrich admits to cheating on his wife is titled "Rediscovering Our Nation's Spiritual Heritage." Apparently, a philanderer like Gingrich is fit to lead us to such rediscovery. It all seemed more as a calculated effort to unload some baggage in a manner timely and expedient for a presidential run than it did an honest moment of self-reflection and remorse.

We won't even talk about Gingrich's two divorces and the shady book deal that led to his 1998 resignation in disgrace from his Speaker's chair. The Right is outraged about shady book deals only when it's Jim Wright's shady book deal in question. As for divorce, take a look at Sean Hannity, who was confronted yesterday by a caller who pointed out that this year's Republican candidates together have more divorces under their belts than those godless Democrats. "I guess I have more compassion than you," Hannity said to the caller, in a rare display of understanding and sympathy toward others. You see, divorce is a pardonable sin to conservatives, partly because so many of their candidates' marriages have failed, even multiple times in the cases of Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Also, research has shown us that evangelical Christians are more likely to divorce than followers of any other religious tradition, even atheists. So of course, the Christian Right has oddly flexible views on the sanctity of marriage, but only so long as it's their own marriages that are failing, not the marriages of liberals.

Let's now turn to right-wing hypocrisy Exhibit B, Scooter Libby. Gingrich, who this week restated his outrage over President Clinton's lies, is oddly silent over Libby's conviction for lying in the investigation over the Valerie Plame leaks. The conservative punditocracy was anything but silent, however, this week, engaging in nothing but excuse-making. Local wannabe cool guys Jamie Allman and Smash (You know you're trying too hard when you call yourself Smash) went into a long diatribe about Libby's conviction on their morning show on wingnut fave 97.1 Talk.

Allman, former TV weasle and St. Louis Archdiocese PR hack who turned out to be a bigger horse's ass than Archbishop Burke (who'd a-thought that possible?), quoted heavily from the repugnant Anne Coulter in one of her rants, in essence whining, You think Libby was bad, well what about these liberals? Folks, I teach fifth-graders, and they're famous for deflection, finger-pointing and excuse -making. With a 10-year-old, anything goes to take the focus off of Little Johnnie's bad behavior and put it anywhere else so Little Johnnie doesn't have to consider that he might really be a turd. I expect it from 10-year-olds, but to hear it from adults... Well, I stand corrected. Coulter is anything but adult.

Allman, quoting from Coulter, went at length about how we liberals were picking on OxyContin abuser and prescription shopper Rush Limbaugh, how that mean ol' Democrat prosecutor in Texas was persecuting Tom Delay, the accused money launderer, political boss and friend of Jack Abramoff (Oh wait, I forgot, Delay is truly a fine Christian because his heart bleeds for Terri Schiavo). Allman even wanted to know why Ted Kennedy got a pass for Chappaquiddick. He must really have had to stretch if he's looking back to 1969 for ammo.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong. I'm sure liberals themselves have been plenty hypocritical. I've tried to avoid that here. I've declared my distaste for Clinton's poor morality on this blog many times. Back in 1994, I found myself eating plenty of crow and admitting that the Democrats deserved their terrible defeat for its years of corruption and power-mongering If I make an excuse for a liberal, I'll make sure it's a valid one, not just a gratuitous deflection because I'm not man enough to admit that my side is wrong.

And many conservatives are quick to show the same forthrightness and honesty - just not their leadership, which faces sad times. All their high-minded rhetoric has crumbled, a badly built facade turning to dust. In the end, many of these politicians and pundits show themselves as transparent and hollow. Ralph Reed was a greedy power-broker intent on defrauding Indian tribes. Ted Haggard was a meth-head with a taste for male prostitutes. I could go on. I'm truly sorry for the millions of sincere Christians taken in by these hucksters. It all sounded so good. The church was coming take over Washington. But in end, Washington took over the church, and we have nothing left but excuses. And boy, do we keep hearing excuses.

The yahoos and rednecks win yet again

2007-03-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

Give us your poor
Your tired
Your huddled masses
We'll piss on 'em
That's what your statue of bigotry says
- Lou Reed

I just finished reading an interview in the Riverfront Times, St. Louis' uneven attempt at alternative journalism, with Valley Park Mayor Jeffrey Whitteaker, who defends - hell, revels - in his hardline stance against illegal immigrants in his community. Whitteaker, who came out of nowhere last summer to champion a city ordinance to run out all the Mexicans, makes no bones about his feelings regarding the Great American Melting Pot:

"You got one guy and his wife that settle down here, have a couple kids, and before long you have Cousin Puerto Rico and Taco Whoever moving in," Whitteaker says in his profanity-laced interview. "They say it's their cousins, but I don't really think they're all related. You see fifteen cars in front of one house — that's pretty suspicious."

Some will say Whitteaker shows the guts to say what everyone else is thinking. He's certainly in good company these days. Michael Savage, railing on the subject last week on his show, blamed America's problems on the "Turd World," declaring, that these people are taking America "from the Metlting Pot to the Chamber Pot." Neal Bortz, neglecting to cite the slightest attribution, said that illegal immigrants murdered more Americans last year than the total number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks.

OK, then, let's talk immigration.

First of all, here's how I feel about the matter. Illegal immigration is a danger to our national security and places a strain on social services. Our federal government's refusal to do much about it for the past 30 years serves as the ultimate deriliction of our government's most basic responsibility. Nobody should cross our borders and live illegally in our country, and I'm all in favor of stopping people from doing just that. We certainly have the right to decide who comes and goes from this country, and I don't care what the politicians in Mexico say. Build the biggest damn wall from Brownsville to San Diego, and that will be just fine with me. Find and deport those living here illegally, and then once we've decided who does get to live here legally, let them know they should learn to speak English and integrate into our community.

So there. I share the same feelings as much of the rest of America. But I was hoping this would be a constructive national discussion filled with thoughtful conversation on how to balance the protection of the integrity of our borders with consideration for our nation's economic needs and a compassion for those from other places who simply wish a better life for their families.

But as usual, no such luck. The Jeffrey Whitteakers of America have once again won the day, drowning out any reasonable conversation with openly racist and xenophobic invective. We all know that such tendencies are sadly a natural part of the human psyche, and our society has worked hard to repress such speech. But increasingly it's OK once again to hate foreigners and immigrants, and I wonder how long it will be before this mutates into a hatred of anyone with brown skin, regardless of immigration status.

You see, a discerning, rational person is able to comprehend the dangers of unchecked immigration and wish to do something very real about those dangers without signing off on a campaign of hatred and suspicion of people who look, act and talk differently from those of us in the majority. But not many among us wish to be discerning or rational. That's for wimps in an age of hardline, draconian, black-and-white get-toughness. Most folks would rather not consider that most people who illegally enter our countries are otherwise honest, law-abiding folks who weren't as lucky as we are to have been born here and who simply wish to live better lives.

Instead, the Whitteakers in our midst wish to lump these foreigners in with the small percentage of illegal immigrants involved in criminal activities. Law-breakers! the get-tough types proclaim, in an attempt to equate swimming across the Rio Grande with murder or robbery or any number of truly serious crimes. Such distinctions are unimportant to xenophobes as they provide the rationalization they need to strip immigrants of their humanity and any sense of empathy the rest of us might feel for them. Just like rational discourse, empathy is for wimps and liberal marshmallows. Real men hate their neighbor.

So congratulations to Jeffrey Whitteaker and his talk-radio buddies. Once again, a tremendous opportunity for substantive, positive change in our country has been squandered. Instead, facing the prospect of such hardline madness demanded by an increasingly vocal group of haters, Congress will back down on the issue and illegal immigration, a very real problem in our country, will again go unsolved.

It appears that the yahoos and rednecks have won yet again.

Outrage!

2007-02-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

Sean Hannity is outraged! Outraged, I tell you!

Today is a very dark day in America, and hundreds of thousands will die if Nancy Pelosi gets her way. She and Harry Reid, the entire Democratic party and 20 or so Republicans are out to "stab our troops in the back." These Democrats are all about politics, and they don't care about our troops. Nor do they care that our shores will be overrun with swarthy men with funny accents and all manner of doomsday devices strapped on their backs. So goes another day in Foxland.

Mark Levin, a more recent arrival on the right-wing talk circuit, the kind of guy who employs affected machismo, name-calling and outright yelling in lieu of eloquence, is even more outraged than Hannity. You want a performance, Levin will give you the most frantically strident show you ever heard on the airwaves. Nikita Khrushchev and his shoe have nothing on this guy. Nancy Pelosi is a left-wing extremist, Levin will have you know, and not only that, but she's from San Francisco.

Enough already. These talk radio demagogues can't stand that Americans have lost all confidence in President Bush and this ridiculous war that has only diverted from the true mission of fighting terrorism and so much worse. These talking head ideologues can't stand that they've lost America and that more and more people see folks like Hannity and Levin as the true extremists. These two and their ilk wish to paint the Democrats as radicals but don't want us to know that most Americans agree that the war was a mistake and the idea of sending in even more troops seems like even greater insanity.

Now let's forget about the talk radio buffoons and talk about how Americans apparently really feel. It's not at all what the war supporters would like, nor is it really what the antiwar people are getting at, either. According to AP-Ipsos survey results released today, 56 percent of Americans find the war to be a "hopeless cause," while 39 percent agree that it's a "worthy cause." Sixty-three percent oppose sending more troops, as opposed to the 35 percent (an admittedly growing figure) who favor it. But paradoxically, 68 percent of Americans do not want to pull out of Iraq. Only 29 percent do.

That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? To believe the polls, the average American sees the war in Iraq as a lost cause but opposes a pullout. And I understand this reasoning. It's hard to pull out. Even though I essentially support doing just that, it's not easy to say that, and part of me wants to keep trying. Hell, part of me even wants to grant President Bush's wish for 20,000 more troops. Give the guy what he needs to have one last shot at winning, just so we can say we exhausted all possibilities.

But in the end, I believe it's time to pull out and go home, and I wish the Democrats would have the guts to stand up and say that, and not go with this chickenshit halfway stuff they seem to be advocating for now. I honestly don't think that these extra troops will do anything but prolong this four-year debacle and result in even more dead American troops. Since I oppose an escalation, and keeping them there without the extra support seems crazy, I don't see any choice but to accept defeat and go home. And that outrages some people.

I guess I can't make everyone happy, so here are some points I've made before that I'll make again:
1) The terrorists were not in Iraq to begin with. Saddam Hussein was not alligned with the terrorists. Therefore, I ask, how does starting a war with Iraq make us safer from terrorists?
2) While we were busy deposing Saddam, the terrorists regrouped and brought their jihad to us in Iraq. So now we really are fighting terrorists in Iraq, but it seems more like a self-fulfilling prophecy than any smart strategy on our part.
3) We were told this war was to be fought over weapons of mass destruction. Bush built this argument using a web of deceitful misinformation, so we shouldn't be surprised that we never found the WMD. I'm told that Bush had good intentions, nonetheless, so I guess that makes everything OK.
4) This war has been nothing but a mismanaged mess from the second Colin Powell opened his mouth about fictional yellowcake from Niger to Ken Adelman's "cakewalk" predictions to the burning and pillaging of Baghdad to the nonexistent body armor to KBR's $300 cases of Coca-Cola. After all this, why should I have the slightest confidence in our president that he'll lead us to victory in Iraq?
5) Frankly, this new "plan" looks like nothing more than staying the course, just in a bigger way. Bush still doesn't seem to have any new ideas about how to change things, and staying on a course that has met with nothing but failure will do nothing but lead us to more failure. It's almost guaranteed.
6) Sean Hannity is right. If we pull out, the terrorists will not go away. But guess what, even if we somehow won, they still wouldn't go away. Furthermore this notion that we actually have a choice of either fighting them over there or here at home is just plain foolishness. The terrorists will be a threat either way.
7) Why would we fight a conventional war against terrorism, anyway? We're fighting a war against a concept, not a real army. Our enemy is made of small, loosely affiliated, always dynamic bands of individuals. How can we fight a conventional war against such an enemy? Shouldn't this be a law enforcement and intelligence issue, with the military used in a limited, more precise way?
8) The rest of the world hates us these days. Anti-Americanism is at an all-time high, even among countries that we often consider our closest friends. Is this anti-Americanism sometimes over the top and unfair? Of course. Do these people also have a few valid points? Absolutely, and I'd say more than a few. Are we really right, and the rest of the world wrong?
9) I suspect quite the opposite would happen from Hannity's dire predictions. If we pulled out, I really do believe that tensions in that part of the world would de-escalate, at least a little. Maybe that's naive, but I do know that our presence over there is doing no good and lots of harm.
10) The Right can talk tough all they want. For some, it comes off like a therapeutic compensation for a self-perceived deficit somewhere. But as manly and tough as it makes them feel, no amount of tough talk can cover-up what most Americans see.

So there, that's what I think of our war in Iraq. And if Sean Hannity wishes to equate that with stabbing troops in the back, well, I suppose that's just one more lie about Iraq that the Right wishes to perpetuates.

OK, so now can we agree on global warming?

2007-02-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

So let's see where things stand on the global warming "debate."

We learn this week that the most comprehensive report on the matter minces the fewest words yet. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expresses 90 percent certainty that the planet is warming before our eyes and that we are to blame for it. Global temperatures are expected to rise 3 to 11 degrees by 2100 with ocean levels rising as much as 23 feet. Those dire chicken little predictions of the past 20 years have turned out to be undestatements. It's too late to stop this climatological freight train, but perhaps we can mitigate it significantly if we act now. At least that's what this report, which relied on scientists from over 2,000 scientists from 113 countries, contends. I'm not a scientist, and so I won't pretend to speak authoritatively on the science of global warming and climate change. Instead, I'll cast my lot with what most scientists believe, and at this point, it's clear that the vast majority of scientists believe that human activity is warming the planet.

Can we now declare this debate over, once and for all? Apparently not, as some conservatives (I say "some" because I believe most conservatives also believe the consensus of the scientific community) insist on denying. Sean Hannity said on Thursday that these scientists sound like a bunch of hysterical children, and he managed to dig up some guy from MIT to concur. We know there are some like Hannity, who still want to pretend there's a debate on this issue, that a handful of global warming naysayers is sufficient to negate what most of us would agree is consensus. There remain many who insist the Holocaust is a myth, that the Earth is flat, and the Moon-landing was a hoax. Yet, most of us consider these matters to be completely settled. So why do we insist on pandering to those who so badly wish to believe that a few fringe elements constitute credible debate?

We've seen the 1998 memo dredged up from Exxon-Mobil officials urging that money be spent to fund global warming deniers to propogate this illusion of debate, which in turn allow President Bush to say that these questions are unsettled. We learned this week that the American Enterprise Institute, funded by Exxon-Mobil and closely tied to the Bush White House, was peddling an offer of $10,000 to any scientist to publicly poke holes in the IPCC report. We know of the many government climate scientists who quit because of heavy-handed editing of their work to play down any mention of the possibility that we're making our planet warmer.How many times have we heard U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., call global warming "a hoax?" And don't forget science fiction writer Michael Crichton, whose book "State of Fear" describes those who warn of global warming as part of a sinister conspiracy and web of deceit, a portrayal that earned Crichton an invitation to the White House to advise President Bush on climate issues. I find it laughable that Crichton, whose books warn that nanoparticles will turn the planet into a mass of gray goo and that prehistoric creatures will eat us if we keep messing with DNA, now implores us to be reasonable.

Then there are the average rank-and-file Joes who buy into all this denial and sophistry.
"A new, IPCC report, is nothing more than guesses and theories," writes the blogmeister at NewsByUs (get the right-wing pun?) "However, it was written by people with the same misguided mind set as Al Gore." From what I can tell, Mr. NewsByUs is a Christian conservative. I presume he's part of the religious right establishment that has sold itself out to satisfy the interests of corporate America, or perhaps he's one of those who believes that Jesus will return in the next few weeks, so who cares if the Earth gets warmer? Or judging by his blog, his hatred for liberals is so knee-jerk that anything Al Gore says automatically demonstrates a left-wing conspiracy. Come on, even Pat Robertson now says, "I'm a convert." Speaking last summer on "The 700 Club," he said, “It is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to do something on fossil fuels.”

Yet disbelief persists from those insisting on an impossible threshhold of truth. In other words, they don't wish to believe, therefore they refuse to. It's an inconvenient truth, to be sure. The deniers employ the powers of dubious observation (If the Earth is warming, then why was it so cold this morning?); folksy homespun wisdom (Now, come on folks, my granddad said it was plenty hot when he was bent over with his cotton sack, so let's not lose our heads here); re-interpretation of what the science actually reports (I don't care if the IPCC Third Assessment explicitly states that we're making our planet warmer, if you actually read the report, it says otherwise); anti-media obfuscation (Of course the media reported that the IPCC said we're causing global warming. They're a bunch of liberals. What do you expect?); and isolated, localized facts with no context ("Britain is one degree Celsius cooler now than it was at the time of the Domesday book," states one denial website).

So, since I hold with the four-out-of-five scientists doctrine, let's see what the scientific community says. Four IPCC assessments have now been issued since the panel was commissioned in 1988. Each one has turned up the volume to state with greater and greater certainty that human activity is causing global climate change. The National Academy of Sciences this past summer, in a report commissioned by Congress, stated, "The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions." A group of several large American corporations, including Alcoa, Duke Energy, Caterpillar, DuPont, BP and General Electric sided last month with environmentalists on the global warming debate, calling on the U.S. government to take action now to curb greenhouse emissions.

So, now that we've spent the past 20 years studying the matter, can we move on now and do something to save our planet? Apparently not, because the granddaddy of all global warming deniers resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and I don't expect him to budge anytime soon.

The Cheap Rhetoric of Culture War

2007-01-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

You may or may not recall Jerry Falwell's remarks on Sept. 13, 2001 blaming liberals for the attacks two days earlier.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen,'" Falwell said to Pat Robertson in a guest appearance on Robertson's "700 Club."

Most of us not on the Right quickly wrote off these comments as the rantings of the goofball that we Falwell to be. But the Right persists with this notion that the alleged "anything goes" spirit of the Left is to blame for the attacks of 9/11. Dinesh D'Souza now makes the same assertion, albeit lacquered over with a pseudo-scholarly veneer, in his new book, "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11." The book is apparently so bad that Amazon.com customers give it an average review of 2 1/2 stars (I'm sure right-wingers will now claim that Amazon has a liberal bias). Have you ever heard of a customer review so poor on Amazon?

D'Souza writes: "I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world."

It brings to mind "Culture Warrior," Bill O'Reilly's recent literary effort at spewing self-righteousness and whipping up his wingnut base into a frenzy. I'm sure you've heard about his new lexicon he's imposed on us concerning "traditionalists" (people who love America and God, drive pickups and listen to country music) and "secular progressives" (francophile atheists who drive Volvos and enjoy hot beverages from Starbuck's).

Which brings me to my belated point: Aren't you sick of hearing about the culture war? Do you really believe these guys' sincerity or do you think they're filled with self-serving, sanctimonious crap.

Don't get me wrong, as a teacher, I hate that our kids are exposed to movies, television and music are filled with violence and all manner of anti-social, indecent content. I hate that our dumbed-down overstimulated youth culture celebrates so much of what is bad in this world. I can't stand that kids waste so much of their youth playing video games and refuse to pick up books or newspapers. But frankly, I'm also sick of all the contrived, calculated, totally empty culture war rhetoric from conservatives. After 30 years, what has the reletntless, aggrieved outrage of the Falwells, Robertsons, Dobsons and O'Reillys gotten us? Absolutely nothing. Our society is worse off than when these guys first started moaning and complaining in the 1970s. In fact, they've only contibuted to this morass by striving diligently to lower the standards of public discourse and statesmanship.

Hollywood and Madison Avenue won't change. It's a battle we lost a long time ago through the Left's insistence 40 years ago on social de-evolution and the Right's ongoing worship of corporate America and its insistence that anything is permissable in the pursuit of a dollar.

But if you want to know who's really to blame, look in the mirror. In America, the public wants what the public gets. All this garbage that we pretend outrages us we really eat up with a voracious collective appetite. My outrage with Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton is spent, knowing full well that they and their friends won't change. My true outrage is with a lot of the parenting I see these days. Here's what really outrages me:

1. Parents who take their children into R-rated movies.
2. Parents who don't monitor what their children watch on TV.
3. Parents who allow their children unrestricted Internet usage.
4. Parents who turn their children's bedrooms into self-contained entertainment centers.
5. Parents who allow video games to take over their house.
6. Parents who let their children stay up until all hours, who think nothing of pulling their kids out of school for a whole week because the lines are shorter at Disney World in January.

If you want to fight a culture war - and sadly, I don't think very many Americans really want to - let's start fighting it at home. Let's start acting like grownups. Don't restrict TV and video games. Throw the damn things out and start really interacting as a family. I hear so many parents talk about how hard it is to raise kids in todays environment, and I realize that many parents are heroically and truly acting as adults and building character and values into their children. Sadly, I'm also convinced that most parents either aren't trying hard at all or harbor good intentions and show poor follow-through. Perhaps this is all cheap talk from one who has chosen, at least for now, to be childless. But then again, parenthood is a conscious choice, and with that choice comes a deep responsibility to step up and be adult.

But let's face it, most Americans won't have any of that, because such radical steps require sacrifice and character, and that's no fun. Falwell and O'Reilly know this damn well, and that's why they never point fingers at the average American, but merely at faceless entities like Hollywood. Let Brittany Spears get some character, but don't ask us to give up our Xboxes.

The silence is broken

2007-01-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

OK, so I've been reeeeaaaalllly bad about keeping up this blog. I guess after Nov. 8's excitement died down, I chose to be quiet for a while. Now let's talk about this and that.

First Hundred Hours
The first 100 hours of Democrats' reign in Congress have passed with little fanfare. I've heard little analysis or even basic reporting of what actually was accomplished during this time. I'll look into that. If nothing else, I'm sure it was far more successful than the first hundred hours of the Republicans' Contract with America, which fizzled into a lot of ideological hot air and almost nothing of substance. Stay tuned...

Have you noticed the virtually complete lack of letters on newspaper opinion pages since November by Democrats telling Republicans to quit whining and get over it? Such discourse has often been the afteraffect of Republican victories, but has been noticeably absent now that the shoe is on the other foot. It's one thing to be pleased with one's own victory. Gloating and poor sportsmanship, however, are something completely different.

The NPR Alternative
This morning I tuned into KWMU, our local NPR station, to find it drowned out on our radio by KSIV, a local purveyor of right-wing "Christian" talk. I left it on, hoping to learn more about how to live a Christian life.

First I heard St. Louis' own Phyllis Schlafly rail against the dangers of bilingual education, using it as a springboard to attack the National Education Association and its alleged promotion of secular humanism, explict sex ed. and even support of the Equal Rights Amendment, something I thought had been been a dead issue since 1982. For the record, I'm an NEA member, as they provide me with legal representation, representation before an educational establishment often indifferent to the concerns of rank-and-fil teachers, and representation before our own local school administration. I believe that if I were to face unfair criminal charges or lawsuits or an unjust termination, NEA would have my back. Last time I checked, Schlafly's Eagle Forum, based just across the river in Alton, Ill., was not providing these services or any support to embattled teachers, nor was any other conservative organization. So given a choice, I'll cast my lot with NEA.

Schlafly was followed by Tony Perkins, founder of the Family Research Council, one of those organizations that sound good in theory until they open their mouths and speak. Perkins today interviewed Oliver North on his recent vist to Iraq (North says we should stay the course. Shocking, I know). What this had to do with family values, I don't know. What I especially don't understand is the Right's unwavering support and canonization of someone who sold weapons to Iran, probably the most dangerous nation on Earth, then funneled the funds to a band of terrorists in Central America. Not only that, but here's a guy who lied to Congress and whose conviction for doing so was thrown out only by a technicality. What Oliver North has to say about anything means nothing to me.

Finally, before turning off the radio and praying for a some wind or weather pattern that would send KWMU back our way, some guy whose name I didn't bother to catch went on a discourse on the dangers of abortion. To believe this guy who painted a picture from The Jungle, abortionists are butchers who work in unsanitary holes. Come on. I'm sure abortions are by and large safe (for the mothers that is), and universally performed in clean, modern facilities. However you feel about abortion - and it is morally wrong - spreading transparently misleading propaganda and disinformation serves no one's cause. This kind of garbage is exactly why an entire generation of druge users 30 years ago found it so easy to disregard the alarmist and flatly untrue information distributed about drug use. Believe what you want, but at least be honest and truthful.

KSIV is owned by the Bott Radio Network, an Overland Park, Kan.-based chain of Christian radio stations, mostly located in the Midwest. Their website proclaims, "Strengthening your family with God's word - all day, everyday." Oddly absent was God's word anywhere throughout this. Rather than enlightening Christians on how to be better Christians, I heard nothing but partisan political discourse, mainly preaching to the choir about how everyone else in America is the problem, but of course not the listener to these shows. Being a Christian is easy when you're told that everyone else is the problem. Focusing inward, however, is a real and not always pleasant challenge, and one that's strangely absent from broadcasters like KSIV.

The War Chronicles
It's been a bad week for President Bush. Once again, as he's done several times throughout this war in Iraq, he has sought to speak directly to Americans about why this war is important. He did so during the summer of 2005 with a series of speeches. He did so again last year. This time, he says, not only should we continue to follow through on this huge mistake, but now we should escalate with 20,000 more troops. The polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans see this immodest proposal as "been there, done that." Most of us believe that things aren't working out in Iraq. When one begins wondering if maybe Iraq really was better off under Saddam, you something is very wrong. As a group, however, we're not sure about the alternative. I know I'm still not sure, although I lean toward a pullout.

Yet, the dire predictions rage if we do so. We will set the stage for World War III, as Neville Chamberlain did for World War II. Americans will never be safe at home again. Nobody believes that a pullout will lead a breakout of peace in the Middle East. In fact, probably whatever happens will be really ugly and bad, thanks largely to the further destabilizing effects this war has had on this region. I say "further" because the Middle East has been a mess for at least 40 years; it certainly was long before Sept. 11. It will continue to be a mess regardless of what America does. Terrorism of course will continue to be a threat, but maybe we'll learn to start treating terrorism as a law enforcement and intelligence issue with more precise and limited military involvement - not as something we can "fix" through a conventional war with an unseen and frankly unknown enemy.

I have to seriously question whether a pullout truly will heighten the endanger that we inarguably face. Instead, is it quite possible that our leaving Iraq will result in some de-escalation of tensions in the Middle East? Our presence there is such an incredibly incendiary flashpoint, I can't help but believe that a pullout will cool down the passions of billions of people who will probably still hate us but will be less inclined to actually cross over to the dark side of terrorism. Many of the insurgents and terrorists see themselves as fighting for their homeland against what they believe to be an occupying force of anti-Islamic infidels. When that kind of urgency is removed, people's passions tend to cool.

Nobody is denying that the terrorists are bad people and that the threat against our nation is extreme, although many war supporters would like to use such a characterization against people like me. But is our country any safer by insistently continuing on the same course we've repeatedly learned doesn't work?

Random thoughts

2006-11-10T18:08:00.000-08:00

Three days out from VA-Day (Victory in America), here's a grab bag of random thoughts:

With Missouri's minimum wage raise amendment passing by a 79-to-21-percent margin, it's clear that Americans have their minds on social justice. No longer are people willing to wait around as we have for 25 years, hoping that voodoo economics might finally trickle down to the rest of us. Not only that, but clearly it's OK these days to show concern for the poor. I remember a time not so long ago that most Americans thought of the poor as a bunch of lazy freeloaders, not worthy of a moment's concern. Now, most Americans seem to agree that something's very wrong when a quarter of all children in the world's richest nation lives in poverty.

I continue to listen to talk radio as Republicans search their post-election souls as we Democrats have often found ourselves doing over the years. Their consensus on why they lost so badly on Tuesday? They just weren't conservative enough. Republicans apparently agree that they need to move even farther to the right. House Majority (not for long) Whip and Missourian Roy Blunt said so yesterday in his address to the Heritage Foundation, an outfit that no doubt thinks moving even farther right is a splendid idea. I too applaud Republicans' ongong quest for ideological purity. Indeed, I hope they succeed mightily. Of course, they'll continue to lose even worse with each subsequent election, but they'll have that ideological fire in their bellies to keep them warm during their winter of discontent.

So what's up with President Bush's sudden about face on Iraq? Until Wednesday morning, it was stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. How quickly things change. And by the way, in the wake of his recent insistence that Rumsfeld was here to stay, can I now safely call Bush a liar?

Have you seen this year's electoral victory maps? They look awfully blue, even in that flyover area where all the real Americans supposedly live, where nobody would ever vote Democrat. Republicans made a big deal about their broad swaths of red in 2000 and 2004. Remember those electoral map T-shirts proclaiming "Bush's America: My America." Republicans are oddly silent about America's 2006 color scheme.

Obviously, Tuesday's results are not a mandate for liberal extremism. Look at most of the Democrats who won and how moderate and centrist they appear. Likewise, look at all the moderate Republicans who lost, leaving the GOP even more ideological and radical. For all Republicans' snide laughing at Democrats' sometimes-foolish efforts at reaching out for the center all these years, at least the Democrats were trying. Republicans meanwhile pandered exclusively to the far Right, thumbing their noses at the other 70 percent of us Americans. Their strategy reaped obvious results on Tuesday.

The dam has broken and there's no turning back. I suspect the future holds combative two-party rule, but I'll take that over what we've seen the past six years. In the meantime, the days are over in which words like Democrat and liberal are hurled like insults. For many years, the Democrats faced an uphill battle at regaining trust that had deservedly been lost years earlier. Democrats have had a burden of proof on themselves for some years now, while Republicans were more likely seen as the more Christian, more morally upright and responsible, more American. I'd say the GOP, due to their own arrogance and moral corruption, has blown that sweet deal for itself. Now, it's seen as OK to vote Democrat, and that burden of proof at least seems to be history.

The day after the day after

2006-11-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

As a Democrat, I'm not used to all this winning. Having been forced so many times in the past to be the gracious loser, I'm not so sure how to act now that my side has won. So I thought I'd take a look back at come newspaper opinion pages to see how graciously Republicans accepted victory in the weeks after the 2004 presidential election.

Let's start with one letter by Peter Writer of Charlestown, R.I., who wrote these conciliatory words to Decmocrats in The Providence Journal: "Climb aboard the crybaby bus and go away. Don't worry -- you won't be missed."

How about these soothing words from Charles Duhon of Tulsa who extended this olive branch via an eloquent letter to the Tulsa World: "Why doesn't John Kerry grow up and act like a man and stop acting like a girlie boy? I'm not even going to give him the honor of being labeled a girlie man. The dude's a girlie boy."

Writing in to the Anchorage Daily News, Mathias Houston so badly wished to unite us all in his letter titled, "Whining Democrats need to accept the election results and get a life."

I could go on. You know how it is every election year. It's the old quit-whining-and-get-over-it letters that appear in the newspapers every time Republicans perceive an electoral victory. Of course this time, they've lost pretty badly, so I've been interested in gauging Republican reaction now that they've been forced to accept defeat. I tuned in yesterday to 97 Talk, St. Louis' purveyor of the Fox News brand of right-wing talk radio. You know, the whole Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham axis, tied together by those top-of-the-hour Fox News updates known for their fairness and balance -- at least by Roger Ailes' definition.

To be sure, Sean and a couple of local wannebe Limbaughs who do drivetime talk assured us they would not be whining and carrying on, as they subtly suggested we liberals did in 2004. They went out of their way to let us know they were not moving to Canada, as Alec Baldwin threatened. I know the rest of us are all relieved. One guy, ever sincere, even said he wished for all the success in the world for Democrats and would even pray for us. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

But of course, tigers can't lose their stripes any more than Karl Rove can grow hair (OK, I shouldn't be one to talk about growing hair), and within minutes these guys were back to their usual liberal- and Democrat-bashing. So much for fond wishes. The Democrats' extreme-left agenda will soon rear it's ugly head. Men will soon be holding hands in public. Men will marry their dogs. Salesclerks at Target will wish customers, "Happy holidays." You know the usual wedge argument. We conservaties are the good Christian patriots, the other 70 percent of America hates God.

One caller delcared that Claire McCaskill's Senate victory signifies that nothing is sacred anymore, that we've lost our sense of values. The host quickly agreed calling us in the majority by O'Reilly's term "secular progressives." Apparently, because most Americans think the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, and they want affordable healthcare and security in their old age, we'll all soon be smoking pot and burning flags in the streets. Another caller, calling Democrats the "give-peace-a-chance crowd," informed us that the voters just handed America over to the terrorists, that we liberals don't understand that those terrorists are bad people. Our host, some wild, crazy guy calling himself Smash, insisted that Republicans are so much more sportsmanlike and ethical in their political conduct than Democrats. Smash, willfully ignorant of such names as Nixon, Atwater, Rove and Abramoff, piously informed us that Republicans would never stoop to the shameful conduct of Democrats.

But still, they're not whining. Really, they're not. After all, if a good conservative like Crash says so enough times, then it must be true.

Wow!

2006-11-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

Today I've been too speechless to gloat.

Instead, I've been shocked by the complete and almost total trail of Democratic victories from sea to shining sea. I went to bed last night thinking Jim Talent had clenched his first electoral victory, cementing what would probably be a long Senate tenure. Instaed, I woke this morning to find that Claire McCaskill had pulled it through. Apparently, those urban and even suburban votes from St. Louis and Kansas City hadn't been counted yet. My only regret here in the Show-Me State was the failure of the tobacco tax amendment, a victory of the tobacco lobby, which financed endless TV ads painting the measure as a political boondoggle.

This evening, the jury's still out on the Senate race in Virginia, but it appears Macaca Allen is poised to go down. Win or lose, the Republicans have lost the Senate, and at best will have to share it with the Dems. From Maryland to Montana, Republicans have fallen in all key races, save for Tennessee, where a little race-baiting again proved effective.

Even in Texas, the Massachusetts of the Right, Democrats made a few strides. In Dallas County, Dems swept countywide races, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On the Gulf Coast, Tom Delay's Congressional district fell to Democrat Nick Lampson. Even unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell showed a far greater standing in a four-way race than anyone would have expected a few weeks back.

And then to hear that Donald Rumsfeld has resigned. Well, it's just too much for my left-wing heart to take.

The first time I paid close attention to a political race was as a 12-year-old in 1980. You know what happened then. I suppose I came of political age that night, not realizing that it would be a long 26 years. Is a new wave of change coming or was yesterda just a speed bump in our long ride through the status quo? I certainly have my own beliefs on that, but I suppose we'll all have to stay tuned.

Perhaps tomorrow, we can discuss the meaning of all this. For tonight, I'll just bask.

Odds and ends

2006-09-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about a little bit of this and that today.

Liar in Chief

We see splashed on this morning's paper news that Saddam Hussein not only had no ties to al-Qaeda, but saw the group as a threat and sought to eradicate it. Not only that, but President Bush knew this to be true the whole time. That's the news released Friday from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"Iraq and al-Qaeda had high-level contacts that go back a decade," President Bush said in October 2002 as he attempted to drum up support for war.

In fact, Saddam opposed al-Qaeda, and at one point Iraqi security forces attempted unsuccessfully to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as he sought medical treatment in Baghdad under an alias. If you'll recall, war supporters have attempted to use this appearance in Baghdad by al-Zarqawi as proof of al-Qaeda ties to Saddam's regime.

Much of the committee's report is based on U.S. intelligence reports, illustrating the degree to which the Bush administration knew damn well that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Many of us have strongly suspected this to be true, and now we all know damn well. It appears more and more that Bush merely wanted to go after Saddam - not an entirely bad idea- and simply used 9/11 as an excuse to do so. This extraordinary diversion from the real war on terror has no doubt put our nation in greater danger than it already faced.

Although Iraq was not a base for terrorists when we invaded in 2003, it certainly has become one since then, turning Bush's lies into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Abominable News Anchor

Last night, I finally tuned into Katie Couric's attempt to remake the network news division that once gave us Edward R. Murrow. What an abysmal excuse for a newscast! Frankly, I've always actively disliked Couric. Lacking more eloquent words, I'll simply describe her as a shrewish bitch. Still I expected her newscast to be better than the trainwreck I viewed last night.

For years, I've clung stubbornly to a sentimental and grossly outdated view of CBS as the Tiffany Network. I long for Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America; "60 Minutes" in its glory days before it became a tired collection of geriatric farts; Charles Kuralt making us feel good about our coutnry, as troubled as it might be; and even its attempt to turn entertainment into something intelligent and witty with the likes of "Mary Tyler Moore" and "All in the Family."

Granted that view has been tarnished greatly, what with "Survivor" and Dan Rather's oversized ego. Still, trustworthy and solid Bob Shieffer brought us hope with a return a couple of years ago to a serious no-nonsense newscast, featuring real news and not the O.J./Jon Benet/Lacy Peterson foolishness that characterizes the cable news axis.

Well, that's all over, apparently. Now, instead of news, we have a more lighthearted, breezy newsmagazine show. I strongly suspect we're seeing news geared toward the thirty- to fiftysomething woman. It's news for the Oprah crowd, which doesn't like to hear all that bad stuff about war and killing and shrinking prospects for the next generation of Americans.

Last night's broadcast started with news of the manhunt for that cop-killer in New York state, featuring an in-studio interview with a U.S. marshal. We also had a humorous essay on summer by some wild and crazy guy I've never seen before. Katie herself presented a fun rundown of some wacky websites we might wish to check out in our spare time, including a high-speed montage of some guy who photographs himself everyday. And we ended with Steve Hartman wringing his hands over how sad 9/11 was for folks in Shanksville, Pa.

Somewhere in there, the folks at CBS forgot to throw in the actual news, so I turned the TV off without a clue of what actually happened in our world on Friday. What a waste of America's time. If this goes over as well as CBS hopes, expect the other two networks to follow with their own newscast-looking lifestyle show.

Thank God for Jim Lehrer. We need him more than ever.

"Munich"

If you're a Netflix subscriber as we are, you know how it keeps you from ever actually visiting the cinema, and you wind up watching movies months and months after they premiered in their first run. That's how it is with us and Steven Spielberg's "Munich." We finally saw it nine months after it first arrived at the movie theater.

I've been fascinated and admittedly admiring of Israel's take-no-prisoners response to terrorism ever since I was a kid viewing '70s-era TV movies reenacting the Munich Olympics attack and the hostage crisis in Entebbe. We Americans tend to view Israel in a far more favorable light than we do her enemies, certainly with great justification. And of course, testosterone dictates that I always like to see the bad guys get theirs.

The movie has been criticized by many as historically inaccurate. For example, in "Munich," the Mossaud employs a secret commando outift to assassinate a list of 11 plotters in the Munich attacking. By the end of the movie, the outfit's head succumbs to paranoia and disillusionment. Whether he actually feels remorse or moral misgivings is left to the viewer to misinterpret. I'm always troubled by movies that don't wish to portray history accurately. I can easily see viewers of "Munich" literally interpreting the story as fact and forming opinions based on events that didn't actually happen, or at least not in the way they were portrayed.

At the same time, the overall message is something we should all consider. Spielberg illustrates us in "Munich," that exacting revenge and seeking to crush are enemies are ultimately unsatisfying. Something therein leaves us a little more hollow and a little less human. Something in revenge sets forth what I've heard described as a perpetual-motion machine of retribution and violence. In the end, Spielberg says, each assassination by Israel was met be an even larger, more hideous act of terrorism by Arab groups. What we see in "Munich" is the genesis of the mess that eminates from the Middle East and now envelopes the entire world. A mess that Israelis and Palestinians attempted to further perpetuate last month, culminating in widespread destruction throughout Lebanon.

These are dangerous times for the world. No doubt, the terrorists are evil and wish to destroy us. We cannot sit idly by, and no doubt violent tactics will and must be used. Yet, are we excused and absolved from any moral considerations ever in our efforts to make our country safer? Sadly, I suspect most Americans feel such absolution to be perfect and easy. Also, looking at this failed war in Iraq and Israel's failed attempt to bomb Hezbollah into submission, is it possible that we are facing the limits of violence. I know that we Americans decided a long time ago that peaceful means of seeking accord is for suckers, the ridiculously naive and the limp-wristed. Yet, look at the war and destruction we've committed ourself to as the only alternative. Is that getting us what we want?

The rhetorical labyrinth of abortion

2006-09-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

Ramesh Ponnuru, resident National Review geek, has a new book out, "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life." Essentially, it's a "pro-life" treatise. I put the term pro-life in quotes because I fail to see how conservatives can call themselves that with their worldview of war as solution to all world conflicts, their sense of bloodlust satisfied via capital punishment, their belief that America would be more peaceful if all her citizens packed heat, their unwavering support of the tobacco lobby and their seeming lack of concern that 1/4 of the American children who weren't aborted live in poverty. But I digress once again into territory covered a million times before.

I must say, I'm a little disappointed by the bombastic title and premise of Ponnuru's book. He's been filling in recently on PBS' "NewsHour" as a foil to liberal Mark Shields while conservative David Brooks is off following the kinds of eggheaded pursuits that make Brooks a lovable nerd. Ponnuru, on the "NewsHour," comes off as reasonable and thoughtful, the kind of guy that actually makes guys like me reconsider and re-evaluate our liberal ways. In spite of this ridiculous book title, worthy of an Anne Coulter screed, I hold out hope that I'm still right about him.

And the New York Times Book Review suggests that I am indeed right to assume that Ponnuru shows himself in this book to be several cuts above, say, Michael Savage. Essentially, he skewers the twisted logic of those who support abortion rights. For example: I think abortion is horrible and tantamount to murder, but I don't believe I should impose my beliefs on others. How crazy is that?

For as long as I've had political and social opinions, I've steadfastly held to the view that abortion is a terrible wrong and that it should be illegal, that Roe v. Wade should be reversed. I've lambasted the Democratic party and fellow liberals for their equally unwavering view that choice trumps life. Furthermore, I've been a strong supporter of the consistent pro-life creed, largely promoted by the Catholic church, not the cheap right-wing, evangelical creed of bleeding hearts for the unborn but indifferent hearts toward everyone else.

So it may surprise some of you to learn that my views on abortion have been evolving somewhat over the past several months. I can thank South Dakota legislators for spurring my reconsideration. You may recall that earlier this year, they passed a law in open defiance of Roe that banned abortion in their state. In essence they forced us all up to the precipice that divides reality from theory. Until now, I found my hard-line beliefs quite tenable in the comfortable knowledge that Roe probably wouldn't be overturned anytime soon. Now that a ban on abortion might be a real deal, I've been forced to consider how that might really affect our society.

In response to South Dakota's new law, The New York Times Magazine examined life in El Salvador, where abortion is illegal and law enforcement works aggressively to stamp it out. In El Salvador, doctors are legally obligated to report evidence of past abortions that turns up during an annual exam to authorities. Once evidence is reported, authorities can obtain a court order insisting that a woman show up at a certain time and place for a pelvic exam. Further evidence can be used to prosecute and imprison women and their doctors. Is this the kind of society we want? I don't see any other way to enforce anti-abortion laws other than what goes on in El Salvador.

Ponnuru is right in his questioning of the pro-choice crowd. But now I have questions of him, and of other pro-lifers, myself included:

1) Isn't it hypocritical to stand up for the sanctity of life for the unborn, then draw numerous exceptions under which abortion is permissable? Is life less valuable when conceived under rape or incest? Obviously, not to allow these exceptions would show true heartlessness, but still doesn't it point out a huge trap in our pro-life rhetoric?

2) Do we really want a return to unsafe, clandestine "back-alley" abortions? This stands as the cornerstone of most pro-choicers' arguments. Isn't there validity to this argument? Do we really think all abortion will stop? Do women who seek an abortion get what they deserve if they bleed to death or are otherwise butchered in unsafe unregulated procedures?

3) If abortion really is murder, then should women who seek abortions and doctors who provide them be prosecuted as murderers? In most states, killing a baby constitutes a capital offense. Should we execute these folks? If we truly believe our own rhetoric, then the answer is yes.

4) Don't we pro-lifers often look a little foolish in our rhetoric? Are doctors who provide abortions really greedy and sinister, or do they sincerely think they're taking great risks to do the right thing? Do most folks who favor legalized abortion really do so as a celebration of liberating choice? Do most of them see abortion as a legitimate form of birth control? I doubt it. Does any thoughtful pro-choicer really think a fetus is a neutral piece of tissue? I think not.

Unable to answer these questions in a satisfactory manner, I regretfully find myself retreating from my hardline stance. Increasingly, I stand in the safe-legal-but-extremely-rare camp, which itself has many logical and moral problems. I can never really be OK with a stance that permits taking an unborn life. Yet, this is exactly where I find myself standing. I'm afraid that once we opened the Pandora's box of Roe, we put ourselves past the point of no return, and ultimately any stance on abortion these days is unsatisfactory and frankly tragic.

Still, the best we can do is ensure that as few women as possible desire abortions, that they're not terribly convenient to those who want them, that other pro-life options are made more desirable, but in the end, that they remain safe and available for the undaunted. I really see no other way. So does this stand forever banish me from the ranks of the pro-life? Many would say yes. On the other hand, perhaps I now join the ranks of most Americans who see this as a nuanced, truly difficult issue.

On the one side of this issue are the Gloria Steinems and Molly Yards of the world. On the other are the Randall Terrys and Phyllis Schlaflys. In between lies a vast spectrum for the truly thoughtful, reflective souls of this world.

The religious Right speaks on public education

If you'll recall, I blogged several weeks ago on the hositility to public education shown by many extremists on the Right. Yesterday's Post-Dispatch carried an Associated Press story on how fundamentalists are increasingly pulling kids out of public schools based on their perceptions of what goes on at the school down the street. Here are some quotes:

"Humanism and evolution are taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."
- Roger Moran, member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee

"Home-schoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted."
- from the California-based Considering Home-schooling Ministry

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war."
- Florida-based evangelist D. James Kennedy

How many of you out there truly believe that we public school teachers spend our time indoctrinating children to hate America, God and all that's good? Promoting drugs and alcohol? That's news to the thousands of schools, mine included, that spend a great deal of instructional time educatingagainst these dangers. Promoting promiscuity and homosexuality? We teachers aren't going near those issues. Amoral? Humanistic? That's a big surprise to schools like mine that actively teach character education. Anti-American? Is the Pledge of Allegiance, recited every morning in schools across America, anti-American? God is mocked? That's a true shocker to the millions of American schoolteachers who happen to be church-going Christians.

I believe that people should provide their children with the kind of education they believe is best, whether it be at a public, private, charter or home school. I also believe that parents should have a solid command of the facts before they make such decisions. Self-serving and ignorant demogogues such as the ones quoted above do nothing to enlighten parents and help them make the best choices for their children.

A list of what I hate about our society (by no means exhaustive)

2006-08-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's this long summer we've been having, and I'm sick of the long, hot days. Perhaps it's this headache I have this evening. Or it could be that terrorists are trying to blow us up. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty peeved that the route I take to work is closed for construction, and it's adding precious minutes onto my commute. Whatever the cause, I'm feeling pretty damned irascible and curmudgeonly this evening. My inner Andy Rooney has emerged. My George Carlin yin to my nice-guy yang has sprung forth, and I'm pretty damned annoyed. So I think I'll take advantage of this mood, and let you in on what really puts me off in our society today. Hopefully, I'll have everyone good and pissed off at me by the time I'm done.

And if any of you wankers out there try to tell me how great America is and how grateful I should be to live here, by God, I'll punch you in the nose.

You say you hated Jimmy Carter's malaise speech? Well, I'm about to give you a malaise speech you won't soon forget:

People who treat cell phones like lifestyle accessories and not, well, phones. They parade around in public with their ears glued to them, talking loudly, putting on a show for everybody. Get over it, America. Cell phones have been around awhile. The novelty wore off sometime around 1997.

Parents who allow video games to take over their homes, their families and their children's minds. These media have zero redeeming value, and please give it a rest about the importance of practicing hand-eye coordination. Instead, how about some eye-brain coordination? Tell your kids to pick up a book and open it. Better still, America, why don't you do the same?

Urban sprawl that eats up our bucolic countryside like cancer, adds to commute times and air pollution, and destabilizes older neighborhoods. Do you really have to live at the edge of creation just because they opened a new Applebee's out there?

Professed Christians who are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Instaed of whining because some salesclerk at Target wished you "Happy Holidays" and not "Merry Christmas," get a clue about what really matters. Do what Jesus would do and take a stand for love, justice, equity, kindness and peace.

African-Amerians' social pathology and march to self-destruction and distinction. The time has come to quit celebrating this insane elevation of ghetto, hiphop, gangsta culture and start looking toward self-sacrifice, discipline and education. Snoop Dogg and his friends have done more to hurt black America than George Wallace and Bull Connor could have ever imagined.

Red-state America's elevation and celebration of low-class, white-trash living. Don't get mad at the African-American lifestyle, then turn around and cheer on Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Gretchen Wilson and the entire NASCAR, Wal-Mart, trailer park lifestyle as some sort of pride in heritage. It's not funny, it's not cute, and it's definitely nothing to be proud of. And while you're at it, put down that loser rebel flag and get the damn chip off your shoulder.

The big lie of the '60s: If it feels good, do it. This has been far more than just some hippie, liberal thing for quite some time now. Americans of all persuasions have plunged headfirst into this creed of irresponsibility, betrayal of those they love and their ultimate demise, even if they refuse to admit it to themselves.

McMansions and teardowns. If your house totals more than 4,000 square feet, then your character is poor.

The entertainment/media juggernaut and America's refusal to unplug itself. The TV, movie, music, publishing, and advertising industries will pull off whatever outrage it takes to get our attention, and we always love it even when we're faking outrage. Whether it's Madonna crucifying herself, the 24-hour T&A fest on MTV and BET, or television's ongoing efforts to peddle sex and obscenity, we keep crying out for more, more, more. The people want what the people get.

Adults who refuse to act like grown-ups. Everybody, regardless of age, has to try and be so damned cool these days. If not cool, then childlike and always fun, fun, fun. The bulk of Halloween sales these days is for human consumption and not for kids. Likewise, most comic book and video game sales are for adults. St. Patrick's Day and Mardi Gras are no longer about good-natured carousing and more about falling-down drunkenness, lewdness, obscenity and hooliganism. Families can't canoe down the beautiful rivers of southern Missouri as a weekend outing anymore without a Daytona spring-break spectacle. For crying out loud, grow up, America and quite acting like a nation of frat boys and overgrown children.

Parents who refuse to rein in their kids. DVD players in minivans blare "Spongebob" lest their children go five minutes without entertainment, kids are allowed to run wild in restaurants as we can't expect them to sit politely at a table, and children throw tantrums in stores with impunity lest mom or dad actually have to do something about it. We teachers are the ones left to clean up this mess.

The prevailing me-firstism and selfishness that makes it impossible to get anything done in this country today. We can't do anything about global warming because our choice in what kind of SUV we drive comes first. We wouldn't want to equalize school funding to ensure every child can get a good education or make college more affordable, because that could raise our taxes. We wouldn't dare ask Americans to sacrifice in this time of war; instead, we'll make them feel patriotic about going to the mall. I'm glad our grandparents weren't this fat, lazy and self-centered. Otherwise we'd all probably be goose-stepping today to "Deutschland Uber Allis."

Wow! I feel better already. I do believe my headache is gone.

The news on public schools

2006-08-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

As I prepare my classroom this weekend for an onslaught of kids on Wednesday, I'm reflecting on the state of public education in America.

You probably didn't hear about the report released last month by the Department of Education which finds that elementary schools perform about as well as private schools. The research examined scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test for fourth- and eighth-graders in math and reading. According to the research, once socioeconomic status and race are isolated, public and private schools show similar results in educating children. In some areas private schools did better, while in other areas public schools came out on top. Statistically the two systems appear to perform about the same.

I say you probably didn't hear about the report because it was released with almost no public notification. The same Department of Edcuation that employs great fanfare and noise in releasing any shred of evidence that public schools are failing was oddly silent with this evidence that public schools might actually be doing a good job. The only notice of the report was a one-sentence item buried inside an e-mail communication from the department's National Center for Education Statistics sent out in limited release on a Friday.

As a former newspaper reporter, I well recall the old release-it-on-Friday trick. Any company with weak earnings reports or any public entity with bad news chooses to report it on Friday when their people have left early for the weekend and when reporters themselves are eager to wrap up their week. In this instance, journalists who caught notice of the report were told that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings would not be available for comment. And In the end, few media outlets reported on this significant report. When challenged later on the almost complete lack of public notification, Spellings said she didn't think parents would be interested. Hmmm. Research that allows parents to make informed decisions about their children's education. Doesn't that sound important to you? In fact, the report's executive summary mentions only the instances of private-school superiority and says nothing of areas where public schools come out on top. It took some intrepid reporters' and educational researchers' deep reading to discover what the study really says.

So is there a vast right-wing conspiracy here? I don't know, but my skeptical mind has been alerted. I know that most rank-and-file conservatives believe in the value of public education, and that most of them are quite pleased with the public schools their own children attend. Many conservatives are teachers and administrators in the public system. But there are a few significant subgroups of powerful right-wingers who are quite hostile to public education, and the White House loves to pander to them.

So who are these folks?

First we have the crowd on the Religious Right who believes our schools are hotbeds of left-wing social engineering. To hear these critics talk, we do little else in the schools these days but read "Heather Has Two Mommies," play the lifeboat game, legitimize all and any sexual activity for minors, persecute and ridicule all forms of religious exercise and teach children that they are in fact their own gods. The Southern Baptist Convention earlier this year considered and ultimately rejected (for now, at least) a resolution calling for all Southern Baptist parents to withdraw their children from public schools. Anne Coulter, in her latest juvenile rant, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," categorically describes all public educators in America as "taxpayer-supported leeches" and devotes an entire chapter to chronicle isloated documented instances when teachers and administrators did attempt to trample a student's First Amendement rights. It's a transparent attempt, a favorite of the talk-radio outrage mill, to smear an entire system based on a few isolated outrages. In fact, the vast majority of us teachers prefers to steer clear of any social controversy. Really, we'd just like our students to sit still long enough so we can teach them to read and do some math. Maybe if they put their GameBoys down long enough, we could even throw in a little science and social studies.

The second group consists of the nothing-is-sacred crowd of money-changers in the education temple. These are the folks who are out to make a quick buck, and they definitely have President Bush's sympathies as we know he believes nothing is worth doing unless someone can make a whole lot of money doing it. Here's where we find snake-oil salesman Chris Whittle and his Edison Schools. This is the school of for-profit education, where children aren't seen as individuals deserving of the best education we can give them, but more as walking bundles of taxpayer-provided cashflow. I worked for a for-profit charter school for two years. We packed 25-30 students in each classroom with grossly inadequate facilities and teachers paid far less than in the public schools. The school was a dangerous place with test scores far below the public campuses we were competing against. At the same time, some folks in the corporate office were making a whole lot of money.

The final group is the bunch that simply hates public education and would like to see the entire system dismantled. Some are wannabe blueblood elitists, others are anti-tax zealots. These folks, in the end, really don't care if all children receive an adequate education - just so long as their kids get one. Others do care but only in theory. These are the libertarian goofballs like John Stossel, whose one-sided and slanted "20/20" report, "Stupid in America: How We Are Cheating Our Kids," presented the entire public school system as a collective of whiny, overpaid, incompetent teachers. In Stossel's free-market-worshipping, utopian la-la land, once we tore down the current system, a new system of private schools would rise up, tending to all children's needs and do so much more efficiently and adequately than what those public-school slugs currently do. Please refer back to my own for-profit charter school experience above.

Fortunately, most Americans disagree with all three of these groups, further illustrating how out of touch the Right is these days. Study after study has come to the same conclusion: Americans feel good about the schools their own children attend. The entire system, however, they're not so sure about, a perception I know is fueled by this concerted attempt to smear public education and by constant reports on the 6-o'clock news about gang fights and shootings at a tiny number of inner-city campuses.

So how do I feel about public schools in America? When I hear that only 70 percent of our kids graduate from high school (more like 40 percent in the 'hood), and that an achievement gap yawns between white and minority students, I don't feel like cheering too loudly. However, I do know that teachers and administrators work harder than ever, and that lazy incompetent types find less and less refuge in our public schools these days. I think we also need to demand more personal responsibility from students and parents than what our system currently demands. Finally, let's look at David Berliner's and Bruce Biddle's 1998 book, "The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on Public Schools" for some perspective. Berliner and Biddle do quite a competent job of pointing out the dangers of comparing American test scores vs. foreign test scores given the vast difference between our inclusive system of education vs. most countries' elitist systems. These comparisons often have lain at the bedrock of public-school-haters' arguments, and they're just not valid.

In the end, I know we have a lot of work to do, but I also believe we do have something to celebrate in our public education system. This recent report that the Education Department doesn't want us to hear about further illustrates it.

Reagan Part II: The Trickle-Down, Voodoo, Supply-Side Effect

2006-08-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

"It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."
-Reagan administration budget director David Stockman, 1981

"Voodoo economics."
-then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, 1980

A frequent reader of my blog took exception to my rather unflattering portrait of Ronald Reagan the other day. He responded by sending me a link to National Review's fawning, obsequious 1992 examination of Reagan's economic legacy. I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to learn that the folks at National Review believe Reagan's economic legacy was a tour de force for America, and that we're all better off as a result. If you think otherwise, that's just an illusion created by the liberals, or so we're to believe. You can NR's read their brown-nosing revisionism here.

I've read most of it now, and it sure sounds impressive. Essentially, these guys dedicated an entire issue of their magazine that is so large and all-encompassing, I would never be able to refute it point-by-point. So instead, I'll make some points of my own. Do I purport to have the last word on Reagan's economic legacy? Are my figures infallable? Absolutely not, but at least I'll admit that. Instead, let's just call this some balance to the Right's spin on trickle-down economics.

Poverty Rate
11.9% - Carter
14.1% - Reagan
Yes, the poor got poorer and the middle class shrunk.

Hourly wages
in 2005 dollars
$16.95 - Carter
$15.72 - Reagan
I think it's very important to examine income in some measure besides household income, a favorite yardstick of the Right, which conveniently overlooks the fact that during the Reagan-Bush years, the number of two-income households grew by about 40 percent. That so many women were forced to enter the workforce itself constitutes a true indictment of the Reagan legacy and a betrayal of the Right's pro-family rhetoric.

Unemployment Rates
7.5% - Carter
6.5% - Reagan
Not a very impressive drop, is it?

Government expenditures
as percentage of national income
27.9% - Carter
28.7% - Reagan
We've known for years that Reagan's talk of shrinking the government was nothing but talk.

National Debt
1981 - $930 billion
1988 - $2.6 trillion

Average Incomes
in 1997 dollars
1981
Bottom Quintile - $15,000 (dropped to $13,700 in 1983)
Middle Quintile - $48,700 (dropped to $47,700 in 1983)
Top Quintile - $129,000 (rose to $138,500 in 1983)
Top 1 Percent - $540,100 (rose to $585,900 in 1983)

1989
Bottom Quintile - $15,800 (5% increase over 1981)
Middle Quintile - $54,600 (12% increase)
Top Quintile - $174,100 (35% increase)
Top 1 Percent - $836,900 (55% increase)

On the second anniversary of Ronald Reagan's death

2006-07-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm close to three months too late to really call this the second anniversary. I guess I was busy on June 5, and I didn't think it polite to say anything negative on the day Reagan actully died two years ago, because we liberals have better home-training than that. I didn't have this blog at the time anyway. I certainly couldn't abide the attempts to rewrite history by the right-wingers who worship Reagan - admittedly an unforgettable president but with at best a mixed record - as some sort of god. So now I'm ready to speak up and provide some balance to these right-wing revisionists efforts, often aided and abetted by the alleged liberal media.

A tribute to Ronald Reagan on the second anniversary of his death (plus 2 months, 3 weeks and 2 days)
If you believe it's only just and good that the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, the middle class shrank and adjusted income declined from 1981 to 1989, then I know you're a Reagan fan.

If you believe the average American living in poverty is a Cadillac-driving welfare queen, then please bow down before King Ronnie.

If you believe the poor in America deserve what they get, then you get the essence of the Gipper.

If you believe that ketchup should be served as a school lunch vegetable to children who may get nothing else to eat all day, then I know you hunger for Reagan's leadership.

If you think Iran is a bad, bad country, but support selling them 1,500 missiles, then you're sold on Reagan.

If you believe terrorists are bad, bad people, but support CIA distribution of a terrorist handbook to the Contras in Nicaragua, then Reagan is your man.

If you believe terrorists are bad, bad people but that it's OK to capitulate when they demand arms for hostages, then Neville Chamberlain - oops, I mean, Ronald Reagan is tops.

If you describe a band of thugs who murdered thousands of civilians in Nicaragua as "freedom fighters" believe they deserved our support, then you must support Reagan.

If you hate Saddam Hussein now but thought he was a swell guy and worthy of our support 20 years ago, then you must think Reagan a swell guy himself.

If you thought Manuel Noriega was a standup guy who belonged on Uncle Sam's payroll, then guess what! Your hero felt the same way.

If you're glad we backed right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Honduras and consider Archbishop Oscar Romero a troublemaker who got what he deserved, then you deserve Reagan.

If you're outraged by Jimmy Carter's failed attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, but believe it no big deal that 241 Marines were blown up by terrorist in an equally insane mission in Lebanon, then Reagan is your kinda guy.

If you saw Jimmy Carter as inept and weak in his efforts to see the hostages released, but see Reagan as strong and competent as American hostages languished for more than six years in Lebanon, then you see Reagan as only a true supporter can.

If you believe MX missiles are "peacekeepers," then you surely long for Pax Reagana.

If you believe facts are stupid things, then I know for a fact, you must love Reagan.

If you believe trees pollute the environment, volcanoes create more pollution than cars and that a tree is a tree ("How many more do you need to see?"), then you must support Reagan's common-sense environmental approach.

If you believe balanced budgets are unnecessary, a 13-figure national debt is no big deal, and don't mind that in four years the U.S. went from status as world's No. 1 creditor to world's No. 1 debtor, then you owe a debt to Reagan.

If you admire the honesty and integrity of Lyn Nofziger, Michael Deaver, Anne Gorsuch Burford, Rita Lavelle, Edwin Meese, Richard Allen, Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Alan Fiers, Richard Miller, Clair George, Richard Secord, Thomas Clineswaws, Carl Channel, John Poindexter, Oliver North, William Casey, James Watt, Phillip Winn, Thomas Demery, Deborah Gore Dean, Catalina Villaponda, Paul Thayer, and Joseph Strauss, then you must honestly admire Reagan, his integrity and the company he kept.

If you admire that a young actor cooperated fully with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its witchhunt and later sought to recharacterize his complicity as some sort of patriotic stand, then you and Joe McCarthy must surely look up to Ronnie Reagan.

If you believe allegiance to the flag and allegiance to a political party are one and the same, then you are a star-spangled Reaganite.

If you believe a man whose campaign crew that stole Jimmy Carter's briefing book on the eve of the 1980 presidential debates can be considered honest and scrupulous, then you are honestly a Reagan supporter.

If you believe our nation's public education system is an enemy of the American people, then you're a true scholar of the school of Reagan.

If you admire a professed warrior of Christian values who virtually never went to church, you must indeed worship at the altar of St. Ron.

If you admire a warrior of family values who spent little time with his own children and didn't even know his own grandchildren's names, then you surely are a Reagan warrior.

If you believe that domestic and international policy should sometimes by dictated by an astrologer, then it must be written in the stars, you're a Reagan kind of guy.

If you believe that AIDS, which so far has killed about 22 million people worldwide (about a fifth of those people children), is a character issue not deserving of decent people's attention, then just say yes to Reagan.

If you trust a man who slept through cabinet meetings, then you must have trusted Reagan.

If the Marines' defeat of some Cuban construction workers building a British-designed international airport on a tiny patch of Caribbean jungle and the subsequent rescue of a handful of American medical students strikes you as the ultimate American victory, then throw up a big V for the Ronmeister.

If you believe Reagan single-handedly ended communism and that Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II and 40 years of previous anti-communism heroes deserve zero credit, and see the Soviet Union of the '80s as more than just a moribund, pathetic shell, then score one for the Gipper.

If you enjoy our current society in which everything has everything to do with the acquisition of money, and nothing has anything to do with anything else, then thank Ronald Reagan's legacy.

If you see greed as virtue and are glad the likes of Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers can run amok and aren't stopped until thousands are unemployed, then pay tribute to Reagan's legacy.

If you believe that corporate pensions and healthcare plans are optional obligations and that eight-figure payouts to corporate executive failures are just compensation, then salute Ronald Reagan's legacy.

If you enjoy living in a society in which corporations have no responsibility except to shareholders, and even that's a flexible notion, then hats off to Reagan's legacy.

If you're glad that any ideal of the public good and commonwealth has been traded for the dominance of private interests, then give a high five to Reagan and his legacy.

If you enjoy the prospect of America's deindustrialization by corporations shipping jobs to Mexico and China, all in the name of free trade, then give three cheers to the Reagan legacy.

If you're enjoying the greatest redistribution of income in U.S. history - this time from the bottom up - then give Reagan a big wet kiss for the culmination of his vision.

If you appreciate the current Bush administration and everything it stands for, then wave a big red-white-and-blue banner for the culumination of Reagan's vision.

If facts and truth are irrelevant in the face of warmfuzzies, generalized feelgood images and inspiring anecdotes of dubious origin, then smile! The Reagan message triumphs.

If you believe that images of a cowboy riding into the sunset are more important than sound policy, a command for facts, and a commitment to honest and truthful characterization, and that style should always trump substance, then you are the truest believer in the Reagan vision.

Congratulations! The Reagan Revolution is fulfilled. You must be very proud.

The quotable Reagan Administration
I found many of these quotes on a site called Ronald Reagan: The Bonzo Years. Click here for a long walk through an account of a presidency described by the Right as triumphant and embodying of everything good, but really venal and inept.

Enjoy!

"Ebenezer Scrooge suffered from bad press in his time. If you really look at the facts, he didn't exploit Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit was paid 10 shillings a week, which was a very good wage at the time... Bob, in fact, had good cause to be happy with his situation. His wife didn't have to work...He was able to afford the traditional Christmas dinner of roast goose and plum pudding...So let's be fair to Scrooge. He had his faults, but he wasn't unfair to anyone."
- Edwin Meese, speaking to the National Press Club, December 1983

"If you tell the same story five times, it's true."
- Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes, responding to criticism concerning a Reagan anecdote of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner that turned out to be a complete fabrication. The anecdote apparently bears a striking resemblance to a scene from the 1944 movie "A Wing and a Prayer" and a 1944 selection from Readers Digest, Reagan's favorite magazine.

"We love your adherence to democratic principle, and to the democratic processes."
- then-Vice President George Bush, addressing Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, 1981

"(Supply-side economics) was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate."
- Reagan budget director David Stockman, quoted in a 1981 Atlantic Monthly article

"I also happen to be someone who believes in tithing - the giving of a tenth."
- Reagan, although tax returns for that year show he actually gave 1.4 percent of his income.

1/19/82
At his seventh press conference, President Reagan:
· Claims there are "a million more working than there were in 1980," though statistics show that 100,000 fewer people are employed.
· Contends his attempt to grant tax-exempt status to segregated schools was to correct "a procedure that we thought had no basis in law," though the Supreme Court had clearly upheld a ruling barring such exemptions a decade earlier.
· Claims he has received a letter from Pope John Paul II in which he "approves what we've done so far" regarding U.S. Sanctions against the USSR, though the sanctions were not mentioned in the papal message.
· Responds to a question about the 17% black unemployment rate by pointing out that "in this time of great unemployment," Sunday's paper had "24 full pages of ... employers looking for employees," though most of the jobs available - computer operator, or cellular immunologist - require special training, for which his administration has cut funds by over 30%.
· Misstates facts about California's abortion law and an Arizona program to aid the elderly

"She really just got tired of people misinterpreting what she was doing."
- an aide explaining Nancy Reagan's decision to no longer accept gifts of designer clothes "on loan." Americans would learn six years later that Nancy never stopped accepting these gifts and would continue doing so until the end of her husband's White House tenure.

"We've got a $120 billion deficit coming, and the President says, 'You know, a young man went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka. That's what's wrong.' And we just shake our heads."
- Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., 1982

"Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?"
- Reagan on the worst unemployment figures in 42 years, 10.4 percent, 1982

"South Succotash, with its population of nearly 11 million, must be a considerable place."
- AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland

"Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?"
-Larry Speakes, on Reagan's citation of a nonexistent British law making the carrying a gun a capital offense. Reagan would make the same claim four years later.

"You know, your nose looks just like Danny Thomas'."
- Reagan to Lebanon's foreign minister in a meeting with Middle Eastern leaders

"Do I think US foreign policy is inept?...At times it is. At times it's not. At times it's even brilliant. At times it's rather stupid. It would be very hard for me to label it."
- Secretary of State Al Haig

"It would be a user fee."
- Reagan describing a proposed 5-cent-per-gallon gas tax

"It's a change in his view. It's not an evil empire. It's a Mickey Mouse system."
- an administration official on Reagan's view of the Soviet Union

"I don't think he's read the report in detail. It's five and a half pages, double-spaced."
- Larry Speakes on Reagan's grasp of facts on a Lebanese truck bombing, 1984

"With regard to the age issue and everything, if I had as much makeup on as he did, I'd have looked younger, too... I never did wear it. I didn't wear it when I was in pictures."
- Reagan in a post-debate swipe at Walter Mondale, quickly refuted by Reagan's former makeup artists on "G.E. Theater" and "Death Valley Days," as well as one of the debate panelists.

"Why aren't we talking about these hostages? Why is it allowed to stand when Ronald Reagan says America won't have hostages again? Are we bored with hostages now?"
- Lucille Levin, wife of an American hostage in Lebanon, comparing his then-1984 stance with his get-tough chest-beating on Iran while Carter was still president

"The moral equival of our Founding Fathers."
- Reagan's description of the Contra's in Nicaragua, terrorists responsible for thousands of civilian deaths

"Just had a verbal message delivered to me from Pope John Paul, urging us to continue our efforts in Central America."
- Reagan in a statement immediately refuted by the Vatican.

"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself."
- Reagan responding to criticism after he laid a wreath in a visit to a Nazi cemetery iin Bitburg, West Germany, 1985. While indeed in uniform during World War II, Reagan stayed behind in Hollywood to make training films.

"(Thirteen-year-old Beth Flom) urged me to lay the wreath at Bitburg cemetery in honor of the future of Germany."
- Reagan, apparently misunderstanding Flom's letter urging the president not to go.

"They haven't been there. I have."
- Reagan responding to Europeans heckling his Nicaragua policy. Reagan, in fact, never once set foot in the Central American country.

"They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country, the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated - that has all been eliminated."
- Reagan, praising the notoriously racist, apartheidist administration of South Africa's P.W. Botha as "reformist"

"You have to treat him as if you were the director and he was the actor, and you tell him what to say and what not to say, and only then does he say the right thing."
- an unnamed White House aide quoted in the New York Times magazine, 1985

"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?"
- David Stockman in his 1986 memoir

'Hypocrisy is a question of degree."
- Donald Regan asked whether it was hypocritical for the U.S. to demand that other countries not trade with Iran while we secretly sold them weapons.

"If Colonel North ripped off the Ayatollah and took $30 million and gave it to the Contras, then God bless Colonel North!"
- Pat Buchanan, praising the sale of arms to terrorist sponsor Iran and the illegal funding of terrorist thugs in Nicaragua

"I don't think there is another person in America that wants to tell this story as much as I do."
- Oliver North, opting just the same to plead the Fifth Amendment before a House ccommittee. Later he would lie to this same committee and be convicted of perjury.

"On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you'd have to argue it's wrong, but it's the exception sometimes that proves the rule."
- Vice President Bush

"The simple truth is, 'I don't remember - period."'
- Reagan on whether he authorized the arms for hostages deal in a written response to the Tower Commission investigating the scandal

"The record is that he was either absent or silent. I don't know what that does for him."
- Bob Dole on Reagan's poor memory

"I hope I'm finally going to hear some of the things I'm still waiting to learn."
- Reagan on the opening day of the Iran-Contra hearings, 1987

"I can't recall."
- Ed Meese in a statement (or some variation thereof) he would utter 340 times during the Iran-Contra hearings

"I can't recall."
- John Poindexter in a statement (or some variation thereof) he would utter 184 times during the Iran-Contra hearings

"That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country."
- Reagan citing what he sees as a communist conspiracy to discredit and dishonor Joseph McCarthy

"I knew those quotes were the way he felt."
- Larry Speakes, in his 1987 memoir, on making up quotes he attributed to the president

"Like reinventing the wheel."
- Speakes describing preparations with the persident for a press conference

"You know, if I listened to him long enough, I would be convinced that we're in an economic downturn, and that people are homeless, and people are going without food and medical attention, and that we've got to do something about the unemployed."
- Reagan on Michael Dukakis

"I will never apologize for the United States of America! I don't care what the facts are!"
- Vice President Bush after the U.S.S. Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, 1988

"This was a PR outfit that became President and took over the country."
- former press aide Leslie Janka in her 1988 tall-all, "On Bended Knee"

The minimum wage, estate tax and a couple of girls who matter to me

2006-07-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky to teach at my suburban school. Our students who live in the city and are bussed in daily under the voluntary transfer program are quite lucky too. I believe in this program strongly, and I can't wait to visit my city families in their northside homes each summer to let them know how lucky we all are. Not only that, but these visits allow me a glimpse into the lives of some kids who are very important to me, yet lead lives very different from mine.

I went out yesterday to visit two girls who will be in my class this year and their families. In one home, my student lives with both her mother and father, as well as several extended family members in a bustling, seemingly joyful single-family house. I didn't catch what mom does for a living, but dad works as a groundskeeper. At the second home I visited, a subsidized apartment, my girl lives with her sister and single mother, who works at Wal-Mart. I admire both families a lot. They are loving and stable with clean well-kept homes; these two girls are quite fortunate to be where they are. Yet, I know that in both homes, the parents earn little money, and day-to-day living must be a struggle. If my wife and I gross a combined $75,000 per year and often feel like we barely make it, then how must these folks feel?

I thought about these two families today as I heard news of the Republicans' efforts to hold hostage efforts to raise the minimum wage, a raise that's not happened since 1996. Under the proposal our minimum wage would incrementally rise over three years from its current $5.15 to $7.25, frankly still a pitiful wage but an improvement nonetheless. Republicans know that most Americans support this - 83 percent, according to a Pew Research poll earlier this month - although that didn't stop the Republican controlled Senate from voting against it in June. This time, they've chosen to blackmail Democrats, who have kept a vote on the estate tax repeal at bay. Either allow a vote on the estate tax repeal, Republicans say, or we will quash your minimum wage hike.

"It's going to be one hell of a rumpus," said Eric Ueland, chief of staff for Bill Frist's chief of staff.

Republicans have once again taken sides on who they value. The mega-wealthy over the working poor. You remember all the old estate tax repeal arguments ultimately demonstrated as dishonest and even outright lies. The most famous was the sob stories of all those family farmers who lost their spread after the heirs couldn't pay the "death taxes." When pressed by the New York Times, neither the White House nor the American Farm Bureau could come up with one example of any real family affected this way. Indeed, do you think the average American stands to inherit $4 million, the minimum at which an estate is currently taxed? Conservatives knew better, too, but still resorted to dishonesty to make it look like some sort of kitchen table issue. They showed true zeal and willingness to fight tooth and nail to repeal a ta that affects less than 1 percent of all estates every year. Is there a good case to be made for repealing the estate tax? Perhaps, but any logical argument was long ago obscured in the fog and haze of the Right's deceit and mendacity.

And they show equal amounts of it in their arguments against a raised minimum wage. Conservatives have always hated this as it interferes with their overly concrete belief in Adam Smith's guiding hand. We've heard it all before. If the economy is booming, these folks say that raising the minimum wage will put the brakes on everyone's fun. If the economy is in the shitcan, these folks warn that raising the minimum wage will slow down the recovery. It seems there's never a good time to suit conservatives. Don't forget the one about all those lost jobs and suffering small businessmen, an apparent falsehood given that three quarters of small business owners see no adverse consequences to a wage hike, according to a recent Gallup poll. And of course, to hear right-wingers talk, nobody actually earns the minimum wage other than teenagers flipping burgers, an utter lie.

I happened to tune into Oprah today - summers are great when you're a teacher - and she and her guests discussed these ridiculous claims made against raising the minimum wage. Morgan Spurlock of "Supersize Me" fame discussed his experiences earning minimum wage for one month as part of his new TV show, "30 Days." Spurlock and his girlfriend worked a string of jobs, doing the work none of us middle-class Americans wants to do and earning shockingly small paychecks in exchange. Their deprivations over a month are unimaginable to us average folks, and for Spurlock himself, this was merely a monthlong experiment, not a lifelong trap.

The Christian Science Monitor reported recently that 4.8 million Americans earn less than $7.25. Of those individuals, 48 percent were between the ages of 25 and 64 and support the majority of household expenses with their earnings. A full-time worker earning minimum wage at 40 hours per week and no vacation will gross $10,712 per year. Oprah reported today that 20 million Americans earn less than $10 per hour, and many of these folks include EMTs, teachers assistants and healthcare professionals - in essence people we depend on to do important work in our society. A 40-hour-per-week worker earning $10 per hour will gross an annaul pay of $20,800, still not a wage many of us middle-class Americans would find livable.

So as the right-wing think tanks and pundits work overtime to decry the injustice in taxing a $4 million estate and explain why the working poor don't really need extra money, my thoughts return to my two city girls, both age 10 and certainly not responsible for their family's financial situation. Their parents probably worry nonstop about how they will pay for the groceries, clothing, housing and the expenses of keeping everything running and working. I felt guilty yesterday simply handing over the school supply list. It's none of my business how much these families make, but I bet they could use some extra money.

Clearly Republicans have taken a stand, and it's not with my two girls. Do you plan to take one in November?

A little irony on your freedom fries?

I stumbled into the website selling W Ketchup today. You might remember this as a brand launched in 2004 by a group of ideologues wanting to boycott Heinz after false allegations connected the company to the Kerry campaign. The W in W Ketchup stands for Washington, the website claims with a knowing wink.

Anyway, on their site is a tribute to the deified one, Ronald Reagan. The purveyors of this product apparently forgot about his administration's classification of ketchup as a vegetable to save money on school lunches. Am I the only one seeing irony here? Apparently, W Ketchup's webmaster didn't.

Click here to see this worshipful paean to the man who single-handedly ended the Cold War, got the dadblamed government off our backs, and allowed the eagle to soar once again.

Did they really say that?

2006-07-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

My e-mail inbox has been filled these past couple of days with missives from an ongoing debate on my posting from a few days ago regarding Bush-haters vs. Clinton-haters.

I continue to hear an insistence from conservatives that liberals' rhetoric is meaner than conservatives. I guess they really believe that old Bushianism, if you repeat it enough times it becomes conventional wisdom and therefore truth. But I won't let that happen. I insist on conservatives facing up to the propaganda machine they've built, dependeed on and reveled in over the past 15 years.

Their arguments to the contrary are so sadly weak. When I ask conservatives to explain how liberals can be possibly worse than the Limbaugh/Hannity/Coulter/Ingraham/O'Reilly/Savage axis, they typically dish up the same recycled half dozen quotes from the past year from Howard Dean, Barbara Boxer or Dick Durbin. One conservative recently offered the old quote, "Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth," said by Ann Richards, at the time Texas state treasurer, in 1988.

We liberals don't need to go back 18 years. I can offer several from just the past couple of weeks. You think I can't? OK, I'll take that bet. Here goes:

Yesterday, July 20
"It is perfectly legitimate, perhaps even praiseworthy, to recognize Islam as a religion of vicious, violent, bloodthirsty cretins."
- Neal Boortz, categorically tarnishing anyone who practices the world's most-practiced religion. Isn't it funny how these same folks expect to win the hearts of Iraqis?

"A lot of Jewish liberals...say it's Israel's fault because we've been mean to (Palestinians), therefore they have a right to do whatever they want, behead people on camera, all this terrible stuff."
-Bill O'Reilly, asserting that some Jews think it's OK for Palestinians to commit acts of terrorism.

Tuesday, July 18
"The American left is cheering today. They'll probably break open the jug wine and cheer that Jews are dying, and that they're living and cowering in bomb shelters. One day, the 'Deutschland über alles' may be played in Jerusalem, and the American left can tear off their masks once and for all and show themselves to be what they really are, which is the Nazis of our time."
-Michael Savage

"So glad to hear that The New York Times got my letter."
-Anne Coulter on The Times' receipt of a powdery substance in the mail that turned out to be corn starch.

Friday, July 14
"(The 9/11 widows) put a lot of other women at risk for becoming widows."
-Coulter, not giving it a rest.

Thursday, July 13
"Couldn't he have killed Jerry Springer?"
-Bill O'Reilly on mafioso Tommy "Horsehead" Scafidi, who allegedly was ordered to rub out Geraldo Rivera.

"Shouldn't somebody be allowed to offer me 10, 20, or 100 thousand dollars?"
-John Stossel, arguing that transplant organs be bought and sold on the open market.

Wednesday, July 12
"I prefer a firing squad, but I'm open to a debate on the method of execution."
-Coulter, calling for New York Times editor Bill Keller's execution.

"I mean, they still have people in Brazil running around with their little darts, hitting you in the head with the poisoned darts, with the loincloths. They still have 'em down there. And they're driving an ethanol vehicle. After they hit you with the poisoned dart, OK, they get into their ethanol vehicle and drive back into the Amazon to do whatever they do there. Eat tapioca, whatever."
-O'Reilly, making what appears to be a backhanded compliment of Brazil's use of ethanol.

Tuesday, July 11
"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."
-Savage

So there you have it, 10 outrageous quotes from the past two weeks lifted off the liberal Media Matters website, which is devoted to monitoring this crew of loose cannons. Media Matter's job is easy. The 24-hour right-wing media establishment of talk-radio hosts and cable news talking heads is always blaring and spewing something mean-spirited, goofball and flat-out false.

And I've heard the right-wing response umpteen times. Well, this isn't the party leadership speaking, conservative ideologues say. It's such an incredibly tiresome, dishonest argument. Well, let's call it what it is - a chickenshit argument. I would argue that these pundits are indeed the party leadership, and the figureheads in the White House and on Capitol Hill beholden. If not that, then the right's pundirty serves as the standard-bearers who do the dirty work and allow Bush and Cheney to look statesmanlike and officious. There's no doubt of the White House's endorsement of this motley bunch. How many times have Cheney and Rumsfeld been Rush Limbaugh's guests? Have the president or any GOP leader ever called for these propagandists to at least turn down the rhetoric? Of course not. They wouldn't dare lest Bush's 35-percent approval rating plummets even further.

And how about the rank-and-file conservatives who listen to, watch and read this crap? They glue their ears and eyes to the radio and TV, unwilling to miss one word that will come out of Michael Savage's or Sean Hannity's mouths. They guffaw, high-five each other and revel in the vicious anger they so smugly describe as political incorrectness. But later, when challenged about the hateful words they so enjoy hearing, these folks harumph and clear their throats and deny they really listen to these guys. Well, someone's listening in. Millions in fact, according to industry figures, and I don't think they're on the left or even in the middle.. Yet, we can't get these conservatives who yammer on and on about personal responsibility to take responsibility for the rhetoric they so eageraly buy into.

And we liberals? Yes, some of us say some mean things, and I continually challenge folks on the left to not fall into the ugliness of the right's rhetoric. Yet, I look at Air America and other failed attempts at liberal talk radio. Folks on the left apparently have better things to do than tune into that garbage. I can't even get many of my liberal friends to read this blog; they tell me they have no interest in anyone's rantings. To equate a few kooks on the left with the very foundation of conservative hegemony is completely fallacious and an impossible task, at least not with a straight face.

How dare these Bush-haters!

2006-07-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg is indignant this morning, flat-out positively outraged. How dare these liberals! How dare they hate President Bush.

"Hatred of Bush drives - or poisons - almost everything in liberal politics now," Goldberg says, the sanctimonious righteousness dripping from his brow like so much sweat (Excuse my flowery Victorian metaphor, but nothing else seems as appopriate alongisde Goldberg's grave disapproval).

For an example of this venomous hatred, he points to the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, who wrote that Bush has "wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of this nation."

Horrors! Gasp! Let the booing and popcorn throwing begin in this melodrama. The cursed, blasted liberals exercise the temerity to say that our handsome, gallant Bush has pursued some extreme courses of action that have been harmful to our nation. To be certain, Chait's criticisms carry none of the elan of the Right's artful wordsmithing. When will these dastardly liberals at least begin showing the gentlemanly or ladylike statesmanship of such conservatives as Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity who so delicately, yet truthfully, make their points so that they can never be denied?

"America haters," Hannity so kindly refers to those wicked liberals.

"God haters," says Coulter, pinky sticking daintily out from her teacup.

"Shut up!" O'Reilly says to disagree in a most constructive fashion with his esteemed colleague in the adjoining chair.

OK, enough of my silly rhetoric stolen from a forgotten episode of "Dudley Do-Right." Let me just ask point blank, do conservatives seem more than a little silly in their self-righteous moralizing against criticizing the president, in their assertion that liberals are sour and mean-spirited? We know that some folks on the right exercise a Soviet-style penchant for rewriting history. But do you remember as I do their bitter, mean-spirited hatred of President Clinton? How can anyone forget, other than conservatves who do so quite conveniently?

Let's go back about 10 or so years ago and recall the constructive, statesmanlike things what they were saying:

1) Clinton murdered Vince Foster.
2) Clinton directed tanks to act as flame-throwers to ignite the Branch Davidian compound.
3) Paramilitary wacko Randy Weaver and child molester David Koresh were misunderstood heroes who stood up to Clinton's evil.
4) Government is evil. In fact, let's overthrow the government. (They backed down from that one after Tim McVeigh attempted to make good on their wish)
5) If an FBI agent comes to your door, aim for the head because he'll probably have on a flak jacket.
6) Clinton murdered those two boys mysteriously found dead along the railroad tracks outside Benton, Ark.
7) State troopers in Arkansas provided Clinton with a steady stream of bimbos. (David Brock admits he made that one up)
8) Whitewater. What the hell was that, anyway? Apparently Kenneth Starr didn't find anything there, try as he might (well, other than a cigar and a stained dress).
9) The American Spectator set up shop in Hot Springs, Ark., to search for any more allegations, the truth behind those allegations clearly of secondary importance.
10) Clinton was a draft dodger. OK, that one might be true, but a hypocrisy considering the accusers' unquestioning worship of the current Draft Dodger in Chief.
11) Clinton was a pot smoker. True again, but it appears to many of us that the current Drug User and Recovering Alcoholic in Chief used more than just pot.

These were widely accepted attitudes and views among the mainstream of conservatism, accepted as fact without any questioning for veracity. As crazy as all these allegations seem, they were not extremist views held by a fringe. Not in the least. These were views held by the average rank and file right-winger with plenty of encouragement from the likes of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and his cabal of Washington ideologues.

Let me say, lest people see this entry as a defense of Clinton, that I grew to thorough dislike him during his presidency. His character was poor, he was shady and he was frankly a disgrace on the office. There was so much about Clinton to dislike that was true that all of these fabricated stories, made-up scandals and flat-out lies were so gratuitous and only served to characterize many Clinton-haters as the same kinds of frothing, red-faced kooks they accuse today's Bush-haters of being. And is there more than a little hypocrisy in tolerating, ignoring and even celebrating so much of the same behavior and poor-character from Bush that these folks claimed to loathe in Clinton?

In the end, are we liberals really so terrible in our criticism of President Bush?

Evil-doers or democracy lovers? Which is it?

2006-07-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

I admit it. I'm perplexed. I seem to be hearing two messages from the right about Middle Easterners, especially Iraqis. They hate us and everything we stand for. They're evil and they wish to destroy us. No wait. They're freedom loving people, and our troops are dying so they can sculpt the democratic republic they so long for.

Which is it?

I consider this as polling data comes forth from the Pew Research Center showing that we Americans and Westerners in general hold a pretty negative view of Middle Easterners and especially Muslims. According to the poll:

*69 percent of Americans think Muslims are disrespectful of women.
*Americans are almost evenly split on whether devout Islam can ever be conducive to life in a modern society.
*More than 40 percent of us think that Muslims are violent and fanatical.

And listen to what some conservatives say about the people they allegedly seek to liberate. Southern Baptist leader Jerry Vines called Mohammed a "deomn-possessed pedophile," and said, "Allah is not Jehovah. Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist that will try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people."

Asked Pat Robertson, "Whoever heard of such a bloody, bloody, brutal type of religion? But that's what it is. It is not a religion of peace."

Michael Savage had a few words about what he'd like to do to Muslims: "So, kill 100 million of them, then there'd be 900 million of them. I mean ... would you rather us die than them? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later."

Remember, these are people who strongly support this war.

At the same time an entire World region is branded as antithetical to everything we hold dear, Republicans, conservatives and war supporters insist that Iraqis are freedom-loving peaceful folks who urgently need our help in transforming their nation into a vibrant democracy.

"The vast majority of Iraqis do not want to live under an Iranian-style theocracy and want Syria to stop allowing the transit of terrorists," states a White House fact sheet on the progress of installing democratic institutions in Iraq.

President Bush himself said in a 2003 speech, "And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free."

Certainly, conservatives cheered on all those blue thumbs held up for the media during last year's elections in Iraq, presented as proof that Iraqis love freedom and democracy and that the war is producing the results we seek.

So which is it? Are Iraqis freedom-haters who despise everything we cherish? Or are they big-hearted lovers of freedom and progressive values? It appears war supporters want it both ways. I know how they would probably answer those questions. The terrorists are different from the average Iraqis, they'd say, who simply seek peace and freedom.

But I'm not so sure that's true. What's becoming increasingly apparent is that most attacks on our troops in Iraq are carried out by locals. We also see that most recent terrorist plots from last year's bombimgs to this summers uncovered plot to attack the Canadian Parliament have been the work of folks from the local mosque, not the work of some worldwide terrorist army. Recent polling data indicates that a large percentage of Iraqis think that attacking U.S. troops is OK and that acts of terrorism might indeed be permissible under some circumstances.

I'm not going to wade in today to fathom attitudes of the average Iraqi. Attempting to ascertain the "goodness" or "badness" of an entire religion or nation is quite a tricky undertaking. Their perceptions of the world and America, right or wrong, often color their attitudes. I would bet that most are just trying to survive and are no better or worse than the society around them.

In the end, I suspect that the folks we wish to liberate are really the same people we Americans label as intolerant terrorists. Somewhere between those two characterizations, I'm sure, lies the truth.

A Greek tragedy played out for the zillionth time

2006-07-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
- Mark 8:36

It appears Ken Lay pulled off the ultimate prison escape yesterday.

You'd think I would have danced a jig in delight. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Or maybe I should have been outraged that he didn't get the punishment many of us feel he deserved. After all, here was public enemy No. 1 for us liberals, the poster boy for everything wrong with corporate America and our money-dominated political system. I rejoiced when he was convicted. I guffawed heartily the other day when I received this month's Texas Monthly magazine in the mail and saw the small tag on the cover teasing, "Kenny Boy Gets His." In fact, we watched "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," just last week (As Netflix subscribers we're quite slow in getting to the latest movies). I watched the documentary with great satisfaction, knowing what I thought was the ultimate outcome, that Kenny Boy was indeed getting his. Obviously, I had no idea at the time what the ultimate outcome would be.

But instead of feeling outraged or thrilled, I just feel kind of sad. I actually do feel sorry for Ken Lay. You know us liberals, how we feel sorry for the worst criminals and always seek to understand those who do terrible things. And look at the terrible things Lay and his minions did. There's the 2001 California power crisis, originally blamed by conservatives on state authorities, but in retrospect clearly the work of Enron trading floor warriors who sought to kidnap every last watt from the state as some sort of twisted ransom scheme. Imagine the essential services and commerce disrupted to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And we can't forget all those employees who stood by helplessly watching their frozen retirement funds drain away like the California power grid while Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow were cashing in secretly on their own investments to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Some conservatives say these rank-and-file workers got what they deserved for their alleged greed, but most of us in middle class America have more empathy than that. There but for the grace of God, we say.

So goshdarnit, why do I feel bad for this guy? I suppose because sometimes it's not fun at all to see someone get his or her just desserts. And I have no doubt that Ken Lay saw himself as a decent guy. I'm sure he honestly saw himself as some sort of visionary out to reinvent American business, a John D. Rockefeller for our times. He was known for his personal generosity, dispensing millions from his own assets for causes I'm sure were worthy. Like me, he belonged to a United Methodist church, so I assume that in his heart he felt he was a good Christian. And perhaps God agrees. His friends all were quoted in this morning's paper, describing lay as a good friend and gave many examples of his personal magnaminity. Who am I to argue?

So how do we reconcile these conflicting pictures of personal generosity and corporate callousness in the very same individual? It seems that the first answer is a matter of compartmentalization, that phenomenon allowing people to act as bastards in the workplace and act as dear friends, parents and otherwise generous souls away from the workplace. There's a line between work life and private life, the compartmentalized soul says, and the two can be kept separate. You've probably worked with - or more likely worked for - one of these people. You couldn't stand being around him, but were shocked to learn what a kind, decent soul he becomes when he goes home from the office. Or perhaps you've been good friends or gone to church with someone like this. You think she's an example of true Christian kindness and charity, and later you're crestfallen to learn that perhaps she mistreats her employees or behaves unethically on the job. There in a nutshell lies the essence of Ken Lay's character.

Lay was also a greedy and arrogant man. He craved money and power more than anything else, certainly more than any sense of ethics or decency could rein in. He labored under a long history and personal track record of winking at gross ethical violations and even outright crookedness. Hear no evil, see no evil, Lay seemed to say. Be sure you're making me lots of money, but please don't tell me what you're doing to earn it. This affected ignorance allowed Lay to plead that he knew nothing of what Skilling and Fastow were up to, yet of course he knew damn well the whole time. Ultimately, his tolerance for malfeasance and the increasing belief in his own corporate divinity led to his downfall.

So Lay never will go to prison. Still, he paid dearly. His fall from the uppper echelons of Houston's power elite must have been unbearable. To watch the corporate empire he built himself crumble into dust must have been the ultimate punishment. And for such a man who thirsted for acclaim to see his name and image loathed by the American public, it must have just killed him worse than any heart attack.

So Kenny Boy really did get his, after all. It's a timeless Greek tragedy. Apparently, the Athenians had a few Kenny Boys over 2,000 years ago. Clearly, Ken Lay was alive and well in Shakespeare's day. And because the arrogant and power hungry learn nothing from history, the tragedy will continue to repeat itself over and over again into perpetuity.

America the Beautiful, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2006-07-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

As we prepare to celebrate another Fourth of July this week, I find myself pondering the national soul.

Maybe it's always been this way, but increasingly, I hear a hopefully small but awfully vocal groups of Americans take our goodness for granted as an absolute assumption. We're moral and just and good, they say, simply because we're Americans. Our goodness is not based on our actions, they seem to believe, but simply on our mere being. Likewise, they say, criticize America's actions and you must believe that America is bad and evil. You apparently hate America.

I think of this in recent days as I've heard arguments made that because we're not as bad as al-Qaeda, we don't really need to consider systematic torture and mistreatment of detainess in Abu Graib or Guantanamo. Because our detention facilities are nowhere near as bad as the Soviet gulags or Hitler's concentration camps, we need not worry about conditions there. Becasue our goodness is absolute, we must always be absolutely right. Because the bad guys are so much worse than we are, self reflection is never necessary and we need never take responsibility for misdeeds or missteps. In fact, there absolutely cannot be any misdeeds and missteps, because after all, we're America.

This extends to our view of the rest of the world. Since we're naturally good, we must always be right. Any nation that disagrees with us must be wrong. Because most nations disagree with us on our war in Iraq, most other countries are wrong and probably even weak in character. Other countries supporting us in Iraq support us only officially with that support quite unpopular among the people there. So those countries must be weak in character, also. Therefore we can take whatever unilateral action we wish, and everyone other nation on Earth must be wrong and even immoral.

These same folks usually call themselves Christians and declare us a Christian nation. It's a nation in which a seeming majority of God's people have committed themselves to warmongering and global coercion; a steadfast, unwavering support for the status quo; and a draconian agenda committed to comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. A few dissenting Christians might argue that this doesn't appear to be Christ's way. But the bulkd of God's people have spoken in America. Because we're God's people, they say, we must be right. If you disagree with our agenda, some of them even say, then you must hate God.

In the end, they say, we're great simply by being Americans, not by anything we say or believe.

I know these are tough words at a time when we should be putting tough words aside for at least a day to celebrate America, despite our differences. But this morning in church, we sang "America the Beautiful" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I've always appreciated both songs, but listening to their words today, I was touched by the humility, self-reflection and true desire for goodness and righteousness they deliver. Both pieces imply an "if-then" statement. If we truly seek wisdom, righteousness and justice, then we truly are great, they say.

As you read the words to both hymns below, consider the message and ask youself what you base your patriotism on. A smug self-satisfaction and self-congratulation? Or a humble self-reflection and deep sense of responsibility to step forth to what is right and make amends for what is wrong?

America the Beautiful
Words by Katharine Lee Bates

Melody by Samuel Ward

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare of freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

America! America!

God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife.

Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life!

America! America!

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness

And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for halcyon skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the enameled plain!

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

Till souls wax fair as earth and air

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Words by Julia W. Howe

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
is day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet;
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free;[originally …let us die to make men free]
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

The America haters who understand what America is all about

2006-06-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin

Amazing, isn't it, how some Americans would virtually take a match to the Bill of Rights if they could live free from terror. And of course the terrorists would applaud these patriots for the utter scorn they show for the American values they pretend to hold dear. We see this in the outrage over the New York Times' decision to publish a story last Sunday describing how authorities are monitoring financial transactions among suspected terrorists. As a Times subscriber, I read the story myself on Sunday and concluded that Uncle Sam's scrutiny of these transactions is reasonable and any intrusion into civil rights was minimal.

Nonetheless, I was glad for the opportunity to decide for myself. You see, these days the Bush administration should be granted little quarter when they argue wartime, national security, and so forth. Yes, I know we're at war, and we don't want to tip off terrorists. But Bush's abuse of this argument and his clear unyielding desire to always keep Americans in the dark leave me with little sympathies to his and other war supporters' arguments that informing the public equals aiding and comforting terrorists.

I'm sure Bush didn't want us to know what was going on at Abu Graib and Guantanamo. But I'm glad the liberal media allowed us Americans to decide for ourselves.

I'm sure Bush didn't want us to know about the archipelago of secret prisons the CIA is operating. But I'm glad the America-haters in the press decided that Americans should judge for themselves whether this was important.

I'm sure Bush didn't want us to know that our country has systematically used torture in its efforts to gather intelligence. But I'm glad the terrorist sympathizers who cover the news chose not to let our leader make that call for the rest of us.

I'm sure Bush didn't want us to know that the terrorist fighters routinely eavesdrop on telephone conversations with no outside oversight and that they wish to collect data on every last phone call every last one us has made since 9/11. But I'm glad the commie pinko faggots in the Fourth Estate were undeterred.

So perhaps you can see why I have a lot of trouble sympathizing when I hear once again that keeping Americans informed on what their government is up to constitutes sedition. Needless to say, Dick Cheney is outraged and said as much in a speech yesterday. A Republican congressman from New York has publicly urged the attorny general to investigate for possible espionage charges. And in one of the more laughable attempts at censure, the head librarian at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio took it upon himself to cancel the tiny liberal arts school's subscription. After all, since the librarian is unhappy with the Times no one else should be allowed to read it, yet more evidence that the loudest of our self-proclaimed patriots seem to understand least why America is so great.

Perhaps in response, I should extend my own Times subscription to seven days.

Global warming and the illusion of debate

2006-06-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

Stop the presses! Secondhand smoke is bad. So proclaims Surgeon General Richard Carmona in this morning's paper.

"The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard," Carmona said.

I well remember when the secondhand smoke theory first made headlines in the 1980s. For years thereafter, the mere idea that breathing someone else's cigarette smoke was dangerous provided grist for the right-wing punditry, which wallowed in outrage at the very idea that one might have the right to not inhale. Pseudoscience, they raged, all in the name of perpetuating a liberal social agenda.

Secondhand smoke? Hell, firsthand smoke remained a controversy until quite recently. Or at least one would think. Really, any doctor would have told you that smoking kills and the vast majority of us believed it. But the tobacco industry spent years and millions of dollars to masterfully throw up a cloud of doubt that didn't really exist and reams of junk science to point out that they've never really PROVEN that cigarettes kill. And they were always able to put a few voices out there to back them up that sounded very scientific. It worked, too. Millions of smokers continued to puff away, willfully rejecting the prevailing science, glad for the illusion that there was still debate over the matter. It wasn't until the tobacco industry, facing hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages, came clean and admitted they knew darn well that smoking kills.

I rehash the smoking "debate" as an analogy to the reputed debate going on right now over global warming. The vast majority of climatologists for years have expressed belief that global warming is transpiring and that we humans are causing it. Finally last week the National Academy of Sciences weighed in that yes indeed we are causing global climate change and courting catastrophe. In the morning's paper, buried behind the front-page revelation that smoking is bad, is brief in which the Associated Press polled 100 top climate researchers about Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Our those 100 polled, 19 had actually seen the movie, and all 19 said Gore and the moviemakers got it right. For the record, I have not seen the movie myself, and I may or may not see it.

Yet the illusion of debate rages on. I'm sure some contrarian scientist are sincere and can make lucid points to support their disbelief in global warming. I also know that there's a concerted effort to throw up a fog of misinformation and give the notion that there are still credible questions over whether global warming exists or if it's just a "hoax," as U.S. James Inhofe, R-Okla., characterizes it. We know that ExxonMobil provides over $1 million per year to organizations who can muddy the waters. Many of these are not science related concerns, but merely right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom (for) average citizens (and) the media," states a 1998 Exxon internal memo that the tree-huggers managed to get their hands on.

And just as the tobacco industry's tricks stalled meaningful action for decades, so do the corporate nay-sayers' tactics. A young classmate of mine declared the other day that all this global-warming talk might just be some sort of Marxist plot. Perhaps some folks really honestly believe that this is an unsettled matter. Others I believe stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what is indeed an inconvenient truth. To admit that there is such a thing as global warming and to understand that it necessitates personal and national sacrifice, well, that's too much to ask. We don't believe in sacrifice anymore. That's what our ancestors did 65 years ago. As for us latter-day folks, it's all about consuming as much as we like, never sacrificing and never denying ourselves.

To those who still don't believe, I ask you, could the weight of all the evidence in the entire universe ever change your mind? Where is the bar of proof for you? In the stratosphere? The troposphere? If 9 out of 10 scientists say X, is it wise to cast your lot with the scientist who says Y? Looking back, when would it have been personally wisest to believe that smoking kills, in 1964 when the first surgeon general's report came out or in 1998 when the tobacco industry finally admitted it? Likewise, if you ever decide that maybe the vast majority of scientists are correct on global warming, will it be too late to do anything about it?

If you still insist that substantive debate remains over whether we are warming our Earth, you may be interested in knowing that debate apparently rages on in other questions of science that you may have thought were settled a long time ago. Click here to learn more.

A backward glance in The Onion

Do you ever read The Onion? For those of you who aren't in on the joke, The Onion is a satirical newspaper that plays on current events and social phenomena. It reads like a regular newspaper, and is very serious in newspaper style, yet is outrageously funny. I have an Onion page-a-day calendar, and here's this morning's selection, obviously dating back to 2003:

BUSH ORDERS IRAQ TO DISARM BEFORE START OF WAR

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Maintaining his hardline stance against Saddam Hussein, President Bush ordered Iraq to fully dismantle his military before the U.S. begins its invasion next week.

"U.S. intelligence confirms that, even as we speak, Saddam is preparing tanks and guns and other weapons of deadly force for use in our upcoming war against him," Bush said Sunday during his weekly radio address. "This madman has every intention of firing back at our troops when we attack his country."

Bush warned the Iraqi dictator to "lay down (his) weapons and enter battle unarmed or face the consequences."

By the way, readers who live here in the Gateway City will enjoy today's story online. Click here.

Yes, but...

2006-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Underneath all their whining and carrying on about their alleged persecution, right-wingers sometimes do present an element of salient truth. In this case I speak of liberal orthodoxy on the college campus. Too bad the hyperbole and hystrionics that so often characterize conservative discourse often make any truth easily dismissable. Truth should never be dismissed out of hand, no matter how badly it's portrayed. Yet, conservatives often make it so easy to do just that.

I reflect on this as I've returned to college this summer to pursue a master's degree in educational administration. Essentially, I'm going to principal's school, and after two days in class, I'm wondering if buried way down beneath all the foolish ideological rhetoric about liberal political correctness, lies more than a kernal of truth.

Certainly we've all heard the right-wing horror stories about tenured radicals on college campuses and how universities are hotbeds of leftist subversion. These allegations go back at least 100 years, and perhaps they really have their roots in the Middle Ages when practicing mathematics was equated with witchcraft.

To be sure, much of this hysteria seems to have an anti-education, closeminded tone, such as the pervasive myth that we teachers are engaged in all sorts of social engineering (Frankly, we teachers just want the kids to put down their Game Boys for a few minutes so we can teach them to read and cypher a little math.) We see this mindset as Southern Baptists reluctantly voted yesterday not to call (at least not yet) for the complete withdrawal of Baptist children from public schools. Instead, they called for Baptists to run for school board posts so they can propogate their own social engineering agenda. I could go on about College Republican types who fly off the handle the second they disagree with their professor, religious fundamentalists who forbid their children to go to college lest they form a different worldview from their parents, or pro-business types who believe that any learning that doesn't contribute to the bottom line of a corporation is frivolous and contemptible.

Yet, amid all this conservative closemindedness, I increasingly can't help but wonder if we liberals are pretty damned closeminded, dogmatic and orthodox ourselves. One of my classes essentially addresses political issues in the educational arena. It's mostly discussion, and really it's loads of fun to discuss and sometimes argue politics with classmates and the professor. Our professor is a pretty laid-back sort, a self-described liberal who enjoys a lively debate and doesn't mind disagreement with his line (or at least I hope, for the sake of my grade). Certainly, the class is not politically monolithic. We have a guy who believes that for-profit schools and school competition will fix everything. We have another gentleman who believes that Christians are under attack in America and the world went to hell with Abington v. Schemp.

As we discussed on, a liberal consensus emerged, one that I sometimes agreed with. At the same time, a rather disturbing charicature of political correctness and liberal orthodoxy began to emerge. Let me outline two rather valid characterizations a conservative would have made about our discussion:

1) Liberals believe in tolerance only for liberal viewpoints. We all started with mostly universal agreement that we should not be leading prayers or other religious observances in the classroom, an admitted minority viewpoint in America today. But as the discussion evolved, some, including the professor, argued that we shouldn't eveb be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in our classrooms, lest someone be offended, and I found myself as the only vocal dissenter to that idea. Yet, many of my classmates felt that it's morally and ethically OK to preach their political and social agenda, whether it be against the war in Iraq or for gay marriage. In essence to me, and I argued quite vocally for this point, it appears that a conservative perspective is verboten in classroom, yet liberals should feel to vocally preach their own worldview.

2) Liberals continue supporting the same empty-headed approach to education that got us into the mess we're in. Here's what I heard: Teachers unions can do no wrong, and perhaps teachers should even be compelled to join. If a child treats you disrespectfully, blame yourself or the system because many teachers are not respectful to children. There is zero benefit to standardized testing. A Christmas tree, no matter how secular, is a true threat to any non-Christian, and must be eradicated from the public arena. Education is really not in crisis; the crisis is merely an invention of right-wing politicians. Have you heard all this before? Any wonder why nothing ever changes?

Am I oversimplifying? Of course. Yet as liberal as you know I am, I found myself in this class discussion frequently saying "Yes, but..." This isn't to say that I'm switching sides. The right's approach to education I still find anti-intellectual, intolerant and often elitist. But if the dogma that's being presented as truth in my graduate classes is all liberal America has to offer in the realm of education reform, then we might as well pack it up and go home, because our non-liberal neighbors ain't buying it, and frankly I'm not either.

Furthermore, if we're so predictable in our logic, then I suppose the reprehensible likes of Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh aren't so off-base after all when they can so predictably charicaturize us.

So how about it liberals? Are you truly the independent thinker you like to think you are? Or have you crammed your entire philosophy and beliefs into some pre-ordained box as we enjoy accusing conservatives of doing?

Something to think about

I rejoiced as everyone did last week with the news of al-Zarqawi last week, but Sylvester Brown makes a good point in his column in today's Post-Dispatch:

It's hard to draw a moral line between a civilized government that proudly displays photos of a bloody corpse and the "uncivilized" insurgents who distributed videos of beheadings. How exactly is the Pentagon behaving better than those soldires who e-mailed photos of sexually and physically brutalized Iraqi detainees?

Ever wonder if we at least sometimes show at least glimpses of the same characteristics as those we claim to be evil-doers?

The heroes Americans love to hate

2006-05-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've heard the news by now that two CBS News crew members were killed yesterday when a nearby car loaded with explosives detonated in Baghdad. The explosion also left correspondent Kimberly Dozier critically injured. Our prayers should be with her as we don't know what her future holds.

Yesterday, I paid tribute to the hundreds of thousands of American service people who have died in war over the past 200-plus years. Perhaps these above-mentioned deaths yesterday provide us with an opportunity to pay tribute to some folks who put their necks on the line everyday, but receive little gratitude and a whole lot of scorn.

So far, 96 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the war began. They come from different backgrounds. Some were reporters. Some were photographers. Others were Iraqi guides and assistants. They came from a number of countries as varied as the U.S., Britain, Argentina, Spain and Australia. Their jobs were essentially the same: to get the wartime news out of Iraq and to the rest of the world so that we might know.

But unlike our soldiers, we haven't waved flags and memorialized these folks with holidays, Air Force flyovers or 21-gun salutes. At best, we've greeted their deaths with a headshake of momentary regret. Too often it's been with ingratitude and snotty attitudes about the a group of people we tend to despise for reasons we all know, some valid, many ridiculously overstated and overgeneralized. Yes, some of these folks are arrogant and ambitious, and we all know about Jayson Blair and his ilk who like to make things up. But mainly we can't stand to have someone tell us something we don't like to hear, so we conveniently assume bias, poor ethics and bicoastal arrogance. That sure beats having to look inward and question whether we have our own facts and understanding of the situation straight. (By the way, the left is getting to be about as bad as the right in this aspect.)

In the meantime, the press corps in Iraq is out on the line taking fire and assuming the risks of bombs, landmines and rockets, just as our soldiers are. The result has been that we on the homefront get to sit in our comfy living rooms every night and learn what is happening in Iraq. Sometimes we learn about things we wish we didn't have to learn, such as the disgrace of Abu Graib and last week's news of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians by Marines. But knowing gives us power as citizens. And that's when good things happen in America.

It's much the same for the thousands of journalists here in our own communities. While not facing the bombs and bullets of their colleagues in Iraq, they work everyday to let you know what's happening from your own school board to our nation's Congress. In essence they give you the information we need to make wise decisions as voters, taxpayers and citizens. Armed with that knowledge, we the people can do great things. Without the media, where would we receive this information? How much change would happen then?

Indeed, freedom isn't free. So, be sure to thank a journalist.

BTW

Did you hear that Pat Robertson leg-pressed 2,000 pounds the other day? Oh, and by the way, he'd love to sell you some protein shake, so you can also leg-press a ton. Click here to learn more about this amazing offer!

Memorial Day Wishes

2006-05-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

Let's put aside our differences on the war in Iraq for just one day, and salute those whose lives were taken in service to country. These men and women knew damn well what might happen to them when they enlisted, yet they chose to enlist anyway. Many of these folks died in the midst of extraordinary heroics, many others just doing their job, which itself is heroic. I watch the faces flash by every night on the "News Hour" on PBS of those killed in Iraq, and I don't know which is sadder, to see those 18- and 19-year-old kids whose lives were stolen fromthem just as they started or those folks in their 30s and 40s, who leave children fatherless or motherless.

A few postings back, I lamented that I could never be a pacifist, as badly as I wish I could be one. Sadly, in this deeply flawed world, we need good people with guns and bombs to protect us from the bad people with guns and bombs who wish us harm. I still consider myself an activist for peace, and I still believe that war is an incredible evil that should be avoided as much as possible. Yet, we have fought just wars in this nation's history, and some of these wars just couldn't be avoided.

The expression "Freedom isn't free," has unfortunately been co-opted by the pro-war activitsts as a cudgel of sorts, and yet those words hold some truth. We can enjoy our mundane lives, relatively free of fear, because some good people have been watching over us for over 200 years.

Just to look at the numbers of these good people who have made the ultimate sacrifice can be overwhelming. Therefore I have posted below the numbers of Americans battle deaths in each war in our nation's history:

Revolutionary War: 4,435
War of 1812: 2,260
Mexican-American War: 1,733
Civil War: 184, 594
Spanish-American War: 385
World War I: 53,583
World War II: 292,131
Korean War: 33,651
Vietnam War: 47,369
Gulf War: 148
Iraq War: 2,465 (As of today, 5/29/06)

These numbers don't include thousands of non-battle deaths, yet war-related deaths, which deserve as much respect as those deaths which occurred in the heat of fighting.

I don't want to get maudlin or overly sentimental. Such expressions elicit more eye-rolling than appreciation, so I'll stop here and ask you to pause if you haven't already and say a prayer of thanks for these hundreds of thousands of Americans who aren't here today so that you could be.

The World According to John Stossel

2006-05-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

I remember a kinder, gentler time when John Stossel was a touchy, feely bleeding heart, warning 20/20 viewers of the dangers of exploding toasters and those orange Fiestaware plates. But ol' John was just one of countless bleeding heart reporters in the pantheon of liberal journalism. He didn't really stand out, and he was badly ithcin' for his own niche (like mediocre CBS guy Bernard Goldberg since turned born-again right-winger).

And then John came up with "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?" a one-hour special from about 10 years ago in which he made a pretty convincing case that we Americans allow ourselves to be frightened by sensational media types (like John himself until now) that we deny ourselves a great deal of enjoyment that should come with life. I think a great argument was made, but sadly, a libertarian wackjob was also born with the acclaim that followed this sepcial. Nowadays of course we know that John Stossel is a liberatarian contrarian extrordinaire, debunking all supposed conventional wisdom as the foolishness of nervous nellie liberals. DDT and asbestos are really good for you. Helmets are for sissies. It's only just and fair that more than a few little old grandmas get cheated out of their pensions every year. Thank God for Stossel. He's going to set the record straight with his homespun wisdom and expse these liberals for the ghouls and bloodsuckers they really are.

Of course, along John's road to Damascus, ABC has been more than happy to let this guy rant, considering that he has a right-wing following that always tunes in. So much for the liberal media, right?

Which brings me to tonight's "20/20" Stossel tour de force "Myths, Lies, and Outright Stupidity." Stossel brings us 10 myths to shock us and bring us around to his worldview that selfishness, greed and cold-heartedness really are virtues. Some of the myths he exposes are just silly and irrelevant (Red cars get pulled over more often. Elephants are afraid of mice) and of course they're designed to mask his ideology run amok. Of course, John encourages us frequently throughtout the presentation to buy his new book on just this very subject.

But others come with a true political agenda, and I'm sure Dick Cheney couldn't agree with ol' John more. Let's recap:

Myth No. 10: Americans are running out of oil.

In Stosselworld, we really have plenty of oil, and we can continue drilling our way to energy independence. But only as long as we annex Canada. You see, according to John, we have these "tar sands" in Alberta that John claims will supply us with oil for more than 100 years. That's the only solution he offers, so I'm assuming he believes tar sands to be the end-all, be-all of energy.

OK, so I'm not going to claim to be a geologist or oil expert. However, I have learned that two tons of sand equal one barrel of oil. So I ask you, how expensive does a barrel of oil have to get to make this cost effective? And is there some cheaper way of producing energy? I'm sure half of Houston will tell me how naive and foolish I am, but I truly wonder if John is oversimplifying things by telling us all how we've finally solved this problem of the past 35 years.

Myth No. 6: Radiation is bad

Did you know that people are actually exposed to high doses of radiation to cure cancer? Well,OK, yeah, I knew that too. But apparently this is a true revelation to John Stossel who breathlessly reports this as an argument for why exposure to high levels of radiation is a good thing. In fact, I guess we should all expose ourselves to high levels of plutonium and strontium. Stossel's main argument apparently is that initial reports of casualties related to Chernobyl were vastly overreported in the tens of thousands. In fact, the widely agreed death toll is 56, so far. Using a parallel logic, the 1,000 or so dead from Hurricane Katrina, compared with intitial estimates of 10,000 dead prove that Katrina wasn't really that big a deal and the liberal media overstated the seriousness of this minor seasonal squall.

If you don't believe Stossel and need further proof of the safety of radiation and foolishness of these liberal nervous nellies, just ask the 60,000 residents of Hiroshima who died within monts of the Enola Gay's visit. (I can't seem to find universal agreement on how many actually were killed by radiation poisoning, so I threw out the first number I found.)

Myth No. 5: Teachers are underpaid

Now, these are fightin' words.

First, let me say, for the record I make $36,000 a year teaching fifth grade. I didn't get into this for the money, and I knew up front I wouldn't make what I really ought to be making, considering the importance of this job and what I could be making doing any number of frivolous, hollow, and frankly stupid pursuits.

Still, the idea that we're not underpaid rings hollow and ridiculous. Stossel asserts that on average we teachers make more than firefighters, chemists and physical therapists. At a national average of about $45,000 per year, teachers do indeed make more than firefighters and chemists. However, chemists make an average of $61,000 per year according to Salary.com

Putting that aside, this is really a question about what we really value as Americans. Apparently, we think lawyers, NBA players and TV newsmagazine correspondents do the world more good than those people who give your child an education. Stossel, ever disengenuous, points out that New York schoolteachers average $60,000 per year, as if one could enjoy any decent standard of living in New York on that kind of money. John's just mad because he got into a highly-visible pissing match with some New York teachers union.

Myth No. 4: Secondhand smoke isn't really dangerous.

Well, John likes to hedge his bets on this one. He admits that it really is dangerous over time. But it's not dangerous over the course of 20 minutes. As if the rest of the world didn't know this. But John likes to point to the rantings of some crackpot scientist who asserts just that to leave us with some vague picture that anyone who thinks cigarettes are dangerous is some sky-is-falling liberal fool, once again duped by the mainstream media's ongoing campaign of lies.

Myth No. 2: Price-gouging is bad.

You see, when Hurricane Katrina struck is was really a good thing that water was going for $2 a bottle or gas at $4.50 per gallon (I'm just making these numbers up.), it was really a good thing. This kept people from hoarding, and if they didn't have the money to buy these things, they should just evacuate themselves to the New Orleans Convention Center where ol' Brownie was sure to lend a hand.

You see, greed is good, and when you're looking out for No. 1 and taking advantage of the other guy, you truly are a shrewd businessman, which equates with moral certitude and godliness. And you certainly pass the WWJD test. That is, What Would John Do?

Class warfare from the White House to you

2006-04-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

I made my annual pilgrimage to H&R Block today to find out how much I owe on my taxes, since I never seem to ever earn a refund. So here's the punchline: $2,193. Funny, huh?

Of course I wasn't laughing. The Mouth and Mrs. Mouth are schoolteachers, so we're not exactly reaping the kinds of windfalls that we would if our last names were Rockefeller, Bush or Cheney. In fact, as fairly recent arrivals to the public school classroom, we both earn toward the bottom of our respective districts' payscales. Consider that we felt we had little to tax, we were able to justify over $12,000 in deductions, including our mortgage, graduate school tuition and over $2,000 in charitable contributions to our church (Yes, liberals go to church). Surely, we would get off somewhat easily, although still in the high-three-digit, low-four-digit area. That clearly was not to be.

I've never been a tax whiner. If you're a middle class American, you probably have an equally sad tale to tell this evening. Still, I always felt I had a responsibility to pay the taxes that are used to rasie our quality of life with schools, highways, parks, and police officers and firefighters, and so I sent my check to the IRS with a feeling of patriotism and civic pride. Besides, I didn't want to be one of those angry old farts who sit around whining and moaning about being taxed into the poorhouse.

But in recent years, tax season has become an increasingly bitter pill to swallow as recognition has grown stronger and stronger that not everyone is shouldering the same share of the burden. It seems as if our White House and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill fight their hardest for tax cuts on things like capital gains and dividends, which have a far greater benefit on the wealthy than on the middle class. Many of saw through the sham of Bush's insistence on completely doing away with estate taxes, as if average Americans are leaving estates in excess of $500,000. In the meantime, Bush appears highly disinterested in doing anything about matters that truly affect the middle class like the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, housing and college tuition.

Tonight I arrived home from H&R Block to find that the New York Times has quantified the level of injustice. Here's a crude quickie graph for 2003 I've recreated from their story:

Avg. Income, Pct. Change in Avg. Tax Bill, Avg. Tax Cut
$50,000, -1.1%, $10
$50,000-$100,000, -.8%, $68
$100,000-$200,000, -1.2%, $268
$200,000-$500,000, -2.2%, $1,489
$500,000-$1million, -2.9%, $5,491
$1million-$10million, -4%, $25,450
Over $10million, -7.3%, $497,468

Looking at this graphic, the flat-taxers can no longer smugly assert that the wealthy get greater cuts because they have more to tax. Here we see a progressive rise in percentage cuts in tax bills. The more you make, a greater percentage that's being cut from your tax bill. Funny, isn't it how Steve Forbes and his plutocrat friends have little to say about a flat rate on tax cuts.

Like most middle-class Americans, Mrs. Mouth and I are in the $50,000-$100,000. Personally, I would be willing to forfeit our $68 savings to reverse our frightening national spending binge and corresponding budget slashes of so many government programs that the middle class and poor use and need. Also, take into consideration that the over-$10 million crowd makes up a grand total of 6,126 taxpayers nationwide. At the same time, the top 1 percent of income earners in our nation controls a third of our nation's assets, so these cuts really add to our government's spending defecit and national debt.

Again, I don't mind paying my fair share. But is this fair?

While we're on the subject of class warfare...

We keep hearing about a great economic boom going on, but in the midst of this alleged miracle, incomes are dropping. The median household in Missouri earned $44,000 in 2002-2004. That's down from $46,800 in 1999-2001. Nationwide, the median household's income slipped during this period from $45,750 to $44,473. Meanwhile, corporate profits consumed 10 percent of our GDP, at its highest percentage since 1968.

You can read more dismal facts from Economic Policy Institute's recent report, The Boom That Wasn't, by clicking here.

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

2006-03-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about peace recently, what it really means in its most concrete, what-would-Jesus-do form and not as just some abstract concept deserving of lip service and immediate dismissal.

Who doesn't want peace? In the midst of this seemingly endless war, wouldn't we all like a planet in which everybody gets along and acts nice? Of course. And we certainly all know that peace was central to the very essence of Christ's example.

Yet, when it comes time to stand up for peace, we Christians all fall apart. We look for excuses. I know you've heard them all: Well, what Christ said was nice, but we can't just open ourselves up to terrorists. What are we going to do, lay our arms down, join hands with al-Qaeda and sing "Kum-ba-ya?" If we turn the other cheek, then America will surely die. Neville Chamberlain stood up for peace, and look what happened.

I can't argue with any of these declarations. They make perfect sense, I agree completely, and yet in the end, the Sermon on the Mount is transformed into a quaint homily. Do unto others pre-emptively before the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud. The Beattitudes are words that sound nice but completely lack power or meaning in modern society. Cursed be the meek, for their naivete entitles them to death by terrorist's bomb. In essence, Christ is dead, impotent, a nice guy who really didn't have much to say to us, after all. He can save our souls from damnation but is powerless to bring on the earth he preached about. The Old Testament is where it's at. Walls of Jericho. A plague of locusts. A pillar of salt. Bring on the angry God of vengeance. He'll show those wicked infidels.

Nothing new here. Look at the polling data. Most Christians support the war in Iraq, as they unflaggingly support the presidential agenda that has brought on this war. In fact, Christ's followers have supported just about every major conflict in modern U.S. history. Christians historically tend to support war in far greater numbers than non-Christians, leaving the secular and atheists to stand up for the words of Jesus. Peace is for sissies and fools, according to our modern church.

I've thought a lot about the Christian Peacemaker Teams that have worked in Iraq. Their reputation comes mainly after four of their members were kidnapped with one of those captives later found shot dead. These Christians hold a different view from the mainstream of Christ's following. They oppose the war and have worked to highlight the abuse of detainees and help Iraqi families gain access and information about their loved-ones in detention. This view has not endeared them to many of their Christian brothers and sisters who believe that their work endangers U.S. troops and aids and comforts the enemy. Some say these guys were foolishly naive and grossly misunderstood the danger. Some were downright gleeful of the detainees' predicament.

(By the way, the CPT vehemently denies that they showed any ingratitude to their rescuers. This appears to be more right-wing spin perversely accepted as conventional wisdom. Click here to read more.)

And yet, knowing full-well the danger (Who wouldn't?), these guys stood up for principles they believed mirrored the truest, most profound teachings of Christ. That peace is not just a nice sentiment that always crumbles in the face of reality. That injustice and abuse are always immoral and un-Christian, even to the most unsympathetic of vicitms. That principle always trumps loyalty to country. That loving one's neighbor is truly the highest calling of a Christian. That violence is never justified.

"If I am ever called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice in love of enemy, I trust that God will give me the grace to do so," Fox once wrote.

I also think of the Mennonites, Quakers and other Christians who have stood up as conscientious objectors, some of whom have faced prison, all of whom have faced derision, scorn and sometimes hatred for their view that all war is evil, and to participate means to participate in evil. And yet they have stood up anyway, out of firm belief that Christ's teachings of peace and love are literal, real and relevant. That following them to the letter is the ultimate outward show of Christian faith.

And alas, I find myself unable to make the same leap of faith. Am I earthbound by man's perversion of truth or am I just realistic in my view of the world? Try as I might to reconcile an unyielding belief in peace and an unflagging opposition to all wars, I just can't do it. I do believe we need armies to keep us safeand I respect the courage of the men and women who serve in them. I also believe war is sometimes necessary, although very rarely and certainly not this one we're fighting in Iraq. And I can't help but wonder what would happen if nobody had stood up to Hitler, had we not fought a war on terrorism.

Yet I also see what the Christian Right's complete and total faith in war and the power of the bomb has wrought: another intractable mess from which resolution seems unattainable, tens of thousands of soliders and civilians dead, a country laid to ruin with the looming prospect of devastating civil war, the escalation of worldwide hatred. And I ask myself, isn't it equally naive to believe that true peace can ever be obtained at the point of a gun?

I then realize that maybe Jesus had a point, after all.

Quotes of the day

"I'm kind of happy about it, because I'm eager for people to see reality, change their minds if necessary, and have things sized up...I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality."
- Rush Limbaugh on the kidnapping of the four Christian Peacemaker Team activists.

"Everything is about them. They want to be the focus of attention, and they don't mind taking the military off path and out of its mission, and they have no appreciation for it in the first place. I mean, just, totally ungrateful. It -- it's offensive. "
- Limbaugh on their rescue.

"Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God."
Matthew 5:9

"You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven."
Matthew 5:43-44

"Love your neighbor as yourself."
Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31

"Love your enemies. Do good to those that hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic."
Luke 6:27-29

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that... But love your enemies, do good to them.
Luke 6:32-34

"A new command I give you: Love one another. AsI have loved you, so you must love one another. All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another."
John 13:34,35

Follow the money

2006-01-07T13:21:00.000-08:00

Beware of Astroturf!

I bring this up as a teacher, who a couple of days ago was helping one of my students look for a website to help him with a science project dealing with carbon dioxide. Googling CO2, our first hit was for a website from the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Ah, a global warming site, I thought. But a quick glimpse of the site helped me realize that co2science.com had reached its conclusions about global warming before it ever even formulated a hypothesis. I didn't have the heart to tell my student that these scholars may not be completely faithful to the scientific method. If he knew, I'm sure my 11-year-old charge would be aghast, if not completely crushed.

The lead story on this informational site crows that the average temperature in Bastrop, La., has actually declined since 1930, somehow offering proof that global temperatures aren't rising. Other stories assert that global warming will actually benefit climbing nightshade, sugarbeets, canola and soybeans. Apparently the folks at co2science.com want it both ways: There is no such thing as global warming. Wait, but just in case there is, it's actually a good thing.
Already wary I followed Deep Throat's advice, I followed the money. A quick Internet search revealed that the Arizona-based center has received at least $65,000 from ExxonMobil, not exactly an unbiased party in the global warming debate.

And thus we return to my admonition to beware of astroturf. What is astroturf, other than that really tacky green carpet made here in St. Louis that adorned those '70s-era football stadiums? This kind of astroturf refers to a movement that can be seen as a fake version of grassroots activism.

There's nothing more American than the idea of an honest grassroots movement, fueled by average folks who want to change their community, even their country. Some of the greatest changes in American history have started from modest roots. Unfortunatlely, corporate America and partisan ideologues fully realize our collective soft spot for the underdog. Knowing this companies like ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris - whoops, I mean Altria - wish to influence our thinking by funding organizations that by appearances seem spurred by average concerned American or by dedicated, learned men in white labcoats. But really they do little more than spew corporate-sponsored propaganda and in some cases engage in outright lobbying. It's fake grassroots, hence the name "astroturf." It's possibly the most cowardly, dishonest way I can imagine to disseminate information, yet these organizations have had a huge, yet subtle, impact on swaying our political and social beliefs and ideals.

Some of these organizations come and go, depending on specific issues before Congress. Here are some examples of astroturf organizations that either currently exist or have impacted legislation or public opinion:

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition - funded by ExxonMobil, 3M, Dow Chemical and Phillip Morris - whoops, I mean Altria - and others

Air Quality Standards Coalition - whose office happens to be in the National Association of Manufacturers headquarters.

Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care - funded by HCR Manor Care, Sun Healthcare Group, Tandem Health Care and Kindred Healthcare.

Business for Social Repsonsibility - funded by such beacons of corporate responsibility as ExxonMobil, Ford Motor Co. and Chiquita Brands Inc.

Citizens for Better Medicare - funded largely by such "citizens" as pharmaceutical corporations and their lobbying groups.

Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain - In this case, the "citizens" paying the bill include at least seven electric utilities and three coal companies.

I could go on and on. For a more lengthy list click here Do you really think Citizens for Better Medicare wants prescription prices lowered for old folks? Do you really think the Air Quality Standards Coalition really wants aggressive enforcement of the Clean Air Act? Probably not, but to look at their websites, you'd think we were dealing with height of reason and clear thinking.

Officially, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change states that it "was created to disseminate factual reports and sound commentary."

"The Center attempts to separate reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change," the center's website goes on to explaing.

Watch out for catch phrases like "sound commentary" and "common sense." They always come with the implication that the activist groups they seek to encounter are a bunch of sensationalists with no grasp of the facts. Of course, the above mentioned center never mentions on its site that it receives money from ExxonMobil, a company that apparently would prefer you not have truthful, honest information.

I say this because of a 1998 leaked memo from Exxon outlining its strategy for winning the PR battle over global warming with such statements as "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom." In its efforts at "truthiness," Exxon has spread around a lot of money - $485,000 to the John C. Marshall Institute; $870,000 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute; $105,000 to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Really I feel kind of bad about beating up on the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change for the paltry $65,000 it received.

Now, does this mean that the "scientists" at these organizations believe what they believe only because of the payola they're getting from Exxon. Not necessarily, but it doesn't really pass the smell test either. And what I'm smelling - bsides the stench of burning fossil fuels - is something that starts with an M and ends with a Y.

Sources

Log onto SourceWatch if you come across the name of a bullshit-sounding think tank or grassroots organization and you want to check them out. Click here

Want to learn more about how ExxonMobil disseminates lies and propaganda about global warming? Then click here and here

Quote of the Day

"Sharon was personally a very likeable person. I am sad to see him in this condition. But I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, "divide my land." God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible, he says, "This is my land." And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, "No. This is mine." And the same thing - I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated."

- Pat Robertson, asserting that those who seek peace in the Middle East meet with a bad end.

I know. I know. You probably already heard about it. And Robertson says so many stupid things that even quoting him here seems gratuitous and cheap. But his quotes are worth noting because Robertson is one of the leaders of a political faction our president holds dear and panders to at all costs. Meanwhile, the majority of conservative Christians who know Robertson is mean and hateful have once again remained silent, thereby condoning his hateful speech.

The alleged trickle-down victory

2006-01-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to have been gone so long. You know how the holidays can be. Oops. Sorry. I mean, you know how Christmas can be. I'm not trying to turn my back on Jesus, so please don't have the American Family Association boycott my blog.

Today I offer conservatives a heartfelt congratulations for it seems they have once and for all fixed the economy. I guess the Right can declare ultimate victory, I must shut down this blog in a red-faced concession, and we liberals should all go hide forevermore under our respective rocks.

Or so that's what I'm gathering in the leftist, pinko Post-Dispatch today (Dang, I wish these liberal rags would actually start doing a little more spinning to help out us beleaguered lefties). On the Metro section front, we read that Republicans in the reconvening Missouri General Assembly have "fixed" the state's economy in the course of one legislative session. House Speaker Rod Jetton and Senate President Pro Tem Micahel Gibbons have attributed these high times in which we live to the "pro-business" agenda that won the day in last year's session.

Jetton and Gibbons "said the spate of pro-business bills passed last year are producing thousands of new jobs by reducing employers' costs for workers' compensation and civil lawsuits," the unquestioning Post-Dispatch story says without quoting any real statistics or even any rebuttal to these claims from Democrats. Rush Limbaugh would be appalled. Where's the Post-Dispatch's sense of cheap shots and dirty play?

By pro-business, I assume Gibbons and Jetton boast of the Medicaid cuts in which 90,000 Missourians lost benefits last year. They must also be talking about about legislation that makes it almost impossible for a buyer to sue a shady homebuilder. And I'm sure they're quite proud of Boy Governor Matt Blunt's appointments to many of the state's regulatory boards in which many insiders now regulte the very industries from which they make a living. Because as conservatives have made it clear, we can't hammer out compromises and agreements in which business folks and regular folks both come out winners. The business community apparently can win only if we screw regular folks. Or so Gibbons and Jetton apparently think.

Meanwhile, inside the Metro section, sydicated columnist Michael Barone sings the praises of Wal-Mart and the wonders they do for the American economy. He chooses to ignore the research that says that in local economies, employment declines when a Wal-Mart opens. He doesn't wish to talk about Wal-Mart's responsibility for our growing trade defecit. He does admit that Wal-Mart's benefits suck. But what the hell, Barone says, most Wal-Mart employees didn't really want health care, anyway.

"Not all workers today want full-time jobs; they may want to be home when the kids return home from school. Not all want health insurance; many are covered by a spouse's policy or Medicare," Barone writes, explaining why it's really OK that 600,000 children of Wal-Mart employees have either no health insurance or are enrolled in Medicaid or other taxpayer-supported children's insurance programs. Of course, thanks to Gibbons and Jetton, they shouldn't count on that Medicaid if they live in Missouri.

Indeed, conservatives have really fixed things in America.

The mouth has reopened for business

2005-12-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

Sorry to the half-dozen or so habituees of this blog who have missed me these past couple of weeks. You know how it is around Christmas (Yes, we liberals celebrate Christmas, too.)

Speaking of Christmas, in the true spirit of giving, isn't it amazing how right-wingers love to give and receive apocryphal e-mails from unknown sources. You know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you get them all the time: some wingnut's screed that supposedly further justifies every conservative's viewpoint. I got one of those again today, allegedly from Andy Rooney. According to this e-mail, Andy went on a real tear a few weeks ago, spewing the kind of xenophobic, racist, anti-intellectual trash that would make every angry, insecure white male loser proud. It seemed pretty suspicious to me, considering that Andy Rooney is a certifiable left-winger and conservatives often rail against him.

So I checked it out on Snopes.com, the best place to check out these things. Of course this e-mail turns out to be one more lie from some pathetic right-winger who can't be bothered to at least be truthful and honest. According to the ever-reliable Snopes, Rooney disclaimed this screed on 60 Minutes a couple of months ago with this statement:

"There's a collection of racist and sexist remarks on the Internet under a picture of me with the caption ‘ANDY ROONEY SAID ON 60 MINUTES.’ If I could find the person who did write it using my name I would sue him."

To read this piece of character defamation against Andy Rooney, click here.

To read a similary screed falsely attributed to George Carlin (but different from the George Carlin e-mail I wrote about a few weeks ago), click here.

Apparently, this fake commentary from Andy Rooney has been so widely spread around that yesterday, Snopes named it one of the Top 25 Urban Legends of 2005, as listed here.

What I think of conservatives

2005-12-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

So most of you know, I'm not a big fan of today's conservative movement. It's a sad alliance between big business, which pays the movement's bills, and the religious right, which gets voters to the polls. As long as the business types show indifference toward Jerry Falwell's rantings and the religious types turn a blind eye on big business' assaults on American families, both sides are happy. Leading this spectacle is George W. Bush, who believes only in George W. Bush, and has merely cast his lot with the plutocrats and theocrats as they work together to keep him in the White House. That leaves the vast majority of Americans out in the cold. I think the whole arrangement stinks, and that's why I write this blog.

So that's what I think of conservatism these days. Now, what do I think of conservatives, themselves? I think that's worth exploring. To read my writings, one could easily believe that I hate folks on the right and and that I think they make a bunch of rude, nasty people. Clarification, I believe, is in order. So let me tell you how I feel about folks who adhere to conservatism:

*I think most conservatives are good, decent people. They love their families, they love America, and they love God. I probably know and associate with more conservatives than I do liberals, and that should tell you something.

*Most conservatives are not ideologues. They believe government has been too intrusive. They believe they pay too much in taxes. They fear what will happen if we weaken our national defense. They wish they could raise their children in a more civil, decent society, and they seek moral leadership that will display the same values they celebrate in church each Sunday.

*Most conservatives are not interested in this liberal-conservative, red state-blue state garbage. They don't listen to talk radio or read the American Spectator. They don't put ridiculous bumper stickers on their cars. They quietly believe what they believe and understand it's best to keep one's political beliefs to oneself.

*Most conservatives are not in it for the money, and their votes are not primarily for their own pocketbooks. Their interest in corporate welfare and tax breaks for the wealthy is marginal and mostly nonexistent. If they do believe in said breaks for the wealthy, it's because they sincerely believe those breaks will benefit us all in the long run.

*Most conservatives would do anything to help a stranger who they saw in need. At the same time, many of these same people show a certain indifference to the idea of helping those in need when they go to the polls or exercise their political voice.

*Too many conservatives believe that peace can only be attained at gunpoint.

*Too many conservative men seem to be conservatives only out of machismo, a vicarious hope that if they take a hardline stance on issues like foreign diplomacy, criminal justice and multiculturalism, onlookers will view them as sufficiently manly.

*Many conservatives believe their political philosophy best reflects the teachings of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, too many of them believe that ONLY their philosophy reflects the teachings of Jesus Christ. However, I know most conservatives believe in every American's right to decide upon their own religious values.

*Too many conservatives seem to fall every election year for the mudslinging, push-polling and hot-button rhetoric that the GOP knows will work so well. The Republican leadership also knows they can easily get most middle-class and even poor conservatives to vote against their own interests every time with a good wedge issue like gays or gun control.

*Many conservatives are catching on, and seeing the disaster in the White House, are increasingly becoming less conservative.

To summarize, I think most conservatives are good people. They're also are motivated by values and issues that are rational and truly important. I just happen to disagree with the conclusions that many of them draw.

Next time we'll talk about how I feel about liberals.

Secular humanist retailers: "Bah humbug!"

2005-12-01T19:36:00.000-08:00

It appears the American Family Association has joined in the militant campaign to save Christmas from the pagan God-haters, whose ranks now appear to include most major retailers. AFA, which is best known for its efforts to keep dirty language off network TV, now believes God will vanish into a poof of smoke and disappear because JCPenney won't put the word Christmas in its circulars. AFA cites a survey of Sunday newspapers that yielded only one circular from Belk's that mentioned the word Christmas. Admittedly they only looked at two papers, but they claim this as proof that we've turned our backs on God.

Indeed they may be onto something here. I jumped onto the Sunday Saver website, which links to store circulars, and found that only Family Dollar and Circuit City actually used the word Christmas in their ads. For the record, Target insists that it acknowledges Christmas in a letter here that AFA cites as some sort of proof that its campaign works, even though Target says it never stopped using the word Christmas. With so few stores invoking the name of Christmas, I'm not sure these boycotters will have a lot choice in where to shop. Does this mean that they'll be hypocrites if they shop at one of these merchants the same way I've been told Barbra Streisand is a hypocrite for living in a wooden house?

So finally we have the one and only issue that has sent right-wingers into a fit of rage against corporate America. Apparently, conservatives are fine with Wal-Mart mistreating employees and encouraging the deindustrailization of our great nation. But when Wal-Mart omits the word Chritsmas from its ads, that's a true outrage!

Let me say again that I do see these folks' point. AFA points out that these stores really depend on Christmas shoppers, yet treat the holiday as the "C-word." Have we really gotten so PC and fearful of offending folks that stores refuse to say "Merry Christmas" or even simply "Christmas Sale?" With Christmas as such a secular celebration anymore, why should anyone be offended by this alleged Christian holiday. I know many Christians would be upset with me for this, but Christmas has become so commercialized and frenzied that I see it as completely divorced from the birth of Christ. It's wildly popular in Japan, for crying out loud. Therefore, nobody should feel threatened by this very secular holidays.

On the other hand, this denial of the word Christmas really isn't anything new. Stores have been saying "Happy Holidays" for years, and I always took it as a reference to the holdiay season - Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year together - not as a denial of Jesus Christ as savior and lord. A Kmart ad proclaiming "Happy Holidays" is no threat to God or his people and should in no way diminish your enjoyment of Christmas. If it does, you should probably examine your rage and get on with celebrating the holiday however you best see fit.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Winter Solstice, or whatever it is we're calling it these days.

2005-11-24T11:36:00.000-08:00

It's no great secret that Christmas has been commercialized in recent years. I started seeing Christmas ads on TV about three weeks ago, and thousands of Americans who work in the retail sector will have their Thanksgiving pre-empted today, because their employers want them stationed at their cash registers to get a jump on the holiday buying season. I think this sorry tradition started last year, and I'm sure it's not going away.

Well, never mind the commercialization. We apparently now have the politicization of Christmas. The ACLU'ers stand on one side, trying to stamp out any observation of the holiday that's not done in secret. Area schools, including the one where I teach, received a letter a few months ago from a local Jewish activist group practically warning us not to even use the word Christmas under a veiled threat of legal action. And buried in this morning's Post-Dipatch was a story that the Ladue School District has been warned by Americans for the Separation of Church and State to cease and desist from its 25-year tradition of gathering food and clothes for the Salvation Army, which is a Christian organization.

Then there's this bunch of activists on the right, outraged that Christmas has nothing to do with the birth of Christ for most Americans. UPS was accused of not allowing drivers to wish customers "Merry Christmas," which UPS denies ever having done. Likewise, Target, the main target (excuse the bad pun) of retail boycotts, denies ever having banned the expression from its stores.

"I don't know where they're coming from. We have no such policy on Christmas. You can see it in our stores," a Target spokeswoman told the San Francisco Chronicle.

This year, the Alliance Defense Fund, sort of an ACLU for evangelical Christians, is bragging on its website that it has sent out 6,000 letters to schools warning teachers and administrators that they'd better not trample anyone's civil rights over the holidays. As if we teachers are sitting around trying to figure out how to brainwash and instill secular humanist values into our captive audiences. Usually we just want our students to sit down and shut up long enough so that we can teach them to read and cipher a little math.

Not to be outdone, Jerry Falwell is on the warpath with his Liberty Counsel. Their big success is that they forced the city of Boston to call its big city hall tree display a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. To call it a holiday tree is silly, indeed. But it's really no more silly than the school where I teach calling its Halloween party a "fall party" because some fundamentalist parents, outraged that we would recognize the Devil's holiday.

For better or worse, few of us celebrate Christmas as a meaningful religious observance. For most of us it's a time to show goodwill toward others and to share special times with family and friends, not to mention participate in a big bacchanal with too much food and drink and a frenzy of gift giving that often surpasses the obscene. I'm a Christian, a Sunday school teacher, and a faithful Sunday regular at a Methodist church, but I admit that Christmas has little religious significance to me. In fact, the whole season has taken on such a separate and secular life of its own that I've chosen to divorce Christmas from Christ; to do otherwise, I think, would be a disservice to Jesus. I choose to observe my faith in more meaningful ways at other times. I know a growing number of Christians are likewise giving up this charade that what they do on Dec. 25 has much of anything to do with their faith.

The point of this is to say that Christmas is a secular, although meaningful, holiday for most Americans. Certainly, it's no threat to the religious freedom of those who choose not to participate. I'm sure that the vast majority of most of us who do celebrate Christmas would like to do so in peace and be left out of this ridiculous tangent of the culture wars.

Seen on a bumper sticker

"We can bomb the world into pieces, but we can't bomb the world into peace."

If we really are one nation under God, then let's act like it

2005-11-23T06:29:00.000-08:00

Ever feel as I do that in spite of all the feverish insistence from our conservative leadership that they are taking a stand for Christian values, that they've in truth led our nation down a terribly immoral, un-Christian path? I mean, these are the folks who apparently believe that torture is OK as a standard operating procedure, that some people should receive no legal rights, that pre-emptive war is good diplomacy, that world peace is a stupid idea for effeminate types, that the wealthy should be served first and everyone else last, and that the legal, ethical and moral considerations of campaign finance are highly situational and flexible.

If you agree with me, then you'll agree with Jimmy Carter, who has to say about the loss of our great nation's moral high ground over the past few years. Click here to read what he has to say.

By the way, here's something President Carter said about war quite a few years ago that's stuck with me:
"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."
And I certainly don't believe the war in Iraq qualifies even as a necessary evil.

Today's mail

We haven't looked at the mail recently, so today I reached in and pulled out a letter from a conservative, who disagreed with my posting about attacks on John Murtha.

O.k., lets call the comments from Libs in the past few days for what they are STRAW MAN POLITICS. I've noticed lately, how adept libs are in consistently using the straw man strategy. Of course, I guess I shouldn't be surprised - when you don't evidence to stand on, then you need to invent a stance for your opposition that you can attack and knock down.

Yes, there are comments from bloggers attacking John Murtha, and a freshman congresswoman read a note from a Marine who said that cowards turn but Marines never quit. (which I expect was actually meant to convey the message to Murtha that he is NOT a coward, and shouldn't be retreating) However, there is no ATTACK against Murtha. We conservatives don't think he's turned into the great satan, and we don't think he was or is a coward. In fact, we respect him, and thank him for his service (something you never seem to hear liberals doing). But we do think he is wrong, and a good number of Democrates think he is wrong.

But, hey, this isn't about the war for libs, its about politics. Win at any cost. And more importantly, give to the Democratic party (who's creating this Straw Man) at any cost.

I'm not sure what a straw man attack is, but it sure doesn't sound very positive.

And darn, we finally have a conservative who's on to us liberals. Here we thoght we had pulled the wool over America's eyes, but it only takes one conservative and our deceit unravels. Yes, you have us figured out. We don't really think the war in Iraq was a grievous error. We don't really believe in economic and social justice. We don't really believe in good government and sound policy. We wish only to attack President Bush because he is a Republican and not a Democrat. We only believe in our blessed party as an end in itself.

If only we could have maintained the high level of decorum, fairness, diplomacy, statesmanship and restraint conservatives showed during the Clinton years.

You mean this damn war's not over yet?

2005-11-21T19:38:00.000-08:00

Since we're talking about the war in Iraq, I thought I would throw out some odds and ends about the war in Iraq.

Let's begin with a few quotes:

They can't say they weren't warned.
"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious.... [Without an 'overwhelming' effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq] the United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."
-Army War College report, February 2003, about a month before the invasion began.

Bush White House logic and WMD
"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."
-Ari Fleischer, July 2003

So much for the 9/11 connection
"We urge you to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf."
-Letter from Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, then private sector think-tankers, in a letter to President Clinton, Jan. 26, 1998, more than 3 1/2 years before the 9/11 bombings.

And now for some links
Ever wonder how much this war is costing us? Click here to see a running tab. Also you can find out what else we could do with that kind of money. How many teachers could we hire? How many hungry people could we feed?

So what is this Downing Street Memo, anyway? Well it's a huge embarassment to the Bush Administration, not to mention Tony Blair. Click here to find out what it is, what it says, and why it's important.

So what do Americans think of this war? Read the polls results here from all major organizations over the past couple of weeks. Of course the sentiment of most Americans means little to a president who says, "I'm not conducting diplomacy by focus group."

Here's a nice fact-check sheet that compares Bush administration claims against the facts on such issues as the WMD, cost of war, Saddam's connection to al-Qaeda.

Slander and character assassination

2005-11-19T18:31:00.000-08:00

John Murtha was apparently a stand-up guy as far as right-wingers are concerned, as long as he supported their war in Iraq. Now that he's changed his mind, however, Murtha has magically become the lowest form of scum imaginable. It's a lesson learned for anyone who disagrees with the far-right fringe that dominates our White House: Disagree with us and we'll do everything we can to destroy you.

"The US cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home," Murtha had the gall to say.

Let's look at some of the things various right-wing bloggers and pundtis have said about the Pennsylvania congressman:

"Murtha joins the likes of traitor Clayton Lonetree, the Marine security guard who gave top-secret intelligence to the Soviets, and traitor Robert Garwood, the Marine who went over to the enemy during the Vietnam War and was involved in holding and abusing US prisoners of war in North Vietnam while wearing the uniform of the enemy."
- Denver talk show host Bob Newman, who hosts the "Anger-Management Hour" and "Gunny Bob" shows.

"(Murtha) would prefer that the United States surrender to the terrorists who would harm innocent Americans."
-House Speaker Dennis Hastert

"John Murtha of Pennsylvania claimed that our troops were the real problem in Iraq."
-Blogger Mary Mostert, writing on The Conservative Voice website.

"(Democrats) know that, despite the Old Media’s characterization, Americans overwhelmingly support this War"
- Blogger Gregory Borse, apparently unaware of last weeks Gallup poll showing 54 percent of Americans believe we never should have invaded Iraq, writing on ChronWatch.

"Murtha is a net drain on the nation, a leech drawing pay at the expense of taxpayers."
- From a blogger known as The Tin Ear.

"The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists."
-White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

"He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message that, 'Cowards cut and run, Marines never do.'"
- U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, relaying a message from a Marine colonel. Schmidt, unaware that Murtha served as a Marine, herself later asked that her comments be stricken from the Congressional Record.

It's OK to disagree with Murtha. It's not OK to call him a coward, a hater of American troops or terrorist sympathizer. If you agree that these personal attacks on him in response to his opposition to White House policy are outrageous and grossly uncivil, you can express your views here.

Bring our troops home.

2005-11-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

Until a few days ago, I was one of those fence-straddlers on the war in Iraq. I was a skeptic from the beginning, gravely susupicious that we might really be getting into something far beyond our abilities. That skepticism soon gave way to a firm belief that invading Iraq was a patently foolish idea. And within six months of the invasion, I was taken by the unwavering belief that the Bush administration's incompetent handling of the war has turned a questionable endeavor into an outright fiasco.

Still, I said, it would be a mistake to back out now. Stay the course, I said, echoing Bush. Let's see if we turn this into something good. At least let's hang in there until, say, June 2006, then we can see if we've accomplished anything.

What was I thinking? For pity's sake, let's pull our troops out as soon as we can safely do so, and be done with this insanity.

Our troops walk the streets of Bagdhad like targets in a video game and drive the highways of Iraq, praying they don't drive over a landmine. We have 2,000 dead and counting, not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead. And for what? Yes, Saddam is gone, and Iraqis have conducted elections, both undeniably good things. But where does this end? Does the Bush administration even know, or have they backed themselves into a corner with no way out? I suspect the Pentagon is down to fighting an LBJ/Nixon style of warfare: Just do enough to not lose.

Looking back on why we went over there in the first place, 20/20 hindsight can easily read the lies perpetrated on the American public. No, I don't mean to say that Bush and cronies actually fabricated evidence or intelligence; it does appear that everything out of their mouths has been factual. But it's a textbook case on how one can be completely factual and still tell a big, stinking lie.

We know that Saddam wasn't involved in planning of 9/11 in any way. We know his relationship with al-Qaeda was never more than casual, the same way our president's father once had a casual relationship with Saddam, himself. To link Saddam to 9/11 was to tell a big lie.

We know that Saddam hadn't possessed any WMD for a long time. We know that the Bush administration's evidence of this alleged possession often relied on information that intelligence officials repeatedly warned was not proof of any WMD possession or manufacture. To present this information as proof was to tell a big lie. (And if it's true, as Bush claims, that a war - A WAR! - was started based on an honest mistake using bad intelligence, then he is guilty of some of the grossest incompetence imaginable in the annals of the Aemrican presidency.)

We have strong evidence that President Bush was hellbent on war with Iraq from even before his first day in the White House. For him to suggest that our war in Iraq was part of the war on terror was to tell a big lie. Our president's father and President Clinton both fully realized that Saddam was a terrible man, and they recieved the same faulty intelligence. On many occasions both presidents debated the wisdom of invading Iraq, and both repeatedly decided that such an invasion would be a grave mistake.

And how can we ever forget all that's happened since the Bush administration's big lie started a war? The torture and abuse at Abu Graib and Guantanamo that possibly continues at secret prisons around the world (Do you really believe we're not torturing anyone?). The total and complete denial of any rights whatsoever to prisoners based almost unilaterally on executive decision. The poor outfitting and equipping of our troops. The revelation last week that this shining beacon of democracy we're building in the Middle East has been running a secret detention/torture center. The building and ongoing insurgency movement in Iraq that wasn't present there before the war but which now threatens the stability of the entire region and provides Osama with the greatest gift he could ever wish to receive from President Bush. The Bush White House's incompentent miscalculations of how hard it would be to win this war (Remember the expressions "cake walk" and "mission accomplished?")

And that's not all.

There's the neglect and inattention to our troops in Afghanistan, where the real terrorists were - until now. The insane notion, discredited in London and Madrid, that fighting them over there will keep us safe over here. The growing hatred and resentment of the rest of the world, even in industrialized, Western nations, toward the U.S. The perverse belief by some that treating our troops as expendible cannon fodder in an unwinnable situation equates with our support for them. The foolish notion that an unwavering commitment to a disastrously unsuccessful strategy will eventually win the war. The 60 percent of Americans who say we never should have done this.

For the love of God, let's put a stop to this insanity and bring our troops home.

Soak the middle class and poor! Part II

2005-11-18T18:18:00.000-08:00

Did you ever really question where the heart of the GOP lies? Did you ever really doubt that Republicans are the party of, by and for the rich? Yeah, you probably did, as have I at times.

Therefore, we should thank the GOP for its performance in the wee hours of this morning as the unsuspecting slumbered under the illusion that $50 billion in spending cuts for the middle class and poor had been summarily defeated the previous evening. But with their stealth victory, Congressional Republicans have now stripped bare any pretense that they ever really give a rat's behind about any of us little people, beyond our votes they could buy cheaply in exchange for meaningless platitudes about family values. With Senate Republicans voting in concert to enact $60 billion in tax cuts for those with large stock portfolios, Hastert, Blunt and Co. have made a bold, brave and unflinching stand for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans and the Fortune 500. Indeed, these guys are no hypocrites, and I personally appreciate their frank honesty.

For the record, not a single Democrat voted for either measure.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, using information from the Congressional Budget Office, has made the following projections related to what henceforth should be called the Friday Morning Massacre:

*Cuts to Medicaid will total more than $30 billion when carried out over 10 years, resulting in higher out-of-pocket costs for the poor. In some cases, those expenses could push more than 100,000 people off the Medicaid rolls.

*States are no longer required to provide comprehensive preventive care and treatment to children living just above the poverty line.

*More than 220,000 people will lose food stamps. Some are Americans who live just above the poverty line, but whose disposable incomes are diminished by high housing costs and other considerations. Many others are legal residents from other countries whose eligibility will be pushed back from five years after arriving in America to seven years.

*Child care subsidies will be eliminated for 330,000 children of low-income working parents participating in "workfare" programs.

*Funding cuts to child support collection efforts will result in an estimated $24 billion in uncollected child support payments.

* Cuts in foster care benefits will affect an unspecified number of children living with grandparents and other relatives. (Let's not forget, Missourians, that our Boy Governor and son of the new Senate majority leader already took an ax to foster care payments here in the Show-Me State.)

Read more about it here

For those of you unmoved by these attacks on our nation's most vulnerable, don't forget the bloodletting of federal student loan expenditures rendered under these cuts or the more than $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control, rural health care and flu pandemic prevention measures.

In the meantime, House Speaker Dennis Hastert quickly postponed the vote on its own $56 billion capital gains tax cut that was scheduled for today, lest slumbering Americans linked it to the Friday Morning Massacre. Republicans want us to believe that these spending cuts are an effort to restrain the recent trend in reckless spending, although I'm sure they hope we don't remember that they themselves are responsible for this binge. Instead these spending cuts are merely to offset further tax cuts for their wealthy friends who fund their campaigns. As far as these tax cuts go, 53 percent of them will go to the .2 percent of Americans who earn $1 million or more each year, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

But hey, Republicans tell us, these aren't really spending cuts. They're merely cuts on future spending increases. Hopefully, 200,000 former food stamp recipients can chew on this piece of wisdom come meal time. As for what else they might have to eat, that's now their problem.

The last refuge of a scoundrel

Bush and Cheney are charging full speed ahead in their attempts to discredit and villify anyone who might second-guess the war in Iraq. We saw this with John Murtha, whose calls to end the war, has left right-wing bloggers and pundits seething with rage. You know the Right's ongoing pathetic attempts to paint anyone who might question the war as unpatriotic, unsupportive of our troops and an aide to terrorists. Apparently, 60 percent of Americans disagree. In light of all this, I thought I would close with a few quotes:

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else."
- Teddy Roosevelt

"The Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them.... To question your government is not unpatriotic - to not question your government is unpatriotic."
- Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.

Charges of hypocrisy from those in glass houses

2005-11-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

The Right's pulp mill, ever industrious in cranking out manifestos that preach to the choir, has produced this week's must-read tome: Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer. Right-wingers are breathless with praise for this book, which they believe proves forevermore that liberalism is bankrupt, and anybody who takes a stand for social or economic justice or for preserving the planet for future generations is full of crap. That is, unless he or she lives in a cave after first giving away all earthly possessions to the poor, downtrodden masses.

From Schweizer, we learn terribly scandalous nuggets. For example, did you know Michael Moore owns stock in Halliburton? Barbra Streisand lives in a house made of wood! Noam Chomsky has accepted grants from the Pentagon! Cornel West lives among white folks! Al Franken has no black folks working on his staff! Gasp! Horrors! Where will all this madness end?

Obviously these are cheap shots from those who drive gas-guzzling SUVs, tear down historic homes to build mcmansions, care not a whit about the environment, think little about social justice and generally live shallow, materialistic, self-centered lives. They don't like others pointing out their own faults, and books like Schweizer's give them license to feel it's OK to live this way. Hey, at least I'm not a hypocrite, they say.

I certainly try to live my life asking the question, What if everyone behaved this way? It's not easy, and I'm sure some smug little person like Schweizer could come along and find all sorts of inconsistencies. I hate Wal-Mart and try not to give them any of my money, but I shop there on occasion; I especially like their 88-cent music downloads. I try to recycle, but on a few occasions, all those newspapers and magazines I read went into the trash. I consider myself a tree-hugger, but I've used Roundup on my lawn and as a teacher, I go through lots and lots of paper. I even once lived in a house of wood. I strongly believe in rescuing the St. Louis Public Schools but if I had children I wouldn't for one minute have them enrolled there, at least not for now. I frequently criticize all those manufacturing jobs lost to Mexico and China, yet I drive a Honda. Still, all in all, I'd like to think that I'm mostly successful in living as a responsible citizen.

The world is a sticky place, and life is hard. Most liberals want to live lives of reasonable comofort, just like anyone else. We find ourselves making compromises at times. I know that conservatives do too.

I hear all this talk from people who preach morality and responsibility, then I look at some of these preachers. There's thrice-divorced Rush Limbaugh, addicted to OxyContin, a drug as bad as crack or methamphetamine. There's the gambling-addicted Book of Virtues editor Bill Bennett. Don't forget Ralph Reed, who has placed so-called Christian values at the forefront of the national agenda, but has greedily raked in millions in consulting and lobbying fees and can claim the dishonor of Jack Abramoff's friendship. Don't forget Tom Delay, whose heart bled over Terri Schiavo, but whose heart also appears blackened by greed and corruption. Then there's the Bush administration, which suggests that anyone who opposes the war in Iraq is unpatriotic, but thinks nothing of exposing a CIA operative's cover for cynical political opportunism.

Barbra Streisand's wood house is nothing compared to some right-wingers' glass houses.

Just say Oink!

Normally, I think Parade magazine is a rag, but I really enjoyed this weekend's edition with a cover story on wasteful government spending, no doubt a bipartisan blight on the public trust. The author asks how we can balk at rebuilding along the Gulf Coast when we think nothing about the $150 million we spend on things like that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.

If you can't find Parade in your local paper, you can read about it here if you don't mind waiting a week or so.

And more from the land of chain e-mails

2005-11-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

Who writes these things anyway?

I picture workshops, or more likely boiler room operations, filled with little gnomes, laboring around the clock to weave cautionary stories of gang-banging motorists who drive with their highbeams to entice would-be initiation victims and tales of kidnappers/child molesters who operate out of Wal-Mart restrooms, secreting away their boy victims by disguising them as girls. When said gnomes have a few spare moments, I suppose they doctor those photos to make it look like John Kerry and Jane Fonda really are standing alongside each other at the podium.

While some cater to the fantasies of liberals, most seem to play into the dreams of right-wingers, eager to send these dispatches on as some sort of proof that once and for all, their vision of the world has been proven right. See, they say, that World War II vet has a "bullshit protector" over his ear as he listens to Ted Kennedy speak. That just proves these left-wing faggot Bolsheviks really are bad people. And with a quick click of the mouse, people spread these missives out to friends and family, accepting them as gospel and never questioning their veracity.

I bring this up a couple of days after I received one of these e-mails from someone claiming to be an emergency management director in North Dakota. Apparently, folks up there recently weathered a bad blizzard, and this director asserts in his e-mail that North Dakotans would never think of accepting help from the federal government. I went on to provide links to press releases from the governor of North Dakota, as well as FEMA, outlining how Uncle Sam had indeed spent taxpayers' money on aiding North Dakotans after disasters. In one instance, I mistakenly said that people in Grand Forks had received $51 million after a 1997 flood. Actually, Grand Forks received more than $1 billion(!) from Washington following the flood.

Anyway, I received another of these chain e-mails yesterday. This time, the alleged author was comedian George Carlin. In this dispatch, "Carlin" gives seven rules for people caught in hurricanes. One rule lambastes folks who build expensive homes on the beach and expect taxpayers to rebuild after they are washed away by the tidal surge. The other six rules have a common theme, that is, You n*****s in New Orleans need to get off your lazy asses. It's a common right-wing rant we've been hearing since Katrina and Rita, a sort of veiled racism no doubt directed at New Orleans' underclass, and it makes me question why conservatives could ever seriously wonder why black folks steadfastly refuse to vote for their candidates.

Well, like most of these e-mails, this one turns out to be a scam, also. George Carlin writes the following on his own web site:

Floating around the Internet these days, posted and e-mailed back and forth, are a number of writings attributed to me, and I want people to know they're not mine. Don't blame me.
Some are essay-length, some are just short lists of one and two-line jokes, but if they're flyin' around the Internet, they're probably not mine.

Occasionally, a couple of jokes on a long list might have come from me, but not often. And because most of this stuff is really lame, it's embarrassing to see my name on it.

And that's the problem. I want people to know that I take care with my writing, and try to keep my standards high. But most of this "humor" on the Internet is just plain stupid. I guess hard-core fans who follow my stuff closely would be able to spot the fake stuff, because the tone of voice is so different. But a casual fan has no way of knowing, and it bothers me that some people might believe I'd actually be capable of writing some of this stuff.

Just so you know that this response is on the level, here's a link to his website where I lifted it.

Honestly, folks, did you really think that if George Carlin has something to say, he's just going to float an e-mail through cyberspace? I mean, really, this being America, Carlin's going to put it in a book and sell it to you for $24.99 at Borders.

A good rule of thumb with these chain e-mails is to ignore them. Most of them are fakes, and really are variations on urban legends and myths that have floated around for decades. The story of gang-bangers flashing their brights predates the web by several years at least. Other e-mails are just plain fraud, completely fabricated stories and doctored photos. Some of these stories and photos are real, however, so here's how to find out whether they're on the level or not. Check out Snopes.com The folks at Snopes are in the business of confirming and debunking these stories, and they're considered to be a highly credible source of information. If you get a chain e-mail, you can probably find it referenced on their site.

Here's their page on George Carlin's seven rules. Here's their page on the North Dakota blizzard.
Snopes is lots of fun to look at. And at the very least, if you plan to send out this junk, at least consult them and make sure the facts are true.

By the way, you know that veteran I told you about photographed with the bullshit protector over his ear? According to Snopes, the photo is indeed real, but the man wasn't listening to Ted Kennedy. He was listening to President Bush, who was speaking on the war in Iraq. You can view the photo here.

The latest news from Fargo

2005-11-03T16:33:00.000-08:00

A conservative family member sent me one of those apocryphal chain e-mails this morning, allegedly written by an emergency manager in North Dakota. Folks in the Peace Garden State apparently stand tough and self-sufficient in times of trouble, not like those wusses we've come to know in Louisiana and Mississippi with the temerity to expect our government to lend them a hand when everything around them is blown away.

This self-perceived John Wayne in North Dakota writes the following:

Up here in the Northern Plains we just recovered from a Historic event --- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 24" inches of snow and winds to 50 MPH that broke trees in half, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed all roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:George Bush did not come....FEMA staged nothing....No one howled for the government...No one even uttered an expletive on TV...Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.....No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House....No one looted....Phil Cantori of the Weather Channel did not come....And Geraldo Rivera did not move in.

Nope, we just melted snow for water, sent out caravans to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars, fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Aladdin lamps, and put on an extra layer of clothes because up here it is 'work or die'. We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.

Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early...we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves. "In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% most of the world’s social problems evaporate."

First of all, where have I been? I'm not sure I've heard of any terrible blizzards in North Dakota. Perhaps it's the Oct. 5 blizzard you can read about here. By the looks of that photo showing a guy in Minot clearing his driveway, doesn't look to have quite the wallop of Hurricane Katrina. But maybe it was, and perhaps the point of this alleged emergency manager is that you didn't hear about it because North Dakotans are too self-reliant and rugged to whine that it took President Bush four days to send help.

Then again, we can read about how North Dakotans have been quite glad in recent years to accept federal aid from Uncle Sam. Read about it here and here and here. When Grand Forks simultaneously flooded and burned in 1997, $51 million was spent to rebuild the city and make it safer from future flooding. And why shouldn't they take the money? Americans, even in North Dakota, fully expect their government to come to the rescue when they cannot help themselves after catastrophes like Katrina and Rita. Entire towns along the Gulf Coast were obliterated from creation. Are those people whiners for expecting some help?

So are we to assume from this e-mail that those on the Right think that assisting individuals whose homes and communities have been wiped out in a community is the work of an intrusive and evil big government? If so, I'm not sure the rest of America agrees, and perhaps that explains why Bush's latest approval rating stands at 35%.

Speaking of Bush (and his friend Cheney)

"Everything they touch turns to crud."
-Columnist Paul Krugman

Read more here.

America attacked!

2005-10-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

We spend so much time worrying about what foreign terrorists might do to us, we often neglect to see what domestic forces are doing to us. While we fret and worry about anthrax or small pox, our elected officials are chipping away at our Social Security and Medicare. Never mind the bomb in the New York subway. What are you going with your exploding debt if you get sick and end up in the hospital? You probably won't be filing bankruptcy, now that President Bush has gotten his way. And if things continue to go his way, you won't even have food stamps to take the place of the company pension you once thought was safe.

Average Americans are under attack, and they don't seem to be paying attention.

Just look at Congress and its scheme for financing rebuilding along the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Eager to look concerned and compassionate for the folks down in Louisiana and Mississippi, those bleeding hearts on Capitol Hill plan to spend $50 billion. Sounds great, except for that small print we learned about this week. Oh yeah, Congressional Republicans say, we forgot to tell you that we'll offset this expenditure by cutting programs that benefit regular folks. Under discussion for cuts are Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Louisiana and Mississippi, the two states Washington is pretending to want to help so badly, stand to lose as much as $100 million and $46 million respectively in food stamps expenditures.

Also on the table is a proposal to raise fees to lenders who are in the student loan business, which is sure to further tighten an already-tough credit market for college students and their families who face skyrocketing tuition. In essence, we plan to help Americans by taking away programs we have in place to help them. Make sense?

U.S. Rep Todd Akin, a St. Louis-area Republican, seems to think so.

"We have to make some tough choices, and we have to figure out how we're going to pay for it," he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "We need to use the hurricane as an incentive to tighten our belt."

And there you have it straight from the mouth. A frightening number of right-wingers in Washington have viewed Katrina, not as a dire situation requiring immediate relief from suffering Americans, but instead as an opportunity to ram through a political agenda that most people have rejected more and more loudly in recent months. Weakened environmental regulations. Softer workplace safety requirements. Loosened standards for rewarding federal contracts. And now $50 million in cuts to programs that have benefitted Americans for decades but which right-wingers despise. That might be end up a truer legacy of Katrina than any footage from the New Orleans Convention Center.

Amazing, isn't it, how Republicans have suddenly morphed into budget hawks. Controlling our mounting deficit seems to be a concern only now.

"Why are we trying to find offsets for rebuilding Biloxi, but not for the cost of rebuilding Bagdhad?" asked U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, a Democract who happens to be my congressman.

Indeed, nobody on the Republican side of the aisle has felt compelled to find offsets for the war in Iraq or President Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact when asked if we should offset Katrina spending but cutting out the pork-laden highway boondoggle passed last summer, Tom Delay pointed out the dire importance of some new highway overpasses in his district. Apparently, we sould only wring our hands over spending when it benefits average Americans. Otherwise, the drunken rampage continues unabated.

Let me point out that many Washington Republicans, some quite conservative, also are standing up against these offsets. They include one of our Missouri senators, Jim Talent, and Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who in spite of being a right-wing ideologue frequently shows heart and concern for the least fortunate among us.

Meanwhile at your local Wal-Mart

Laurels were heaped earlier this week on the world's largest corporation for finally ponying up to subsidize affordable health coverage for its employees. Yet, days later we learn that the company is thinking up its own agenda of offsets. The New York Times has reported that a memo sent by Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, suggests cutting 401(k) contributions, lowering life insurance benefits and raising premiums on employee spouses.

The memo goes on to point out that employees with seven years seniority are costing the company considerably more than employees with one year without a commensurate increase in productivity. I think I would be a little concerned if had been with Wal-Mart for more than a few years, but from what I hear, those morning pep rallies have gone far in clouding their judgment. But in a victory for disclosure, Chambers admits in her memo that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart workers either go uninsured or are on Medicaid.

This is just the latest in a long line of disclosures underscoring Wal-Mart's crappy treatment of its own people. And we haven't even begun to discuss the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs to China or Mexico because of Wal-Mart's unrelenting pressure on suppliers to keep costs low.

Apparently the Todd Oldham designer toasters and the cute pit bull in the commercials aren't the only reasons to shop at Target.

As for those everyday low prices at Wal-Mart, hope you're enjoying them. We're all gonna need them, but the time these guys are done with America.

What Horrigan saw at the revolution

2005-10-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

Post-Distpatch columnist Kevin Horrigan yesterday described what he saw at last week's right-wing pep rally at the St. Charles Family Arena, a star-studded affair with Sean Hannity and Oliver North. You can read about it here.

For those who don't wish to read Horrigan's column, it sounds like right-wingers are desperately trying to hold onto the illusion that they're on the vanguard of a revolution that has been fizzling and sputtering recently. Yes folks, I'm afraid 2005 will be to conservatives what 1972 turned out to be for liberals, a milestone year in which the rest of America tired and turned away from an ideological fringe's increasingly bizarrre and extreme excesses.

In the meantime, the right-wingers party on at the Family Arena with Hannity, who seems bankrupt of any idea beyond "Liberals hate America," and Oliver North, a thrice-convicted felon who lied to Congress (How is it that conservatives hate Clinton for lying to an FBI agent about having sex with a bimbo, but call North a hero for lying under oath to Congress over selling arms to one of our worst enemies in order to capitulate to terrorists?).

In the meantime, President Bush, whom they had trusted to carry the revolution to its ultimate destiny labors under an all-time-low 39-percent approval rating.

Americans are clearly saying, "Let's move on," but to what I'm not sure they really know.

Rendering unto Caesar

2005-10-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I shared with readers a bumper sticker I saw that said "Annoy a conservative: Share."

A regular conservative reader - perhaps my only regular conservative reader - responded thusly:

"Liberals would like the government to take your money, and share it with other people. Conservatives would like to keep their money, and share it themselves. You know, so many liberals are all talk and no action. Each and every reader of this blog should examine not just their heart, but their actions. Forget about what the government has done - what have YOU done?The conservatives I know steped into action when the recent hurricanes hit the southern coast. Many of them took days off work to pitch in with the relief effort, sunday school classes adopted displaced louisiana families providing food, shelter, transportation, and love. Meanwhile, liberals took this time as an opportunity to bash President Bush and argue for more taxes from their sugar daddy, the American public."

First of all, I have a hard time believing that not a liberal in America did anything to help as the reader states. I decided to go online to gather facts to prove him wrong. And you know what? This reader was proven right, well kind of right. I couldn't find anything that directly links conservatism with personal generosity. But I found some information that more than hints at a link. For one, the Catalogue of Philanthropy's Generosity Index ranks the states by charitable giving from most generous to least. At the top of the list was red stronghold Mississippi. And as I read down the list, I saw nothing but right-leaning states at the top. In fact, I had to get halfway down the list to find a blue state listed. The bottom is made up of nothing but left-leaning states, ending with Massachusetts. I went on to read articles pointing out that Christians give more than non-Christians, and broken down, that conservative Christians give more than mainline protestants or Catholics. And the less money one has, the more generous one is with the pocketbook, so we can't just say it's a bunch of Republican fat cats throwing their money around.

I must say, it stole a lot of thunder from me. It's certainly nothing a self-righteous liberal like myself can take pride in. It's a true reminder to those of us who like to think that we are truly the more compassionate ones. Conservatives have something to gloat about here. As a group, we liberals talk about compassion, but apparently only as long as someone else pays the bills.

Now does this give conservatives the last word on compassion? Absolutely not. It's truly impressive to give generously of one's own resources. But it seems awfully defeating to do that and then advocate government policy that necessitates such generosity. It seems illogical to give freely to the poor, then give political support to a trickle-down philosophy that has deindustrialized our nation, devalued jobs for the working and middle class, done little to provide economic opportunity to the poor and refused to find solutions to make health care more affordable and a quality education more accessible.

And then there's this laughable and naive proposition that we should get government out of the human services business, that if the government quit doing anything for anyone (except of course for large corporations), private agencies would just step in and fill the void. Giving some money to the Salvation Army is commendable, and spending one's spring break by going with a church group down to Kentucky is nice. But it's not enough. If it were, the government wouldn't have become the juggernaut it's often criticized as being, sometimes with justification. Remember, the New Deal wasn't created in a vacuum, and anyone who thinks America was such a great place for the average Joe before 1933, doesn't know a damn thing about history.

And let me also say to conservatives, lest they gloat too much, considering that charitable contributions persist at less than 2 percent of GDP, I don't think anyone has a whole lot to be proud of, be they on the left or right.

Liberals, open up your checkbooks and give more freely of your time. To do otherwise is just plain hypocritical. Conservatives, the check you wrote and the time you spent at the soup kitchen don't absolve you of a responsibility to stand up for social justice.

This is no way to run a blog!

2005-10-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's just that nobody except the most extreme ideologue likes Bush anymore, so throwing stones at him now seems cheap and gratuitous, like kicking a dead mule. Maybe the conservative movement seems equally pathetic these days, undone by its own arrogance, hubris and venality. Or maybe it's just that I've gotten pretty damned lazy. Whatever the case, I haven't made a posting in something like nine days, and that's no way to run a blog.

It's not as if the world has vanished, and there's nothing to write about. In fact there are many ideas germinating in my mind, so why don't I just get them all out into cyberspace now and be done with it?

1) It's been great fun watching the conservative movement imploding in recent weeks taking the GOP down with it. It appears the Republican big tent has lost a lot of its hot air and it's coming down around their heads. In fact, the right-wingers have now turned on their sugar daddy in the White House over the Harriet Miers nomination. The likes of Robert Bork, George Will, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer are red-faced with rage, and they do have a point. I mean, who the hell is this woman? I lived in Dallas for many years and I never heard of Miers; her two years there on the City Council completely escaped my notice. Of course, I'm far from the first to point out the laughable White House cronyism this nominatin illustrates. Maybe if it fails, Bush should check to see if his dentist or accountant are looking for a career change.

2) Meanwhile, some conservatives support the nomination, making me wonder what these folks are up to. "I can't reveal it all," James Dobson said last week in an attempt to assuage the fears of fellow conservatives, "because I do know things that I'm privy to that I can't describe because of confidentiality." Yikes! Should we be scared by this?

3) Remember those hopes for a silver lining after Hurricane Katrina that might bring a worldwide focus to social justice and renewed effort to fight poverty. Even President Bush suggested it was time that we all turned to these goals. According to today's New York Times, that was perhaps a lot of hot air from our president. Instead, the White House is focusing its efforts on right-wing social engineering down on the Gulf, something I reported on a couple of weeks ago. "This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said some guy at the kneejerk right-wing Heritage Foundation. As if furthering failed right-wing trickle-down economic policies will do anybody any good. Yet another squandered opportunity from the Bush White House. Read all about it here.

4) David Brooks, every liberal's favorite conservative, writes here about how tiresome this left-right debate has become for the vast majority of Americans, even for many liberals and conservatives. It was tiresome 10 years ago, and it's become practically intolerable. Yet, we have two parties that continue to fan the flames. Both are too bankrupt of ideas and too lazy to try to unite Americans, so instead they spread outrage like so much manure, hoping to nurture weeds of discontent. (Sigh. I can't believe I just said that) I'm not an ideologue, although I am pretty darned liberal. I've cast my lot with the Democrats, knowing they've badly failed America, but seeing them as a dim hope in an otherwise hopeless situation. Like most Americans I just want someone to help us save our country.

5) And it's sure not Hillary Clinton. I don't think she's the devil incarnate. But I do see her as a supremely divisive figure, and after eight years of Clinton and eight years of Bush, Americans are tired of the divisiveness. Most of us are looking for plain vanilla, hopefully plain vanilla who solves problems like the budget deficit and the cost of health care. I wonder if a seance will bring Eisenhower back from the dead.

6) Here's a slogan I read in The Nation magazine: "Make levees, not war."

7) After spending $30 for the first time ever to fill up my car last week (and I know that's a fraction of what some are paying), I was thinking about how these days the image of Jimmy Carter wearing a cardigan doesn't look so silly anymore. Too bad we chose not to listen to him.

Equal time, even for Republicans

2005-10-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

Unlike right-wingers, who think that only their ideas should ever be heard, we liberals believe that a diversity of viewpoints makes America great. That's why we have a response today from a conservative on my posting of a few days ago on Tom DeLay's indictment:

Did y'all actually READ Delay's defense info on his sight?

I don't know all the facts, but the facts that are public sure make this look like a witch hunt.
It looks like two PAC were set up which Delay was on the board of, the TRMPAC (Texans for a Republican Majority) And another one which I can't remember. These PACs were given money by corporations, legally. These PACs Gave money to the RNC and RNSEC, which are not political parties, but are considered PACs, just as the DNC is.

Ronnie Earle is trying to convict Delay on a "conspiracy" charge (you Dems really love that word) that says that Delay Conspired with other Repubs to skirt the Texas Election Code that says "A corporation or labor organization may not knowingly make a contribution [to a political party] during a period beginning on the 60th day before the date of a general election for state and county officers and continuing through the day of the election."

by having corporations give money to the TRMPAC who in turn, gave money to the RNC and RNSEC. Now, even if the RNC was a political party, this would not be illegal, unless, the law said that a person is in violation of the code if his intent was to funnel the money to the political party, which, it does not. So, even if the RNC WAS a political party, which it is NOT, the worst Earle has on Delay is that his PAC acted within the context of the law to its political advantage, the same way all us Americans do when filing our tax return.

There just doesn't seem to be ANYTHING here, and, yes, it does seem that Ronnie Earle has a political agenda. Yes, Earle has convicted more Democrats as district attorney in AUSTIN..duh. Since Austin barely has enough Republicans to fill a phone booth, its hardly surprising that its Dist. Attorney, even when overtly partisan, has convicted more Dems. Earle has clearly CONDUCTED his investigation in an openly partisan manner, as indicated by the Houston Chronicle:

The Houston Chronicle called into question Earle's impartiality and judgment:"The fact that Earle refuses to recognize his blunder and would do it again calls into question whether he has the necessary impartiality and judgment to conduct the investigation that to a great extent will determine whether Texas election campaigns will be financed and perhaps determined by corporations or by individuals."
(Self-inflicted wound; District attorney's poor judgment in speaking at a Democratic fund-raiser provides an unintended boost for DeLay's defenders., The Houston Chronicle, May 20, 2005)

Now, unlike the "elite" media which takes right-wing potshots without comment, The Mouth gets to respond to feedback from critics.

First of all, the fact that Ronnie Earle serves as DA in a mostly Democratic county has nothing to do with the ratio of Republican vs. Democratic officeholders he has prosecuted. None of those names I mentioned in my posting were local politicans; they all were statewide officeholders. The twist here is that Earle serves the county where the State Capitol happens to be located and where Texas politicians of all stripes do their dirty deeds. As a result, he has the latitude to prosecute any criminal activity that takes place in his county no matter who commits it. In fact, his office even has a public integrity section that investigates politicians and bureaucrats, something unique to Travis County.

Bill Clinton, one of my least favorite Democrats, would certanly applaud your explanation of why DeLay and TRMPAC did nothing wrong. You have chosen to take the most legalistic and narrow view of what the players did here, and refuse to look at how their actions subverted the spirit of the law, and most likely the letter of it. I suppose you'll be asking me next for a definition of the word "is." The fact is, Texas law forbids corporate contributions to political candidates, and the maneuverings and machinations undertaken by TRMPAC and the RNC amount to money laundering. There's no doubt their intentions were to subvert the law and undermine the integrity of the 2002 state legislative election.

Please note from my column the other day that I haven't ruled out that DeLay might not be convicted by the time this is all over. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. William Gibson, the foreman of the grand jury that indicted DeLay, told NPR this morning that the jury was shown e-mails and phone logs, which cast our House majority leader in the most negative light. Also to consider is the speculation, discussed Friday on PBS' NewsHour, that an insider has perhaps "flipped" and will testify against DeLay to his own ass.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying all of this thoroughly. Remember a decade ago how it seemed the threshhold of proof was awfully low to brand President Clinton with all manner of crimes. All that was needed was mere allegation and even innuendo, and the lynch mob would come calling. Seems as if that threshhold has been raised skyward in recent years. But then that's the kind of moral and ethical exucse-making we've come to expect from the Right.

Delay and the spreading ooze effect

2005-09-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

It's a little early to be dancing on Tom Delay's political grave. For all we know, he could walk away a free man from the conspiracy indictment leveled against him by a Texas grand jury. Hell, he might even be innocent, or let's just say not guilty, because no one could ever really call Delay innocent.

But it sure looks like justice for a man who has spent his career five miles beyond the line that any reasonable person would say divides the ethical from the shady. And if anybody still questions how shady Delay is, they should read my June 6 posting, "Delay tactics" by clicking here.

The indictment against Delay charges that he and his buddies at a PAC called Texans for a Republican Majority engaged in a money laundering scheme to funnel $190,000 from corporate donors to Republican candidates in the Lone Star state. Texas law forbids the use of corporate contributions to political campaigns, so Delay and the folks at TRMPAC allegedly concocted this scheme.

To read his response and for a few laughs, take a look at his personal website by clicking here. The site gives Delay's own legal analysis of the charges against him, as well as a page devoted to smears against Ronnie Earle, the Austin, Texas, district attorney who is prosecuting him. "Our team can't rely on the mainstream media," Delay's site reads, providing the best argument yet for supporting the mainstream media. He does liberally quote such bastions of responsible journalism as the Washington Times and National Review.

Now let's talk about Ronnie Earle. Delay and his right-wing cronies have called him all sorts of things like vindictive and partisan, to which Earle replied in a 60 Minutes interview, "Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being called ugly by a frog. It sort of comes with the territory. But that’s my job. That’s what I’m supposed to do." Right-wingers would like to characterize this as a renegade politician out to persecute his opponents.

But the fact is, of all the politicans Earle has investigated and prosecuted, most have been Democrats. Their ranks include Bob Bullock, at the time state comptroller and later lieutenant governor; Gib Lewis, a former speaker of the house; and Warren G. Harding, a former state treaasurer. These aren't low-level Democratic hacks, but top office-holders.

"I have some very, very bitter feelings toward him," Lewis told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, adding that his true feelings about Earle are unprintable.

But I digress, which is exactly what Delay wants all of us to do. Even if he isn't convicted on the charges, Delay's political sun is quickly setting. He's another in a long list of scoundrels who lived by the political sword and die by the political sword. Think Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. And then think of the growing list of conservatives caught up in charges of ethical malfeasance: Bill Frist, David Safavian, Jack Abramoff. For an entire list of GOP miscreants, check out this admittedly biased page from the Democratic National Committee here.

This spreading ethical ooze of the GOP threatens along with other developments to derail Republican supremacy and even the conservative movement. E.J. Dionne said it best today on NPR's All Things Considered when he pointed out that what had been a party of ideas seems to have devolved into a political machine.

Quote of the Day
"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"
- Delay, chatting up three young Katrina survivors sheltered at Houston's Reliant Park, comparing their predicament to a camping trip.

Seen on a bumper sticker
"Annoy a conservative: Share."

The drunken sailors go on another binge

2005-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

With estimates of rebuilding the Gulf Coast currently running as high as $200 billion, politicians and wonks are scratching their heads wondering where the money is coming from. No doubt, we need to spend whatever is necessary in response to Katrina and Rita. But with fighting a war in Iraq and financing gross tax cuts for the uberwealthy, I'm feeling quite dizzy these days wrapping my little pea brain around the idea of a $4 trillion deficit. It seems like not so long ago, in another presidential administration, we had a budget surplus. But that was then, this is now.

Our Repbublican friends have been clear about where the money is not coming from. It won't be coming from a repeal in the tax cuts for the top 1 percent of Americans. It also won't come from putting a stop to the $24 billion squealing and oinking highway bill recently passed. Tom Delay told The New York Times that he would be loathe to put a stop all those highway projects his constituents in Houston expect.

"My earmarks are pretty important to building an economy in that region," Delay said of his pet projects, which one watchdog group said would cost $114 million.

So what are the Republicans, who control both the White House and Congress, willing to ax?

Well, let's start with the infamous Medicaid prescription bill, a monstrosity of legendary proportions that deserves to get axed. Of course, that will leave us back at square one on the question of how to make prescription drugs more affordable with no relief going to anyone. Also on the chopping block is all government funding to PBS, something that in theory I support because I'm tired of all the right-wing whining about liberal bias and would like to see public broadcasting earn independence once and for all from the politicians. Yet, here's another instance in which government spending for average folks is seen as a vice.

And we haven't begun to hear about what the right-wingers might propose next. I've already been labeled a conspiracy theorist by some right-wingers, so I'll throw caution to the wind here and suggest that Katrina is the excuse Republicans have been seeking to cut a great deal of government spending that benefits average Americans. No, I don't think there's a secret lab somewhere in Nevada where conservatives manufacture hurricanes to perpetuate their agenda. But we're all aware of the current regime's sense of opportunism and determination to impose its ideological dogma on the rest of America.

Putting aside who would be hurt most by these budget cuts, we should also lament the insanity of the Republican spending spree that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Our national debt is just under $8 trillion; over 40 percent of that debt is owed to Japan and China. Do you think that partly explains we turn a blind eye to some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet perpetuated from Beijing? Remember the old excuse, "It's OK. That's just money we owe ourselves." Not true anymore! As recently as 10 years ago, we owed 20 percent of our debt to foreighners. And consider this: each of us owes Beijing and Tokyo more than $6,000.

As that debt increases, a larger percentage of each dollar you spend in taxes will be used to pay interest. I know you don't like to pay taxes, but I'm sure you'd at least like for it to be spent on something useful like new highways in Tom Delay's congressional district. Hard to believe isn't it, that just five years ago we had balanced the budget and were running surpluses and were even considering the unthinkable idea of saving Social Security with all that extra money. Now we're even loathe to rebuild a substantial chunk of America wiped out by a hurricane.

Hope you weren't planning to retire anytime in your lifetime. Your country needs you to pay off that debt.

The Concord Coalition, led by former senators Warren Rudman and Bob Kerrey, is one of the leading voices raised against the frightening level of spending going on these days in Washington.
http://www.concordcoalition.org/

Another good source of information is the Grandfather Economic Reports, which describes in easy-to-understand language how your future, as well your children's and grandchildren's futures are being squandered by our president and Congress.
http://mwhodges.home.att.net/

A brave new post-Katrina world

2005-09-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Right-wing ideologues, always out to engineer a utopian world, have set their sites on New Orleans, according the Wall Street Journal. The Journal, not exactly known for its liberal alarmism, contends that right-wingers have envisioned a new conservative civilization rising from the ashes - make that mud - of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.

"The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot," said U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind, who also leads the Republican Study Group.

Said William A. Niskanen, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute: "Everyone is attaching their own agenda to this.... It's being seen as a test of the conservative agenda, from enterprise zones to school vouchers and the repeal of labor laws, and these ideas deserve careful thought."

Maybe they'll even change New Orleans' name to Aynrandopolis or Reagania.

Of course, this bold incubation of White House-supported rightward thinking won't come cheap to the average American. The right's vision calls for curtailing environmental laws and labor laws, as well attacking a plaintiff's right to a day in court. It's all comes under the pretext of national emergency and the need to cut through red tape to relaunch civilization where civilization currently is somewhat wanting. In fact, to hear them talk about it all, it sounds like very reasonsble responses to an extraordinary situation. And I'm sure some deregulation provisions truly are reasonable.

But knowing the Bush administration and its reliance on red herrings, trojan horses and stealth campaigns, one must always look for ulterior motives. And this time, the right's not being very secretive about its "pro-business" agenda on the Gulf. Isn't it funny how "pro-business" often translates into anti-people?

Read The Wall Street Journal's story here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112674719461641356-43p2eR5Z9GaOg_Ub3CekoDfRpTY_20060915,00.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

NPR also reported last week on how a national emergency isn't standing in the way of right-wing ideological opportunism. Listen to it here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4848417

Quote of the Day

"I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out. And I wouldn't have rescued them."
-Bill O'Reilly

Katrina and the airwaves

2005-09-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

An anonymous writer accused me last week of using the anguish Hurricane Katrina to satisfy my own wicked ends. I thought I should share with said writer some of the things conservatives are saying. Of course, I'm sure they have only the most noble intentions when they say these things.

"I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims."
- Glenn Beck, speaking on his syndicated radio show, expressing his hatred for Katrina's survivors.

"The price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it. It was the price gouger's 'exploitation' that saved your child."
- Libertarian wackjob John Stossel, explaining that gouging desperate people is a virtue, on ABC's 20/20, Sept. 7

"We found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?"
- Pat Robertson, speaking on The 700 Club, linking Katrina to our nation's legalization of abortion. And we wondered when someone would smear God's good name with Katrina.

"Did God have anything to do with Katrina?," people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get our attention so that we don't delude ourselves into thinking that all we have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal again."
- Right-wing politico and convicted Watergate felon Charles Colson, speaking on his TV show BreakPoint.

"The government needs to build the levees. The government needs to make sure the levees are (said in the most snide tone possible)... The government. You're passing the buck all over the place and accepting all the money that the government's sending in to you, ah, and then something like this happens and then you start, you know, wringing your hands."
-Rush Limbaugh, rationalizing the Bush administration's decision to ax $71 million to fix and upgrade New Orleans' sagging levee system.

Thanks to David Brock's Media Matters website for letting me steal the above quotes.

So, how well is the right-wing spin machine doing these days, in spite of its best Mephistopholean efforts?

41%
That's President Bush's overall approval rating, versus a 59% disapproval, according to the latest Zogby poll. He gets a whopping big 36% approval on his handling of Hurricane Katrina. According to the poll, if Bush ran today, he would lose to every recent president as far back as Jimmy Carter. (He would still beat John Kerry, however.)

Mail Day

2005-09-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

We had two different responses to my posting on Hurricane Katrina with widely divergent opinions.

An anonymous writer said this:

What an incredibly mean spirited petty lump of hogwash, South Mouth. You really need to search your soul, this is beneath you. Its obvious that you ARE politicizing this. Saying that you aren't, doesn't make it so. You hate Bush, and its crystal clear from all of your post that you will find some angle to demonize him in everything he does.

And I guess that's what it all comes down to - your hatrid of Bush. Your mad because you hate Bush, and because you hate him, you don't trust him, and because you don't trust him, you assume he does every evil thing possible. In this case you assume he's sitting around twiddling his thumbs, laughing at the little people. In other cases, you assume he had knowledge of the lack of WMD that nobody else in the world has, and lied.

OK, Anonymous, at your request, I've searched my soul. I must say I feel pretty good about everything I said. Yes, Anonymous, I hate President Bush because of his agenda to exclusively serve large corporations, the wealthy and the religious right to the exclusion and opposition of everyone else. You and your right-wing friends spewed malevolence and black-hearted meanness for eight years during the Clinton administration, and now you're outraged that someone would say anything negative about the president you now worship?At least my dislike for Bush stems from actual policy and matters of substance. The right's hatred of Clinton was personal and vindictive, based on nothing of substance (Just look at the lies and fake scandals that were invented to fuel this hatred. Anyone remember "troopergate" or Jerry Falwell's Clinton Chronicles?). Frankly, I think Bush's personal character is every bit as weak and loathesome as Clinton's, but I choose to focus on his actions as president.

As for Bush's response to Katrina, thousands of people are needlessly dead because hardly anyone came to help, at least not for four days. We should have had tens of thousands of troops on the way within 24 hours. Apparently, we can invade and occupy a foreign country, but we can't respond in a timely manner to a hurricane on our own soil. Bush is commander in chief, and if this isn't a national security issue, I don't know what is.

Another writer had this to say:

Although I don't want to politicize a serious situation in New Orleans, I don't want to hear it from my conservative friends criticizing the politicizing this catastrophe also. Remember, there were some conservative voices who blamed 9-11 on the Liberal state of our country. If I hear one of God's so-called pundits blame this as God's revenge on a licentious, morally corrupt society, I will personally hunt them down and shoot them myself.

Fortunately, I've not heard the God's revenge explanation so far. However, a friend pretty quickly forwarded a release from the ultra-right Newsmax, charging that hardly any other nation stepped forward to help us. As it turns out, plenty of countries have indeed offered help, but the Bush administration has turned much of it down. Apparently, I'm not allowed to criticize Bush's four-day delay in sending troops to help, but some folks on the radical right get to use this hurricane as a forum to advance what seems to be their growing hatred of every other nation on the planet.

Equal time for James Dobson

A few weeks back, I wrote a posting to criticize the two Justice Weekend events sponsored by some folks on the religious right, including James Dobson, calling for a Supreme Court that better serves their interests. I wrote Focus on the Family after reading a press release praising Tom Delay as a friend to their cause. I asked them whether it really served their cause to cozy up to a man who has been linked to several ethics scandals. Dobson's folks had this to say:

It was good of you to share your reaction to CitizenLink’s article titled “DeLay to Attend Justice Sunday II.” In response, we must point out that there is nothing untrue about Bruce Hausknecht’s characterization of Representative Tom DeLay. Indeed, the House Majority Leader has “consistently and courageously carried the banner for the American people in the fight to rein in our out-of-control judiciary.” It should be obvious that positive remarks of this nature shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of any *alleged* ethics violations on the part of Representative DeLay.

Thanks again for writing. Grace and peace to you!

Alexander Mackenzie
Focus on the Family Action

Let me say, I thought this was a very gracious reply to what may not have been the most gracious e-mail from The Mouth. Mackenzie, however, chose not to directly answer why Focus on the Family chose to entangle itself with a scumbag like Delay. Let me quote what I once heard from a fellow teacher: "What we don't condemn, we condone."

Bush to N.O.: "Drop dead."

2005-09-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

You've probably been just like me these past five days, eyes glued to the television, ears fastened to the radio, unable to really comprehend the news from New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. Could it really be? An American metro area of over a million people laid to waste, almost abandandoned and uninhabitable? People left behind forced to live as animals as the subhumans among them have ravaged the streets, taking anything they can get their hands on and shooting anything that moves. And then the stories of thousands forgotten and forsaken, the sun beating down on them and water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

For four days they've waited at the convention center, and no one has come to help until today. Consider that throughout the city, people have been so isolated in their despair, they haven't a clue what's going on anywhere. You and I know infinitely more about what's happening in their own city than they do. They must think the world has ended. And for all the help they've gotten, it might as well have.

A woman is photographed by the shrouded cancer-ridden body of her husband, who suffocated after running out of the oxygen he needed. A boy of about 10 or 11 among the throngs at the convention center telling reporters that he had passed out earlier from the heat. An old man joining looters at a Walgreen's, expressing regret that he's been reduced to this. His plunder? A box of Depends for his incontinence.

And you've probably watched all this with that same awful feeling in your gut that you felt on Sept. 11. You sure never thought you'd feel this way four years later, if ever again in your life, certainly not by anything on the news. At least on Sept. 11, there were uplifting stories about humans helping humans. This time there seems to be little but ugliness in what pundit David Brooks referred to on this evening's News Hour as the "anti-9/11."

The whole sad spectacle, the struggle for human survival, plays out as we sit in our living rooms like a bad network miniseries. Just picture Christine Lahti trying to fight her way out of hurricane-ravaged city against all sorts of perils, both human and natural.

And toward the end of this third-rate production, President Bush comes swaggering into the city with his entourage, letting us know that everything would be OK now. Four days after the dreaded Big One finally hits New Orleans our president arrives accompanied by the first real convoy of National Guard troops, not just the skeleton crew we've seen working valiantly but futilely.

"I'm not going to foget what I've seen," Bush says.

Isn't that nice? Never mind the people killed in the hurricane. We have perhaps thousnds who have died of dehydration and exposure, as well as goodness knows what, and all because nobody showed up to help. But at least Bush feels really bad about this whole mess.

"The results are not enough," Bush said, laughably understating the response.

I know what some of my critics might be thinking. I'm shamelessly exploiting this catastrophe for the sake of a few political points. But that's not it at all. What I'm expressing is pure rage. Plenty of Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, have expressed their own outrage over how badly President Bush responded to this mess. There should have been 50,000 troops down there by now. They should have been rolling in within hours after the storm. Of course the question will be increasingly asked in coming days whether the ongoing commitment to Iraq has affected the military's ability to provide the assistance really needed on the Gulf Coast.

There's also a larger, more disturbing side to this pathetic response from Washington, a true slap in the face compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at Iraq and for tax cuts for the wealthy. This sad situation appears to be the logical end result in an ongoing 30-year attack on our government and its ability to help average Americans or even (Gasp!) the poor. Government is evil, we've been told. It's our enemy. And we shouldn't rely on the government's help anyway. Right?

I know that nobody of any political persuasion would wish the suffering of the last few days on anyone. And I also know that everyone across the ideological spectrum would have preferred a more decisive response. But when we continue to shrink government to the size that we can drag it into the bathtub and drown it, as Grover Norquist put it, should we be surprised that this is all our government can do for us?

News from New Orleans
Since Sunday night, I've been keeping a close watch on the New Orleans Times-Picayune website. The staff had to evacuate the newspaper's building, and the paper was published only as a blog from Tuesday until today, when it appears to have again come out in paper. To read those blog postings with all their drama and pathos is truly heartbreaking. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching part was to read postings by people trapped in their homes:
http://www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_nolaview/archives/2005_09.html#076407

From the files of the Peter Principle
I don't know if FEMA Director Michael Brown, whom President Bush praised today as doing a swell job, is a big liar or if he is so incredibly incompetent that he hasn't a clue what's happening in New Orleans, but CNN juxtaposes his outrageously rosy statements with the observations of people who actually are on the scene:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/katrina.response/index.html

Wonder what Uncle Sam was doing to stave off this catastrophe? You can read about it in this story in an obscure New Orleans business journal from last June:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/is_20050606/ai_n14657367

And the latest from the warfront

2005-08-30T20:04:00.000-07:00

"We are winning. Everyone except the Americans knows this."
-U.S. Sen. Mike Monroney, D-Okla., speaking on Vietnam, 1964

Sound familiar?

Various bits and pieces of spin

2005-08-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

God's self-appointed spokesmen speak again

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."
-Pat Robertson, advocating the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. God could not be reached for comment on this matter, but I suspect He disagrees with Robertson's position.

"Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore," and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, "Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death." And you know, well, I'm not sure."
-Clear Channel talk show host Glenn Beck.

Numbers - Boring, yet fun

54% - The portion of the American population who thinks it was a mistake to invade Iraq.

51% - The portion of Americans who approve of President Bush's overall performance, according to the latest Gallup poll.

45% - The share of Americans who think Bush is actually doing something worth a damn about anything.

I read the other day that Al Franken and Air America radio are really doing badly. I was saddened at first, but with numbers like these coming in, I don't guess we left-wingers really need our own propaganda machine. Right-wingers have made it so easy for us, it's almost not sporting to bash them.

$2.61 - The average cost of a gallon of unleaded in America last week. I hope the admittedly small minority among SUV drivers who once acted so smug, in-your-face and gleeful about the political incorrectness of their choice of vehicle are enjoying themselves as they fill up their Escalades and Expeditions these days. So much for the pundits who said Americans would be undeterred by any gas price.

Lies, deceptions and Bush

2005-08-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

President Bush got away with so much during his first term. It took us liberals four years to see the pattern of dishonesty within which he and his staff operate. We now know better, and we routinely search for the ulterior motive and figure out what lies waiting inside any Trojan horse Bush presents to the public. He knows his agenda is unpalatable and detestable to the American public, whether it be privatization of Social Security, tax cuts for the wealthy or the war in Iraq. Therefore, he has no choice but to resort to lies and deceptions, always hiding his real agenda, to get his way.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman discusses Bush's pathological dishonesty in his column this week, and he makes his case a lot better than I've made mine, so I'll let you read about it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/opinion/15krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fPaul%20Krugman&oref=login

God's spokespeople

2005-08-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

Did you know that God is opposed to Senate filibusters? Did you know that God strongly believes in judicial restraint, especially a strict constructionist view of the Constitution? I can't actually find Him on record stating these views, especially not in the Bible. But His self-appointed spokesmen at Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council insist it's true. And since they get to decide for all of us Christians what we should believe, I suppose I shouldn't argue, lest I be branded a secular humanist.

These folks have gotten together recently for a couple of events they've called Justice Sunday and Justice Sunday II to express support for John G. Roberts and to quash anybody who might even question his qualifications and to express its scorn for the Supreme Court in a rabid display not seen since "Impeach Earl Warren" signs began dotting southern highways shortly after Brown v. Board of Ed.

So marching in lockstep with Tom Delay, a paragon of Christian values currently under investigation for a lengthy trail of ethical misdeeds, as well as convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, this army of values has shown zero concern about social injustices or that many children in America have no future or that the precarious financial state of middle-class America is perhaps our greatest threat to families. In fact neither the Family Research Council's nor Focus on the Family's archives of statements show that they have anything to say about any real concerns that impact real families. In essence it's the usual story with the Christian right: Hearts bleed over the unborn, but turn to stone for those out of the womb. Indeed, these two groups are about little more than sanctimonious indignation and how it can be harnessed to gain political power.

But instead of listening to me pontificate further, I'll quote some highlights from the two Justice Sundays and throw in some other quotes.

"Justice Sunday: Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith."
-The first event's official name, reflecting the religious right's insistence that anyone who disagrees with them is persecuting them.

"How do the judges get away with such outrageous decisions? By asserting that Supreme Court decisions are the supreme law of the land. But you know that is not true. That is a terrible heresy."
-Phyllis Schlafly, attempting to interpret the Constitution at Justice Sunday II.

"The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority..."
-Article III, Section 2, U.S. Constitution

"There is a majority on the Supreme Court that is -- and you'll have to pardon me, but this is the way I see it -- they're unelected and unaccountable and arrogant and imperious and determined to redesign the culture according to their own biases and values, and they're out of control. And I think they need to be reined in."
-James Dobson at Justice Sunday II, ignoring that six of the nine justice were appointed by Republican presidents.

"Black churches are too concerned with justice,"
- Harry Jackson, who happens to be black, speaking at the first Justice Sunday.

"Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court. They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
-James Dobson, proposing that Congress get rid of judges it dislikes by stripping their courts of funding.

"But when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men."
-Matthew 6:5

Right-wing mouthing off vs. the truth

If you ever listen to conservative talk radio as I try to do as little as possible, you'll notice those guys speak so fast and throw so many opinions and "facts" out into the airwaves, you can't keep it straight. Outrageous comments are made without substantiation. Facts are presented without attribution. It's all part of their game to misinform. Don't let the truth get in the way of a good argument, as Sean Hannity believes. Here's a fun link that presents right-wing opinion alongside what is factually correct:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/custom/cap/findorg.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=124702&lftnav=claimvsfact

Flash blogging

2005-08-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

I have 22 kids coming to my classroom in three days, so I'm a little busy right now, so I thought I'd take some time for some lightning fast blogging, quick opinions on this and that:

1) President Bush likes to think of himself as the heir to Ronald Reagan. Taking a look at his guns and butter approach, what with this ongoing mess in Iraq and his pork-packed highway bill that went over his original estimate by $3 billion, perhaps Bush should start looking at himself as the heir to LBJ.

2) Does it seem like Bush is looking more and more foolish trying to pretend he doesn't see this woman camped out in front of the "ranch" in Crawford? I'm sure you've heard all about this mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who demands an audience with the president. Apparently, she's joined by an increasing number of people, who remain undaunted by a passing parade of drive-by yahoos trying to bully and intimidate them into leaving. Meanwhile, our president refuses to acknowledge that this woman is sitting by his front gate. To my knowledge, Bush still has not attended one funeral of a fallen soldier out of a persistent fear of what that would do to him politically. What kind of leadership is this?

3) And here we thought that the Tom Delay affair had quietly blown over as right-wingers were hoping. Fortunately, federal prosecutors are quite tenacious and work on their own schedule. Republican lobbyist/crook Jack Abramoff was finally indicted Thursday for his trail of malfeasance. As you know, this guy is connected to Christian right leader Ralph Reed, whose own ethics have been questioned lately, and of course connected to Delay. Of course we're also hearing that Delay's own PAC has been rife with inconsistencies and bad bookkeeping. We'll stay tuned for further news on him. Of course, I'm sure right-wingers are continuing to make excuses.

MAIL

We had some interesting responses to my blog on Monday discussing how reasonable conservatives continue to see morning in America, while right-wing ideologues peddle the end times to score donations and votes. One reader said this:

Good blog, Mouth. I get sooo tired of conservatives harking back to the good old days of the 1950's. Yeah, lets go back to Jim Crow, Red baiting, and mono. Where we all walked lockstep together in our homogenous staid society. Where conformity was a virtue. I think the 60's and 70's was a convulsive reaction against this, though no doubt it went too far and has left some societal problems that we are still dealing with. I got a novel suggestion: instead of pointing a finger at others, how about we reach out a help hand.

Indeed. The basic philosophy guiding many right-wingers is, "I'm just fine. You're the problem."

Another reader said this:

You are also correct about 48% of the electorate voting for the party of the far left. However, I just think this goes to diminish your suggestion that we're slouching towards Jerusalem.

It seems statistically impossible for all this positive change to take place if 48 percent of the electorate is this bad. And do you really believe that because someone voted for Kerry that means they support drug use, divorce and teenage promiscuity? If so, then thank you for illustrating what I've been saying all along about right-wingers.

Furthermore, I urge you to revisit my June 24 posting, which shows some strong evidence that while red-staters talk the talk on family values, blue-staters are far more likely to actually walk the walk.

Good news doesn't sell

2005-08-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

We hear so often from the right-wingers in this country about the moral decline in America. To hear them talk we're defining deviancy downward as we slouch toward Gomorrah. Children don't say "Yes ma'am" and "No sir." Men wear their hats indoors. And women use curse words. Indeed, they say, we must be in the end times.

Fortunately, not all conservatives feel this way. Francis Fukuyama, for example, writes in his 1999 book, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, that after the social chaos and moral erosion of the 1960s and '70s, we seem to be in the midst of a reweaving of the social fabric. Our society is rebuilding the civic institutions and social order it needs to stay healthy.

Just yesterday, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times about how America seems to be picking up the pieces from the if-it-feels-good-do-it era and putting itself back together. He cites many statistics showing that out-of-wedlock births are way down, as are crime and drug use. Even divorce rates seem to be on their way downward, especially among younger college graduates. His column brings us good news and let's us know that we really have a lot to celebrate in these times. Americans are not just mouthing off about traditional values but actually practicing them. It even appears that the younger one is, the more likely one is to show firm moral discipline.

I strongly recommend you read, Brooks' editorial. Click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/opinion/07brooks.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fDavid%20Brooks

Unfortunately, even while reasonable conservatives like Brooks and Fukuyama cheer on this social reconstruction of civic America, the right-wing GOP leadership would rather focus on the negative. Bearing good news about rebuilding the social order doesn't sufficiently incense the rank and file. If the average Republican actually heard that an increasing number of Americans choose to behave responsibly, those checks to the RNC might quit coming and the feverish outrage might subside on Election Day. Therefore, the right-wing outrage mill must continue its focus on the negative, and boy, do they have to really dig and take liberties some days to dredge up some santimonious indignation.

God and Politics

Speaking of morals, the New York Times and our ongoing discussion of the Democrats' search for identity, the Times ran a pretty good column the other day written by Jim Wallis, who heads the liberal evangelical Christian group Sojourners. Wallis, who also wrote the book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, disucsses how Democrats should speak up and start molding the discussion of what it means to bring a Christian perspective to public forum.

Click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/opinion/04wallis.html

Lessons from Fleet Street

2005-08-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Mouth and wife have returned from a wonderful week in London, exploring the multi-textured dimensions of a 2,000-year-old city and keeping an eye out for suspicious packages left in the Underground.

An added bonus to leaving the United States for a week was taking a breather from the rancorous partisanship and ideological feuding that characterizes so much of day-to-day life here. It seems you can't even casually read a newspaper or have the TV on without hearing about how the Republicans are mad at Bill Frist for supporting stem-cell research or how Pat Robertson is praying for illness and death on left-leaning Supreme Court justices. I hadn't realized how nice it could be to get away from all that. In fact, I was reluctant to even pick up the paper this morning.

The newspapers in London had very little American news, other than John Bolton's appointment, and very little news about their own political foolishness. No stories about how the exchequer is mad at the home minister or anything like that. The only domestic political controversy I read about followed a member of Parliament blaming the July 7 bombings on Tony Blair, and he was hastily and harshly criticized by other MPs. Unlike the big divide that has characterized our politics at least since Clinton was first voted in, Brits seem to be more agreeable about things. And that puts them pretty far to the left of us.

British newspapers are notoriously bad, content to scream large headlines about any homicide (There aren't many) or accident, and the grislier the better. They also love celebrity gossip, especially anything concerning David Beckham and the former Posh Spice. The big divide seems to be the one concerning Manchester United vs. Arsenal. Politics? Well, that's for those stuffy guys gathered under Big Ben to figure out. In the meantime, what's the latest on Jessica Simpson?

At the risk of sounding like the tourist who becomes a know-it-all after one week in Britain, I would suggest this supposed apathy partly results from a somewhat less democratic and constitutional government than ours. Brits lack access to many government records we Americans are able to see, and their judiciary liberally restrains newspapers from printing stories that could reflect poorly on the government or its officials. So there goes any investigative journalism, and there goes a lot of government scrutiny. In its place is tabloid crap, and the average citizen comes out the loser. But he doesn't seem terribly up-in-arms about it.

Perhaps there's something else at work here, namely a greater sense of perspective. The English are known for their level heads and cool demeanor. On the tube, riders didn't panic after the bombings that took place July 7. Oh, I'm sure they felt fearful, but they didn't show it while we were there. Mostly on the train they talked and laughed with their friends, and if they were by themselves, they read, dozed or just looked bored.

Consider that London dates back to within a hundred years of Christ's death, and compare that with our measly 400 years of recorded history. Brits have seen a lot from the Romans to Harold the Conquerer to a long, bloody succession of kings and queens. Want political intrigue? Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have nothing on Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell. Abu Graib and Guantanamo are no doubt nightmarish places, but they can't compare with the torture that ruled at the Tower of London. I would never want to trivialize Sept. 11, but consider that 20,000 Londoners were killed and 45,000 homes were destroyed by Hitler's luftwaffe. Walking last week through Churchill's underground bunker, one could palpably sense the deprivation and fear, yet courage and fortitude that carried Britain through the war. Many Londoners are still around who remember it firsthand, and few don't remember parents or grandparents who told them all about it.

With all that, I think that so-called British stiff upper lip must be imprinted in the collective DNA after two millenia. A month after the terrorist bombings and a couple of weeks after a second attempt, life is normal in London. People go about their business in the day, and fill the streets at night in a festive attempt to enjoy every nice summer evening they can in their too-short season. Are the concerned about terrorism? Of course. Who wouldn't be concerned? But hey, after 2,000 years, they've seen a lot worse.

The Mouth needs a vacation

2005-07-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

The Mouth and Mrs. Mouth will be traveling to London next week to have some fun while keeping our eyes open for any unattended packages. Upon our return, I head back to the classroom, which will keep me pretty focused. Because 23 or so kids need a committed teacher more than America needs another armchair pundit, I'll no longer be able to keep up these daily postings (Obviously, I've already been cutting back.) However, I'll be sure to post my thoughtful and provocative commentary at least once a week and hopefully even more often, so keep coming back to see what I have to say. I appreciate my faithful readers, many of whom I know strongly disagree with what I say.

And now, the mail

My posting yesterday on the Democrats' search for identity elicited some responses. One reader, while agreeing with my contention that we need to focus on economic issues, isn't so sure about what my idea of steering clear of social issues:

I agree that while Clinton was on to something with "It's the economy, stupid", let's not forget that the Republican party has been really successful pulling out the Rove bag of tricks. Targeting middle America, they struck a core with subliminal messages such as "The Dems might have your wallet concerns, but look who they are, i.e. fags, atheists, pot-smokers (wink, wink). If they can hit a core with not just the economic concerns but also the social concerns (crime, abortion, ect.), then they might get back on track. The key is appealing to middle America. They already have the coasts.

I agree that we need to take a very centrist position on social issues. On the other hand, I don't think Middle America is as strongly Republican as they would like us all to think. One can look simply at the narrow margins in many heartland states to see that. Also, I don't believe we'll ever out-NASCAR the Republicans, so why try? Besides, why would we want to?

I'm certainly not the first to contend that a new political order seems to be works. Some call it the religious vs. secular or the Christians vs. God-haters. I would describe it more aptly as the orthodox and ideological vs. the pragmatic and reasonable. You can see this as old-line southern yellow-dogs go Republican and as a large segment of the wealthy take rather liberal views, both economically and socially. It'll be interesting to see how where this winds up.

A conservative reader had this to say:

Well written Mouth. But let's remember that, now, more than ever, you Dems are the party of Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, Strom Thurmond (still), Barbara Boxer, Sheila Jackson Lee, and many other hate sputing far left wacko extremist. Guys like Joe Lieberman never stand a chance in your party, and well, the reason Clinton made it was because he could be all things to all people at any given time.

The Democratic party will remain the party of the far left until they start embracing "family values." I can't tell you how happy it makes me every time Howard Dean opens his mouth, and Michael Moore steps up to a podium. With leaders like those, you're sure to take the back seat in American politics for a while to come.

If we are the party of the far left, then I guess 48 percent of the electorate was perfectly comfortable with that last November. Now if we could just do something about the other 3 percent we need.

As you've pointed out, there are many Democrats who I'd prefer not to have associated with the party and whom I fear wield too much influence. Hopefully, some of the folks you mentioned will be more marginalized in the future. For the record, I like Al Gore, and frankly Ted Kennedy sounds increasingly reasonable and fair-minded considering some of the folks across the aisle.

Now allow me to list some folks who are among the top ranks of the Republican party: Tom Delay, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Trent Lott and of course, our president. We don't have to look too far back in time to remember the foul and disgusting Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, David Duke and all those crooks who served in the Reagan and Nixon administrations. I know you're proud of these folks and will go to great lenghts to defend them, and that's why the Republicans are in big trouble.

As for Strom Thurmond, I should point out he was highly dissatisfied with LBJ's stand for Civil Rights and left the party in 1964, deciding he would be more comfortable joining the Republicans in their stand for bigotry and intolerance.

A party that stands for something. Please.

2005-07-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

As I've lambasted and excoriated hard-core conservatives and Republicans repeatedly this summer, I've been nagged by the constant reminder that at least these folks, as extremist as they've become, know what they stand for. We Democrats haven't a clue. We're not quite so bad as we were 40 years ago when our ranks counted such strange bedfellows as Strom Thurmond and George McGovern, the biggest redneck segregationists and the most flaming hearts all united in a great stand for and against nothing. In those yellow-dog days, party allegiance was the end itself, about as empty as rooting for a sports team.

Republicans justly point out that the Democrats never seem to have any alternative plan to the Bush administration's agenda. Obstructionism seems to be the end goal. Social Security certainly comes to mind as an issue where our obstruction has been merited, but not followed up with any meaningful ideas. You can also look at John Kerry's presidential run last year. His platform seemed to be I'm not Bush, so vote for me. A lot of Americans, many of them quite conservative, were highly dissatisfied with our president and actually looked to the Democrats for an alternative. Seeing little there, many held their noses and voted for Bush. What a squandered opportunity!

I bring this up as the Democratic Leadership Committee meets this week to try to figure out exactly what the party should stand for. We've been here before quite a few times. We know we don't want to return to our hippy-dippy wackiness of 1972. We also know we don't want to be the party of union thugs, urban machine crooks and populist pork-barrelers.

President Clinton deserves a great deal of credit in breathing life back into the party. He realized the importance of showing Americans that Democrats can be fiscally prudent, tough on crime and bold on defense, areas traditionally perceived as Republican strongholds. Unfortunately, Clinton was quite cozy with big business. His administration made the world safe for NAFTA, Clear Channel's near-monopoly of the public airwaves and the euphemistically named Freedom to Farm Act, which drove many family farms under and allowed the food giants like ADM and Tyson to grow even more intimidating. Through much of Clinton's administration, many liberals complained that it was like having two Republican Parties. Really, it's a wonder conservatives hate Clinton so much. I fear that as much as Clinton and the DLC helped shake much of the stigma attached to the Democrats over the last 25 years, their conservative approach emboldened and empowered the right-wing wackos to take over the GOP and push it to its current extremist position on the spectrum.

Standing in opposition to the DLC is the Howard Dean wing of the party, which he called the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. This group is fiery and defiantly liberal. They believe Democrats should take a stand for average Americans and fight for such issues as affordable quality healthcare, Social Security, and tax equity. I agree that these issues should be the core of the party's platform and my heart is often with this end of the spectrum, yet the left wing of the party is where all the ideologues reside, a group of people who can be every bit as tiresome and ridiculous as the kooks on the right. Here you find a bold stand for abortion rights, gun control and affirmative action, huge loser issues for Democrats that have cost us so much. We lost our southern base on these issues, and now we seem to be losing the Catholic vote. If nothing else, we need to ease up on our unyielding stance on these positions and adopt the kind of "big tent" approach of the GOP. Our other problem is Howard Dean, who fires up the base and alienates everyone else.

Although Clinton's actual policies didn't always show it, I think his '92 campaign people had it right when he said "It's the economy, stupid." In the long run, we need to focus on those issues that really affect middle-class America's standard of living and steer clear of unpopular stances on social issues. A renewed opportunity is presenting itself to Democrats. Most Americans remain unimpressed with the Bush White House and Republican Congress. Now the question is this: As the Republicans see diminishing returns from their unpopular platform, will the Democrats be ready to step in and offer anything else?

Those @#$% latte-sipping, cabernet-drinking, bicoastal liberal faggots are persecuting us again!

2005-07-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

This past week the St. Louis Federal Reserve released a report examining how well our nation is doing at job creation, focusing on "good" and "bad" jobs. You know the difference. High wages, good benefits = Good. Low wages, poor benefits = Bad. Not too surprisingly, St. Louis is doing a poor job at creating the good ones. But keep reading, and you find out that much of America is in the same boat. Between 1980 and 2000, good jobs increased at a much slower rate than bad jobs. When you isolate the sucking sound of all those manufacturing jobs lost to China and Mexico, we average Americans are really looking at trouble.

In the meantime, a friend has sent me a piece praising Bernard Goldberg's book 100 People Who Are Screwing up America (and Al Franken is #37). You probably know Goldberg as the disgruntled CBS reporter who rebranded himself a right-winger so he could sell a lot of books saying bad things about his former employer. Anyway, this latest effort at sucking up to conservatives is a rather predictable Who's Who of every liberal hated by the right. You know, Michael Moore, Al Franken, all those Hollywood celebrities. The underlying message is the usual self-pity in which some conservatives enjoy wallowing, the self-aggrandizing delusion that they are being persecuted by "elites" on either coast.

So what do the Fed's report on poor job growth and Bernard Goldberg's flimsy little book have in common? Really, nothing, or at least they shouldn't, except that one can see the standard shell game the Republicans have been playing for many years now to sway the same average folks whom they screw year after year. Forget about the dwindling number of good jobs. They would rather we not consider that Bush's first term showed the first negative job growth since Herbert Hoover. They don't want us to dwell on the fact that instead of using President Clinton's budget surplus to fix Social Security, Bush chose to hand it over to the super-wealthy as tax breaks and further endanger Social Security by proposing some ridiculous private investment scheme. They don't want us up in arms over the high cost of healthcare or the administration's record on the environment or workplace safety. In fact, they would rather we forget about the endangered status of the American middle class, altogether. Instead, they say, let's just focus on Alec Baldwin, the "tenured radicals" in the universities and anybody to whom you can attach the adjective "latte-sipping."

I think Molly Ivins summed it up best when she said, "Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it." Your well-being and the nation's should come first, and the pundits' attempts to divert attention from the real issues are nothing but cheap politics. Quite simply, they know they haven't got a chance with most Americans when it comes to the issues that really matter, so they throw out red flags and red herrings like Janet Jackson's nipple, gay marriage and flag burning.

This was the essence of Thomas Frank's 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? He asks the question, how can so many Americans sell out their best interests in the face of cheap hot-button demagoguery and this kind of calculated reverse snobbery? Throw out a few platitudes about family values or express outrage over rap lyrics and many Americans will hand over the keys to their own demise. Frank puts it best here:

"The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity dereulation. Vote to get the government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

Bernard Goldberg's list illustrates Frank's point (and mine) perfectly. It's made up of the usual suspects designed to send many right-wingers into a frothing rage. Many of these people I dislike myself, like Paris Hilton and Eminem. But seriously, how do these two bozos affect your immediate and future well-being? Other names on the list are calculated to press the hot buttons of some red-staters' insecurity, the idea that somebody in Manhattan might be looking down on them (Why they should care, I don't know). Simply mention the name Barbra Streisand, and so many conservatives fly into a rage. Associate a liberal position on any issue with people sitting in hot tubs and many votes are guaranteed. Goldberg shows his ham-handed desperation at making some kind of point by putting some of the farthest-out, most wacko liberals on his list, a transparently cheap tactic that would be akin to my arguing that Tim McVeigh proves the sinister nature of conservatism. I wouldn't do that; not only would that be unfair, but I need only point to the White House and Congress to show you how far out and extreme the right is these days.

One listed name in Goldberg's book that's especially laughable is Jesse Jackson; for years I've referred to the right-wing outrage machine's pundits as the Jesse Jacksons of the right for their incessant need to dredge up isolated outrages. In the right-wing example, isolated instances of buffoonery and idiocy are thrown out and tied together as alleged proof of a vast conspiracy to undermine America. If you've listened to any of these guys on the radio for more than 10 minutes, you know what I mean. Have you heard about that principal in Florida who wouldn't let a student bring her Bible to school? Did you hear what those PETA protesters in San Francisco did? I can't believe that Harvard professor who compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany! And so forth.

In the meantime, the Federal Reserve's outlook on job growth in America isn't improving any, nor is the outlook for middle-class America. But you'll never hear that from ace reporter and media critic Bernard Goldberg. He's too busy reporting on more important matters, like how much he hates Michael Moore.

Quotes of the Day

"What if you said something like, if this (a terrorist attack) happens in the United States, and we determine it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites."
- U.S. Rep Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., advocting a bombing raid on Mecca.

"I wonder: Am I the only one who feels that lately - 'lately' described as, 'since Sept. 11, 2001' - the nation seems overrun by yahoos?"
- Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts on Tancredo and his ilk.

Mail

One reader responds to my calling President Bush a "lying sack of you-know-what."

"Hey Mouth,

I thought you weren't calling the President a liar?"

Whoops. Well, I guess that makes me a lying sack of you-know-what.

At least it's not Priscilla Owen

2005-07-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

I suppose "relief" is the word I would use to describe my feelings on President Bush's choice of John G. Roberts to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.

He's certainly not the man I would pick to defend our Constitution, but knowing Bush as we know him all too well, he could have picked a real whackjob extremist. I think we liberals were flat-out expecting that. Roberts is certainly conservative, and if appointed, I'm sure I will disagree with him frequently. At the same time, he seems to be a conservative like Rehnquist, and not a conservative like Scalia. In other words, the sum of his opinions puts him somewhere on the right, but he's not an activist pushing some ideological agenda.

Examining Roberts' record briefly today, I couldn't find too many instances of frightning rulings or tortured logic exercised to fit a preconceived end goal. On some of his decisions where he has fallen on the right, I would actually agree. I'm opposed to abortion. I think race-based affirmative action is unfair and should be based on one's economic background. I also think the forced busing of the '70s and '80s severely undermined public education and ripped apart our cities.

Still, a few bits and pieces from Roberts' past have trouble me. He is reported to be actively involved in the Washington Legal Foundation, a right-wing group that appears to be pro-big business to everyone else's detriment. Click here to see what they stand for:
http://www.wlf.org/Resources/Releases/pressreleases.asp
As part of the Reagan-era Justice Department, Roberts supported a 1980 Supreme Court decision diluting the Voting Rights Act and claiming that it was OK to discriminate during elections as long as you didn't mean to. As acting Solicitor General under George H.W. Bush, he argued in court in favor of mining 4,500 public acres in which recreational activities were ongoing. As a private attorney, he successfully defended Toyota in a workplace injury claim, essentially arguing that carpal tunnel syndrome does not entitle a worker to workplace accomodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Roberts also filed an amicus brief in a case

Roberts' paper trail isn't anywhere near as frightening as what I know we would have seen with some of the others Bush was considering for the Supreme Court spot. Enough is there, however, to make me quickly realize that this guy probably wouldn't stand in agreement with some of the values I hold dear: stewardship of the environment, justice and a fair shake for average Americans. Besides, how sad is it that we have a president who stands so far off on the political spectrum from where average Americans stand that we're relieved that Bush nominated a garden variety right-winger and not an orthodox radical?

Also troubling is the thinness of his record. There doesn't seem to be much there to examine. Could we be confirming a stealth radical? That's certainly how Bush ran his own 2000 election campaign. On the other hand, he could be a sore disappointment to conservatives. Much to their consternation, they have a lengthy track record of nominating pragmatists in ideologues' clothing. Consider Earl Warren and O'Connor, for examples.

For now, Roberts seems to be about as good as we can expect. The old-line liberal organizations, the ones who send you mail with screaming warnings if you've ever donated as little as $1 to a leftist cause, are naturally outraged and vocal already in their opposition to this guy. I'm not exactly thrilled, myself. But who did they expect, Hillary Clinton?

More Numbers
49%
That's the percentage of Americans who think the president is trustworthy, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center, down from 56 percent in April. By contrast, 46 percent of Americans find Bush to be a lying sack of you-know-what. OK, actually I believe the poll results merely used the expression "not trustworthy." The "lying sack of you-know-what" part represents my own biased opinion.

19%
That's the portion of self-described Republicans who think Karl Rove should resign, according to the same poll. Thirty-nine percent said he should not. So much for Republicans standing up for values, huh? An additional 42 percent of Republicans couldn't turn off "Nanny 911" long enough to form a coherent opinion.

80%
That's the portion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of daily newspapers, according to the Pew Center's polling. How can this be? According to the right-wing spin, America has given up trust in the mainstream media and has decided to use Sean Hannity as a primary news source. Also, 54 percent of Americans say these so-called liberal rags are too easy on Bush.

54%
That's the percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq has actually made us less safe from terrorism, according to the most recent CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll. Forty percent of Americans believe that the war has kept us safe from the evil-doers.

The Mouth and his friends have been engaging in some lively debates lately, especially over God and politics. Click on "Comments" at the bottom of each day's posting to see what folks have to say. I hope you too will participate in our discussions. And don't forget to keep reading and to tell your friends about The Mouth. Before long, I'll be able to count readers on both my fingers and toes.

Examining the architect

2005-07-19T05:23:00.000-07:00

It was 1970 when a flier circulated on skid row advertising "Free beer. Free food. Girls." and giving directions to a campaign rally for Alan Dixon, a Chicago Democrat running for Illinois state treasurer. I'm sorry I wasn't there to witness the assortment of miscreants who showed up; it's one of those things we can all look back on and laugh at now (Dixon, by the way, went on to win the race). And who initiated this prank? Why, a college-aged Karl Rove, who sent out the fliers on letterhead he brazenly stole from Dixon's campaign headquarters.

It was a minor, rather juvenile stunt from Rove, then a disciple of Donald Segretti, Nixon's "dirty tricks" operative who ended up in prison over Watergate. But it serves as a harbinger of bigger, grander political misdeeds to come over the next 35 years as Rove rose from College Republican rabble-rouser (Lee Atwater was a close CR colleague) to the GOP's head smear artist and sleaze peddler, the amoral bad cop behind Presidnet Bush's magnanimous-sounding good cop. Rove, of course, has surfaced as the shadowy figure who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Everybody figured as much, and this certainly isn't the first time we've heard about Rove and his rotten tricks. But this time is different. Rove's e-mail regarding the Plame outing serves as a smoking gun, perhaps the first time we've ever gotten the goods on this guy, who never leaves fingerprints.

Of course, Republicans and conservatives make excuses and moral equivocations, while silently keeping their fingers crossed that the whole thing will blow over, and they can again fall back into their old means of winning at all costs. A curious worldview for people who say God is on their side. One letter writer to this blog stated last week, "I really think that your bitter, bitter hatred for Pres. Bush, Tom Delay, Carl Rove, or anyone else who progresses the policies of the Republican party is just..well, sour grapes." I appreciate the statement as it fully illustrates the moral relativism and ethical double-standard that serve as a rhetorical crutch to many Republicans and conservatives.

So am I just full of sour grapes, or am I correct in saying that Rove years ago crossed over the line into what any reasonable American would consider sleazy and immoral? Funny thing about Rove. He's so good at what he does, you never can prove he did it. Yet Rove always seems to be hanging in the shadows when these things happen. Is it any coincidence that when he's running a campaign, the sleaze begins to gush forth? Consider:

*In 1986, mere weeks before the Texas gubernatorial election, Rove announced that bugging devices had been found in the offices of hs client, Republican candidate Bill Clements. Nobody ever determined that incumbent opponent Mark White's people ever had anything to do with the bugs, and a strong suspicion exists today in Texas that the bugs were planted by Rove himself. But the resulting damage of the accusation served as a contributing factor in White's defeat. Clements who had already served one term as the state's chief executive, went on to cement his place in history as one of Texas' worst-ever governors.

*In 1994, Karl Rove ran the campaign of Republican judicial candidate Harold See in Alabama. Rumors began ciruclating that Democratic opponent Mark Kennedy was a child molester and had used a children's welfare nonprofit as a front to mask financial misdeeds. A Kennedy campaign commercial showing him holding the hands of the children he was helping through the nonprofit was used as evidence to support the child indecency allegations. Kennedy ultimately won, but barely.

*In 1994, Texas voters began receiving telephone calls asking this question about Democratic Gov. Ann Richards, who was running for her second term against George W. Bush: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?" This of course is an example of a "push poll," a fake poll that is not intended at all to measure voter sentiment but is merely designed to plant negative thoughts about an opponent in voters' heads. These polls have been a tactical mainstay for Republicans and conservatives. In this case, it helped to defeat Richards and send Bush on his ascendancy to the White House. By the way, who was Bush's campaign manager? Why, Karl Rove, of course.

*Rove is believed to be behind the 2000 smear campaign to discredit Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as he ran against Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. Whispers passed along the Beltway grapevine and out into the media accused McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child (In truth, McCain adopted a black girl) and willfully consorting with his North Vietnamese captors when he was a POW.

*During the 2000 elelction debacle as Florida bureaucrats were bumbling their way through their vote count, Rove loaded buses with "protesters," essentially a group of Beltway Republican insiders pretending to be an angry mob of "disenfranchised Republicans," and held a "protest."

I could go on and on. In researching this posting, I was confronted with an embarassment of riches when it comes to examples of Rove's deeds. It's no wonder that Bush's nickname for his head thug is "Turd Blossom." I certainly can't argue.

And if you think that Rove is just some campaign operative who then goes away after the inauguration, you thought wrong. This guy is very much a part of Bush's inner-circle with a real influence on the policies that come out of the White House. Next to Dick Cheney, probably nobody has as much sway with the president as Rove.

"Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office," former Bush adviser John Dilulio told Esquire magazine after he resigned in 2001.

I'm sure some angry conservative will respond with the usual litany of obfuscation and deflection. You know the old story. The Democrats are no better. Everybody's doing it. Well, what about Bill Clinton? And so forth. I would respond with a question I ask often, If conservatives are the Godly paragons of moral virtue they claim to be, when do they plan to start acting like it? Indeed, we shall know them by their fruit, not to mention the company they keep.

Read more about it:
Here's a transcript of PBS "Frontline" episode on Rove. You can also watch the actual episode:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/architect/

Now I'm not saying rotten.com is the most trusted source of journalism in America today, but they did put together a good factual bio on Rove:
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/karl-rove/

Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper had this good article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1165126,00.html

Numbers, numbers, numbers
25%
-The portion of Americans who think the Bush administration is cooperating with investigators over the Plame leakage, according to an ABC poll released yesterday, down from 47% when the inquiry began last September.

Quote of the Day
"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."
- President Bush on Monday, revising his statement last month that he would fire anyone associated with the Plame outing.

"It appears that an administration that came to office promising 'honesty and integrity' and to avoid 'legalisms' is now defining ethical standards downward. In this White House, apparently no aide will be fired or forced to resign unless and until the jail cell door is locked behind him."
- Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich, on Bush's announcement yesterday that Rove can be as sleazy as he wishes as long as he doesn't break the law.

You lose again, Missouri (and again, again and again)

2005-07-18T05:52:00.000-07:00

The Boy Governor has been mighty busy in recent weeks.

From day one, Matt Blunt has boldly and bravely stood up to average Missourians, determined to conquer their unreasonable and outrageous demands such as access to healthcare and honest, open government (please note my June 26 posting "Missourians Blugeoned by a Blunt"). As I recall, Blunt's victory margin was less than one percentage point. But like his role model in the White House, neither a slim margin nor low approval ratings (35 percent for Blunt this month!) should ever deter the ideologue from defeating the selfish special interests of regular working folks. His untiring commitment to improving life for the downtrodden underdogs of corporate Missouri - homebuilders, insurance companies and railroads, to name a few - is truly inspiring.

Let's examine his ongoing efforts for further inspiration:

1) Blunt signed a law making any complaint filed with the Missouri Department of Insurance a closed record. Until now, complaints against insurance companies have been a matter of public record here in Missouri. Essentially you, the average citizen, could request access to any complaints filed against any insurer. I myself have examined such records when purchasing an insurance policy to ensure that I'm dealing with a reputable company. Well, not anymore. You lose, Missouri.

2) Blunt signed a law prohibiting discount brokers from placing a homeseller's property on Multiple Listing Service for a one-time fee. This service has allowed a homeowner who wants to sell his own home an opportunity to bypass real estate agents, yet have his listing out there for the public to see it. Now a homeowner who wants an MLS listing must go through a traditional agent, who inevitably will insist on an exclusive contract and a cut of the sale. The bill was so egregiously anti-consumer and anti-competitive that the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department requested a veto from Blunt. But the Missouri Association of Realtors ponied up $50,000 in a one-time lobbying fee to Blunt family friend Greg Hartley, a former top aide of the gov's dad, U.S. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo. Hartley, it should be noted, has close ties with Tom Delay and lobbyist/crook Jack Abramoff. You lose again, Missouri.

3) Blunt signed a law requiring that a homebuyer can't sue a builder over shabby construction without first allowing the builder to fix the problem or mediating the dispute. On the surface, the law sounds commendable, but it requires the buyer to jump through an interminable series of legal hoops, and if the i's and t's aren't dotted and crossed perfectly, the homeowner's right to a fair hearing in court is forever forfeited. Yes, I'm afraid Missouri that you lose yet again.

4) Blunt remains hellbent in his efforts to give away a bridge on Missouri's Katy Trail to Union Pacific Railroad. For those not from Missouri, the Katy Trail is a hiking and biking trail on abandoned Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad right-of-way, running across the state from St. Louis to Kansas City. The trail is hugely popular and a national treasure. The one gap in its length is an abandoned lift-span bridge over the Missouri River at Boonville, where the middle span has been raised indefinitely for 20 years. The city of Boonville has raised money to fix the bridge for public use, but Blunt stands in the way. He insists on handing the bridge over to Union Pacific (which owns the bridge, but legally must keep it in place as long as the rail line is used as a hiking trail). UP wants to tear down the bridge and sell it for scrap, and it's probably no coincidence they've hired an active Republican fund-raiser, Ted Kettlewell of Fulton, as a contractor to do the job. We learned yesterday from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Blunt has ignored and tried to hide legal advice from a lawyer he hired to study this affair who said that the bridge should not be removed. Missouri, you haven't lost this one yet. But you might still.

Now lest I beat up too much on the Boy Governor, let me take issue with the Democrats. The first three items I've discussed here deal with legislation passed by the state's General Assembly. None of these votes broke down on partisan lines. In fact, the real estate listing law passed unanimously. Where the hell are the Democrats when we need them? We know where the Republicans stand. Are we to assume that we now have two parties who care not a lick about the average Missourians best interests?

Conservatives quoted

"While I didn't invent negative politics, I am among its most ardent practitioners."
- Lee Atwater, architect of the GOP's ongoing strategy of dirty tricks and skullduggery.

Mail Day

2005-07-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

Our friend, Throat Deep, offers these comments on my posting the other day on capital punishment:

Great commentary on capital punishment. All too often, the conservative evangelical Christian's logic on capital punishment is stupefying. What we are really telling society is that we would rather dispose of the murderer than rehabilitate. That he is beyond society's help. Thank God that Jesus Christ did not have that attitude with the human race. Let God be the sole ultimate authority on the disposal of life. Capital punishment does nothing but fulfills the base human instinct of bloodlust, and weakens society's value of life.

Thanks, TD. Isn't it funny how so many self-professed Christians never seem to ask the WWJD question?

Frequent reader and infrequent sleeper Brian M. went on quite a letter-writing binge in the wee hours of this morning. Unlike the average right-wing pundit, I'm an equal-time kinda guy, so I'm going to let him have his say today. He had this to say about l'affaire Rove.

O.k., lets get this right, shall we? You say in your blog that Pres. Bush said that he would fire anyone who was involved in a leak, and then you directly quote him as saying he would "take care of" anyone who "violated the law." The next time you speak for the President, please be sure to use his words, and not yours...

Yes, indeed, let's get this right. I said the Bush administration vowed to fire the leaker, not President Bush, himself. To support that, I quoted Scott McClellan who said, "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Brian M. writes on my quote from Grover Norquist who likens bipartisanship to date rape:

You know, I have to say, if you think about it, that is quite a acute statement. For quite a while what seems like a minority of us conservatives have been warning Pres. Bush not to "get in bed" with you dems. Bush, being the conciliatory and warm hearted person he is, assumes that you dems are o.k. (which, on a personal level, many of you are), and that if he just opens himself up to you, and spends some time getting to know you (date), then you'll be reasonable and we can work together despite our differences. But alas, time after time our President has asked you Dems in for a nightcap only to be raped. President Bush, hear this clearly, "When it comes to politics, Dems are not your friends!"

I give President Bush lots of credit this week for his bipartisan solicitation of input into whom he should nominate to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. I hope it results in a candidate who pleases reasonable Americans. But prior to this week, please give me one example of an attempt Bush made to reach consensus with opponents in a gentlemanly way, instead of his usual means of running them over with his bulldozer approach - an approach that doesn't seem to be working too well these days.

Brian M. responded to my quoting of Rush Limbaush, who said that Christian liberals hate God:

Hmm...well, if this is an accurate quote, (and, I actually doubt that it is, since Rush seldom discusses anything concerning religion) I'll have to disagree with Rush. Although, while there are Christians on the left, it is a comfortable HOME of those who despise Jesus Christ.

The Mouth doesn't make up quotes; right-wingers ensure that I never need to. Now, who exactly are these people who you say despise Jesus Christ? What did they do, disagree with you and James Dobson?

A second letter on religion addresses my thoughts on capital punishment:

Concerning your comments on the death penalty...yes, there are problems with the execution (no pun intended) of the death penalty. However, lets not throw the baby out with the bath water. The death penalty, instituted by the God of the old and new testament for the Isrealites, is not only an instrument of order, but of justice. While I'll agree with you that justice is not, and will not be perfectly just in this world, God has set forth those in authority (governments) to establish order and justice on this earth (Romans 13:1), and, according to the NEW testament, carry out that justice with the SWORD. I'll include the actual text here for the benefit of our nonchristian friends:Romans 13:4"But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he [the government]does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer."So, there is your one verse justifying capital punishment. AND, I have to say, that I did not see any argument against capital punishment in the verses you included. If you'll be more specific, I'll be glad to address the passages. For instance, I'm guessing that you're arguing that Jesus was against the death penalty because he sent away the guys wanting to stone the prostitute. However, an understanding of Hebrew law shows this not to be the case (and the fact that Jesus did not tell them not to prosecute the girl, but rather disqualified them as judges). The law of Moses reqired two or more witnesses for someone to be put to death, (Deut 17:6; 19:15; Matt 18:16; John 7:51; 8:17,18) and, by this account, there were no witnesses.(By the way, I am against cap. punishment on the basis of circumstantial evidence or on the basis of one witness) Further, because the stoners had not brought the male adulterer (death for both participants was mandated for adultery (Lev 20:10, and Det 22:22)), the woman could not legally be stoned, even if she did have two or more witnesses, and this also showed the stoners true intent of trying to trap Jesus.

You make very good points. Regarding Romans 13, is this sword to be taken that literally as a means of capital punishment or is it symbolic merely of punishment? As for your interpretation of Jesus and the prostitute spared by the stone, do you really think this story is included in the Bible to merely illustrate some technical point of law? I think Jesus had a much a larger picture in mind, and I don't really see Jesus as a legal nitpicker.

Brian M. also is shocked and dismayed that I dislike President Bush:

What a sad, sad commentary for you, Mouth, that you have such disdain for what may be the most God fearing President of the 20th and 21st Century. I really think you need to examine your heart on this! I've seen absolutely no proof, or even evidence that suggest that President Bush has ever lied or played loose with the truth. Rather, he has been a man of his word, sometimes even to the dismay of some Republicans. Pres. Bush means what he says, and he says what he means (in quite a stark contrast to Clinton).

You criticize Republicans for calling Clinton a liar, but, the difference is, that Clinton IS a liar! Even Dems in congress marveled at how he constantly lied with such ease, and, we also know that he lied UNDER OATH!I really think that you bitter, bitter hatred for Pres. Bush, Tom Delay, Carl Rove, or anyone else who progresses the policies of the Republican party is just..well, sour grapes. You still think that somehow the election was stolen from you in 2000, and you're still shell shocked that, with the strongest push libs have ever even conceived, you lost again to Pres. Bush in 2004. Man, and..I can't imagine how much every thing inside you must scream out at the thought of us conservatives placing up to 3 Supreme Court nominees on the bench!Ease up Mouth! You may hate Bush's policies, and all the things us conservatives are doing, but just like you, he's a good guy, just staring down a different pair of spectacles.

Yikes. That must have been very cathartic.

I'm sorry you're so outraged at the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll numbers, which find that a plurality of Americans think the president isn't being very truthful. But why are you attacking me? I even went out of my way to state my opposition against calling the president a liar. I'm even on record on this blog stating strong dislike for President Clinton. Instead, you should direct your anger at the average American, who apparently doesn't mind calling Bush a liar.

I've noticed that it's 1:30 a.m. as you write this. I'm sure the late hour is just making you cranky.

Ouch!

2005-07-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

Well, it appears Abe Lincoln was right, after all. Americans seem to be catching on.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday shows that more Americans think President Bush is playing hard and fast with the truth, as opposed to those who think ol' W is the straight-shootin' Texan he pretends to be. Asked whether Bush is "honest and straightforward," 45 percent of those polled said he is not, while 41 percent said he is. Bush has suffered in this area since January when the same poll showed that 50 percent said he was honest and strightforward and 36 percent said he was not.

I think you know how I feel about Bush. I won't call him a liar, because I have more respect for the presidency than the right-wingers who threw every childish name they could think of at Clinton. But let me paraphrase Honest Abe and say that Bush shows his utmost devotion to the truth by using it sparingly.

As for Bush's overall job performance, numbers look equally dismal. Forty-nine percent of those polled expressed their disapproval. Forty-six percent said they approve of his performance. The same poll given in May found an even 47-to-47-percent-tie on Bush's overall performance.

“It’s a bad period for the president,” said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican Bill McInturff. Hart attributes Bush’s problems to “one part the economy, two parts Iraq, and one part everything else.”

Speaking to NBC News, Hart expressed surprise that Bush's numbers had not taken a bounce in the positive direction in the wake of the London bombings last week.

Lest we Democrats get too smug, respondents heaped equal amounts of scorn on both parties for their behavior and ability to get things done. To those results, I would echo a big amen. Let me put it this way: Currently, the Democratic Party is not as detestable as the GOP, but they're plenty awful, too.